October 30, 2018 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
The Punishment of Sisyphus
In his 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”
which fascinatingly and I would add appropriately is built upon a Greek
mythology Camus introduces his philosophy of absurd.
Sisyphus as some of you may know was a King
who was punished in the underworld for playing out deceit and fraud upon some
very senior gods.
The story behind the punishment is
irrelevant in our case; the punishment itself is the crux of the matter at
hand.
The penance came in the form of rolling a
massive boulder of stone up a steep hill.
Since the punishment was against the deceit
and cunning act of Sisyphus against the god Zeus, the great god Zeus comes back
at him with similar act of cleverness by rigging the game and making the
boulder slip away from the hands of the victim the moment he is about to make
it atop the steep hill.
This act of deceit by Zeus seals the fate
of Sisyphus to eternal misery with all his efforts to be proven useless and
leading to despair and frustration.
This is why any activity that will bring no
reward in any true materialistic sense is deemed to be Sisyphean with a
derogatory connotation and if I would be fair and candid then even my bedtime
stories should also be classified as Sisyphean.
Though the work of Albert Camus was first
published in 1942 it was available to English readers only as late as in 1955.
Camus breaks his philosophical essay into
four parts and one appendix and very strangely enough dedicates this work to a
French writer and illustrator Pascal Pia who kind of specialized in erotic literature.
The reason I think for this dedication is
the shared philosophy that these two writers had in common which isolated them
from other men.
The essay has four chapters titled:
1. An Absurd Reasoning
2. The Absurd Man
3. Absurd Creation
4. The Myth of Sisyphus
Appendix
Camus does not question the futility and
meaninglessness of human life but begins with it as a self-evident assertion.
It is a given that life is bereft of any
intrinsic meaning and hence is nonsensical and yet humans keep posing questions
about its meaning and trying to make sense of it.
Science can surely explain the mechanism of
life and its origins but it fails to explain why there is life rather than not.
In that sense Spinoza was proven wrong as
he had once hoped science would be able to provide as assuring answer.
The truth is, in the legendary words of
physicist Steven Weinberg, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the
more it also seems pointless.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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