November 02, 2018 Friday
Bedtime Story
What Confronting the Absurd can Lead to
No other apes closely related to us such as
chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) or bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees or Pan paniscus
both of who are an endangered great apes) or our distant cousins in the entire
animal kingdom are worried about this paradox.
It is only the human mind and its desire to
seek meaning and purpose of its existence that creates this paradox of absurd.
And yet for Camus suicide is not an option
because suicide eliminates man and without man there is no absurd.
It is akin to the solution of beheading for
the medical ailment of chronic migraine which of course will get rid of the episodes
of splitting headache but at a cost hardly desirable to both the parties.
Camus insists that we as thinking apes are duty-bound
to face and acknowledge this contradiction using reason and logic without
resorting to the promises of false hopes.
And yet if left this way, if the
contradiction is left unresolved, then a problem surfaces.
It makes the human ape a dangerous animal
for then without meaning or purpose man attains unmitigated emancipation to do
as he pleases.
He is not bounded by morals of any sort nor
an aim of better future and for the same reason that all moral and civic laws become
worthless for him.
In such a circumstance man will not
consider “not the best living but the most living” which many men do and they
are restrained only by criminal laws.
Such a man if purely logical will revolt
against all the moral values forced upon him from the society, he will be freed
from all obligations and discipline and then let passion take over him.
With this Camus ends the first chapter and
then goes on the second one.
In the second chapter Camus describes three
sorts of men that would appear or perhaps should appear on the world when
confronted with the absurd.
Their behavior would become absurd when
they come to realize that their lives are absurd and meaningless.
The first of the three example of this type
of men is the legendary fictional libertine Don Juan a character who has been
depicted to be completely devoid and bereft of moral or sexual restraints.
Such a person is a total hedonistic (which
quite contradictorily is also the basic tenant of Epicureanism though only
figuratively) whose sole purpose is to attain maximum pleasure as displayed by
the Royal Dynasties of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Europe.
One must always acknowledge the fat that
human brain eventually work on the pleasure principle and this was known and is
known to all religions and they all advocate restrain on one’s desires.
For instance, in Islam Allah directly
threatens men who desire to pursue worldly pleasures.
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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