Camus and the subtle moment
2
Tag Archives: philosophy webcomic
S&F Paths and the Forks On’Em
I really struggled with this strip on every level.. drawing, writing, formatting.. one of those days I guess! And now I just spotted a spelling mistake too. Gr.
The opening quote is courtesy of Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus.
******************************************************************************
S&F Camus Rising
“Is one going to die, escape by the leap, rebuild a mansion of ideas and forms to one’s own scale? Is one, on the contrary, going to take up the heart-rending and marvelous wager of the absurd?”
So writes Camus in Absurd Freedom, a small section in the book The Myth of Sisyphus (thank you J. Swift!). As near as I can tell, in this section Camus argues against the constructs we use to try to define, understand, render meaning to, and ultimately constrain life – our “bureaucracy of mind and heart” which, regardless of our desperate efforts, do not write us a blank cheque on eternity…
Instead, he argues that dying unreconciled and not of one’s own free will is essential – – as, “life will be lived all the better if it has no meaning”.
Yes, you heard that right! To continue to live with impunity and abandon in the great unknowable shadow of absurdity is the ultimate revolt against oblivion!
(Or, as per The Slow Room…)
P.S. On a tangential note, this got me to thinking about how we tell stories.. with beginning, middle, and end, and especially through endorsing satisfactory resolution of all introduced threads. It’s no wonder we struggle with accepting the non-reconciliation of our own lives, given we are taught that good stories should always have closure as well as karmic balance.
S&F Nagel’s Bat!
So… this week’s S&F took a convoluted path. I have been (trying to) read Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus and was ranting about how perplexed I was by certain passages.
My friend took that opportune moment to introduce me to Thomas Nagel, more specifically his essay on “What is it like to be a bat”. Now who could turn down a (short!) essay with a title like that, especially when it also contains such rarities as: “Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is like to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.” Is that.. a sense of humour one can detect?! I thought that was fundamentally alien to philosophers!
More seriously, it is a rather good essay that discusses how difficult it is to truly “get” something or somebody else without experiencing everything they do in their exact way. I suppose our shared experience of life itself is the one major thing we all have in common, but within that so much else can differ, making relating to each other form a sort of tragic Venn diagram.
P.S. I was trying to remember if “echolocation” is spelled with an “h”… I thought it was just with a “c”, as in “ecolocation” but then it was pointed out that would only be used by environmental bats. 🙂
Bearings – Eye Spy
I haven’t posted any Bearings sketches for a while… it seems sleep deprivation and World Cup excitement is conducive to his reappearance!
S&F Beware the Conversation Weasel, repurposed
You’ve probably figured out by now I’ve been redrawing a few older strips for another project, and here’s one more. This one accompanied a post on Conversational Narcissim (a.k.a. beware the Conversation Weasel!)
S&F Maggie’s Way
For my dear friend Maggie, who posts the most exquisite and colourful recipes on her blog, Maggie’s Way.
S&F and Philosophy Now: Existence and the Matrix
The following cartoon accompanied the print version of A Justification of Empirical Thinking (Philosophy Now). The article got me to thinking about the Matrix film where Neo is asked whether he wanted to take the blue pill (fabricated reality) vs. the red pill (the truth behind the reality). This fork in the road seems loosely based on a classical philosophical problem, that being Hume’s problem of induction, that is, how do we know whether reality is real? Can we trust our experience of our senses? Or, is this all an illusion as we row, row, row our boats, gently down the stream?
“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.“
S&F & the Arctic Grail, repurposed
Some time ago I wrote a brief post on McKenzie Funk’s awesome bit of writing on territory wars ensuing from the melting ice in the Arctic. I wanted to redraw the cartoon as the original was pretty rough. Here is the more evolved S&F for this week. 🙂
S&F Taming Tigers
This cartoon wasn’t meant to be particularly funny per se, but is more a comment on a conversation (aka minor skirmish) I had earlier this week. We were talking about risk-taking vs. non-risk taking behaviour, at which point my colleague quipped: “It’s easier to tame a tiger than to paint stripes on a kitty cat.”
The conversation went on for a while until I burst in with a series of complaints of how actually it would not be easier to tame a tiger, it would be in fact much easier to paint stripes on a cat (and safer).
They both looked at me with some amusement as I had missed the whole point, that being it’s easier to make behavioural changes (taming a tiger), than it is to make fundamental shifts in being (changing a kitty cat into a tiger).
All this said, my logic brain would still would favour painting stripes than taming a tiger, but the following quote sort of sums it up:
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
— Henry David Thoreau
simonandfinn 