An absurd undertaking.
This is the final step towards finally getting my diploma. When this is finished, I can be declared a Psychologist, for better or worse. It's a lot of responsibility, and I'm only one paper away from being this piece of paper I've been struggling to get for the last... 9 years. The course itself only takes 5, but I'm adding 4 more years in there just to remind myself the epic battle it was to get admitted into the place I wanted in the first place.
The final paper (a standard monograph) is theoretically simple: you find a subject you want to explore within a major area of psychology, pick your bibliographical references, your method, the relevant data and so on. But... since I like complicating things, I picked something I really like, which is something no faculty member has actually studied before. The something is a short study on Albert Camus and his relevance to psychology on the 21st century. More to the point: Humanistic Psychology has traditionally admitted the existentialist movement as a major influence in its theoretical body and practice. Said influence is usually the more known 'brands' of existentialism: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger and Jaspers, in no particular order. Husserl is not an existentialist, but he did create the phenomenological method, which at least Sartre and Heidegger claim to employ. Albert Camus, on the other hand, is usually mentioned, but not listed as an active influence in said branch of psychology. He's usually listed, as the many compendiums on Existentialism have shown me, as a secondary author of the so-called 'Atheist-Existentialism' branch headed by one Jean-Paul Sartre.
The authors of these books obviously never read Albert Camus aside from The Stranger, since he actively denied being a part of Sartre's existentialist flavor. As a matter of fact, he denied subscribing to any philosophical or ideological system of ideas, but it seems that worrying about existential matters made him an existentialist by association. Or something like that. Of course, he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus explicitly against the whole existential endeavor, but his statements went duly ignored. But I did not! So there you go!
Anyway, the focus of the paper is the notion of the Absurd on Camus. It works more or less like this: ordinary people some times have a fleeting sensation that this life does not actually makes any sense. It's a feeling one can't quite explain, but it certainly does have its effects. If waking up every day to go to work, eat, work some more, then go to bed and sleep to do it all over again, five days a week until you die suddenly doesn't make sense (and it really doesn't, if you ask me), then you begin questioning the worth of such existence. And that's what he wants to find out -- is there any meaning to all of this? And if there isn't, is there a good reason to keep on living? The existentialists, he claims, have all came to recognize this feeling and have drawn some conclusions and consequences of it in man's life. One, that man is mortal and his death ultimately has no meaning in itself; second, that man is limited by time, it's not eternal; third, that the external world is ultimately unknowable and resistant to our attempts to actually understand its essence. Essentially, man is alone and has this clock ticking above the head. But, unlike the ones he credits for the discovery of such a notion, Camus wants to know if it's possible to live a life that doesn't have a given meaning. After an extensive dialogue, his conclusion is that the very absurd condition is the reason to keep on living because it allows man to give his life its own meaning, instead of forcing him to look for meaning outside himself. He doesn't really deny the existence of God (Camus spent a good deal of his life trying to find the possibility of a kind of christianism without a deity), but he asserts that, since it's impossible to know God, then man has to assume that it has to act as if He didn't exist -- that's a pretty gross oversimplification, of course. The whole argument is much more complex. At any rate, he ultimately rejects ending one's life because it's absurd. Human condition is absurd, therefore, it must be maintained.
But! But!!!! There is also the notion of revolt. The revolt is a consequence of an absurd life. It's a refusal; it denounces the unjust character of the human condition and is the way for the absurd man to reach out to other men -- by recognizing they all share the same condition and are, in this very essential level, the same. So, the rebel defends the entirety of the human race, not an individual value it claims to be universal. It reclaims unity in a fragmented world, and it denounces the tragedy of human condition. This notion is much more complicated than the notion of the absurd because it entails many contradictory ways of acting in order to preserve the benevolent character of the rebellion. In the end, it's about preserving a shred of humanity in a world that has been overrun with impersonal, historical, necessity, that in the end end up justifying any means necessary as if history had become an entity in itself. Basically, rebellion defeats itself once it becomes a revolution, instituting the same kind of oppression it first denounced. In the end, ideologies end up transforming reality (or, rather, deforming reality so it can fit into a single worldview), and end up justifying every kind of horror inflicted into the same innocents it claimed to protect in the first place. So, he calls for moderation as the all around value to be kept in order to have some real, positive change. Or something like that. The Rebel has been largely panned by philosophers and I honestly understand why, but many philosophers also agree that it was a pioneer when it came to such an academic undertaking. It ended his friendship between him and Sartre as well, but I personally think Sartre can rot in hell. :)
Anyway... so that's a third of the paper. A third! I'm almost finished with this chapter, but there are two more to go. I have to wrap things up until February and the prospect is getting dimmer... I dunno. Oh well, back to the hard, fruitless labor.
The final paper (a standard monograph) is theoretically simple: you find a subject you want to explore within a major area of psychology, pick your bibliographical references, your method, the relevant data and so on. But... since I like complicating things, I picked something I really like, which is something no faculty member has actually studied before. The something is a short study on Albert Camus and his relevance to psychology on the 21st century. More to the point: Humanistic Psychology has traditionally admitted the existentialist movement as a major influence in its theoretical body and practice. Said influence is usually the more known 'brands' of existentialism: Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger and Jaspers, in no particular order. Husserl is not an existentialist, but he did create the phenomenological method, which at least Sartre and Heidegger claim to employ. Albert Camus, on the other hand, is usually mentioned, but not listed as an active influence in said branch of psychology. He's usually listed, as the many compendiums on Existentialism have shown me, as a secondary author of the so-called 'Atheist-Existentialism' branch headed by one Jean-Paul Sartre.
The authors of these books obviously never read Albert Camus aside from The Stranger, since he actively denied being a part of Sartre's existentialist flavor. As a matter of fact, he denied subscribing to any philosophical or ideological system of ideas, but it seems that worrying about existential matters made him an existentialist by association. Or something like that. Of course, he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus explicitly against the whole existential endeavor, but his statements went duly ignored. But I did not! So there you go!
Anyway, the focus of the paper is the notion of the Absurd on Camus. It works more or less like this: ordinary people some times have a fleeting sensation that this life does not actually makes any sense. It's a feeling one can't quite explain, but it certainly does have its effects. If waking up every day to go to work, eat, work some more, then go to bed and sleep to do it all over again, five days a week until you die suddenly doesn't make sense (and it really doesn't, if you ask me), then you begin questioning the worth of such existence. And that's what he wants to find out -- is there any meaning to all of this? And if there isn't, is there a good reason to keep on living? The existentialists, he claims, have all came to recognize this feeling and have drawn some conclusions and consequences of it in man's life. One, that man is mortal and his death ultimately has no meaning in itself; second, that man is limited by time, it's not eternal; third, that the external world is ultimately unknowable and resistant to our attempts to actually understand its essence. Essentially, man is alone and has this clock ticking above the head. But, unlike the ones he credits for the discovery of such a notion, Camus wants to know if it's possible to live a life that doesn't have a given meaning. After an extensive dialogue, his conclusion is that the very absurd condition is the reason to keep on living because it allows man to give his life its own meaning, instead of forcing him to look for meaning outside himself. He doesn't really deny the existence of God (Camus spent a good deal of his life trying to find the possibility of a kind of christianism without a deity), but he asserts that, since it's impossible to know God, then man has to assume that it has to act as if He didn't exist -- that's a pretty gross oversimplification, of course. The whole argument is much more complex. At any rate, he ultimately rejects ending one's life because it's absurd. Human condition is absurd, therefore, it must be maintained.
But! But!!!! There is also the notion of revolt. The revolt is a consequence of an absurd life. It's a refusal; it denounces the unjust character of the human condition and is the way for the absurd man to reach out to other men -- by recognizing they all share the same condition and are, in this very essential level, the same. So, the rebel defends the entirety of the human race, not an individual value it claims to be universal. It reclaims unity in a fragmented world, and it denounces the tragedy of human condition. This notion is much more complicated than the notion of the absurd because it entails many contradictory ways of acting in order to preserve the benevolent character of the rebellion. In the end, it's about preserving a shred of humanity in a world that has been overrun with impersonal, historical, necessity, that in the end end up justifying any means necessary as if history had become an entity in itself. Basically, rebellion defeats itself once it becomes a revolution, instituting the same kind of oppression it first denounced. In the end, ideologies end up transforming reality (or, rather, deforming reality so it can fit into a single worldview), and end up justifying every kind of horror inflicted into the same innocents it claimed to protect in the first place. So, he calls for moderation as the all around value to be kept in order to have some real, positive change. Or something like that. The Rebel has been largely panned by philosophers and I honestly understand why, but many philosophers also agree that it was a pioneer when it came to such an academic undertaking. It ended his friendship between him and Sartre as well, but I personally think Sartre can rot in hell. :)
Anyway... so that's a third of the paper. A third! I'm almost finished with this chapter, but there are two more to go. I have to wrap things up until February and the prospect is getting dimmer... I dunno. Oh well, back to the hard, fruitless labor.