Happy birthday, 2020

 

Another year, another birthday.  Some achievements:

• I lost 30 pounds from Jan-April, and I've managed to keep most of it off, even with less activity through COVID-19
• I've started doing more sketching and drawing again, which has been really enjoyable for me
• I submitted writing to a Netflix writing competition
• I applied for a board position...I didn't get it, but proud of myself for at least trying
• I've started a new job position at work since January, it's been a good learning experience
• I'm writing more letters and connecting with old friends again that I've lost touch with
• I grew out my hair...it was an experience.  Never again!! Haha.
  

 

I've had this Kylie Minogue song running through my head this year during my birthday week.  Some of the lyrics really appeal to me, the gist of it being to enjoy life and turn life into action that makes you happy/fulfilled.  And happiness doesn't mean always feeling pleasurable about certain problems or issues.  A state of living well, or a life well-lived is a problem of morality for the average person, the average person's philosophical problem.  

There are many unsatisfactory answers to this problem (Sartre, Hegel, Aristotle, silly nihilists) but there are also very thoughtful, and well placed answers.  Heidegger had a lot to say about living authentically in the world. Being in the world, and understanding our 'heritage,' in other words, discovery of the self in conjuction with those that have come before, and discovery of the value (facticity) of the world itself.  We are meant to be guardians of the world as is.

How can we be people in the world, in connection with others, and create a meaningful life?

I think at the end of the day, our intentions are what matter. We are here for a limited time.  Regardless of our energy, time, money, opportunities, the direction we are pointed in the world, will take us to places of value, or not.

There are a lot of philosophical answers to intentions, but simple to say, if your so-called intentions don't lead to action, they aren't intentions.  They are simply wishes. I wish I had more hair, was taller, was skinnier, was wealthier, etc. but these things are just dreams of dreams.  Intentionality means to be real in the world we live in, with a hope for real change.

 Real change is possible in the world, I believe it, and I believe it for most of us, achievable. Though this year is a strange one, and 2021 will probably be stranger still, I'm hopeful for the future, for the future generations coming up into the world.  

Happy birthday to me.  

Sartre and Camus: Freedom and Justice

Albert Camus

     

Jean-Paul Sartre

 

 

Camus and Sartre: two figures could not be so different in history, and yet talk about the same subject, existentialism, in a time where the Western world hungered for an answer to the question 'what is the meaning of the life?' (The question of 'what is meaning at all' would come from the German philosophers and poets)

I read a very excellent article called 'How Camus and Sartre Split on the question of How to Be Free' and it reminded, in one phrase, how the problems of the past are once again our problems:

In October 1951, Camus published The Rebel. In it, he gave voice to a roughly drawn ‘philosophy of revolt’. This wasn’t a philosophical system per se, but an amalgamation of philosophical and political ideas: every human is free, but freedom itself is relative; one must embrace limits, moderation, ‘calculated risk’; absolutes are anti-human. Most of all, Camus condemned revolutionary violence. Violence might be used in extreme circumstances (he supported the French war effort, after all) but the use of revolutionary violence to nudge history in the direction you desire is utopian, absolutist, and a betrayal of yourself.

 

For Sartre,  revolution required much more than what might be a middle way by Camus.  Sartre was a radical of belief, and I'm not sure it served him well.

Sartre read The Rebel with disgust. As far as he was concerned, it was possible to achieve perfect justice and freedom – that described the achievement of communism. Under capitalism, and in poverty, workers could not be free. Their options were unpalatable and inhumane: to work a pitiless and alienating job, or to die. But by removing the oppressors and broadly returning autonomy to the workers, communism allows each individual to live without material want, and therefore to choose how best they can realise themselves. This makes them free, and through this unbending equality, it is also just.

It's troubling that the Sartre's answer to radical freedom in the west was communism. Radical freedom, by its nature, is a burden.  A world with burdens cannot have a utopian ideal: they go together like oil and water.

France has had many kinds of revolutions, many of them bloody, some of them odd, and the one pivotal idea every citizen of Western belief has burned in them, the inalienable rights of humankind.  It's all very common sense today...that no one is really so much better than everyone else.  But at the time it was such a startling way of thinking.

Today, in the light of yellow vests, BLM, Proud Boys, Antifa, and COVID-19, there's so much confusion, real social confusion, about the way forward.  And it's interesting because there are radical thinkers that think communism could definitely work for America, or that abolishing capitalism, or revisionism of whole monetary debt systems will solve social problems. 

The reality is much simpler than that.  Ethics and moral systems that value people's inalienable rights and freedoms need to be present.  And right now, instead of a world of capitalism vs communism, the debate between Sartre and Camus reminds me that revolution as violence will never be the final answer.  If it was, there would be no verse of turning swords into plowshares...we would live on swords and fire alone.