Unnerving Silence Of The World By Arthur Scchopenhauer And Albert Camus

803 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Absurdity in Albert Camus the stranger

For all our lives we deal with the thought of becoming consumed by the impossible which is also known as the absurd. What creates the absurd is human confrontation with the unnerving silence of the world; that silence representing the idea of death. Since humans try to combat the absurd with meaning it is safe to claim that our lives are absurd without some form of ultimate meaning. This search for an ultimate meaning also allows us to live a meaningful life in spite of this absurdity. Philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Albert Camus strongly believe that both of these claims are undoubtedly truthful and greatly intertwined. To start, the absurd is a key motivator within the lives of humanity. It is our fear of the absurd that pushes us to find …show more content…

Suffering is in fact is a nature of the absurd. I am not denying that we can’t live without suffering but, it is simply not an ultimate reasons to live life against the absurd. Camus also asserts this claim when he states “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter–– these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.” (Camus, 70) Camus is claiming that it is possible to live a meaningful life in the face of absurdity because of the existence of the absurd. Suffering, itself, is simply a side effect of living to combat absurdity. According to Camus’ statement, absurdity is the main reason for leading a meaningful life in the face of it. The nature of absurdity also includes a form of human interaction meaning that our creation of a meaningful life in the face of absurdity is in fact what causes the

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of Kevin Brockmeier's The Year Of Silence

    886 Words  | 2 Pages

    Silence — the sound of quiet, the state of mind, the lack of meaning — all these pertain to its definition. Communication is expanding, noise is increasing, music is becoming more obtainable as people search desperately for a moment of peace or a breeze of silence. As the scarcity of physical silence increases, its value as a rare commodity increases as well. The idiom “Silence is golden” may perhaps only grow closer to reality as time passes, as exemplified by the white noise machines or silent fans entering the market and fictionalized in Kevin Brockmeier’s short story, “The Year of Silence.” In light of this, Brockmeier explores the value of silence and noise in his story without putting one above the other. Through strange clues and hidden

    Read More

  • Dehumanization in Night by Elie Wiesel

    1785 Words  | 4 Pages

    callous to the death of their peers, and going so far as to murder fellow

    Read More

  • Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis

    1230 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the year 1625, Francis Bacon, a famous essayist and poet wrote about the influences of fear on everyday life. He stated, “Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other” (Essays Dedication of Death). Clearly, external surroundings affect perceptions of fear as well as human nature in general. Although C.S. Lewis published the novel, Out of the Silent Planet, over three centuries after Bacon wrote his theory on fear, Lewis similarly portrayed external surrounding to manipulate perceptions of fear. From the first chapter of the novel, Lewis revealed fear to be a weakness that leads to ignorance. It was this ignorance that apparently fueled the cycle of corruption and immorality on “The Silent Planet.” Using the character Ransom to reveal the effect of memory and morality on fear, C.S. Lewis demonstrates that fear is a quality of the “bent” race (humans), and only by eliminating fear in our lives can the human race become hnau.

    Read More

  • The Perils of Obedience, by Stanley Milgram

    1490 Words  | 3 Pages

    If a person of authority ordered you inflict a 15 to 400 volt electrical shock on another innocent human being, would you follow your direct orders? That is the question that Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University tested in the 1960’s. Most people would answer “no,” to imposing pain on innocent human beings but Milgram wanted to go further with his study. Writing and Reading across the Curriculum holds a shortened edition of Stanley Milgram’s “The Perils of Obedience,” where he displays an eye-opening experiment that tests the true obedience of people under authority figures. He observes that most people go against their natural instinct to never harm innocent humans and obey the extreme and dangerous instructions of authority figures. Milgram is well aware of his audience and organization throughout his article, uses quotes directly from his experiment and connects his research with a real world example to make his article as effective as possible.

    Read More

  • Night by Elie Wiesel and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom

    1726 Words  | 4 Pages

    The chaos and destruction that the Nazi’s are causing are not changing the lives of only Jews, but also the lives of citizens in other countries. Between Night by Elie Wiesel and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, comradeship, faith, strength, and people of visions are crucial to the survival of principle characters. Ironically, in both stories there is a foreseen future, that both seemed to be ignored.

    Read More

  • Nazi Death Camps in the Night by Elie Wiesel

    823 Words  | 2 Pages

    Night is an non fiction, dramatic book that tells the horrors of the nazi death camps all around Europe. The book is an autobiographical account of what happened, so the main character is the author. The author is Elie Wiesel who was only 14 year old when Nazi Germany came through his town of Sighet, Transylvania. This is story is set between the years of 1944 and 1945. Elie and his family of 4 are optimistic when Germany begins to take power. Germany invades Hungary, then arrives in Elie’s town. The Nazi’s begin to take over the Jews by limiting their freedom. Jews are eventually deported. The Jewish people are crowded into wagons where they are shipped to Auschwitz. He is separated from his mother and sister. Over the course of the book, Elie and his father are sent to two different concentration camps. Their final concentration camp is Buchenwald. His father ends up dieing before the allied troops liberated Budapest in 1945. Elie is left with the memories of death and violence.

    Read More

  • Existentialism In Albert Camus

    1150 Words  | 3 Pages

    writings where people as humans struggle to find purpose and ask themselves what is the meaning of life to which the universe responses by simply showing a complete and utter disregard for such a question or any questions as a matter of fact. It is “This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd.” Existentialism essentially deals with the absurd which had been “cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.” and besides Albert Camus there was other Philosophers who adopted such ideas like “Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, etc.….. [with]

    Read More

  • The Writings of Alebert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus

    827 Words  | 2 Pages

    Human beings live in a world where all we do is try to seek out the meaning on things. We grow up on principles that give us a comfort that things are the way they are for a reason, until somebody or something opposes it, like the absurd. We have expectations of how things are and when our expectations clash and the completely opposite happens, we start questioning our morals and faith of what we believe and know. When we start to compare our expectations with what actually happened is when we start to confront the absurd. Absurdity springs from comparison, it transcends what we expect and makes it absurd.

    Read More

  • Ted Chiang's The Great Silence

    1084 Words  | 3 Pages

    In “The Great Silence” Ted Chiang presents the reader with the idea that humans and other intelligent species do live on earth. Communication between different species on earth can be difficult because they can’t express their thoughts to one another. According to a possible solution to fermi’s paradox, intelligent life would rather hide than to present themselves to potential enemies. Humans have a hard time trying to find other species to communicate with because they only focus on extraterrestrial life. Humans created the Arecibo observatory to send out signals into space and pick up any signals that could be sent by extraterrestrial life. Although Humans cannot speak directly to other species we are able to communicate with our actions and vibes.

    Read More

  • The Meaningless Life of Grendel in John Gardner's Grendel

    2577 Words  | 6 Pages

    "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive...." Joseph Campbell made this comment on the search for meaning common to every man's life. His statement implies that what we seem bent on finding is that higher spark for which we would all be willing to live or die; we look for some key equation through which we might tie all of the experiences of our life and feel the satisfaction of action toward a goal, rather than the emptiness which sometimes consumes the activities of our existence. He states, however, that we will never find some great pure meaning behind everything, because there is none. What there is to be found, however, is the life itself. We seek to find meaning so that emptiness will not pervade our every thought, our every deed, with the coldness of reality as the unemotional eye chooses to see it. Without color, without joy, without future, reality untouched by hope is an icy thing to view; we have no desire to see it that way. We forget, however, that the higher meaning might be found in existence itself. The joy of life and the experience of living are what make up true meaning, as the swirl of atoms guided by chaotic chance in which we find our existence has no meaning outside itself.

    Read More

  • How Is Richard Taylor And Camus's View On The Meaning Of Life Is Meaningless?

    1000 Words  | 2 Pages

    However, he provides an alternative more substantial solution in such a way that does not let the universe triumph. What one must do to overcome this absurdity to is to be scornful of the fact that the universe has created such an individual with the ability to contemplate on his or her own existence. Suicide is an option that takes the easy route out of this absurdity, implicating the difficulty of life is too much to handle. Camus acknowledges his conscious and revolts, or becomes scornful of that fact, and refuses the option of suicide. By choosing to embrace the absurdity of the meaningless of one’s own existence, then freedom to create your own meaning and purpose is

    Read More

  • Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

    2394 Words  | 5 Pages

    Night by Elie Wiesel is one man’s story of surviving the holocaust and his struggle with maintaining relationships with his family and other Jews as they are dehumanized by their captivity and conditions. Through the characterization in the book as well as through the recounting of his journey, itself, Wiesel tells the story of how humankind can dehumanize others and cause the captives to also begin to dehumanize one another.

    Read More

  • The Human Condition

    613 Words  | 2 Pages

    Camus believes that Sisyphus’s fortune is similar to human life. Through all the activities and events people do throughout life, simply nothing is accomplished in the end. Sisyphus is a direct ...

    Read More

  • The Existential View Of Absurdity in Camus' The Plague

    1009 Words  | 3 Pages

    An absurd hero is developed by the six tenets of existentialism: anxiety, death, the void, existence precedes essence, absurdity, and alienation. These six tenets explain the overwhelming question, “Why do we exist?”. To understand why we exist, one must first question why the absurd happens. Camus did such. Camus develops the plot of his existential novel through a plethora of absurd events that boosts the overall theme of the novel. One example of this is how the town of Oran turns it back on the sea at random moments of time. This is very strange, why would a town that is isolated between the sea and a mountain range want to turn away from the one source of its salvation and one of the few ways it could connec...

    Read More

  • Mark Esslin's Theatre of the Absurd: Camus and his Debasement of Language

    1680 Words  | 4 Pages

    In 1962, writer Mark Esslin took pleasure in composing the novel Theatre of the Absurd and quickly became a major influence on the works of many inspired writers. Esslin subsequently made ensuing plays and stories which focused on nonspecific existentialist concepts and which did not remain consistent with his ideas, rejecting the “narrative continuity and the rigidity of logic.” As a result, the protagonist of these stories is often not capable of containing himself within his or her disorderly society (“Theatre”). Writer Albert Camus made such an interpretation of the “Absurd” by altering the idea into his view of believing it is the rudimentary absence of “reasonableness” and consistency in the human personality. Not only does Camus attempt to display the absurd through studied deformities and established arrangements; he also “undermines the ordinary expectations of continuity and rationality” (“The Theatre”). Camus envisions life in his works, The Stranger and “The Myth of Sisyphus,” as having no time frame or significance, and the toiling endeavor to find such significance where it does not exist is what Camus believes to be the absurd (“Albert”).

    Read More

More about Unnerving Silence Of The World By Arthur Scchopenhauer And Albert Camus

Open Document