'It is possible for man to snatch the world from the darkness of absurdity'
How should we think and act in the world? These writings on the human condition by one of the twentieth century's great philosophers explore the absurdity of our notions of good and evil, and show instead how we make our own destiny simply by being.
A következő kiadói sorozatban jelent meg: Penguin Great Ideas Penguin
Dostoevsky said that ‘each person is guilty for everything, before everyone.’ Immobile or in action, we always weigh upon the earth. Every refusal is a choice, every silence has a voice. Our very passivity is willed; in order to not choose, we still must choose not to choose. It is impossible to escape.
85. oldal
How many times man exclaimed, ‘I didn’t want that to happen!’ when contemplating the unexpected result of his action. Nobel thought he was working for science; he was working for war. Epicurus did not anticipate what would later be called Epicureanism, nor Nietzsche Nietzscheanism, nor Christ the Inquisition. Everything that comes from the hands of man is immediately taken away by the ebb and flow of history, remoulded by each new minute, and give rise around it to thousand unexpected eddies.
50. oldal
Cineas seems wise. What’s the use of leaving if it is to return home? What’s the use of starting if you must stop? And yet, if I don’t first decide to stop, it seems to me to be even more pointless to leave. ‘I will not say A,’ says the schoolboy stubbornly. ‘But why?’ – ‘Because, after that, I will have to say B.’ He knows that if he starts, he will never be finished with it: after B, it will be the entire alphabet, syllables, words, books, tests, and a career. Each minute a new task, without rest. If it is never to be finished, what’s the use of starting?
9. oldal
Mr Camus’s Stranger is right to reject all those ties that others want to impose upon him from the outside; no tie is given at first. If a man is satisfied with a completely exterior relationship with the object, saying, ‘My painting, my park, my workers’ because a contract bestowed him with certain rights over these objects, it is because he is choosing to delude himself. He would like to spread out his place on earth, to expand his being beyond the limits of his body and his memory, yet without running the risk of any action. But the object facing him remains, indifferent, foreign. Social, organic, economic relationships are only external relationships and cannot be the foundation of any true possession.
14. oldal
‘Man is a being of faraway places,’ says Heidegger; he is always somewhere else. There exists no privileged spot in the world about which he can safely say, ‘This is me.’ He is constitutively oriented toward something other than himself. He is himself only through relationships with something other than himself.
25. oldal
