Discussion
4: The Meaning of Life
Questions:
Are Tolstoy and Camus right or wrong to say nothing has value other than what we put on it?
Ought we look outside ourselves for value, as Tolstoy says?
Must we make and be responsible for values all on our own, as Camus suggests?
Observations:
Both Tolstoy and Camus' crises resolve by reexamining and making peace with their situations.
Leo Tolstoy is not so much comforted by faith in God, as he is by a trust and alliance with the happiness in the lives of yet common men, that he comes to admire and even love for their simplicity-of-heart, so far removed from the intellectual elitism and listlessness which he had become accustomed to.
Albert Camus comes to a meaningful awareness despite his unshakable ideal of accepting meaning only in certainties, by a close scrutiny of his circumstances. No matter how much he longs for some transcendent truth beyond his possible knowing, it could never fit with his ideal of certainty. So be it, he resolves. His ideal of certainty-alone intact, and adrift and apart from some transcendent meaning he yet longs for but can never allow, he decries existence itself as absurd and devoid of meaning, and makes his peace only by deciding to live on in defiance of this absurdity. This enduring of the absurd he does not admit as meaningful, though it does close his line of thought...
Both Tolstoy and Camus also long for greater meaning and purpose than their present circumstances allow, and find it in unexpected ways.
For Camus, meaning comes in living a life of defiance against an existence without meaning despite our longing for it, though he does not address his conviction as such.
For Tolstoy, meaning awakens within him by coming to accept, appreciate, and even love the happiness of the common man who trusts in what he does not wholly know - God, the greater unity he experiences together-with them allowing him to come to do the same and be at peace and happy -despite- the depressing conventions of his elite intellectual circle.
Questions:
Are Tolstoy and Camus right or wrong to say nothing has value other than what we put on it?
Ought we look outside ourselves for value, as Tolstoy says?
Must we make and be responsible for values all on our own, as Camus suggests?
Observations:
Both Tolstoy and Camus' crises resolve by reexamining and making peace with their situations.
Leo Tolstoy is not so much comforted by faith in God, as he is by a trust and alliance with the happiness in the lives of yet common men, that he comes to admire and even love for their simplicity-of-heart, so far removed from the intellectual elitism and listlessness which he had become accustomed to.
Albert Camus comes to a meaningful awareness despite his unshakable ideal of accepting meaning only in certainties, by a close scrutiny of his circumstances. No matter how much he longs for some transcendent truth beyond his possible knowing, it could never fit with his ideal of certainty. So be it, he resolves. His ideal of certainty-alone intact, and adrift and apart from some transcendent meaning he yet longs for but can never allow, he decries existence itself as absurd and devoid of meaning, and makes his peace only by deciding to live on in defiance of this absurdity. This enduring of the absurd he does not admit as meaningful, though it does close his line of thought...
Both Tolstoy and Camus also long for greater meaning and purpose than their present circumstances allow, and find it in unexpected ways.
For Camus, meaning comes in living a life of defiance against an existence without meaning despite our longing for it, though he does not address his conviction as such.
For Tolstoy, meaning awakens within him by coming to accept, appreciate, and even love the happiness of the common man who trusts in what he does not wholly know - God, the greater unity he experiences together-with them allowing him to come to do the same and be at peace and happy -despite- the depressing conventions of his elite intellectual circle.
Opinions:
There is value and meaning inasmuch as we live, as being is necessarily more valuable, and so more meaningful, than oblivion. One is greater than zero.
We may think of God or any value-source externally, as Tolstoy suggests, only inasmuch as that external source can exist within us as a concept, filtered through our initial apprehension, memories, and imaginations.
Whether as external objects of thought as Tolstoy suggests necessary, or as fully-internalized value determinations as Camus illustrates, we come to understand and assert value and meaning only by first conceiving of the possibility within, even if we only conceive of it as we act upon it.
I think this view is akin then to both Tolstoy and Camus', if also very unlike theirs; that meaning and value are immediately inherent in the act of being, no matter what we think of it.
We manifest our developing understanding-of and participation-with that value, that meaningfulness of being based-on our apprehension, conceptualization, and imagination of all things both within and without by means of our actions.
I drink a glass of water. I do not know this glass of water intimately, immediately, as-it-is: the molecules, the sediments, the glass. I know this glass of water imperfectly, by my apprehending of
it, conceiving of it by my memories of experiences like it. I really believe it to be cool and refreshing, and that I actually interact with it, as an external, real thing, through my senses and concepts, which are internal and part of me.
As to external or internal, then, to Tolstoy or Camus: I say neither fully, yet both.
...but I am still thirsty.
There is value and meaning inasmuch as we live, as being is necessarily more valuable, and so more meaningful, than oblivion. One is greater than zero.
We may think of God or any value-source externally, as Tolstoy suggests, only inasmuch as that external source can exist within us as a concept, filtered through our initial apprehension, memories, and imaginations.
Whether as external objects of thought as Tolstoy suggests necessary, or as fully-internalized value determinations as Camus illustrates, we come to understand and assert value and meaning only by first conceiving of the possibility within, even if we only conceive of it as we act upon it.
I think this view is akin then to both Tolstoy and Camus', if also very unlike theirs; that meaning and value are immediately inherent in the act of being, no matter what we think of it.
We manifest our developing understanding-of and participation-with that value, that meaningfulness of being based-on our apprehension, conceptualization, and imagination of all things both within and without by means of our actions.
I drink a glass of water. I do not know this glass of water intimately, immediately, as-it-is: the molecules, the sediments, the glass. I know this glass of water imperfectly, by my apprehending of
it, conceiving of it by my memories of experiences like it. I really believe it to be cool and refreshing, and that I actually interact with it, as an external, real thing, through my senses and concepts, which are internal and part of me.
As to external or internal, then, to Tolstoy or Camus: I say neither fully, yet both.
...but I am still thirsty.
