{"id":84874,"date":"2017-01-02T12:00:01","date_gmt":"2017-01-02T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=84874"},"modified":"2017-01-02T09:46:55","modified_gmt":"2017-01-02T09:46:55","slug":"albert-camus-on-consciousness-and-the-lacuna-between-truth-and-meaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/01\/albert-camus-on-consciousness-and-the-lacuna-between-truth-and-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"Albert Camus on Consciousness and the Lacuna between Truth and Meaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cFrom the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThe need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same,\u201d<\/em> Hannah Arendt observed in her brilliant treatise on the life of the mind<\/a>, adding: \u201cThe basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The nature of consciousness and its role in both creating and mediating that fallacy is what Albert Camus<\/strong> (November 7, 1913\u2013January 4, 1960) explored three decades earlier in The Myth of Sisyphus<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the source of his abiding wisdom on the will to live and the most important question of existence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Noting that \u201ceverything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it,\u201d 28-year-old Camus considers the nature of consciousness and its supreme object \u2014 truth. Fifteen years before he became the second youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded him for the \u201cclear-sighted earnestness\u201d with which he \u201cilluminates the problems of the human conscience,\u201d<\/a> he writes:<\/p>\n

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question: \u201cWhat would life be?\u201d one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard\u2019s reply: \u201cdespair.\u201d Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it. Consciousness does not form the object of its understanding, it merely focuses, it is the act of attention, and, to borrow a Bergsonian image, it resembles the projector that suddenly focuses on an image. The difference is that there is no scenario, but a successive and incoherent illustration. In that magic lantern all the pictures are privileged. Consciousness suspends in experience the objects of its attention. Through its miracle it isolates them. Henceforth they are beyond all judgments. This is the \u201cintention\u201d that characterizes consciousness. But the word does not imply any idea of finality; it is taken in its sense of \u201cdirection\u201d: its only value is topographical.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

And yet the ultimate function of consciousness, Camus suggests, is not the retrieval of truth but the higher-order synthesis of meaning. He writes:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me \u2014 that is what I understand. And these two certainties \u2014 my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle \u2014 I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?<\/p>\n

If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be<\/em> this world.<\/p>\n

With this, Camus comes full circle to the opening sentence of his treatise, which remains among the most famous in literature and poses one of the most profound questions of philosophy \u2014 whether or not life is worth living<\/a>. With an eye to his first great philosophical preoccupation \u2014 the experience of the absurd and the perplexity of how one is to live with it \u2014 he writes:<\/p>\n

The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death \u2014 and I refuse suicide.<\/p>\n

Complement this particular portion of the wholly indispensable The Myth of Sisyphus<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Sy Montgomery on how the octopus illuminates the wonders of consciousness<\/a> and Israel Rosenfield\u2019s trailblazing exploration of consciousness, memory, and how our sense of self arises<\/a>, then revisit Camus on the art of awareness<\/a>, how to bolster our spirit in hard times<\/a>, what it means to be a rebel<\/a>, happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons<\/a>, and his moving correspondence with Boris Pasternak<\/a>.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cFrom the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inspirational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}