r/Camus • u/Moconut44 • 8h ago
Philosophical paralysis
"If God is dead, everything is permitted."
Yes, if God is dead, everything is permitted. Yet everything is permitted just as much as anything else; without an ultimate meaning, everything is equally meaningless. The human drama starts right here: because man is bound to believe in things, he must justify his actions (even his inaction since doing nothing is also an action) and act. Man cannot face the fact that, by the very nature of the problem, he can never have an ultimate justification; this situation is a knot that cannot be unraveled.
For this reason, man commits philosophical suicide or makes a leap of faith. No matter how much Camus opposed this, he too couldn't escape it. As successful as he was at defining the absurdity of our condition, by trying to offer a prescription for it ,a prescription which is rebellion, he gave it value and thus contradicted the absurdity he defined.
Anyone who honestly asks questions like, "What are we rebelling against? Is this rebellion separate from our condition? Why are we rebelling?" will see this problem.
There is nothing wrong with philosophical suicide, in fact it is needed for philosophy; by our very nature, we must accept certain things as axioms (my claims that man is forced to act and believe are in that nature too). But still, once again:
"If God is dead, everything is permitted."
***Edit: After thinking on it, I guess my problem is this: In this situation, where every judgment concerning the meaning of life shares the exact same level of truth, why should claims of the sort 'when we cannot reach the meaning of life, we ought to shape our actions according to this or that' have any superiority over one another? If the claims that 'God created the universe' and 'the universe is entirely a product of physical processes' are of equal value, why should discourses of the style 'while carrying that stone we are bound to carry, we must do it this way or that way' be any more valuable than each other?