The document discusses existentialist philosophy as presented in works by Camus, Sartre, and Beckett. It analyzes how their characters find purpose and meaning through self-creation even in absurd situations lacking inherent significance. While the document's author is initially drawn to existentialism, they ultimately reject it due to their belief in predetermined essence and purpose derived from faith in God rather than self-construction.
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The document discusses existentialist philosophy as presented in works by Camus, Sartre, and Beckett. It analyzes how their characters find purpose and meaning through self-creation even in absurd situations lacking inherent significance. While the document's author is initially drawn to existentialism, they ultimately reject it due to their belief in predetermined essence and purpose derived from faith in God rather than self-construction.
The document discusses existentialist philosophy as presented in works by Camus, Sartre, and Beckett. It analyzes how their characters find purpose and meaning through self-creation even in absurd situations lacking inherent significance. While the document's author is initially drawn to existentialism, they ultimately reject it due to their belief in predetermined essence and purpose derived from faith in God rather than self-construction.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
The document discusses existentialist philosophy as presented in works by Camus, Sartre, and Beckett. It analyzes how their characters find purpose and meaning through self-creation even in absurd situations lacking inherent significance. While the document's author is initially drawn to existentialism, they ultimately reject it due to their belief in predetermined essence and purpose derived from faith in God rather than self-construction.
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Sean Wang-Lu AP Lit 6* 4/30/2012 Existentialism Essay Among The Plague, No Exit, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Act
Without Words, each attempts to communicate the common notion that existence precedes essence. Essentially, the three authors Camus, Sartre, and Beckett assert that there is no inherent worth in any noumenon or phenomenon, thus things like morality and death are merely pieces in an incoherent and nonsensical world that we live in. What follows, however, is that worth is a mental construction, and therefore what you do is what you are (i.e. not what is hypothetically predetermined by a metaphysical God). Camus expresses this idea in his novel, The Plague, by situating the protagonist/narrator, Dr. Reiux, in the middle of a town inflicted by the bubonic plague. In doing so, he creates an absurd situation where death is as common as a seasonal flu, killing both the innocent and the guilty. In the novel, however, Reiux discovers his own purpose in the world by creating a value system where being selfless is given worth. Thus even though he concedes that his actions have no inherent worth, they are valuable to him and only him for all that he cares. For instance, even when Grand calls Reiux a hero, he dismisses the notion, saying that he was doing little more than what he ought to, or in existentialist terms what he deems is his selfcreated essence. Similarly, No Exit and The Myth of Sisyphus place their characters in situations of pointlessness and nothingness (hell and a hill accordingly), but eventually have them realize the meaning they are able to give themselves even in the midst of such ridiculous circumstances.
For while Garcin is trapped in a timeless universe with two people he abhors, by the end of the play, he manages to convince himself that he can escape and therefore gives his pointless eternity a certain degree of purpose. Further more, in Camus interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus, he extends this existentialist framework onto the tragic Sisyphus, cursed to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll all the way back down. Camus, however, takes the curse of rolling the boulder and makes it into Sisyphus essence. For while his purpose is not meaningful in the lens of any modern day observer, it is a purpose nonetheless, and thus, he somehow convinces himself that what he is doing is in some way substantial and fulfilling. In regards to Act Without Words, Beckett sets the stage for existentialist philosophy as opposed to providing his own example of an existentialist hero. Instead, Beckett uses his play to exemplify certain elements of the human condition, namely its idiotic means of making sense of the universe (stacking big box below small box) and its confinement within the five senses. His protagonist, however, may be seen as a tragic existentialist who eventually loses his purpose, the water acting as survival, and survival being his essence, which he eventually gives up on attaining. However, I interpret the water as a meaningful purpose and survival as the apparent intrinsic function, but in quotations because the protagonist realizes in the end that it is simply unattainable, even if there is something inside that tells him he must try to grab it. Instead, simply existing becomes his life, even if it is one that he abhors. The fact that most of these texts were written around the same time (the end of world war two) is indicative of the evaluation of death and, consequently, life that occurred in the post-war era. The idea of a meaningful life became an appropriate topic to be discussed when life became such a fleeting thing with people are dying for no apparent logical reason. In essence, the world
became more apparent as being an absurd environment, a stage for these absurdist writers to examine the nature of the universe we lived in. Personally, because I am a Christian, it would seem logically contradictory to believe I must construct a value system for myself when I already have a doctrine to base my worth as an individual. The problem arises, however, when the doctrine that is the cornerstone of any believer cannot be trusted with complete certainty. Consequently, the purpose of the Christian becomes muddled and indeterminate, as no objective methods of pleasing a God can be definitively known. This is where existentialism should have an impact on my life in that I must, in this nonsensical situation, create my own way of pleasing this God. I do not take on this belief system, however, because of my belief in a metaphysical connection with this omniscient and omnipotent mind. Under this premise, I am able to disregard the existentialist premise of absurdism, and subsequently suggest that my essence is in fact predetermined and that my intrinsic function is made available to me through a metaphysical stimulus known in religion as the Holy Spirit. Whether that stimulus can be attributed to being a result of society is a separate argument. Essentially, because I cannot live in a world where I must live with the illusion of choice or purpose, I refuse to accept the existentialist premise of an absurd and objectively pointless existence. For instance, the idea of determinism suggests that because our universe adheres to the natural laws of cause and effect (an leading to an+1 every time), the notion of free will is then lost in that all we are doing is experiencing a four-dimensional crystal in a string of time, making decisions that were already predetermined at the start of the universe. To sum it up, I personally cannot commit to a belief system that bases itself in circular logic: where the illusion of significance is nothing more than a mental construction.
