Philosophy and spirituality and the whole damn thing

The diagram that follows is wrong. In a recent discussion, a friend’s description of religion sounded - or so I thought - like philosophy, later I decided spirituality, which led me to wonder, as most do, on the relationship between the three. I am not completely happy with any of it, meaning I’m partially happy with some of it; and then I added atheism, lest I forget, to skewer my ideas completely. Canon Giles Fraser pointed out to Richard Dawkins not so long ago the questionable merit of pronouncing on someone else’s belief. Hence my own notions can only ever suit my own imperfect ideas. I think of it as a start to a more internal discussion.

Wine into water

...our age is not willing to stop with faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine, it goes further, it turns wine into water.

I am 92% of the way through Fear and Trembling which, if I am to believe Amazon, is only 160 pages. Surely this is a miss-print, it feels more... substantial. Since a Kindle supports multiple font sizes, it deals not with page numbers but percentages; you always know exactly how much there is left to enjoy, or endure. Kierkegaard is not boring in any sense (though he is repetitive) but since it is a religious stance on the absurd, a philosophy I read previously in Camus, I find myself constantly having to walk in another’s shoes; which is no bad thing, but with Camus I could - at least in part - walk in my own.

Hence try as I might, I can never see Abraham as he does - though Kierkegaard does not claim to understand him - but I do admire his determination to question Abraham’s willing sacrifice of his son, to posit that without faith he is no more than a murderer; interestingly, for Kierkegaard, faith requires the absurd.

Faith ... is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence.

The happiness of angels

I find no meaning in the happiness of angels. I know simply that this sky will last longer than I.

There was no rancour, only a gentle parting of the ways. Sometime in my early teenage years I came to the conclusion that I no longer believed in God, realising that I couldn’t remember the last time I had. That my outlook on life - some vague notion of leaving the world a better place - didn’t change as a result, might suggest it was never serious; certainly, I don’t think I’d ever thought of the life that came next. Of course my outlook did change, or rather the scope, but not until much later and at an age when such goals feel foolishly optimistic, conceited even.

At first I never gave it more than a passing thought; life would appear to have little purpose but there was plenty to keep me occupied. Age granted me time to think again, not through a fear of death, more a building curiosity on a question for which I suspected an unedifying answer. Thus I came to The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays.

Albert Camus; born in 1913 in Algeria, died in 1960 in Paris, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, a one-time communist - albeit during the 1930’s - who in criticising Soviet communism after the war managed to alienate his colleagues on the left, including Sartre who publicly denounced him. I confess, as with George Orwell, this only makes me like him more. Camus was a proponent of absurdism; a philosophy describing the conflict borne from our desire for meaning in a meaningless world, and discussing how we should react when conscious of this fate.

At least I think that’s it. I could hardly claim a complete understanding, yet for a work portraying the “philosophical suicide” of others, notably Kierkegaard of whom he suggests “an almost intentional mutilation of the soul”, The Myth of Sisyphus is a positive life-affirming read. Camus examines whether realisation should logically lead to suicide and answers with a defiant ‘No’, concluding such an act to be rejection. “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” he says, though I think he describes it better in one of the other essays:

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

It’s anarchy

I’ve always thought of anarchy in its pejorative sense; as such anarchists were to be pitied at best, and at worse full of violence, a general urge to destruction and dangerous to the ‘common good’ – though I’m uneasy with such a term. Possibly an unfair generalisation and I am reminded of a conversation with a socialist activist friend who despaired at the appearance of the Socialist Workers Party at every demonstration. Some people, she explained, are full of anger at an injustice whereas some are just full of anger.

I’ve not a lot of time for people railing against a system without providing (credible) alternatives; thus anarchism came even lower down than socialism in my estimation. However I recently came across this quote from Gustav Landauer:

The State is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.

I like that. Anarchism, like socialism, would appear to have many sometimes competing facets. Gustav Landauer was murdered by soldiers one day after being arrested during the November Revolution. It serves to remind me that when I win the lottery, for which I’d have to buy a ticket, I must look to further education and the study of something “useless”. There’s nothing to stop me now of course, except time and a general weariness, I’d just like the money; though in some anarchist systems I wouldn’t need it... apparently.