The meaning of it all
Though scientists have proclaimed that animals are as conscious as we are, it can be safely assumed only human beings are full of the yearning to decipher the meaning of life. Such matters obviously are hardly a concern for a child, but while growing up my heart was broken and my interest piqued by the experience of how random death was and how fleeting life could be. When I was nine, I returned from school one day to find that my grandfather, who was my first, and back then only, playmate, had passed away in his sleep. A man, who I had talked to the night before, was gone, and all the words of solace telling me he still existed somewhere in some form struck me as disingenuous. The feeling came rushing back years later when a cousin, suffering from depression, took her own life. All this made me question the sense of purpose with which we live our lives and our inherent desire to give it some meaning.
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The Fallby Albert Camus : My first attempts at reading thinkers who wrote on matters of life and existence ended in frustration. I failed to make sense of their abstruse treatises. The works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche are as dense as they come and still out of my reach. But then I discovered Albert Camus. Of all the existentialist thinkers, his writings are perhaps the most accessible. While one needs to go through Camus’s entire oeuvre to understand his philosophy of the absurd, The Myth of Sisyphus contains the crux of it. The only way we can survive in a meaningless world, Camus says, is by accepting that there is none.
But my favourite book of his is The Fall —a searing indictment of modern man and his endless capability to deceive himself. In the course of one of his monologues, the protagonist, a duplicitous and boastful Parisian lawyer by the name of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, offers his most damning assessment. “I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They will be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers.”
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The Conspiracy Against The Human Race byThomas Ligotti :While Camus recognised that an individual could still create his or her own meaning despite accepting the absurdity of existence, American horror writer Thomas Ligotti rejects even that premise. Summarising the ideas of Norwegian metaphysician Peter Wessel Zapffe, Ligotti posits in The Conspiracy... that we are a mistake in the world of nature. The need to unravel the mystery of a cosmos without any foundation or direction is essentially insatiable, and hence consciousness, which helped us survive the prehistoric world, has turned into a curse. Zapffe sees only one way out of this existential dread. We should, he says, stop reproducing and voluntarily put an end to our existence.
