Prabanjan's Cosmos

Episode #224 ... Albert Camus - The Stranger

2 min read

Asteroid 13 Asteroids
Black Hole 1 Black Hole
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Albert Camus wrote a book called A Happy Death before The Stranger. It is a book about happiness. Why would Camus write a book about happiness and never publish it then write The Stranger, who cares nothing about happiness.

In The Stranger, Mersault, represents indifference towards the typical ways the people get their meaning.

To fully understand Camus, you need to also read his lectures and essays, not just his novels.

Understand the symbolism of the Sun, in The Stranger, and A Happy Death

Happiness depends on 3 things:

  • Money: It is easier to find Happiness, if you have money to secure basic stuff.
  • Time:
    • Time to spend pursuing your own interests.
    • Time that’s not just spent working for someone else all day.
    • It also means you have enough good health to take advantage of the Time to pursue your own interest in the first place.
  • Solitude:
    • If you’re always distracted and are fulfilling some social requirement that people have of you, you never truly have any time to fully possess yourself.

How can you ever be happy if you’re constantly being something else for someone else all the time?

  • What is Happiness but just a certain kind of Harmony between the person and the life they lead. The Dessert

  • Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Wittgenstein ladder when you proceed a philosophical discussion and arrive at a new idea oftentimes the conversation you were having seems to look naive or silly. Like a ladder that you kick from underneath once you have

  • Philosophers create a set of abstraction of the real world and try to escape from the real world.

  • Most philosophies, say we can be happy only if we knew how to frame them. but isn’t that delusional. Should what happens in the world matter as well.

  • Demons The best work of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

  • Live life not based on some moral justification, Live just for the sake of life.

  • Look at life as it is. Don’t try to paint it to your likes or dislikes.

Questions???

What is religious self-emptying

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