All you need to be a philosopher is to ask “Why?” By this standard, most three-year-olds are philosophers. When he hears the obvious answer, a philosopher thinks, “I’m not satisfied with this. There must be more to it!” The three-year-old responds to every answer with a further “Why?” until the adult tires of the game. Most of the fun in reading The Myth of Sisyphus is to think, “I’m not satisfied with this. There must be more to it!”
Gentleeye suggested in a comment on my last post but one: “As far as I know, no other animal species manifests a behaviour anything like suicide.” That interested me. At the time, I could not think of any sensible instances to challenge her proposition. But now it seems to me that any animal in a cage can feel absurdity. If it has not been domesticated but has been used to roam across vast spaces, it may lose the will to live. It paces back and forth psychotically. It may pine and die. It may refuse to reproduce. For decades zoos tried to get pandas to mate, and failed. When you lose the will to live, your immune system is weakened and you fail to take care of yourself properly. Widowers for example often don’t outlive their wives very long. Despair and recklessness, as I have personally observed, can hasten death, and are close cousins to suicide proper.
As humans, we can find ourselves locked in a cage, just like any zoo animal. What bars, what padlock am I talking about? They are no different to those which pen the zoo animal (except for being metaphorical bars and padlocks). They are whatever prevents me from the exercise of my true nature. I may be in a cage from birth. I might be free during childhood, or a part of it, and then trapped. The chances are that I will reconcile myself to this diminished freedom, and deny the constraints, professing no knowledge of the world beyond. That is what we call adaptation, or in some instances “education”.
So Gentleeye goes on to say that suicide “is connected with consciousness, specifically with having a view of ‘what life is’ and not liking the conclusion, which may be idiosyncratic. More than ‘not liking’, in fact, rather, finding it intolerable enough to take action to end it.”
I think she is seeing other animals as lacking in that consciousness. I was reminded of this by today’s excerpt of the BBC’s Book of the Week. The author describes being present at the birth of a lamb. It’s a breech birth. One leg is out and the farmer’s son is pulling on it to help the rest to emerge. She speculates on the ewe’s consciousness: “Did she know she was giving birth? Maybe, if she’d done it before. Assuming sheep remember what happened to them the year before, and they can relate it to what is happening now. Two imponderables. But what would knowing she was giving birth mean to a sheep? And if this was her first pregnancy, she couldn’t know.” The book is called What I don’t know about animals, and the extracts I’ve heard are designed to point out the impossibility of knowing what another species thinks. She is sceptical too as to whether we can know what another of our own species thinks.
I shall play philosopher here and ask “How do I know what I think?” It’s a surprisingly interesting question. Actually it implies another question: “Do I know what I think?” For me, the answer for most of my life has been “No,” and might be still. Certainly, I have not known if I was really in love. I have not known what I liked and didn’t like, or what I wanted to do. There is a name for this malady: lack of clear-sightedness. All I know is that I have more clear-sightedness than once I had.
I know that the author’s words about the ewe, as quoted above, are absurd, and probably intended to be so. But from this absurdity we can question more sensibly what we mean by consciousness. I belong to the class of mammals. Like other animals, I have intelligence enough to survive. Too much, perhaps, but then human life is very very complicated.
I think it is absurd to say that humans differ from the other animals in that we have consciousness and they don’t. That’s because I don’t think we know about the inner life of other animals. I think this is Jenny Diski’s point.
Camus would like to persuade us that absurdity is our friend, a better tool than hope for reconciling ourselves to life on earth.
I contend that mood is more important than any thought-content. More important even than hope or meaning.
I heard on the radio that dementia patients become much happier when they have an animal to look after; when they can be carers themselves, rather than recipients of care. I imagine that in advanced dementia, hope and meaning shrivel away, but there is still mood.
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Photo Lambing, 1978: James Ravilious. Click on the photo for source.
a wayfarer’s notes 
We are but animals,with few more freedom, in a larger cage and extended loops of rules and regulations,which are not visible in short scale scenario.How true and meaningful your writing is Vincent!
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Can we do anything about it to be free, Jitu? For we have an idea of freedom, as well as this consciousness of being restricted animals. For the moment we say “I am in a cage” we imagine the possibility of not being in the cage.
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One reason why it is easy to agree on our caged status is that one can interpret metaphors in many ways.
You refer to rules and regulations, which is fair enough. One normally thinks of them as externally imposed. But we are also conditioned by internalised rules and regulations, which we could call taboos; whether culturally determined or arising from personal history.
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The latter ones are the hardest to change. Many times we are playing against our own freedom and don´t notice that.
When I was growing up all I wanted was freedom, although I didn´t quite know what that meant. I didn´t know it could mean different things from person to person. For me it meant being who I was, or thought I was, and it meant changing and still being the same in the core.So I can say I feel free now.
Vincent, you mentioned dementia.I have close people in my family who are dementia patients in earlier stages. It´s one of the most horrible cages, in my opinion, for the fact that you forget who you are.
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why (to be 3 again) is it absurdity to pace and miss one's freedom – instead of grief? Very different, yes? One is no-meaning, the other is loss. Perhaps it's loss of a life that was imputed with meaning, but this increases the abstraction of the idea and we can't know that this is what a caged animal feels. With loss, one knows that liberty is a potential out there: satisfaction is possible, even if no longer possible for oneself. With absurdity, I think, we recognize that there is no satisfaction, it simply doesn't exist.
This again goes back to the crux of my argument: it appears that absurdity implies that a satisfactory life is fiction. If this is indeed what absurdity rests on, it's easily revealed as fiction by finding someone – anyone – happy in their current life, accepting it as it is with ups and downs. NOT resting acceptance on the idea of some future perfected happiness, but on current contentment, warts and all. Clearly this may not be the commonest state of being, but also must be recognized as occurring.
I think that Camus is assuming that the perception of happiness is based on the hope that life will get better than it currently is. That is precisely where I find my disagreement with him.
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If happiness is based on future hopes, it can be characterized as delusional, absurd.
If happiness is based on present experience and acceptance of death, illness, all that we experience – it isn't delusional, but simply- dare I say it? – a different mood.
If we can imagine the possibility of not being in the cage, and accept the dangers of not receiving our meal from our keeper 2X daily – we can leave the cage.
It seems to me what is truly absurd is to recognize the cage, to understand the price of leaving, to choose to remain and then rail about conditions!
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Hayden, thanks for your comments on this and previous post. I'll think about them and respond as soon as possible.
Luciana, I've been brooding on what you said about early stages of dementia and forgetting who you are. Something strikes me as not quite right about this, and I have been trying to work it out, and research it too, but with no luck as yet.
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I didn´t mean it literally, but in the sense of losing identity and not being able to rely on your memory anymore. One of the people in question, my mother-in-law, forgot she had seen her son on his birthday, that she had visited her grandchildren and even that there was a newborn one in the family, just to give you an example.
She wiped it out in a few days. She knows her name, her address etc, but she´s been losing “pieces of herself” in the way she forgets things she has lived recently. She´s been diagnosed with dementia a couple of years ago and we don´t need a research to tell us we´ve been losing her little by little and that she is not the same woman.
We are our memories, our dreams,our thoughts, our actions, and our plans, Vincent.
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I’m very glad of your clarification here, Luciana, which confirms my own experience. The research I intend to conduct (I’ve ordered a certain book from the library) is to augment my rather slight experience of dementia. The case I have in mind is a schoolmaster I met at a reunion thirty years after I had been a pupil. I found him to be exactly the same personality, but unable to work out the present and recent past. In fact he was happy to dwell in the time period I had known him before. Trying to place me, he was convinced I was one of his colleagues, a teacher from that time, and not a pupil. In the same vein, he called his wife by the name of his previous wife. The new wife was much younger. So though he was eighty years old, he inhabited a mental world in which he was in his late forties.
In my own life I have been rediscovering pieces of myself over the last five years or so, reconstructing who I am from memories, dreams, thoughts and actions of childhood. So now I know “who I am” and it’s quite different from the alienation I experienced in forty years from 18 to 58. I know I am not my plans, because I don’t have any, other than to die well. I’m nearly 69. I know I am not suffering from dementia because I’m sharply aware of the present as well as the past; and still able to do skilled tasks.
My purpose in the research is to discover how it would be to have dementia. I know it is distressing for a loved one who feels that the person is disappearing. However, I could well imagine a retreat from the present world, that is, my own environment outside the home, into the essence of “who I am”. Even with all my faculties intact as they are at present, I find the world has less and less attraction for me. I could imagine not knowing my grandchildren at all, and not recognising my children in their present adult forms. But I might still cherish the memories of those same children when they were really children.
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Hayden, you said “I think that Camus is assuming that the perception of happiness is based on the hope that life will get better than it currently is. That is precisely where I find my disagreement with him.”
Right! I think that the only authentic reaction to Camus is to disagree with him in one’s own way. Despite the intellectualising, I believe that he’s doing his best to be authentic, and this is the wellspring of his philosophic creativity.
I’m pretty certain that his book is not to provide answers, or a route-map to happiness, but to let us share his own journey of discovery. It’s an attempt to understand intellectually the dilemmas of life, which he characterises as falling outside any rational scheme. To summarise his notion of the absurd, I think it goes something like this: “Just because there are questions, it doesn’t mean there are answers. It is our nature to desire answers. It is Nature’s nature not to provide them. Man has got by till now by inventing fake answers, as an avoidance technique. It’s possible to transcend that way of getting by, through facing life head on. Then we can realize that we are Sisyphus, enduring the weight of rolling the stone up the hill; and yet live happily.”
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I have to acknowledge that I do not know anything certain about the inner life of animals, or what their consciousness is like. I like to tell myself that my cat loves me… but what does this mean? Is it just that I enjoy the way he behaves, and choose to interpret it as evidence that he experiences (at least some of) the same range of emotions that I feel myself? Or does he in fact participate in such feelings, regardless of my interpretations?
Somewhere in my numerous boxes of books which I won't be unpacking for at least another year is a truly fascinating volume which, among many other intriguing issues, addresses this very question – A General Theory of Love. It's frustrating not to be able to get it out and refer to the relevant text! My rather hazy recollection is that it picks up on the point that the mammalian brain is not unique to humans, and the way it functions emotionally is not unique to humans either. The thesis is something like 'brains WANT to be together with other brains' and there is no a priori reason why this cannot operate across species. But I can't get it out of the box right now, so you'll have to order your own copy from Amazon or your library to check whether my memory is correct (and you should do that anyway, because it is a marvellous book!).
Another point – is 'alienation' a mood?
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“Man has got by till now by inventing fake answers, as an avoidance technique.”
Exactly what Becker says, by the way.
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I can believe that, Raymond, but I suppose I thought his neo-Freudian beliefs were fake answers too.
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The love between cat and owner does make us question what we mean by love. I certainly accept that capability for love is built-in to human beings; that it manifests as an emotion; that it can be seen in dogs as a kind of worship, or at any rate reverence of a father-figure or pack leader. I don't have a cat but the ownerless cat that our neighbours let into their house knows me as well as I know it. Our relationship is one of mutual caution.
I already have two books dealing with the brain and emotions, both by Antonio Damasio: The Feeling Of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness; and Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain.
Do I need to read another book on brain and emotion?
My attitude to love could be summed up like this. On the sublunary level, including the erotic, it's a built-in capability (in humans & perhaps certain domestic pets) which supports self-interest. On a family, community, nature-mystical or divine level, it's a recognition of oneness & world-soul.
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Yes Vincent, now did you check out page 257 where he presents Rank's astute criticism of Freud?
I see no fundamental difference between Camus's idea of facing the absurd, and the summary Becker has made of Freud, Rank, Kierkegaard, Brown end the rest.
I think Camus would agree with Becker that “The urge to cosmic heroism, then, is sacred and mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism.”
By the way, it's a joy to disagree with you.
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Well, it's a joy to disagree with you too, Raymond.
I sent the book back to the library, after waiting a while to see if you would want to discuss it.
Presenting Rank's astute criticism of Freud is good enough to support my careful phrasing: “neo-Freudian beliefs”. For every 100 who think Freud is worth bothering with, I guess 99 have astute criticisms, with only 1% being fundamentalists.
By the way, have your read Erica Jong's Fear of Flying? Not of course because it's a delightfully sexy book (all about the quest of the “zipless fuck”), but because the narrator is wife of a Freudian analyst travelling with him and all the other shrinks to a convention in Vienna.
She doesn't bother with astute criticisms of Freud, merely blows the whole thing apart with her delicious satire.
Saying what Camus would agree with, him being dead before Becker's book was written, is classifiable with sentences such as “God wants us to …” and “Jesus would …”, in my insufficiently humble opinion.
Personally, as his self-styled translator, I have enough difficulty with unravelling what he actually said, never mind would he would have agreed with!
If he had any integrity (and I'm not taking sides for or against) he might have agreed or disagreed or refused to comment on anything that was put before him.
I respect him as a writer, which of course is all that's left of him now. I'm mindful of the responsibility not to project on to him my own opinions or any preconceived idea of his opinions. To do so would taint my translation (he said with pompous high-mindedness, after having translated no more than three sentences of Camus this week).
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“Saying what Camus would agree with, him being dead before Becker's book was written, is classifiable with sentences such as “God wants us to …” and “Jesus would …”, in my insufficiently humble opinion.”
Hi Vincent, your criticism misses my point, in my not so humble opinion. But that is okay, you are welcome to write off my point. There is no need to further discuss my view on this subject.
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Now I feel guilty, like one who has used a great deal too much force. It's no longer such a joy to disagree with you!
I also feel guilty in a different way about my inability to confirm or deny your surmise about Camus, since I have not read his book further than I have translated it.
May I never write off any point you raise. But I'll confess to you that Becker's book convinced me as no other homage mixed-with-criticism of Freud has ever done, that Freud is a plague on our intellectual life if not the shrink industry. His profession was to help patients get better, but because of his books and his general lordliness has been venerated as a thinker equal to Marx (another plague) or Darwin (entirely benign, who cannot be blamed for Richard Dawkins any more than Wagner can be blamed for the Nazis).
I think it's better that I this be frank with you, Raymond, though I shall feel even more guilty later despite the joy you claim to get from our disagreements!
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Luciana, as a postscript to our discussion on dementia, I want to contact you but don't have an email address. I mentioned “research”. It was to follow up what I briefly heard on the radio. Here is a link to an organisation started by the woman I heard speaking, called SPECAL.
There's also a book which I'm currently reading – or see also US Amazon.
I feel sure that this methodology for caring for demential patients must have spread beyond UK by now (it has been going more than 10 years) or will have been spontaneously discovered elsewhere.
But to me, the quickest way to understand the illness and how to make a good experience for the sufferer and loved ones instead of a hell, is to get the understanding from a book. I do urge you to look for yourself for your close relatives' sake and your own.
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If you want to discuss privately, Luciana, my email address is ianmulder at tiscali dot co dot uk.
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Thank you so much for this, Vincent! I checked the website and the books and I also got interested in other ones on the same topic at the Amazon page, like the one on activities for dementia patients.
I have your e-mail because I´ve sent you e-mail before, so you might have mine, but I´ll send you a message so that you can keep my e-mail address.
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Hi Vincent
I think it is useful to discuss these points of disagreement. I feel lucky to have your views. I do like Freud but think he made a big mistake when he tried to provide a complete answer to the existential challenges of the human being.
For one good thing, he made the world more aware of “denial” and “repression”. In light of these two concepts I think I understand myself much better for having read some Freud.
Freud completely missed understanding some ideas you have noted from Camus:
“Camus would like to persuade us that absurdity is our friend, a better tool than hope for reconciling ourselves to life on earth.”
I like to have both absurdity and hope as my friends. And of course Vincent.
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You've made a very important point there, Raymond, about hope. Camus is against it because in most people it prevents recognition of absurdity, which he takes to be the higher thing. He finds hope the deadly evasion, but in that he fails to recognise that hope is the saving grace of the poor and downtrodden.
Camus and Nietzsche are thus the snobs, the elitists, sniffing the air of the mountaintops like Zarathustra. Nietzche sneers at Christianity for being the religion of slaves – without the compassion to realise the extent to which many have no choice but to be slaves, even if not so literally, not so brutally deprived of physical freedom, as in much of the nineteenth century.
Thanks for standing up for hope. It may be the opium of the people, but opium is easier to absorb than high-falutin' philosophy!
I would like to say, prettily, that friendship is far better than opium, by way of returning your pretty compliment.
But I have never tried opium!
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if you “NO” what you think most of the time there becomes less to think about . . . as a trained observer (social worker) my mom didn't “NO” what to think about her Alzheimer's and impressed the doctors with her awareness and grace . . .
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I can't know if I was in-love if it is insane . . . love is sanity because it allows me freedom from judgment for better or for worse, I care. When in-love, judgments are of passion, I have given control to my object of desire. Sometimes I fall in-love with my awareness.
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Hi there Vincent. Looks like you have been dealing with some morbid topics while I was away!
Some pigs in the new testament committed suicide by jumping over a cliff.
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It's good to see you back, Ashok! I assure you there is nothing morbid about my interest in mortality. I shall write more on the topic and you'll see what I mean.
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Brad4d thanks for your observation about your mother's Alzheimer's. I have been wondering about how aware one can be of having this condition: whether one can know it, accept it, live within the limitation. I would still like to know more.
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