CREATING

LIFE’S MEANING
FOR OURSELVES
Dr. Benjamin Winokur
FC-0503-2: Mind and Behaviour
April 6th, 2023
 Announcements

 Reflection piece 2: don’t forget! No need to submit last minute

 If you have a creative idea for a final assignment that is not an essay, get in touch with me
sooner than later!
 Students choice lecture on April 20th: email me with a topic you want me to discuss. (I will
soon organize a poll with some options)
Albert Camus once said that there is an absurd confrontation between self and world: the way we want the world
to be and the way the world actually is.

Metaphysical absurdity: the universe is ultimately Epistemological absurdity: we are unable to grasp
indifferent to us the point of our confrontations with the universe

The essential question:

whether to go on or not!
 Solutions to Absurdity?

Tolstoy: “irrational faith!” in the

purpose and meaning of life

Buddha: detachment from the sources

of suffering

Schopenhauer: there isn’t one

Camus: you can’t acknowledge the absurdity of life and solve that absurdity

Our lives are like that of Sisyphus

(Schopenhauer might agree…)

However, for Camus, Sisyphus is heroic because he willingly persists in the face of
absurdity – his persistence is a revolt against meaninglessness!
Camus: you can’t acknowledge the absurdity of life and solve that absurdity

Sorry! 
Our lives are like that of Sisyphus

(Schopenhauer might agree…)

However, for Camus, Sisyphus is heroic because he willingly persists in the face of
absurdity – his persistence is a revolt against meaninglessness!
Camus: you can’t acknowledge the absurdity of life and solve that absurdity

Sorry! 
Our lives are like that of Sisyphus

(Schopenhauer might agree…)

However, for Camus, Sisyphus is heroic because he willingly persists in the face of
absurdity – his persistence is a revolt against meaninglessness!
 The Myth of Sisyphus, Once More

“According to the original myth, the stone is

so large that Sisyphus never quite gets it to
the top and must groan under every step, so
that his enormous labor is all for naught.
But…Even if we suppose, for example, that
the stone is but a pebble that can be carried
effortlessly…not the slightest meaning is
introduced into their lives…

…it is not the fact that the labors of

Sisyphus continue forever that deprives
them of meaning. It is, rather, the
implication of this: that they come to
nothing.”
 cheetos and builds a palace
A Revised Scenario: Sisyphus rolls many boulders

“His labors would then have a point”

Another Revised Scenario: the Gods imbue Sisyphus with stone-rolling desires!

“it has now gained not the least shred of

meaningfulness…the task is never completed,
nothing comes of it, no temple ever begins to rise,
and all this cycle of the same pointless thing over
and over goes on forever in this picture as in the
other.”

“Meaninglessness is essentially endless

pointlessness, and meaningfulness is
therefore the opposite.”

But which side do our lives belong to?

[Like Sisyphus,] We toil after goals…of transitory significance and, having gained one of
them, we immediately set forth for the next…the difference is that whereas Sisyphus
himself returns to push the stone up again, we leave this to our children…We do achieve
things—we scale our towers and raise our stones to the hilltops—but every such
accomplishment fades, providing only an occasion for renewed labors of the same kind.

Is any possible achievement of ours permanently significant?

The Lesson: our lives, like Sisyphus’s life, lacks objective meaningfulness because nothing
produces everlasting value

But so what? If Sisyphus built his temple, he’d be bored!

“Where before we were

presented with the nightmare
of eternal and pointless
activity, we are now confronted
with the hell of its eternal
absence.”
…wherein we imagined
Sisyphus to have had
inflicted on him the
irrational desire to be
doing just what he
found himself doing,
should not have been
dismissed so abruptly.
 The point of living is simply to be living, in the
manner that it is your nature to be living.

Do you have a project that always fulfills you?

A problem: what if we get subjective fulfillment out of horrible things? Is such a life really meaningful?
Next class: a final take on the meaning of life…
QUIZ AMENDMENT:

Q6. Buddha believes that his teachings are:

 
1.      Primarily practical in nature, though supported by a theoretical
framework 
2.      Primarily theoretical, though also supported by its practical value
3.      Based on a powerful moral law
4.      Based on a powerful reasoning skill