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[...] Kierkegaard, like Sartre, regards human existence as characterized by the tension between what one is and what one still has to become (as we know, Sartre calls these aspects facticity and transcendence). For Kierkegaard, becoming a self means relating both aspects of human-reality to each other, constantly bringing them into 'synthesis'. He calls these two aspects the gift and task of human existence. [...]
The aesthete does not realize this task. His reality 'is only possibility', and he wants to keep it that way; everything has to remain possible at all times for the aesthete. The ironic-aesthetic attitude is a flight for the responsibility from the becoming of one's existence: to redeem his task, the individual cannot just remain (non-committal) possibility, but has to freely determine himself, that is, realize himself as a positivity, an actuality.
means never committing to anything, always being detached from every situation
[...] ethical self-becoming, as the constant relating of gift and task, is a process that is never finished; the ethical view is not something that one arrives at, after which one is done, and no unclarity and aesthetic confusion remain. [...]
while analyzing Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The aesthete is afraid of being bored, tries fervently to occupy his oversaturated mind with all kinds of distractions, but inevitably ends up being bored. This is what we might call the double nature of boredom: it encompasses both the individual's basic, languid state of apathy, as well as the frenetic attempts that he might make, out of boredom, to distract himself from that state. Kierkegaard thus concludes: 'Boredom is the only continuity the ironist has. boredom, this eternity devoid of content, this salvation devoid of joy, this superficial profundity, this hungry glut'. The ironic inability to commit to something causes an absolute emptiness. Try as the aesthete might, all his attempts at distraction, at 'poetic' variation, lead back to boredom [...]
[...] Boredom is the confrontation with the nothingness of aesthetic existence, and, as such, is connected to what Kierkegaard famously calls anxiety. While fear is always directed at a (supposedly) specific aspect of the world (snakes, heights, the monster under the bed), the object of anxiety is nothingness: it is directed at the undetermined situation of the individual, his freedom to form himself. Anxiety is the realization of the groundlessness of the individual, the realization that he is not automatically himself, but has to become a self, as the product of choices for which he is solely responsible. Boredom has the same nothingness as its source, only the bored individual does not yet seem fully pervaded (or 'anxiety-struck') by the existential task that this nothingness represents.
The absurd is not a quality of man or of the world, but 'is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world', writes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. The absurd is the tension, the discrepancy between man asking the world for meaning. for reasons, and the world that does not answer, that stays meaningless, reasonless by itself.
'At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face', says Camus. Man can live his life unthinkingly: 'Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, fourr hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm--this path is easily followed most of the time,' writes Camus. Habit is the unconscious explanation of the world, which means that the demand for an actual explanation does not really arise: 'A world that may be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world.' But, as we read, 'one day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement'. According to Camus this is 'the first sign of absurdity', 'it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness'. From that moment on, man and world are no longer unthinkingly 'one': 'in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land', writes Camus, '[t]his divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.'
What Camus describes as the experience of the absurd is man realizing the meaning of his own consciousness, that is, of his freedom. His descriptions of man's 'absurd freedom' are very similar to Sartre's analysis of the intentionality of consciousness, which is always a relation, a distance to the world [...] Camus emphasizes on the one hand the physical factuality and on the other hand the free consciousness of man: 'Through the whole of human consciousness runs a fault line; man is double. Due to his body, he also belongs to the world of objects, while as consciousness he is free from this world. It is this division that Camus calls "absurdity", writes Achterhuis.
Achterhuis's book: Camus, p.183
Holland describes 'Octet' as 'sculpting through fiction a powerful human presence whose insistent engagement with the reader makes her feel, in her own life, less alone'.
footnote 82. Holland being the author of Succeeding Postmodernism
Through this experience of communal suffering, AA seems to do something that Wallace also regards as one of the main purposes of 'serious fiction', namely: 'giv[ing] access to other selves'. Wallace states: 'Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is [a sort of "generalization" of suffering]. [...] This is nourishing, redemptive; we have become less alone inside'. At that point, we can say, in the words of Camus, that '[we have] conquered solitude'.
Wittgenstein often compares the arbitrariness of the rules of a language to that of the rules of a game, for example, chess: "the purpose of the rules of chess is not to correspond to the essence of chess but to the purpose of the game of chess" [...] We can of course decide, while playing chess, to ignore the existing rules and make up new ones, but then we are not playing chess anymore, and there is a good chance that our opponent does not understand what we are doing (as in the Eschaton game, which ends in a massive fight). [...]