To you, the thing doing the existing.

Philosophy, to the uninitiated, is often regarded as incomprehensible overly pontificating jargon that gets the reader or listener nowhere. When in actual practice, while it may get us nowhere, it explores what ‘now’ and ‘here’ is. A certain while ago I embarked on the journey to ascertain what exactly those words meant. I fell through many wormholes of thought, through Kierkegaard’s fear and trembling, exploring notions of ethics, and Faith. Through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, digging into What “knowing” is. Neither of these made remote sense to me. I fast-forwarded through time to catch up on post-structuralist theory, I read through Jean Baudrillard’s System of Objects and A Short Introduction to Foucault. These were titles that gave me some glimpse of hope that I could someday wrap my mind around these introspective, and completely abstract concepts–but they didn’t satisfy the craving I was looking for, they were, incomplete. What I was craving was what did it mean to “be”- Did Prince Hamlet even know the question he was invoking? It was at this time that I became fanatically intimate with the term ‘Ontology.’

I was eventually introduced to Graham Harmans by the whims of online algorithms. They, aligned with what is called ‘speculative realism’, coined their own concept - Object Oriented Ontology, (shorthand being OOO, pronounced “Tripple-O.”) I was hooked. A comprehensive nugget upon which one could build a next-to complete system of principles that describes ‘being a thing’. This is what I’ve been looking for as a burnt-out, down-on-their-luck, angry young adult, hurled into a world filled with societally implicit promises, broken. 

I had to wrestle with a lot of the ideas that Harman put out, I was a layperson - I certainly still am in one way or another. Harman in an attempt to share their thoughts, forced me to really consider the term Objects-in-Themselves. This is to mean, the point of view of the thing being addressed. In OOO, objects aren’t defined purely by how humans interact with them; instead, they possess intrinsic qualities that exist independent of human thought or utility. Examples given include chairs, cans of cola, and the Sun.

Understand, I’m reading about what it may feels like to be a freakin’ can of Coke, and it’s at that moment, that it dawns on me just how infrequent I considered what it’s like be other humans. This is my opinion, but I ought to devote more energy to learning to better empathize with fellow humans before I tackle the psych eval of a can of Coke. And so I regressed to prioritize the human being and their experience in my line of inquiry. Sometime later, I began searching online for the humanist giants. Enter Albert Camus, and The Myth of Sisyphus, the Greek deity, whose eternal task is completely pointless and futile. This was a transformative read - but for reasons to be addressed later, in spite of the great love and respect I have for the work, and I mean this in the most charitable way, it’s the ‘Catcher in the Rye’ of philosophy. Embrace the absurdity of it all, fine, acknowledge that the whole of existence is the absurd conjured by the fact that you exist to witness it; but decisions mean something. Decisions affect the world.  Decision serves to both people’s happiness and detriment. 

The Myth of Sisyphus is at ends, a meditation on suicide. Camus, in my opinion, provides the clearest absurdist analysis in their take on Kirilov from Dostoevsky’s The possessed. Camus quotes the following:

“Since in reply to my to my questions about happiness, I am told, through the intermediary of my consciousness, that I cannot be happy except in harmony with the great all, which I cannot conceive and shall never be in a position to conceive, it is evident [...] Since, finally, in this connection, I assume both the role of plaintiff and that of the defendant, of the accused and the judge, and since I consider this comedy perpetuated by nature altogether stupid, and since I deem it humiliating for me to deign to play it [...] In my indisputable capacity of plaintiff and defendant, of judge and accused, I condemn that nature which, with such imprudent nerve, brought me into being in order to suffer- I condemn it to be annihilated with me.”

The analysis provided here ascribes to the act of killing oneself under the context of Kirilov’s logics as being an act of revolt against an indifferent universe. Camus calls kirilov’s suicide, pedagogic in that it demonstrates a rational argument for the normatively heinous act. The act is then linked to good ol’ ‘God-is-dead’ Nietzsche, adding that, to kill God, is to become God as a free object.

So God is dead, and we have killed him - what now to do with our newly found freedom? If you’re Schopenhauer; as my father would once jokingly said, qu’on se pends toussent! This solution does not sit well with me because, while it affirms my own existence as some object in the world, free to seize my own destiny, it also hand waves away the existence of Others-In-Themselves, including people close to me in my life. People who, in fact, I like very much - dare say even love. I’m not terribly bent on hanging myself for their sake, I think this would make people sad.

 Notice, with the introduction of pecking order to the existence of things, we’re no longer in lockstep with Triple-O, my first foray into Ontology.  I put Camus down thinking, maybe this is why he was so cool - he just didn’t give a shit in all the right nuanced ways. Though not really satiated by the outcome, I was still fascinated by the man and read into the life story. Six months after the publication of the philosophical text, Camus, a writing sensation at that time, was fixing to meet this philosopher & playwright whom he had written about long before. In June of 1943 at the opening of the play, La Mouche, Albert Camus would, at first sight, befriend the playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre & the rest, kept me hooked.

Reading list:

Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist Cafe : Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails. Toronto, Vintage Canada, 2017.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Vintage Books, 2018.

Cohen-Solal, Annie. Sartre. Editions Gallimard, 1985.

Edith Goldenberg KERN. Sartre. A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Edith Kern. [by Various Authors.]. Englewood Cliffs, N.J, USA, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962.

Heidegger, Martin, et al. Being and Time. Eastford, Ct, Martino Fine Books, 2019.

Howells, Christina. The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness : A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. 1943. New York, Ny, Washington Square Press, 1999.

---. Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1976. Translated by Alan Sheridon-Smith, edited by Jonathan Rée, London, Canada , Verso , 1982.

---. Existentialism Is a Humanism : Including, a Commentary on the Stranger = L’Existentialism Est Un Humanisme : Explication de L’Étranger. Winnipeg, Man., W. Manitoba Education Instructional Resources - Library, 2016.

---. Ĺêtre et Le Néant : Essai d’Ontologie Phénoménologique. Saint Amand, Gallimard, 1993.

---. No Exit and Three Other Plays. Vintage International, 1989.

---. Situations. New York : G. Braziller, 1965.

---. The Words : Jean-Paul Sartre, Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Greenwich, Conn., Fawcett, 1969.

Jean-Paul Sartre, and Hazel E Barnes. Search for a Method. 1960. New York, Vintage Books, 1969.

Simone De Beauvoir, and Marybeth Timmermann. What Is Existentialism? 1944. London, Penguin Books, 2020.

Wilfrid Desan. The Tragic Finale. 1960. Revised Edition ed., New York, USA, Harper & Row, 1970.