Truth and Illusion—is illusion ultimately happier?


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Truth and Illusion—is illusion ultimately happier?


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Truth and Illusion—is illusion ultimately happier? (and on this idea of Happiness—Camus and G-d? “The point is to live”—how is suffering related to the production of meaning? How is meaning related to happiness and does happiness imply some denial? What is the status—either specifically in Camus’ works or beyond them? We can consider, for instance, that Kierkegaard likewise narrows the scope of happiness, in a certain sense as inauthentic or illegitimate—save as resignation to the divine. Or else, we can take up how Dostoevsky undertakes this theme of happiness, either explicitly in “The Grand Inquisitor” or implicitly in the thematic linkages between Kirillov’s suicide, Ivan’s anecdote of the quadrillion kilometers and “The Geologic Cataclysm” [as related to him by the Devil], or how the image of Christ is used and perhaps reevaluated in Dostoevsky’s and Borges’ work in terms of happiness: for instance, one might consider, what is the nature of Nils Runeberg’s happiness? Can we be content, for example, with the one singular moment of justification—expressed either as understanding [as in “The Library of Babel” and the observation of its narrator that “To me, it does not seem unlikely that on some shelf in the universe there lies a total book. I pray the unknown gods that some man–even if only one man, and though it have been thousands of years ago!–may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. May heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but may Thy enormous Library be justified, for one instant, in one being.”—or through the stillness of nature—that is, the footnote: “the water in the forest is happy, we can be evil and in pain”). o A) More broadly, what is the relationship of happiness to worth and can we say, perhaps, considering Camus’ conception of absurdity or Rimbaud’s the reinvention of values such as love—along with this expression, “I should not say I think, but rather I am thought”—that there is an insufficiency and nonetheless an inaccessible or irreducible truth in the happiness of the water in the forest or “The Man of the Book”? –Which is to say, in what way is happiness, as commonly conceived, always already (in Borges, in Kierkegaard, perhaps even in Dostoevsky or in Rimbaud as unity of experience) correlated with an aspiration towards or need for universality? How can we contrast this to the happiness of Sisyphus or Scipio’s “pursuit of happiness without hope”? o B) As another modification: What is the role of the divine (or its absence) in the construction of happiness and of truth? Is the assertion of the divine adequate to our experience? Is there any way, from an existential perspective, to assert the possibility (not merely the hollow and not-guaranteed necessity) of G-d without lapsing into what Camus calls “philosophical suicide”?