Stranger on Earth

Within the pages of Albert Camus’ The Fall ( La Chute , 1956), I come face to face with some of the philosophical issues that have kept me intrigued for a number of years: the meaning of innocence, the judgemental God, among other things. Composed as an unbroken internal monologue in typically opaque Camus style, The Fall is an inscrutable read even for the most seasoned of Camus readers. The challenge is to figure out what innocence has to do with it all. The narrator Clamence “speaks” to us from a bar in the seedy old heart of Amsterdam, where its “concentric canals resemble the circles of hell” (10). Clamence, a down-and-out ex-lawyer from Paris, tells us we are in the last circle of hell. Dante’s last circle of hell is reserved for traitors and betrayers. The reader is thus effectively reminded of treachery; he is literally seated in the heart of evil. Clamence’s references to the erstwhile Jewish quarter make it clear that Camus wants the reader to dredge up memories ...

Link to Part 1:  http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2012/11/the-thinking-mans-bible-and-messiah.html Of all the accusations Nietzsche hurls at Christianity, it is the sanctification of untruths concerning earthly matters that is the gravest: God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked and all that stands giddy. What? Would time be gone and all that is transitory only a lie? … I call it evil and misanthropic, all this teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory. All that is intransitory – that is but an image! ( On the Blissful Islands , 110-11) Nietzsche claims that Christian belief inculcates the wrong perception of reality in the believer. The belief in an unchanging, perfect God is philosophically false, since nothing in the universe we inhabit is “intransitory.” Everything is always in flux, and divine constancy can be nothing but a deception. For Nietzsche (or Zarathustra), co...

A great many clichés we usually associate with Nietzsche – “God is dead” (often quoted out of context), “Man must be overcome,” “the Übermensch ” – have their origin in the infamous 1883-5 text Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None ( Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen ). It is a “treatise” generally ignored by professional philosophers for being “too artistic”; for the common reader, if he is not religious, it is a trying reading experience due to its cryptic nature, and if he is a believer in God, a full-frontal attack. It is a text many have heard of (and think they can quote from it), but few have seriously read from cover to cover. My aim is to synopsise some its recurring (pun intended) messages and explain why it is essential reading – now more than ever – for any man who strives to rise above himself and others. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a literary/philosophical bulldozer: it attempts to raze to the ground all extant mora...

The perception of literature is culture-specific. Depending on where you are in the world and which educational system you find yourself in, literature is served up in a certain way – sometimes a little unpalatably. One of the common misconceptions about literature is that it must have a “moral message” – an idea stemming from, and I am generalising, conservative, retrograde, over-religious cultures. The tendency to moralise literature may seem innocuous, but if you turn the matter over a few times in your head, you will see that the damage it does to an individual’s interpretive faculties is considerable. This is because when one is constantly told to search for moral messages in works of art, one ends up assuming that all art is moral, which, as most of us know, is a gross generalisation. The person told to do so constantly will go through life thinking every word, act, and decision comes with a clear moral code.  More often than not, the morals we are force-fed fail ...