Абсурд и вокруг: сборник статей

Camus then follows his notions to their logical conclusions and insists that people must substitute quantity of experience for quality of experience. The purest of joys is «feeling, and feeling on this earth». Of course, this statement cannot be used to claim a hedonism as Camus's basic philosophy, but must be thought of in connection with the notion of the absurd that has been developed. Man is mortal. The world is not. A person's dignity arises from a consciousness of death, an awareness that eternal values and ideas do not exist, and a refusal to give in to the notion of hope or appeal for something that we are uncertain of and cannot know. Is it possible in the technological civilization?

The human subject is at one remove from the technological subject because the authority of the former precedes that of the latter by virtue of the instability of the dynamics of consciousness. Creativity is multidirectional: Janus has many faces, some of which are forever hidden from knowledge. Meaning occurs at the interface of what exists and what does not yet exist, the one infinitely regressive, the other infinitely progressive; hence, for example, the ambivalence of art in relation to the past, and the determining function of memory in thought. Technique is what inscribes the subject in the world where absurdity and creativity are the reciprocal conditions of the event itself, rather than of the subject. Technique is the sanction of the finite subject, because it brings to bear a multiplicity of constitutive energies upon a circumscribed occasion of meaning. This is the creative, non-transcendent obverse of Husserl's re-activation of the past: what is more urgent is to find the value of the activation of the present, its precariously creative plenitude and catastrophic self-evacuation, its paradoxical status as both temporal process and a temporal form, its inability to be either identical to itself or different from itself. The irony is that such values can only be performed, not thought; and this is precisely the motive of technology. There is no greater power, political, moral etc., that could direct at will its potential. And finally, science, especially after Hiroshima, is not a pursuit for truth any more, but for power. An emerging ideology of science is soteriology — the view that only science holds the key to the future. Science has become divine. This image of science entails a high status of experts, who all too often fail and resolve nothing. Many needs and trends are absurd. A pursuit for producing more and more at all costs and doing it faster and faster is also absurd. The latter feature strikes a blow at democracy, which is slow. Moreover, some very costly projects are launched with no clear vision for their purpose (e.g. orbital stations, space anti-nuclear defense systems), or knowing that their full power will not be used (e.g. fast cars), only because technology makes it possible. It is absurd to rely on technology as the means of increasing productivity. Specialized technology requires specialists, which easily lead to emergence of the class of technocrats. This technology results in centralized power that has to oversee, for instance, nuclear power plants.

Our civilization is characterized by an inability to leave anything in nature alone. «If it can be done, do it» is a maxim of technological civilization. Technology is the starting point for the moral imperatives of present time. Technology is the starting point of moral imperatives of modern time that make moral considerations of our forefathers, both individual and social, to seem ridiculous. Ethical considerations become irrelevant, and the sense of sanctity of life unimportant. For example, to satisfy technological needs, i.e. to do what can be done, man has manufactured weapons for mass destruction of our civilization and human beings in general. The use of such weapons would lead to a situation in which it would not be required, or moreover, it would not be possible to use technology nor any of its products. However, what is more frightening and absurd in our technological civilization is that technology does not end with «If it can be done, do it» maxim. On the contrary, this maxim is being transformed into a new maxim or imperative: «Everything that has been invented, has to be applied». This means that not only every invented weapon could be effectively manufactured, but also that every manufactured weapon had t be used effectively. We can say that we live in a civilization that has been constantly manufacturing its own apocalypse for half a century. The only thing we cannot claim with certainty is to predict the moment when it will happen.