THE FALL

Monday night's discussion was awesome. I think some really important questions were brought up and answered in a bunch of different ways, all of which might be right. We seemed to sit on the weighty questions for a while, come up with a bunch of different (and equally plausible) answers, debate the merit of these answers, refine these answers, ultimately agree to disagree, and then move on to the next question and do it all over again. All of our discussions up to this point seem to unfold this way, which I think is interesting because it's kind of reflective of the nature of existentialism. It's like, we talk and realize we disagree, and know we're all never going to agree, so we agree to disagree, and we always end up in the same place. But the part that's kind of like existentialism is that even though we know exactly how it's going to end, we enter the discussion and actively participate and prescribe a lot of meaning our opinions, knowing all the while where we're going to end up. So I guess in existential terms, discussion is analogous to death. But about The Fall...

We sat on the meaning of the 'fall' for a while and came up with a few different interpretations. I interpreted the meaning of the fall to be a fall in the biblical sense, a fall from grace. Everybody knows the story, Adam and Eve eat an apple after God told them not to, so God gets mad, furrows his godly, white brow, and boom! we have The Fall of Man. In this story, the fall marks man's fall from the grace of God and exile from the Garden of Eden. In Camus' story, the fall also marks Jean-Baptiste's fall from 'God', but who is God in Camus' (an outspoken atheist) literary world? Well, considering there are only two real characters in The Fall, you and Jean-Baptiste, it has to be one of the two. I think Camus meant for Jean-Baptiste to be interpreted as God in The Fall, because he takes it upon himself to hand judgement down to everybody, and in Jean-Baptiste's world, everybody is guilty in one way or another. This is interesting because it's akin to Adam and Eve's original sin, both Jean-Baptiste and Christianity assert guilt-by-birth in one or another. Taking all this into consideration, it's like Camus has used our world as a paradigm for Jean-Baptiste's world, and successfully re-created our world using just two characters, which is seriously remarkable.

Our discussion deviated a little from direct text, and brought us to the question of whether or not true altruism exists. After Jean-Baptiste's fall, he came to the realization that all the good he had been doing, all of his acts which he thought were altruistic, were in reality self-serving. Given the definition of altruism - the principle or practice of unselfish concern for or devotion to the welfare of others – one would initially assume that it not only exists, but is demonstrated quite often. But if you really delve in and give it some serious thought, the existence of true altruism is contestable. By definition, altruism posits that one performs actions, solely for the benefit of others and receives absolutely no reward in exchange. This would suggest that actions that are typically considered altruistic, like Jean-Baptiste helping the blind cross the street, are in some way self-serving - Jean-Baptiste is rewarded with a warm, fuzzy feeling, thinks others think highly of him, and thus, feels better about himself. It seems that a truly altruistic act, would require the sacrifice of one's life (assuming that one will no longer be able to experience human emotions after death) for the benefit of others. However, even this gets a little fuzzy because during that split second before dying, the 'altruistic' individual would have the capacity to experience that warm, fuzzy feeling. I'm not sure true altruism does exists, not because of it's definition (albeit there may be some fundamental flaw in the definition of altruism that prevents any act from completely fitting the bill), but rather because it doesn't seem like there would be any evolutionary explanation for it to exist. Sure, altruism encourages the welfare of humanity, but as innately selfish creatures I'm not sure the welfare of the rest of humanity would be as desirable as self-preservation. Conversely, there are other facets of humanity that exist in the absence of any glaring evolutionary explanation.

And just like Monday night discussions, I conclude without coming to any major conclusion. I still have more questions than answers. When I started typing, I knew how it would end, I knew I wouldn't come to any concrete conclusion. But I typed anyway, and I believed my input was meaningful, and maybe I typed to help me forget that I knew exactly how it would end. And I'll do it all over again next week and the week after that and the week after that and the week after that...