God and Man Benedict Spinoza

Since the alienation is made without reservation, the union is as perfect as possible, and no associate has anything further to demand; When the social compact is violated each person then regains his first rights and resumes his natural liberty while losing the conventional liberty for which he renounced it; Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus) The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain whence the stone would fall back of its own weight; If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was wisest and most prudent of mortals and according to another tradition, however, ne was disposed to practice the protession ot highwayman; Opinions d as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld; To begin with, he is accused of certain levity in regard to the Gods; Homer tells us that Sisyphus had put Death in chains He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror;

He wanted to test his wife’s love so he ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square; He is much through to his passions as through his torture; His scorn of the Gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing; Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them; If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious; But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods; powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile; The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart; Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) Those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest.

This notion that we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics; Present existence can only be Justified by ts expansion towards an indefinitely open future; Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, existence is degraded into an en soi(in itself), and freedom into facticity; Every individual concerned to Justify his or her existence experiences it as an undefined urge to transcend himself or herself; Woman is a free and autonomous being like all human nevertheless finds herself and chooses herself within a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other; Biologically – The more separate the female individual, the more imperiously does continuity of life assert tself against her separateness. Historically is when sub-species of humans are brought together each aspires to impose its sovereignty upon the other. If both are able to resist this imposition there is created between them a reciprocal relation sometimes in enmity, sometimes in amity but always in a state of tension. Ontologically is when man never thinks “self” without thinking “other”; he views the world wider the sign of duality, a polarity which is not at first sexual in character.

Miguel de Unamuno The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies; the man who eats nd drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother; He is the legendary featherless biped, the social contractor for Rousseau, the homo economicus of the Manchester school, The home sapiens of Linnaeus, or, if you like, the vertical mammal; This concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the subject and the supreme object of philosophy, whether certain self-styled philosophers like it or not; Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a esult of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward action; The philosophy of this man Kant, a man of heart and head that is to say, a man there is a significant somersault, as Kierkegaard, another man would have said, the somersault ot the Critique ot Pure reason to the Critique ot Practical reason; This transition of Kant exists already in embryo in the Lutheran notion of faith; The first God, the rational God, is the projection to the outward infinite of man as he is by definition, that is to say, of the abstract man, of the man no-man; The other God, the

God of feeling and volition, is the projection to the inward infinite of man as he is by life, of the concrete man, the man flesh and bone; Whosoever reads the Critique of Practical Reason carefully and without blinkers will see that, in strict fact, the existence of God is therein deduced from the immortality of the soul, and not the immortality of the soul from the existence of God; All the rest is the Jugglery of the professional of philosophy