Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a steady, slippery slope initiated before the accident of our individual
births. It is, in a word, our human condition—to be always in search of
firm or firmer footing than presently at hand, and always to be disap-
pointed in our failure to find it. In this respect, that fabulous slope is not
unlike what Albert Camus brilliantly stated in his great work
The Myth
of Sisyphus
. His words allow me to bring this long reflection to some
kind of conclusion.
Camus had the courage to say out loud for all to hear that any appeal
whatsoever to transcendence and absolutes (the supposedly firmer
footing that moves so many of us at times of radical uncertainty) can
only be “absurd.” Such an appeal is but one of the machinations by
which control is sought; it is but a way to try and ensure that the one
who asserts the transcendent or the absolute also asserts that they know
better than anyone else what's good for all the others. As if there were
something absolute; as if, even if there were, such an absolute would be
the truth of who and what we are; as if, even were that coherent, this
or that finite human being could apprehend it surely and doubtlessly;
and as if, apprehending it in one grand sweep of thought innocent of
every infelicity of being a specific, error-prone, historically bound indi-
vidual, this were not the height of hubris.
Camus' point, or some key part of it, is that such schemes are beyond
our capabilities. Such appeals to some sort of higher ledge of authority—
available to no one else and from which to pronounce judgments on the
rest of us—are but tacit signs of dread and doom, of the deep uncer-
tainty and chance that constitute our condition as human. “I want to
know whether, accepting a life
without appeal
, one can also agree to
work
and create
without appeal
and what is the way leading to these
liberties.” And this, set out as starkly as the sun-blistered sands on that
striking, colorless beach in
The Stranger
, may be the sole way genuinely
to reclaim our lives. “I want to liberate my universe of its phantoms and
to people it solely with flesh-and-blood truths whose presence I cannot
deny.”
57
Notes
1. James Blish,
The Seedling Stars and Galactic Cluster
(Hicksville, NY: Gnome
Press, 1957).
