The Absurd — Epoch Reading

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The lines he pulled

“We see ourselves from outside… there lies our absurdity: not in the fact that such an external view can be taken of us, but in the fact that we ourselves can take it, without ceasing to be the persons whose ultimate concerns are so coolly regarded.”

p.720 · the starred “Jist” — the collision, in one sentence

“This seems to me romantic and slightly self-pitying… absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.”

p.726 · margin: “Thesis” — Nagel against Camus’s defiance

“The dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.”

p.726 · margin: the hyper-processor tele-connector to God, forced to sit in traffic with no A/C

“We can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.”

p.727 · margin: “a witty way to land the plane”

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The read, page by page

p.717

CThe task as a one-to-one to address a specific instance for one unique moment; similar to the current spar-philo point about conversations as a one-to-one. — chains of justification ending within life: his felt-remainder spar argument surfacing.

p.718 ★

★THE JIST — the standard arguments for absurdity fail as arguments, yet express something fundamentally correct. — Nagel’s hinge, flagged.
EHow we juggle spheres or worry about lanes that themselves may be hollow or odd to care about. — at the collision between seriousness and the possibility of regarding it all as arbitrary.

p.719

BFree will with a set of goal / world constraints — trial & error, experimental machine, “new V1, V2… V365” each year. — the Dennett Natural-Selection-2.0 framing carried in: self-versioning inside constraints.
CMomentary wake up from the fog. — at “stop thinking about it after a certain period of inconclusive reflection.”

p.720

AEmerson's point about serving a purpose / running the marathon, or pacing your bags & leaving the world. — direct cross-link to the same-day Circles read.
BEven building a self-archive is a cringe process in a way — very very hyper-aware of the absurdity. — the meta-note: Epoch OS watching itself.

p.721

AWhat value does religion have for the “lower” tier of thinker under the Averroes model, especially if they cannot understand the little they are taught? — significance borrowed from a larger enterprise, checked against Averroes.
CThe monster quote from Infinite Jest that I love. — at “once the fundamental doubt has begun, it cannot be laid to rest.”

p.722

AOur own minds trying to cope with our goals, how silly they are — but then also how much sillier other people's ideas are. — the absurdity as a collision within ourselves, not with the world.

p.723

BSort of “buy the ticket, take the ride” — Hunter S. Thompson mentality. — at the dreaming / total-hallucination possibilities we decline to rule out.

p.724

DR-E-L-A-X, from the skeptic bro — but it is FIFA & a walk / spar-philo sesh. — Hume’s backgammon cure, translated to his own reset.

p.725

ABeing both a number-one fan of external Instagram followers versus being the influencer / man in the arena. — spectator-versus-actor mapped to the follower/arena split.

p.726 ★

★Thesis. — starred at “absurdity is one of the most human things about us.”

Structure is scaffold; every quoted line is his, verbatim from the annotated pages across three sittings. Letters are per-page comment order. One private-lane margin on p.716 is held out of the public read by standing rule.

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us.Thomas Nagel · The Absurd · The Journal of Philosophy · 1971

Where the margins reached

The lines he pulled

The read, page by page