{"id":1926,"date":"2010-01-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wptest\/2010\/01\/12\/absurdity-and-the-apocalypse-meaningful-existence-in-a-dying-world\/"},"modified":"2010-01-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-12T00:00:00","slug":"absurdity-and-the-apocalypse-meaningful-existence-in-a-dying-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/2010\/01\/12\/absurdity-and-the-apocalypse-meaningful-existence-in-a-dying-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Absurdity and the Apocalypse. Meaningful Existence in a Dying World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mankind has long held a kind of morbid fascination in the prospect of its own demise, and with that of the world as a whole.  The apocalypse \u2013 the cataclysmic end of all life on Earth \u2013 has frequently been a subject of film, art and literature.   In my project, I intend to investigate one such literary instantiation of a world subject to just such a cataclysm \u2013  the bleak and ruined existence described in Cormac McCarthy\u2019s \u2018The Road\u2019 \u2013  with regard to the philosophy of the absurd, as found specifically in the works of S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard and Albert Camus.  <\/p>\n<p>When faced with the absurdity and meaninglessness of our existence \u2013 by the tension between our intuitive feeling that our lives have meaning, and our inevitable failure to find it in the world \u2013 we are plunged into nihilism. <\/p>\n<p>The absurd man has recourse to three possibilities upon his experience of nihilistic feeling; faith, defiance, and suicide.   <\/p>\n<p>Through an investigation into the absurdist thought of Kierkegaard and Camus, and with reference to the world imagined in The Road, I intend to show existence in the post-apocalyptic world to be the ultimate embodiment of the absurdity of human life; that in this Godless world, where death is an experience one cannot stop living, and where nihilism is substantiated, inescapably, by existence itself, we find the true essence of our being, and the true nature of our attempt to give a point to our lives.  <\/p>\n<p>I intend to argue two things; one, that our world and the post-apocalyptic one are, in terms of human meaning, identical. And secondly, that despite the absurd nature at the core of human existence, our lives can still be worth living.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jack Smith, 2010, Stage 2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564,22,128],"tags":[399,62,4],"class_list":["post-1926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-564","category-abstracts","category-stage-2-abstracts","tag-apocalypse","tag-cinema","tag-kierkegaard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8792"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/philosophy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}