Experience and the Absurd
Experience and the Absurd: The Ecstasy of Experience and the Joy in Everything, My Challenge to Nihilism. The Joyful Existence is held somewhere between the bear trap of life and the bullet of death . It is our constant struggle to hold ourselves between the two: Jump up into experience too fast and be impaled on the teeth of doom. Submit to life and you will have survived but never lived. Thesis Within this life there appears two sets of experiences, those which produce pain and those which produce pleasure in some form and some measure. The culmination of the two is roughly described as catharsis and the absence of the two as ataraxia . It is from these two experiences and the combinations or lack thereof from which all experiences and their emotional value, alongside the value of their derivatives arise. Philosophers have long argued between the extremes of these feelings, with the Naive-Hedonist falling into vice and permanent pleasurable decay and the Emotional-Stoic rejecting