“ The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of the anthill. ”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). copy citation
| Author | Albert Camus |
|---|---|
| Source | The Myth of Sisyphus |
| Topic | clarity understanding |
| Date | 1942 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | Translated by Justin O'Brien |
| Weblink | http://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyph... |
Context
“This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind that studies itself gets lost in a giddy whirling. The very simplicity of these paradoxes makes them irreducible. Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify. The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of the anthill. The truism “All thought is anthropomorphic” has no other meaning. Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled.”
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