Morteza Shahram

This paper develops a speculative cosmology from an existential principle: there will be symmetry. Rather than treating this principle as an established fact about the physical universe, it asks what kind of cosmological structure could make it possible. The proposal distinguishes two radically asymmetric regimes of existence. The forward regime emerges through decision and temporal differentiation from a primordial condition of circularity and pure temporal continuity. It is characterized by nomological economy, radical contingency, irreversible history, and severely constrained agency. The retrograde regime, associated with death and the backward development of temporal existence, gives every temporal moment of an individual's forward life sovereign cosmological standing. Agency becomes fully deployable, and identity becomes available for continuous hermeneutic interpretation, experimentation, and transformation. Moral luck is fundamental to this account. Historical agents are constituted by sequences of decisions made under unequal conditions of knowledge, power, and interpretive access. Even oppression may involve forms of blindness and constitutive bad luck that complicate the allocation of responsibility. Retrograde existence does not resolve these complications through a compulsory tribunal. Instead, it provides possibilities for emancipation, power reversal, closure, forgetfulness, and play. Historical events remain globally real, but their traces need not remain operative in every individual universe. The agent decides what to do with the shape and force of their history. The resulting symmetry is neither the restoration of an original homogeneous identity nor the repetition of an unchanged world. It is a higher-order symmetry generated through two asymmetric regimes: irreversible forward differentiation and retrograde proliferation. This account is offered as a speculative exercise in cosmological construction, motivated by the demand that no individual's suffering should exhaust the possibilities of the life to which it belongs.

This essay is an exercise in pushing a concept to its limit. The concept is authenticity. The limit is Mr. Stevens, the butler in \emph{The Remains of the Day}. Stevens is a man whose dedication to his vocation is so complete that the distinction between himself and his role appears to disappear. Is he authentic? Or has he merely internalized his chains so thoroughly that he can no longer feel them? The essay argues that neither answer is adequate. Stevens exposes a problem for any theory of authenticity that identifies it with wholehearted commitment, consistency, or fidelity to a self-imposed law. But he also exposes a problem for the opposite theory---the theory that authenticity requires perpetual critique, perpetual acknowledgment of the elephant in the room. That demand, pushed to its limit, becomes unlivable. The essay proposes that authenticity sometimes requires a deliberate refusal of the demand for authenticity---an absurd commitment, a looking away, a wager made under conditions of finitude. It calls this the camel's wager, after Nietzsche's figure of the spirit that bears burdens without yet questioning them. The wager is not a solution. It is a way of continuing when no solution is available. The essay develops this through three case studies---Stevens, Meursault, and Runeberg's Judas---and concludes by distinguishing the judgment of an action from the judgment of an agent. The distinction does not acquit anyone. It preserves the asymmetry between what we can know and what we must decide.

This essay is a record of an interpretation in motion. It begins with confusion about Louis Armstrong's "St. James Infirmary"---a song that moves from grief to boasting to a fantasy of one's own funeral in a tone that fits none of them. It passes through a phase of suspicion, in which the lyric is read as a document of inauthenticity: a socially scripted performance of masculinity and cool concealing a void. It ends with a return to the song that reverses the suspicion without simply refuting it. The correction comes from the music. Armstrong's delivery is not cool in the sense of withholding; it is warm, present, and audibly in grief. The bragging and the funeral comedy are not the ego covering a wound. They are the wound finding a way to keep moving. The essay argues that the song is \emph{lucidly inauthentic}: it performs the social scripts of masculine grief with full awareness that they are scripts, and in that performance it becomes a dance---Nietzsche's dance---that carries the mourner through the void rather than denying it. The hermeneutic lesson is that the music does not supplement the lyric; it changes what kind of object is being interpreted. The persona, the performance, and the listener are distinct levels, and the song's achievement lies in the relationship between them. The essay concludes by distinguishing the interpreter's emancipation from the song's intention, and by proposing four criteria for adjudicating radical readings.

Deterministic accounts of the world are commonly presented in an initial-value form: a complete initial state, together with the laws, determines the subsequent history. This paper explores a different explanatory picture. On the proposed ``Funnel'' account, a history is globally constrained, and events within it can help determine which candidate initial conditions are compatible with the complete history. The suggestion is not that the past is changed by the future, nor that agents can send signals backward in time. Rather, the initial state need not be treated as explanatorily independent of the history of which it is the beginning. This perspective separates global determinacy from prediction based on an independently specified initial state. It also clarifies what chaos theory does and does not threaten: sensitive dependence on initial conditions can undermine practical predictability without, by itself, settling whether a complete history is globally determinate. Feynman's path-integral exposition provides an important conceptual stimulus for thinking beyond a single forward-propagating trajectory, although the present proposal does not identify path-integral interference with agentive selection or claim to derive its metaphysical thesis from quantum mechanics.

This paper develops an original epistemological reading of Lacan's mirror stage. I argue that the mirror stage is not primarily about self-recognition but about the internalization of temporality---the child's discovery that meaning unfolds across time and that its own identity is a sign for others. Before the mirror stage, the child operates in a world of ``pure signified'': meaning is immediate, simultaneous, non-mediated. The child is a ``center without an other''; the other exists only as servant. The mirror stage is the moment when the child discovers that it is a sign for others---that it is perceived and represented regardless of its self-conception. This discovery is fundamentally temporal: the child realizes that its identity unfolds across time, in the gaze of the other, and that meaning (like speech) takes time. The paper develops this through a theory of proto-consciousness, the two interfaces of interiority and exteriority, and the post-mirror state of oscillation between paradigms. It connects the account to Davidson's anomalous monism and to the hermeneutic structure of epistemic transformation.

Habermas's _The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_ defends the project of modernity against its Nietzschean and postmodern critics by shifting the paradigm of reason from the subject-centered to the communicative. While sympathetic to this project, I argue that Habermas's communicative rationality remains too formal, synchronic, and insufficiently attentive to the hermeneutic and genealogical conditions of discourse. The critique has five parts: (1) Habermas brackets nature as a normative source; (2) his proceduralism is empty until filled by discourse that is always power-laden; (3) his formal pragmatics privileges the synchronic over the diachronic; (4) the lifeworld is always already hegemonically structured; and (5) communicative reason cannot ground substantive norms for the ecological crisis. The constructive alternative is offered not as a doctrine but as a question. Drawing on Gramsci, Nietzsche, and Gadamer, I develop context-freedom as a regulative ideal achieved through the fusion of horizons. I then ask: after the so-called death of God, what non-psychological sovereign can ground political legitimacy? The market, the state, and the law are all psychological or conventional. Ecology is the strongest remaining candidate. This is offered as a challenge: if not ecology, then what? The paper concludes by addressing the quietism, normativity, teleology, and population problems that this position must confront.

A text has a provisional semantic core: the content it was intended to communicate in its original context. Around this core, and often indistinguishable from it, is an aesthetic surplus: narrative form, imagery, stylistic condensation, and other features whose primary role is communicative and evocative rather than directly semantic. The distinction between core and surplus is not fixed. When a text is recontextualized, what was originally formal surplus may be treated as the new semantic core. This paper develops a theory of recontextualization that explains how texts produce new meanings across historical distances without collapsing into either Gadamerian tradition or Derridean différance. The central case study is Freud's reading of Oedipus. I argue that Freud mistakes aesthetic surplus for semantic core. The myth's proximal semantic core is political-theological: a warning to kings to obey oracular authority. The tragedy is set in motion not by Oedipus's desire but by Laius's refusal to accept the prophecy. Freud's reading is a distal discursive object produced by a later recontextualization, constrained by a trace that the myth carries but failing to honor it. The paper develops the semiotic architecture of semantic core and aesthetic surplus, applies it to the Oedipus myth, and draws out the implications for a theory of recontextualization. The key concept is the trace: a structural remainder produced in the dialogic encounter between text and interpreter, which constrains re-signification and orients history toward emancipation rather than justice.

This paper addresses a problem internal to emancipatory thought: the means through which domination is challenged can reproduce domination in a new form. Critique is itself an exercise of power; it selects, excludes, and reorganizes. It generates consequences beyond its intentions—what I call surplus. The result is a recursive structure: power generates surplus; surplus becomes available for interpretation; critique arises in response; but critique is itself a new exercise of power, generating new surplus, new limitations, new forms of domination. The question is whether critique can escape this recursion without claiming a position outside history and power. I argue that it can—but only through an ongoing process of self-overcoming. Self-overcoming is not the final elimination of power, nor the discovery of a perfect political arrangement. It is the development of a capacity to recognize and transform limitations that become visible only through the historical consequences of previous attempts at transformation. Drawing on Orwell's Animal Farm, the ecological extension of the farm, Nietzsche's metamorphoses, and Hegel's dialectic of experience, I develop a political hermeneutics organized around the concepts of surplus, trace, and provisional closure. The paper concludes with a provisional criterion of non-domination and a defense of closure without finality.

Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics achieves a decisive insight: understanding is an event, not a method, and application is constitutive of meaning. But Gadamer's account remains too Platonic, too oriented toward coherence and fusion, and too quiet about the constitutive role of exclusion and rupture. This paper radicalizes Gadamer's central concepts—play, application, fusion of horizons—by submitting them to Nietzschean contingency and Hegelian historical dynamism. The result is a theory of interpretation in which the event of understanding is a disclosure that leaves a trace, and the task of interpretation is to honor this trace through provisional, transformative applications that expand the space of reasons and advance the trajectory of self-overcoming. The paper's central unnamed principle is that the answer is ontologically and epistemologically prior to the predicament. We do not first formulate a question and then seek an answer. We stumble on an answer, and only afterward do we recognize that it fits a predicament we may not have fully articulated. The deaf person does not seek sound; sound finds her. The text does not answer our question; it gives us the question by first giving us the answer. This inverts the standard hermeneutic priority of the question and explains why disclosure cannot be reduced to will-to-power. The paper argues that the trace—the normative residue of disclosure—is the non-arbitrary, non-repressive kernel of interpretation. It is the ground for distinguishing emancipatory interpretation from mere will-to-power. The paper concludes by distinguishing emancipation from Derridean justice and sketching a practice of interpretation governed by charity, urgency, and irony.

This paper develops a value-theoretic and decision-theoretic account of practical reason, drawing on Nietzsche's moral psychology, Kierkegaard's existentialism, and the Quinean holism developed in companion papers. I argue that reasons are internal or external only relative to a horizon—a temporal projection of self-understanding. I distinguish between the proximal horizon (immediate satisfaction), the distal horizon (aspirational identity), and the middle horizon (negotiation between them). This framework allows for a relativistic conception of internality and externality that supports robust normative evaluation without appealing to external moral standards. The central criterion is integration—the unification of desires, beliefs, and dispositions over time. But the framework also acknowledges its own limits. When deliberation runs out—when both Φ and Ψ connect to S equally well—the agent must leap. The instant of decision is "madness"—not because it is irrational, but because it is trans-rational. Such moments reveal a form of existential externality that Williams cannot accommodate. Drawing on the coin flip, the phenomenon of reluctance, the insincere promise, and Meursault as a limit-case, I argue that reasons are preferential and that the supremum of decision is the point at which the objective and subjective collide—a regulative ideal that structures the topology of practical reason.

This paper develops a Two-Tiered Model of Rationality that distinguishes between articulable reasons (Tier 1) and exact explanations (Tier 2). Tier 1 captures the conscious, normative justifications agents give for their actions. Tier 2 captures the full causal history, including unconscious motivations, habits, moods, and temporal dynamics. In deliberatively conducive conditions, these tiers converge. In non-ideal conditions—self-deception, akrasia, unconscious interference—they diverge. I argue that this divergence is not a metaphysical gap but an explanatory one, grounded in Davidson's anomalous monism. The paper applies the model to weakness of will (akrasia), developing a temporal analysis of deliberative routes. Proximal desires have greater causal immediacy; distal judgments have greater rational value. The agent's struggle is a struggle to thrust explanatory force into the future. When the agent fails, they face an epistemic cost: to remain sincere in their best judgment while acting against it, they must distort their beliefs about the distal good. This is epistemic devastation—the sacrifice of true belief to maintain apparent coherence. Rationality, on this view, is not a static state of correct judgment but a dynamic project of bringing Tier 2 into alignment with Tier 1 through self-knowledge, self-discipline, and temporal integration.

Bernard Williams argues that all reasons for action must be internal to the agent's motivational set S, reachable via a sound deliberative route. This paper argues that Williams' internalism rests on assumptions that Quine's philosophy undermines. Quine's holism shows that beliefs and desires are not isolated atoms but nodes in a web. Quine's indeterminacy of translation shows that meaning is underdetermined by evidence. Quine's naturalism shows that philosophy is continuous with science and cannot claim a priori access to the structure of reasons. Together, these themes expose a fatal weakness in Williams' internalism: the ``sound deliberative route'' assumes a degree of semantic and psychological transparency that agents do not possess. But the result is not the rejection of internalism. It is its transformation. Drawing on the topological structure of S, I argue that reasons are nodes in a holistic web with centers and peripheries, proximities and distances. Externality is not binary but scalar---a matter of topological distance, phenomenological resistance, opacity, and receptivity. This scalar view resolves three tensions in Williams: it restores a robust notion of moral evaluation, it accounts for the role of false beliefs and ignorance, and it allows for the normative ideal of achieved externality. The normative consequence is a virtue-theoretic account of practical reason. Internalism survives---but transformed.

Davidson's Anomalous Monism (AM) holds that mental events are token-identical to physical events, that mental properties are anomalous, and that physical events are causally closed. This paper argues that AM has been constrained by an ontology of discrete event-tokens. Mental events are not merely identical to physical states; they are identical to the registration of physical causal relations. Understanding that A causes B is a mental event. This relational registration can cause an intention to reinstate A' --> B', which in turn causes future physical sequences. The result is a causal loop: physical relations are registered mentally, and mental registrations re-enter physical causation. The paper develops this through five arguments: (1) understanding as the perception of causal relations; (2) the causal loop of intention; (3) Gareth Evans and the persistence of overarching goals; (4) the ``Bus Runner'' paradox and higher-order causation; and (5) existential deferral and self-constitution. It then argues that Davidson's holism, combined with the dispositional nature of mental predicates, implies that psychological explanation is \emph{interminable}. The Bus Runner example captures this interminability. Finally, the paper shows that Davidson's identification of mental events with physical events is unstable, because it reduces mental events to relations within physical causal chains. The result is Processual Anomalous Monism: a revision that preserves Davidson's token-identity and anomalism while giving mental events a robust causal role.

This essay argues that Raskolnikov's crime and confession are two manifestations of a single psychological dynamic: the fragmented self's desperate search for unity through transgression. Drawing on Kierkegaard's concept of the ``leap of faith,'' Nietzsche's critique of moral systems, and Rumi's warning---``Do not compare the work of the innocent to your own''---I contend that Raskolnikov fails on two grounds. First, he transgresses not merely culture (the conventional moral boundaries open to revaluation) but nature itself, including the market mechanism, which is nature's violence-free extension. Second, his act is not a genuine creation of new values but a pathological grab for identity and reputation---\emph{engineered fame}. Sonya, the apparent saint of the novel, is not the solution to this crisis but its most refined expression: a ``moral disaster'' whose self-abnegation is itself a symptom of the same pathology. The paper concludes that Raskolnikov's deepest punishment is not eight years in Siberia but the lifelong recognition that he did not undergo the leap.

Runeberg's ``lucid Judas'' in Borges's ``Three Versions of Judas'' retains an implicit psychological pride: if Judas premeditated his offense with ``terrible lucidity,'' his act remains a form of heroic asceticism rather than true abasement. This article develops a two-stage critique of Runeberg's thesis. First, I argue that Runeberg's Judas remains an ascetic---still obsessed with heaven, still stung by conscience---and has therefore not reached the Nietzschean stage of the child. Second, I propose two revisions. The Chaplin-Judas---a figure whose betrayal is a causally deviant chain, a nervous twitch, a slapstick accident---achieves radical forgetfulness but loses interiority, and therefore loses sacrifice. The Meursault-Judas---a camel-spirit whose absurd fidelity to an unplacatable friend drives him to bear the burden of infamy without heroic intention---preserves interiority without restoring pride. This ``least violent revision'' saves Runeberg's theology from nihilism without collapsing into orthodox piety. The essay concludes that the deepest claim of the paper is hermeneutic: grace operates through the absurd failures of human loyalty, and theological significance need not coincide with the agent's intended meaning.

This essay offers a philosophical reading of Meursault, the narrator of Camus's “The Stranger”, through the question of the Nothing as developed in Heidegger's ``What Is Metaphysics?'' The prosecutor at Meursault's trial declares that he has looked into Meursault's soul and found nothing there. This essay takes the prosecutor's charge seriously---not as an accusation to be refuted, but as a metaphysical description to be interpreted. I argue that Meursault is not literally an embodiment of Heidegger's Nothing. Heidegger's Nothing is disclosed through anxiety, and Meursault is conspicuously untroubled. But Meursault can be read as a literary figure through whom the question of the Nothing is staged---and he complicates that staging. The paper develops three claims. First, the novel's central philosophical puzzle is not “What is Meursault?” but How does Meursault inhabit the world, and why does the novel withhold the genealogy of how he came to do so? Second, Meursault's mode of comportment---which I call his method---involves non-preference, embodied immediacy, and practical fidelity without metaphysical endorsement. Third, this method breaks down at two points: the murder and the final scene. Meursault does not achieve the self-sufficiency that a simple reading of him as Heidegger's ``daring one'' would require. His ``authenticity,'' if he has any, is not the achievement of independence from others but a peculiar way of remaining entangled with them without accepting their interpretations of him.

This essay argues that Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the narrator of Camus's \emph{The Fall}, is not a genuine penitent but a \emph{pathological penitent}---a figure who converts repentance from an event of transformation into an identity and then uses that identity as an instrument of judgment. Clamence's confession is a performance, but not in the shallow sense of insincerity. His guilt, shame, and self-condemnation are real. The pathology lies in what he does with them: he organizes them into a self-serving structure that protects his narcissism, maintains his superiority, and gives him power over his listener. The essay develops this reading through Nietzsche's concepts of nausea and bad conscience, the Islamic mystical tradition of the Malamatiyya (the ``People of Blame''), and a narrowed existentialist framework focused on the refusal of responsibility. The central claim is that Clamence's narrative is itself a strategy of evasion. He confesses the lesser guilt---indifference on the bridge---in order to avoid confronting the greater guilt: the woman he directly ruined through his indifference, who killed herself because he ignored her. The bridge is a displacement. The narrative form---oblique, delayed, embellished---is part of the evasion, not incidental to it. Clamence does not simulate repentance. He converts it into performance. And the performance is his final refuge.

This article offers a philosophical reading of Dostoevsky's A Gentle Creature, focusing on memory, non-physical violence, and the struggle over interpretive authority. Drawing on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I argue that both the narrator and his wife are trapped by what I call excessive memory---the conversion of one's past into a possession that fixes identity and blocks genuine moral development. The narrator's attempts to dominate his wife through non-physical violence (a “game of power” sustained by asymmetric information) and her strategic resistance (culminating in suicide) reveal a neurotic dynamic rooted in unequal power relations and a battle over knowledge. I integrate Goethe's insight that virtue and vice grow together and Heideggerian reflections on death and finitude to argue that salvation---if it is possible at all---lies only in radical forgetting. The essay concludes that both characters remain imprisoned by their past achievements, and that the narrator's only hope is to become a child: innocent, forgetful, capable of a new beginning. The narrator's retrospective monologue is itself the final exercise of power: having lost control of his wife's life, he attempts to recover control of her meaning.

Frege's puzzle and Kripke's puzzle about belief are often taken to show that a purely referential theory of proper names cannot account for the cognitive significance of identity statements and the rationality of apparently contradictory beliefs. This paper develops an externalist version of Millianism that distinguishes semantic content from the cognitive organization through which a referent is accessed. The central proposal is that a name use is governed by an \emph{effective causal-informational branch}: a socially and historically sustained route of reference characterized by a relatively stable identifying basis, correction practices, and information flow. Two uses of the same linguistic form can therefore be governed by distinct effective branches even when they refer to the same object. I call such cases \emph{coreferential homonymy}. The theory does not identify a branch with a description or with a private mental representation. Identifying predicates and descriptions are evidence for the structure of a branch, but they are not semantic determinants of reference. Two branches count as distinct not merely when their associated descriptions differ, but when they provide independently sufficient means of identifying the same object and are not effectively cross-coordinated. This gives a principled response to the objection that every individual token would otherwise generate a new name. It also clarifies the relation between coreferential homonymy and mental files. Distinct branches can sustain distinct files, but files may remain distinct after an identity has been learned, because learning an identity can link previously independent files without eliminating their historical bases. The paper applies the view to Frege's Hesperus-Phosphorus puzzle and to Kripke's Pierre case. In both cases, the relevant cognitive achievement is not the acquisition of a new Russellian proposition. It is the discovery or establishment that two previously independent identifying routes concern one and the same object. Branch-indexed Millianism thus preserves direct reference while offering an externalist account of cognitive significance. The view is contrasted with Nathan Salmon's implicature theory, which locates cognitive significance in pragmatics rather than in the external structure of reference.

This paper offers a hermeneutic critique of Freud's death instinct (Thanatos) and argues that Thanatos is explanatorily unnecessary: the phenomena Freud groups under it---repetition compulsion, aggression, self-destruction---exhibit structural similarities, but similarity of phenomenology does not establish a common biological drive. These phenomena are better understood as manifestations of _strategic naivete_: a locally functional interpretive strategy that becomes globally destructive because its short-term success prevents long-term correction. Repetition compulsion is a guilt-driven ritual of vigilance; excessive violence is the dramaturgical misuse of power. I distinguish four forms of guilt---Vigilance, Excess, Exposure, and Imagination---as temporal moments of a single interpretive structure. The paper concludes that Thanatos is not proven false but shown to be unnecessary. Freud transformed a historically and interpretively intelligible structural conflict into a metapsychological biological principle.

what really needs to remain from the text at the end of the day is that which contains all there is to know about how to live the end (The Final Text). The most effective technique of acceleration to the summit of history is to forget all that needs to be forgotten. Perhaps languages must compete and merge for unification. One thing that for sure has to go is that who wrote what and when. Once the author is physically dead, absolutely nothing benefits him posthumously. What matters is Total semiosis and internalization of terms of hegemonic anarchism constrained by zero violence and singular acutely politically concentrated free market.

Imagine a soccer dominated society and life-world. No damn military and stupid land disputes. Sustainable Economy. Radical reconciliation with nature. Adopting to natural structures. Singular global acutely politically concentrated free market least exploitative and disruptive to nature beyond that only soccer-related. ------ As an emissary from political unconscious, I speak directly to political power eye-to-eye universally: legalize assisted suicide (I so much rather be dead than be dependent on others) AND self-destruction via artificial narcotics AND consumption of natural narcotics as long as at any case no harm is inflicted on other people.

Let Judas be constituted by Meursault (Camus' "Stranger") in dispositions / Let Judas' friend ask him to betray Christ and bear infamy on behalf of him who cannot be placated / Let Judas in his Meursault-ness tolerate absurdly too much not to disappoint his friend who is relentless in his pursuit and request. Meursault Version of Judas undergoes theatrical but loyal friendship. His words and his acts are the same. But his thoughts and his words are diametrically opposite. ------ Nietzsche's notion of Camel/Lion/Child metamorphoses constitutes a lens through which we can examine texts. Meursault is Camel emulating Child.

Clearly nature does not care about human suffering. Culture does not care either due to the pressures of marketplace. ------ It has been said that God's omnipotence, omniscience and perfect goodness is not reconcilable with suffering and existence of evil. The only solution seems to be that the most divine attribute is indifference. Contra Leibniz, the world is not the best possible world but the most indifferent possible world. ------ Habermas says the 'Never Again' principle must lead to a German commitment to protecting Jewish life and Israel's right to exist. We know what German commitment means in the current political climate ... then the reports of the end of world war II are greatly exaggerated. ------ Strategy I: Mend the marketplace. Strategy II: Do not reproduce and die ASAP. Leave this beautiful world to those who want it so badly (colonials).

---- I ---- Once upon a time, there was a most elegant lady who had a most majestic dog on leash standing but distracted by something other than the dog. The dog struggled impossibly but forcefully to loose free and chase a most ordinary rabbit. ------ II ------ Another time the elegant lady dines at a fancy restaurant. Then she was walking on the sidewalk when she encountered an ordinary homeless in the state of minimal energy giving all in to gravity. She gave him her left-over. He nodded or something. Then she cheerfully and vigorously and most innocently and heartwarmingly and charmingly wished the homeless guy a GREAT night. ----- III ----- IF the rabbit and the homeless guy are the same ordinary entity, and the elegant entity is to represent acutely concentrated political power and the Majestic entity is to represent the free market THEN a fair contract would be: ask for food and security and shelter in exchange for mindless work and give up money or capital and the privilege of procreation. Excursus: cryptocurrency features the rabid dog.

The Prosecutor in Camus’ novel claims to have peered into Meursault’s soul but found nothing human in there. But the nothingness attests to Meursault embodying something like a musical instrument through which the world plays its music. Meursault does not initiate anything that in the presence of standing conditions causes a change in environment—aside from physical needs which are also immensely flexible and dependent on existing circumstances. He himself constitute the standing conditions awaiting external factors to cause any change. Meursault’s radical indifference and acceptance towards the world and authenticity (his speech and his deed are perfectly coordinated) (his thought and his speech are the same except situation where out of consideration for others he keeps silent) indicates that he has no sickness unto death undergoing life or in anticipation of his death. What the prosecutor announces amounts to Meursault’s existence preceding his essence (given his openness to the world despite his acute rationality and understanding of his environment). But if existence precedes essence, the method precedes existence. He roams the world already equipped with a method. ------------ Abstract II: ---------- What is something that it is not a being? The question implicates there be something that it is not a being but that into which beings as a whole in one's existence slipped into in sickness unto death. Meursault brings to consciousness (of the chaplain) the sickness unto death separated from absurdity by a transparent sheet. Something to which he himself was not susceptible out of his own life-affirmative reasoning.

Sisyphus has no right to complain for his fate of eternal repetition. As long as he only has the boulder to worry about he enjoys the greatest life. — If in one world Odysseus has to take drastic measures to battle his temptation, there must be another world taking the course of temptation automatically grants him impunity. — The bizarre mythologization of Oedipus must be a female psychogenesis. [This is in all likelihood just a waste of your time. I apologize for my awful writing. I'd be infinitely grateful for any comment.]

The question that "how one should live?" constitutes the ultimate question of philosophy according to Aristotle. According to Camus "there is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." The riddle and our predicament is that these two questions are exactly one and the same question. [Why?] ------ [Because for example] Nietzsche, in claiming that "the beggars should be entirely abolished ... truly it is annoying to give to them and it is annoying one not to give to them", has spectacularly failed to notice that there is another logical option: simply to abolish the observer. (Especially that nowadays we witness live-stream genocide, punctuated by commercials, comfortably numb.) The option also resolves Ivan Karamazov's problematic: "if I must love my fellow man, he had better hide himself, for no sooner do I see his face than there is an end to my love for him".

A Cultural Criticism --- Clearly there can be nothing more praiseworthy than conferring virtues on things. Then the most celebrated strand of ecstasy of communication can be identified as the factor responsible for conferring an extra virtue to an already virtuous. This is problematic because, according to Nietzsche, one virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to. Excessive communication is the antipode of authenticity. Because where there is reinforcement there is lack. (For instance: talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself)