CH. 14 Existentialism

Question 1

The Existential Tone

Answer 1

EXISTENTIAL TONE: Focuses on answering the ultimate question – how should a person live? That is, how can an individual live a meaningful life?

• No interest in metaphysical theories, scientific facts, or abstract truths (like Socrates).
• Kierkegaard – the Father of Existentialism – says the answers can be found only in the realm of the personal and subjective—only in the “existing individual.” – this is EXISTENTIALISM.
  
  • The concern for the nature of what it means to ‘be’ – to ‘exist’ is a concern that is unique to human existence.

EXISTENTIALISM – Inexact label for different philosophies that share themes about the uniqueness of each human being, about the central importance of choice, and about the individual’s response to an indifferent, absurd universe.

• Philosophers who embrace these ideas may differ among themselves.
  
  • But in their own way, they explore many of these basic concerns and try to show how they relate to flesh-and-blood individuals.
  • From the Christian Kierkegaard we can trace the existentialist thread to the atheistic philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir; to the theologians Karl Barth and Paul Tillich; and to the literary figures Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus.

MAIN EXISTENTIAL THEMES:

• INDIVIDUALISM and SUBJECTIVITY – Centered on the individual, not on abstract principles or universal generalizations.
  
  • It is the solitary, unique person who must come to terms with the world, who must choose how to live and how to die, and who must take responsibility for the actions that define his or her existence.
  • Rules and generalities and one-size-fits-all morality are of little help.
• FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY – The heart of existentialism is its emphasis on the freedom of the individual—freedom from deterministic forces and freedom to make choices that shape who he or she is.
  
  • But with freedom comes the momentous responsibility to choose and to accept what follows. However we choose, we have no one to blame or thank but ourselves.
• EXISTENCE AND ESSENCE – The traditional view is that we have a human nature, an essence given to us by God or nature, and this essence defines us, explains us. In other words, our essence is present when we begin to exist, and it is not up to us.
  
  • Existentialists insist that We first exist, and then we make our own essence. We can decide what and who we are by the choices we make in life. For better or worse, we create ourselves. We are born with a blank slate, and we are responsible for filling it in.
• ANGUISH AND ABSURDITY. THE EXISTENTIAL PREDICAMENT – The conditions just described—engenders existential emotions when the implications of the predicament are recognized.
  
  • We feel anguish (angst) or a sense of absurdity when we realize that we are totally free to create ourselves, that we and we alone are responsible for the direction of our lives, or that life is meaningless unless we give it meaning through our choices.
• AUTHENTICITY:
  
  • AUTHENTIC – is to realize that you are an individual whose essence is up to you and that you are responsible for choosing the kind of individual you want to be. To be authentic is to choose your own path.
  • INAUTHENTIC – to act in “bad faith,” as Sartre says—is to run from this responsibility, to accept whatever the world has already decided you should be.
    
    • In inauthenticity, you believe you are stuck with the traits that nature or God gave you, that you simply cannot change. Or you lie to yourself, pretending that all your choices are free when in fact they are weighted down with determining factors from the past.

Question 2

Kierkegaard

Answer 2

KIERKEGAARD – Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855).

• Father of modern existentialism and the champion of a radical form of FIDEISM, the notion that religious belief is grounded in faith, not reason.
• Relentlessly criticized the church for what he considered its insipid version of Christianity, and he rejected the system-building philosophy of Hegel that was in vogue at the time.
• In 1830 he entered the University of Copenhagen, where he worked toward a degree in theology. He eventually developed a distaste for his chosen field of study, however, and lapsed into the life of a cultivated and dissolute man about town.
  
  • He believed, as young adults sometimes do, that his existence was empty, devoid of a worldview or grand commitment that would give meaning to his life.
• A central concern of Kierkegaard’s work is the nature and status of the individual, an “existing human being.”
  
  • Kierkegaard charges that society is crushing individuals, diluting their personal identity, and replacing them with people who have “forgotten what it means to exist,” to live as authentic, passionate human beings.

Patrick Gardiner: Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction:

• Everything (communism, socialism) tended to be seen in ‘abstract’ terms, as theoretical possibilities which could be contemplated and compared but to the concrete realization of which people were unwilling to commit themselves.
  
  • (NOTE: Here, Kierkegaard is lamenting the Marxist thought that was popular at the time, something that stripped the freedom of choice from the individual – the Collectivist ideal)
  • Keirkegaard was upset that living had become a matter of knowing rather than doing, accumulating information, and learning things by rote as opposed to making decisions that bore the stamp of individual passion or conviction.
    
    • (NOTE – This was the Opposite of individualism and free choice, the things upon which existentialism were founded. – TJB)

Kierkegaard’s own denunciation of society’s plague of conformity and groupthink:

• Søren Kierkegaard: Either/Or
  
  • “​Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is wretched, for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful.Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy. They do their duty, these shopkeeping souls, but they clip the coin a trifle …”
    
    • NOTE: Here, he was lamenting the outrage shown by the self-righteous, the orthodox, and the radical religious, who strived (and failed) at every moment to either obey or find loopholes to the rules of their God so that they might make their way to heaven someday. But he thought that they were lame, not only because of their pitiable shuffling of the truth in order to remain pious in their own minds, but rather because the ‘sins’ for which they thought they might be sent to hell, were laughable, weak and unimaginitive, without passion and bareley worth talking about in the first place. And for THAT, they should be ashamed, not becuase they think they sinned, but because the sins that they think they broke were silly and trivial.

“That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

—Nietzsche

Kierkegaard: The Point of View:

• etc.—a crowd in its very concept is the untruth, by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.
  
  • NOTE– We often think of the ‘madness of crowds’ in the sense of mania or riots, panics, and cults, but Kierkegaard was railing more specifically against political and religious confomism (Commonism and Christianity) which were two ideas that had sapped the individuality from humanity. – TJB
• Objective knowledge has its place, but it cannot give someone the truth—the real and immediate truth of personal experience, where the individual uncovers the meaning of his or her life.
• Objective facts are just that—cold, abstract, impersonal, impartial truths that are relevant only within the realm of theoretical speculation and empirical generalities.
• Only subjective truth—the realities of concrete, lived experience—can show the individual what really matters in life and how that life can be lived.
  
  • NOTE: Here, Kierkegaard is pointing out that past phhilosophers had focused on things (like objective knowledge) that mostly had no true bearing on how we live our lives, and so what is the point of that pursuit? Perhaps as an academic pursuit, it is important on some level, but as far as discovering the nature by which our lives are imbued with meaning, they were fairly useless.

Kierkegaard: Journal:

• For what would it profit me if I found the so-called ‘objective truth,’ if I worked through all the systems of philosophy and were able to analyze them and expose their inconsistencies … what would it profit me if I developed the correct interpretation of Christianity in which I resolved all the internal problems, if it had no deeper significance for me and for my life … ?
• For him, being a genuine Christian means resisting the anemic values of conventional society and expressing personal faith through one’s life, not through mere belief in a set of abstract principles or through the perfunctory performance of prescribed behavior.
  
  • A real Christian is a radical, a person who lives life in opposition to socially acceptable conduct, as Christ did. For a real Christian, Christianity is intensely personal, an extreme commitment with no guarantees, an inner transforming experience that needs no justifying reasons, no phony assurances or blessings or endorsements from the church.
• He says, “the Christianity of the New Testament no longer exists.” Christendom does not oppose conventional society; instead, it tries to identify itself with conventional society. It avoids giving offense or disquieting the casual Christian. It is worldly and hypocritical. It has watered down genuine Christianity by ignoring its implications for the individual Christian in everyday life.
• Kierkegaard insists that attempts to make religion conform to reason, to prove it objectively, to offer evidence or arguments in its favor—are doomed to fail. First, from an objective standpoint, the belief in, say, the incarnation of Christ is absurd. No scientific or philosophical investigations could ever prove it.
  
  • Second, even with the best of reasons supporting a religious belief, its truth is still only a matter of thin probabilities,
• Kierkegaard gives us a paradox: Christian belief is absurd, but only such an absurd belief can be believed. Believing the absurd requires an extreme, passionate “leap of faith,” and only an absurd belief—a belief contrary to all objective evidence—can provoke such passionate belief.
  
  • What this intense kind of belief can yield, and what objectivity can never give, is a deeply fulfilling subjective certainty, a personally meaningful truth. Great absurdities (such as Christianity’s central story) require great, passionate faith.
• Kierkegaard maintains that what is believed has to do with objective truth, and how it is believed has to do with subjective truth.
  
  • Subjective truth is an objectively uncertain belief “held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness.”
  • And subjective truth is “the highest truth available for an existing person.”
    
    • In fact, Kierkegaard says, if the how of faith is present (in the “most passionate inwardness”), then the what of objectivity will also be present. That is, subjective truth becomes objective truth:

Question 3

Nietzsche

Answer 3

NIETZCHE – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900)

• His most famous (or notorious) views are his doctrine of:
  
  • the will to power,
  • his notion of the mighty human being known as the Übermensch (Overman or Superman),
  • and his claim that “God is dead.”
• WILL TO POWER – The fundamental nature of human existence is a drive to control and dominate.
  
  • The will to power is life, striving to overcome, to rule, to break out.
  • All human struggles and striving are manifestations of the will to power.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra:

• “Where I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of those who serve I found the will to be master.… And where men make sacrifices and serve and cast amorous glances, there too is the will to be master. Along stealthy paths the weaker steals into the castle and into the very heart of the more powerful—and there steals power.
• To Nietzsche, the will to power is evident in humankind’s search for knowledge, especially in science, philosophy, and religion.
  • “Knowledge,” he says, “is an instrument of power.” The will to know arises from the will to power—from the desire to master and control a particular domain of reality.
  • Reality is in flux, a kaleidoscope of sense data and concepts, and on this chaos we try to impose order, theory, and pattern so we can turn reality to our advantage. We do not seek truth for truth’s sake. There is only the will to power that impels us to try to make sense of the muddle.
  • A belief, says Nietzsche, may be necessary for the survival of humankind, but it has nothing to do with the truth:

Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil

• Even philosophers, he says, do not pursue the truth; they strive to satisfy their own inner needs by creating a world in their own image. They use reasons after the fact to defend their cognitive creations.NOTE: This is so true – something I’ve pointed out multiple times throughout this class.
  
  • Their real agenda is their irresistible urge to “truth.” This “tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the ‘creation of the world.’”

We can also see the pulse of the will to power in morality. – There are two sorts of morality:

• MASTER MORALITY is the morality of the powerful, the superior, the proud, the aristocrats, the rich, the conquerors. They are the proud, independent, select few.
  
  • In master morality, the masters define themselves as the good. So good means powerful, aristocratic, noble—the characteristics of the superior people of the “first rank.”
  • For the masters, bad refers to those who are none of these things: the lowly, the vile, the common, the pathetic, the slaves. The bad people are unworthy, and the good masters can use them or abuse them as they see fit.
• SLAVE MORALITY– Is concerned not with good and bad but with good and evil. For the slave, the masters are dangerous monsters; they are evil.
  
  • The slaves define themselves as the good; the good are the weak, meek, powerless, and downtrodden.
  • To them, the good qualities are those that advance the interests of the good ones, the slave qualities such as love, kindness, and sympathy. From such slave values the modern world has derived the ideals of equality, human dignity, equal rights, socialism, and democracy.
• HERD MORALITY – Nietzsche says, these are still slave values, which amount to herd morality, the morality of weakness, inferior existence, and degradation.
  
  • And in slave morality, he thinks he clearly sees Judeo-Christian roots. Didn’t Jesus reserve his blessings for the poor, humble, meek, and weak?
  • Christian morality is slave morality. And this morality of weakness and otherworldliness, says Nietzsche, looks at this life and sees only pessimism and hopelessness.

“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point … The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”

—Richard Dawkins

• The hope that herd morality can be transcended by a rising champion of a much greater morality, a higher form of human life: the OVERMAN (or SUPERMAN) – the superior man of the future.
  
  • Zarathustra, the (fictional) prophet of the Overman, declares:

Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

• The overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak of otherworldly hopes (i.e. religion)!
  
  • Zarathustra says that someday man will be surpassed by the Overman —the future of mortal human life. In the meantime, look to this world, this earthly, material existence, for answers, and do not be deceived by those who would have you put your faith in the supernatural or otherworldly.
    
    • The Overman himself will remain faithful to the Earth, this world. He will be his own master and the giver of his own rules, his own creator of his own higher morality.
• Nietzsche maintains that slaves are weak and fearful—and slave morality helps keep them that way—largely because of religion.
  
  • To believe in God, he says, is to accept the morality of the herd (and to assume the role of a sheep), to live not for this world but for a hereafter, to see humans as sinful and inadequate, and to view this life with pessimism and hopelessness.
    
    • Thus for Nietzsche, the death of God would be good news—and he believes this great event has already occurred! He proclaims that “GOD IS DEAD” in the sense that belief in the Christian God is now weaker and less common than ever before. Science, technology, secularism, and worldly pursuits now reign, and these have put a stake in God’s heart.
    • But humankind has not yet fully grasped this epic event; the news, however, is slowly sinking in. Nietzsche says, “The greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable—is even now beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” He expresses this idea (shocking in his day and less so in ours) in a well-known parable about the Madman seeking god.

Question 4

Heidegger

Answer 4

HEIDEGGER – Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Masterpiece, Being and Time.

• Heidegger was consumed with what he calls the most pressing and most important question a person could ask: the question of being, or existence.
• Heidegger asks, What is it for something to be? What is it for a stone or pen or human to exist?
• He doesn’t mean by being what philosophers of the past have usually meant.
• The question of being is not about a particular being, an existing thing (such as a dog or a desk), or even about everything. It’s not synonymous with the properties or essence or substance of something. And it’s not about the Being, the God or logos or supreme entity that creates or sustains the world. Being concerns what we might call “pure existence”—not how an object exists or what it is that exists but existence itself.
• Heidegger explains it like this:
  
  • Martin Heidegger: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
  • Heidegger recognized that he would need to examine one particular type of being—the self-conscious kind called human, the “entity for which being is an issue.”
• DASEIN – The idea is that by understanding the being of Dasein, we may be able to grasp the meaning of being itself.
• How can we study Dasein? Science, Heidegger believes, is no help here. He thinks another approach is far more useful.
• The technique is called phenomenology. It’s a way of painstakingly describing the data of consciousness without the distortions of preconceived ideas.
• Heidegger says that through his phenomenological study, he was able to learn a great deal about Dasein, and therefore about being.
• For one thing, Dasein is necessarily in the world (Heidegger’s word for this aspect of being is, not surprisingly, being-in-the-world).
• Dasein is not something that exists independently of the universe. For Plato and Descartes there are two realms of existence, but for Heidegger there is only one reality or being.
• Dasein’s being-in-the-world is expressed through its involvement in, or concern for, the world by actions—doing things, producing things, accomplishing things, exploring things, and the like.
• Like Sartre and others, Heidegger denies that we come into the world with an assigned essence. We are instead what we make of ourselves. Dasein is the happening of its life in its journey from birth to death. Dasein is a becoming, not a soul or substance.

Dasein’s being is characterized by three “existentials,” or fundamental aspects.

THROWNESS: Dasein is thrown into the world without its consent. We had no say in the where and when of our birth and no choice about our parents, our nationality, our race, our gender, our economic situation, or anything else. Yet we unavoidably care about the world into which we are thrown.

PROJECTION – Notion that Dasein is forced to define itself by actions that shape its present and future. Each action undertaken now changes future possibilities and thus our lives, and actions help form who we are now.

FALLENNESS – Erosion of Dasein’s individuality by falling away from its true self and into the world. This falling happens when we dim our understanding of the world through idle, ambiguous, and vacuous thinking.

The distinction here, Heidegger says, is between the authentic and inauthentic self

Thomas R. Flynn: Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction

• One is no more born an individual (in the existentialist sense) than one is born authentic. To be truly authentic is to have realized one’s individuality and vice versa. Both existential ‘individuality’ and ‘authenticity’ are achievement words.
• The person who avoids choice, who becomes a mere face in the crowd or cog in the bureaucratic machine, has failed to become authentic. So we can now describe the person who lives his or her life as ‘they’ command or expect as inauthentic.

Question 5

Sartre

Answer 5

SARTRE – Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)

• Greatest work—Being and Nothingness examined the central theme of his philosophy: freedom of the individual. Humans, he says, are profoundly free to create their own lives and thus are entirely responsible for defining the meaning and moral relevance of their existence.
• Unlike almost every philosopher before him, he not only believes that we are free but also insists that we are radically free. We may be influenced by the factors of nature and nurture (heredity and environment), but ultimately we are not determined by them. We are totally free—free to define ourselves by our own lights and capable of resisting the physical, psychological, and social forces that will thoroughly shape us if we let them. We are determined only if we allow ourselves to be determined.
• Most people assume, Sartre says, that “essence precedes existence”that before we come into existence, our fundamental characteristics (our essence) as humans are already set. They think that our psychological makeup, choices, desires, and ideas are, in a sense, locked in before we can say our first words.
  
  • But according to Sartre, this kind of “essence precedes existence” thinking is tragically mistaken. It prevents us from seeing a future of open possibilities, saps our creativity, limits our freedom, and weakens our sense of our moral responsibility. The truth, says Sartre, is the opposite of the received view: “existence precedes essence”—we first come into being and then we define ourselves. He declares, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
• And what is this radical freedom that we all possess? It is both a blessing and a curse. As Sartre says, “We are condemned to be free.”
• Blessing is that as free persons, we have the power to set our own goals, live our own lives, and create ourselves as we go. The Curse is that as free beings, we can look to no one but ourselves to decide how we should live. We carry this burden alone. We must bear the awesome moral responsibility of deciding how we should live, how we should treat others, and what values we should prescribe for the rest of the world through our actions.
• We can celebrate our capacity to create our essence and live by our own rules, but because we are utterly alone in bearing this monumental burden, we are also condemned to experience great anguish, despair, and a sense of abandonment.

Sartre – Communist Party – joined the party in the early 1950s but withdrew from it in 1956.

NOTE – How can an Existentialist, who demands that we take control of our lives and make our own choices even think about being a communist, which takes all that away? – TJB

Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism

• What [existentialists] have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre

• Thus, the presence of the paper-cutter or book in front of me is determined. Therefore, we have here a technical view of the world whereby it can be said that production precedes existence.
• Thus, the concept of man in the mind of God is comparable to the concept of paper-cutter in the mind of the manufacturer.
• In the eighteenth century, the atheism of the philosophes discarded the idea of God, but not so much for the notion that essence precedes existence. To a certain extent, this idea is found everywhere; we find it in Diderot, in Voltaire, and even in Kant. Man has a human nature; this human nature, which is the concept of the human, is found in all men, which means that each man is a particular example of a universal concept, man.

Atheistic Existentialism, which I represent, is more coherent. It states that if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality.

• What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.
• If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
• Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism. It is also what is called subjectivity, the name we are labeled with when charges are brought against us.
• Man first exists, that is, that man first of all is the being in the future. Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower;
  
  • Nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man will be what he will have planned to be. Not what he will want to be. Because by the word “will” we generally mean a conscious decision, which is subsequent to what we have already made of ourselves. I may want to belong to a political party, write a book, get married; but all that is only a manifestation of an earlier, more spontaneous choice that is called “will.”
    
    • But if existence really does precede essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.
    • And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.…
• What is meant by anguish? The existentialists say at once that man is anguish. What that means is this: the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a law-maker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, cannot help escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility.
• Of course, there are many people who are not anxious; but we claim that they are hiding their anxiety, that they are fleeing from it. Certainly, many people believe that when they do something, they themselves are the only ones involved, and when someone says to them, “What if everyone acted that way?” they shrug their shoulders and answer, “Everyone doesn’t act that way.” But really, one should always ask himself, “What would happen if everybody looked at things that way?”

The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can be no longer an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. NOTE – Existentialism is actually completely compatible with a belief in God or spirituality. They only regret the premise that we are born with predetermined essence, then the nature of our creation is irrelevant. – TJB

• Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men.
• Dostoevsky said, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.” That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn,

because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to. He can’t start making excuses for himself.

• If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, no justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses. – NOTE – In other words, the concept of a “God” gives some people an outlet for blame – essentially blaming God for fate. If there is no such scapegoat, then we only have ourselves to blame for our choices. – TJB
• That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.…
• As for despair, the term has a very simple meaning. It means that we shall confine ourselves to reckoning only with what depends upon our will,
• When we want something, we always have to reckon with probabilities.
• But possibilities are to be reckoned with only to the point where my action comports with the ensemble of these possibilities, and no further. The moment the possibilities I am considering are not rigorously involved by my action, I ought to disengage myself from them, because no God, no scheme, can adapt the world and its possibilities to my will. When Descartes said, “Conquer yourself rather than the world,” he meant essentially the same thing.14

​

“As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.”

—Jean-Paul Sartre

Existenstialist was a French cultural import, which Paris then reexported to Germany, its country of origin, in a sophisticated and vastly more attractive guise.

Question 6

Camus

Answer 6

CAMUS – French novelist and essayist Albert Camus (19131960).

• Absurdity is the dominant theme in his novels (notably The Stranger and The Plague) and in his essays (especially “The Myth of Sisyphus”).

Summary of Existentialism:

As we’ve seen, existentialism does not offer rules or principles to guide moral action. Instead, it provides a broad analysis of the individual’s predicament in an uncaring universe and explains how to find meaning in such a forlorn world. Thus, a central existentialist theme is that our existence is ABSURD there is an unbearable conflict between our need for meaning and purpose in life and the meaningless, indifferent universe.

• Our situation is impossible, and there is no higher power or governing principle to help us make sense of it. There is just us and the cold, silent cosmos, which cares nothing about our needs and desires. Moreover, our condition is terminal; our death is guaranteed. So we must live an absurd existence, and at the last we get no answers, just an ending. The responsibility of self-definition rests heavily upon us. To many, the weight is terrifying.
• But those who accept their responsibility and freedom, who recognize that they alone are the ultimate designers of their lives, who are brave enough to make the best of an absurd existence—they are living Authentically. Those who allow society, religion, history, mass culture, or their own fear to define them are living Inauthentically.

“The Myth of Sisyphus,” – Camus dramatizes the absurdity of human existence by likening it to that of the mythical Sisyphus, who is forced by the gods to repeat a pointless task for all eternity: push a boulder to the top of a mountain only to have it tumble down to the bottom. Yet Sisyphus finds meaning in this seemingly meaningless burden by courageously embracing it and refusing to be overwhelmed by despair.

• To Camus, Sisyphus is a hero because he accepts his fate and valiantly pushes on anyway. Likewise, humans too can be heroic by carrying on with life even though it has no inherent meaning and will soon be over.

Camus right about the absurdity of existence? Is the universe meaningless?

• r own goals and NOTE –The universe is filled with meaning but it is up to us to determine what that is through our own goals and creations. – TJB

Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

—Albert Camus