DE Weekly: A Christmas Carol, Humanity, & Transformation
In existentialism, there is a great emphasis placed on personal responsibility; it is important you make the right choices so you can create a life of meaning and value. At what point after a life lived in precisely the wrong way does it become too late to change the way things are?
Every Christmas, I like to watch a few of my favorite Christmas movies, most of which are closer to 100 years old than they are to today. One of those movies is A Christmas Carol (the 1938 version).
DE Weekly: Barron, Modern Thought, & the Influence of Ideas
Last week, I wrote about Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, a book explaining how perception of the modern world is dominated by “simulacra,” or “copies without originals.” Baudrillard argues we endure a “hyperreality,” wherein signs replace reality and our perception is defined by said signs.
If you haven’t read last week’s newsletter yet, I highly recommend doing so to get caught up on what I’ll be discussing this week.
DE Weekly: Perception, Baudrillard, & Simulacra
In existentialism, the role perception plays in our lives is as important to understanding the philosophy as anything else. This is because in existentialism, perception is much more than “seeing” the world with your senses; perception is about our being-in-the-world.
How do we experience the world? How do we experience our own existence? How do we know the things we perceive are true reality, that we can believe our perception?
DE Weekly: Heidegger, Temporality, & Retracing the Past
Martin Heidegger, the German phenomenologist who had a huge influence on existentialism, wrote about time and temporality, what he saw as the structure of his Dasein––human existence.
Heidegger lifted the term Dasein from the German word for “existence” and molded it into a concept explaining the human condition; namely, our “Being-in-the-world.”
DE Weekly: Simone de Beauvoir, Sedimentation, & Blank Slate Theory
One of the themes you will see repeated in existentialist texts is that we are born into this world with a radical freedom, “thrown” totally free into life to make whatever we like of it. If there is no inherent meaning to life, the existentialists argue, that means we are free to find and create our own meaning.
How simple is it, though, to create meaning in our lives? Is there anything blocking our path, standing in our way? It turns out, there is.
DE Weekly: Free Will, Good Faith, & Bruce Almighty
Free Will is at the center of existential philosophy. The existentialists agreed: as humans, we possess a radical freedom which allows us the opportunity to create meaning in our lives through our own choices. This opportunity is not to be taken lightly, however; with this level of freedom comes real responsibility.
Why did Jean-Paul Sartre say we are “condemned” to be free? It is for this very reason. Being as it is that we are responsible for our choices, it implies that we are responsible also for how our choices affect other people.
DE Weekly: Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, & William James
Earlier this month, I wrote about the existential humanism put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre in his published 1945 lecture L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism). I compared traditional existentialism with humanist philosophy, marking the differences between the two and where they intersect.
Today, I’d like to do the same with the pragmatism and radical empiricism of American psychologist and philosopher William James.
DE Weekly: Kierkegaard, Paradox, & Theistic Existentialism
Anthony Bourdain once said something like, “To say you’ve had Mexican food is to say nothing at all.” What he meant was, if one was to explore the different regions of Mexico, the local cuisine varies so much, so drastically that you would almost think you’re eating a totally different type of food.
In the same way, to say you could define existentialism in one sentence is to say nothing at all. You can’t.
DE Weekly: Existentialism, Humanism, & Life as a Project
Existentialism sometimes has a rap for being a rather convoluted philosophy. We can assign blame to its most famous authors, I think, for that perception; Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the like wrote in such a way that many of the philosophy’s takeaways seem abstruse to the average reader.
This being the case, if we were to pose the question, “What is Existentialism?”, where would we begin? It’s unhelpful when those like Albert Camus and even Sartre himself rejected the term “existentialist.”
DE Weekly: Meaning, Ex Nihilo, & the Chasm of Existence
For those not entirely familiar with existentialism, a pervasive mistake that can be made is to conflate the philosophy with nihilism, and to associate the beliefs of one with the other. In fact, even if you do have a solid understanding of existential philosophy, the two can sometimes bleed into one another.
The reason I like to differentiate between the two and really hammer home the fact that existentialism is not nihilist in its underlying beliefs is that I really do not have patience for nihilists and nihilism in general.