Authenticity has become something of a commodity now. We are sold authentic-sounding recordings on vinyl records, authentic breakfast cereal, authentic floorboards, and authentic prepackaged holiday experiences.
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The existentialists remind us that authentic authenticity has more to do with honesty and alertness. Another existentialist, Gabriel Marcel, said that the distinctive task of a philosopher was to remain ever-vigilant so that, when seductive political delusions or lies crept over our minds, he or she could ring like an alarm clock and wake everybody up. Most existentialists were in favour of getting out into the world and making a difference, rather than being authentic all by themselves in a room.
It was not just talk: This made them many enemies. On 7 January , someone planted a bomb in the apartment above the one Sartre shared with his mother. By sheer luck, no one was hurt, though both flats were damaged. He and his mother moved out, but he did not let the attack stop his activism. The belief in the importance of commitment had roots in an idea borrowed from the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant: This belief in the mattering of everything made the Parisian existentialists passionate debaters: They stayed up all hours arguing with friends — who were not always friends any more by the time morning came.
What principles could be worth losing friends over? Well, some decisions really do matter in that life-or-death way. After the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in , Sartre wrote an essay pointing out how this changed everything. From now on, he said, we know we can destroy ourselves, so we must decide every day whether we want to keep living. They are still right about this. Contrary to general belief, Sartre and De Beauvoir did not generally toe a party line, although they kicked a few around. Sartre briefly considered himself a communist convert in the early s, especially after a bizarre incident in which the French Communist party leader, Jacques Duclos, was arrested and held for a month after being caught in a car containing two dead pigeons.
The authorities thought the birds had been intended for taking messages to Moscow; Duclos said he was taking them home to cook for dinner. He defended the party by writing articles, but even now he did not sign up. On their side, the communists never accepted existentialism. They disliked its insistence on freedom: They feared that reading atheist existentialists would lead people to doubt their faith and church authority — which it did.
Existentialism inclines people to doubt and challenge almost everything — even if its own practitioners sometimes took a while to see this. A rarely noted fact about existentialists and their allies is that they wrote some wonderful books — along with some dreadful ones. Camus is famously readable: De Beauvoir created gripping psychological fiction out of the real-life dramas and discussions raging among her friends, and she encouraged Sartre to make his Nausea more like a whodunnit than a treatise.
Actually, even his treatises had novelistic qualities. He incorporated many personal experiences into his masterwork Being and Nothingness , often to startling effect, since his perspective included peculiar hangups about trees, ski tracks, honey and slimy things, and terrifying post-mescaline flashbacks in which he was pursued by imaginary lobsters.
As for Heidegger, his writing affords different kind of pleasure — although that word is not often mentioned in relation to his books. He wrote them in a style filled with idiosyncratic coinages. The idea is to keep us from slipping lazily into traditional habits and errors of thought. They and their phenomenological friends often took topics previously considered on the fringes of philosophy, such as the body, gender, sexuality, social life, child development and our relationship with technology, and brought them into the very centre of their thought. Heidegger was a pioneer in noticing how much it has changed the very nature of human experience.
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That is, it has nothing to do with making machines more user-friendly or efficient or productive. The real question is about our own way of being: He also warned against our endless desire to make everything on the planet more exploitable and storable. In , the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus described the internet as the ultimate Heideggerian device: Fifteen years after these words were published, many of us are already so immersed in that network that we can hardly find a separate vantage point from which to think critically about it.
Heidegger is there to remind us not just to question the technology itself, but to question ourselves.
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Unlike some later continental philosophers, besotted with the play of meanings in texts and uninterested in real people, the existentialists went directly for the biggest and most personal questions. What makes us different from other animals? How do we interact? What world do we want to create for the future?
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What responsibilities do we have? What do we do? Sartre was self-indulgent and demanding, and he defended odious regimes, if only fleetingly. Heidegger, as is now well documented, was a nationalist and Nazi sympathiser who probably remained one long after the war. Almost everyone in the existentialist story displayed some qualities that should make us uncomfortable. But they do offer something more useful: They remind us that existence is difficult and that people behave appallingly, but at the same time they point out how vast our human possibilities are.
That is why we might pick up some inspiring ideas from reading them again — and why we might even try being just a little more existentialist ourselves. Jean-Paul Sartre Simone de Beauvoir features. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading?
Those People who do not cling to professional football are more likely to experience Sunday neurosis between the months of early autumn and winter than those who enjoy professional football. Sadly, not even professional football is eternal; it too will vanish, likely because football sucks.
One then slips away—a off the grid. The white noise that once kept one connected one now feels a stranger to. One is likely to redefine the word cavity to a positive: But there are other more delightfully engaging and stimulating manifestations, for instance: But there is another grave potential eventuality: Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure. That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation.
We can observe in such cases that sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum. Power, money, sex, and drugs—the primitive will to pleasure—are the active engagements one is liable to resort to to counter the knowingness of the existential vacuum. Sadly, these more shallow activities may offer us only a brief reprieve. They are not strong enough to clog the sucking power of the vacuum. The vacuums kryptonite is an authentic existence. And it is not we who ask what is the meaning to life, but it us who are being asked. A Creating a work, or doing a deed.
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Very Similar to Camus, who argues that we can either commit suicide in the face of absurdity, or create our own work of art that is our life. B Experiencing something or encountering someone esp. Vague I know, but the people in our lives obviously impact us a great deal. We need them and they need us, we experience each other. Frankl survived four death camps during World War II.
He experienced incomprehensible suffering, suffering that he identified at the time as meaningless. People in the camps, he said, either committed suicide in one form or another or they continued to live despite the meaninglessness of their suffering. Good, then you need to be kicked down a few notches in your perceptions of your fellow human cousins.
Fuck the existential vaccuum, make that shit into your fire-core and go create a goddamn world. Go burn your pansy French pomo bullshit, be a fucking god, and pull your own meaning out of that void ex nihilo. I have this intuitive theory that meaninglessness or the feeling thereof is the key to finding meaning -or is a tool to that effect. In other words; what appears to be a void is just a way to strip life to its essence of worth and substance and meaning. Meaning, then, is a thin illusion enjoyed by those innocents.
When we know this, we may become dysfunctional. At a certain point of despair, however, when we face the ledge we all know, we might, in acknowledgement of meaninglessness, ask ourselves: We, the existentially sequestered, may find purpose or at least solace in bolstering the strength of the intellectual-sheltering which cocoons those aging children.
Think big, be free, have sex … 10 reasons to be an existentialist
For as much as we may despise or envy them, we must know that there is a sweetness in their experience. As we preserve their innocence, taking the role of their guardian against the void, we become the watchful protectors of joy. Inured to our own despair, we take it into the womb of our minds as seed.
We become the mother of meaning. The babe is frail yet, and I write of a view from the very mountaintop under which I am buried. Existential angst has plagued me since childhood. I just try to stay busy as possible and dive into studies and science with my curiosity. Marrying and procreating has helped too. In the end there is always something missing. I have only read half of it but I feel this is completely true. I experienced a panic attack 7 years ago, followed by depersonalization.
That feeling was terrifying.
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I looked around and nothing felt familiar. My room, my computer, people around me, like they have lost substance, meaning, purpose and joy. I am sorry for your anxieties. Realise that existentialism is total bullshit: Understand that you have a soul that reincarnates to learn lessons.
Troll around the internet and help to get the record straight. Thank you, but astrology is both a psuedo-science based on geocentrism and a part of the occult the attempt to gain knowledge and wrest power from the supernatural apart from the true God. Jesus rose from the dead and insures the resurrection of all who follow him.
Define yourself in your own terms, or dont define, if it feels confining. On a big scheme of things there no bad, good, wrong, right choices.