DE Weekly: Cynicism, Meaning, & Smiling Friends
There are many roads that lead to existentialism. What piqued my interest at first was how the philosophy presented itself to me during what I would call my “quarter-life crisis.” I had a feeling of listlessness, uncertainty, and dread about how my life was going to unfold in the years to come.
For me, what I saw in existentialism offered hope: a way out and a way forward of this hopelessness I was feeling.
DE Weekly: Amor Fati, Nietzsche, & Sisyphus
Although existentialism didn’t roll around to officially cement itself as a bona fide philosophy until the twentieth century, earlier philosophies explored proto-existentialist ideas and laid the foundation upon which it would one day sprout from.
One philosophy that has quite a bit in common with existentialism, at least insofar as it seeks to answer many of the same questions, is the ancient philosophy of Stoicism.
DE Weekly: Hamlet, Shakespeare, & Fortune
Should we capitalize on our free will, or resign ourselves to what fate has in store for us? Is it better to take things into our own hands, or let nature run its course and whatever happens, happens? Does whatever we choose to do––does anything we choose to do––make a difference?
Such are just a few questions explored and answered in some fashion by William Shakespeare in his longest play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
DE Weekly: Tolstoy, Master and Man, & Sacrifice
It is often told by people who have had near-death experiences that, in the moment when you think you are going to die, you reflect on your entire life, with everything truly important rising to the top of mind.
I imagine it’s the same for those on their deathbed; in their final moments on this earth, some (hopefully peaceful) reflection and contemplation of one’s life would come to mind.
DE Weekly: Kafka, The Metamorphosis, & Absurdity
What if one day you woke up and everything changed? Not because of anything you did, or of anything anyone else did to you, but for no reason at all. Even worse, what if you woke up and you weren’t you anymore?
Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis deals with an extreme example of just such a scenario.
DE Weekly: Hesse, Siddhartha, & Oneness
Have you ever felt like the life you’re living is not enough? Like you aren’t satisfied with the way things are? Like there has to be more than this? I suspect you have, just as I have.
This feeling of wondering is a driver of a lot of existentialist thought; the existentialists themselves were searchers, both of meaning and purpose. So, too, were their contemporaries who did not buy into existentialism, but other philosophies and answers to life.
DE Weekly: Mystery, Suffering, & The Book of Job
Like any philosophy, the core tenets of existentialism are solid because they’re true. They are true all the time, and they are true for everyone. This makes it possible when, in reading old (even ancient) texts, one is looking to find something that evokes existentialism, they are likely to find it.
For an example of this, let’s go back thousands of years to The Holy Bible, specifically The Book of Job.
DE Weekly: Macbeth, Shakespeare, & Nihilism
“Life’s . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” These words come from the speech “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from William Shakespeare’s play The Tragedie of Macbeth.
Reading this quote back, these words could have just as well been written by any of the existentialist authors of the twentieth century. It certainly espouses some of the attitudes toward life that those authors held themselves.
DE Weekly: Zeno’s Paradox, Husserl, & Epoché
As much as it owes to the millennia of philosophy that came before it, existentialism is a revolutionary philosophy in that it sought to view the world and existence in a different way than past philosophers had done. The concept that “existence precedes essence” is a pretty good example of how the existentialists aimed to turn Aristotelian metaphysics on its head.
The existentialists weren’t all contrarians, though, nor did they set themselves miles apart from every philosophical conclusion of the past. This holds true for pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea.
DE Weekly: Finitude, Nothingness, & Meaning
In existentialism, there are some concepts with relative consensus, and others with lots of varying theories. Life itself (specifically the meaning of life) is one of those major questions with many answers. Another is Death itself. We’ve all heard the question “What is the meaning of life?”, but here’s another question: what is the meaning of death?
The existentialists had widely differing views on the importance of death and on the meaning of death, each with their own unique input. The two authors I’ll discuss today are Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.