DE Weekly: Modernity, Reality, & My Dinner With Andre
“I’ve lived in this city all my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side and when I was ten years old, I was rich, I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I am 36, and all I think about is money.”
These words are spoken by Wallace Shawn, playing a fictionalized version of himself in the 1981 film My Dinner With Andre.
DE Weekly: The Hurt Locker, Cereal, & the Burden of Choice
Jean-Paul Sartre made famous the Existentialist idea that, as humans, we are “condemned to be free.” By this, he meant that we did not choose to be alive, but once alive, we are responsible for the choices we make. Even not choosing to choose is a choice.
This level of absolute personal responsibility––what Sartre called our radical freedom––often leads us to anguish and dread. The overwhelming weight of being the one responsible for your choices is terrifying, on some level; in the end, we are the one true author of our life.
DE Weekly: Maritain, Personalism, & Existence and the Existent
Today, I am going to introduce a philosopher I have not written about in this newsletter to date, whose name is Jacques Maritain. Born in 1882, Maritain was a twentieth-century philosopher and theologian who revitalized Thomism, the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Maritain used the philosophy of Aquinas to address modern issues, drawing from Aquinas on issues such as the dignity inherent in every human person, and emphasizing a God-centered approach to politics and ethics.
DE Weekly: Wisdom, Vanity, & The Book of Ecclesiastes
“What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.” (Ecclesiastes 1:3-4)
This is an existential question as old as humanity itself. It seems impossible for us as human beings to truly answer such questions as: why do things happen the way they do? Why should we strive in life––to be anything––when we are all going to die? Why strive to be good, to be rich, to be intelligent…why? Why are we here?
DE Weekly: Camus, Absurdism, & A Happy Death
When one thinks of existentialism, one of the first authors to come to mind is likely to be Albert Camus. Two of his works in particular––his novel The Stranger and his book-length essay The Myth of Sisyphus––are undoubtedly his best known works. However, there is another novel of his I’ll be writing about today: A Happy Death.
A Happy Death is, in many ways, the classic Camus novel. Replete with beautifully written, endlessly quotable passages, wondrous highs and desperate lows, it is an enjoyable read, like many of his books.
DE Weekly: Demy, Love, & The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
In Existentialism, the past, present, and future are always in focus. Much of what the existentialist authors wrote about these three states of time emphasized their role in determining how our lives will turn out.
The past acts as the “givenness” of our life: a fixed period of time that has come and gone and that we cannot change. In this way, it is devoid of choices; there is nothing more we can do with the past.
DE Weekly: Bergman, The Seventh Seal, & The Dance Macabre
More than anything, Existentialism arose as a profound symptom of its time. In the mid-twentieth century––amid a torrent of war and of tumult and of death unlike anything seen before in history––its philosophers turned their attention to the “Why?” of it all.
In a world ravaged by suffering, what are we to do? Where can we find meaning when God seems silent and the inevitability of death so prescient?
DE Weekly: Kant, Kantianism, & Transcendental Idealism
Existentialism came into its own as a bona fide philosophical discipline in the twentieth century but, as I’ve written in the past, it traces its roots to centuries before it was coined. I believe one such “root” is German philosopher Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century Aufklärung (Enlightenment) thinker whose moral ethics have had a major impact on Western philosophy.
Kant’s ethical framework has had such a major impact, in fact, that it’s often referred to as Kantianism.
DE Weekly: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology, & Being-in-the-World
One could raise a valid critique that the most glaring weakness of existentialism is that it is too abstract; it could be said that it deals too much in theory, is too complicated, and not grounded enough to be useful in everyday life. However, not every existentialist thought the same way. Some even challenged that same abstractness, including one Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty was a twentieth-century French philosopher who is often grouped with his contemporaries––especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whom he studied alongside at the École Normale Supérieure––as an existentialist. Being strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger helps bolster this notion.
DE Weekly: Spinoza, Rationalism, & Determinism
“There can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.” These words belong to Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century. What Spinoza meant by this is that, as we project our future, our hope for something carries with it inherently the risk of losing it. Such is the fundamental nature of our will. But why is our will like this?
Today, we’ll discuss Spinoza’s unique brand of rationalism and determinism, as well as his personal spirituality which informed his philosophy.