DE Weekly: Sartre, Facticity, & Transcendence
Throughout their rigorous study of the human condition, the existentialists introduced and coined key words to represent the important concepts of their philosophies. Two of these key concepts are facticity and transcendence.
Facticity refers to the concrete facts of an individual’s existence––birthdate, birthplace, physical appearance, the social class one is born into––which are inescapable and cannot be changed.
DE Weekly: Past, Present, & Future
“Life can only be understood backwards;” wrote Søren Kierkegaard in his journals, “but it must be lived forwards.”
This is one of Kierkegaard's most famous entries, and rightly so; I’d wager all of us have at one point or another reflected on our past and thought, “If only I had known…” or, “If only I had done that instead of this…”.
DE Weekly: Chalmers, Descartes, & The Hard Problem
There are easy problems and there are hard problems. In life, the hard problems seem to permeate generations and stump even the most prolific philosophers. Existentialism deals, in large part, with mostly “hard” problems.
There is perhaps no such harder “problem” as consciousness. It’s so hard, in fact, that it’s sometimes referred to as “the hard problem of consciousness”, or even just “the hard problem”.
DE Weekly: Vitalism, Nietzsche, & God
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?”
This quote from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1882 book The Gay Science is one of his most famous.
DE Weekly: Identity, Plutarch, & the Ship of Theseus
Last week, I wrote about how certain stories and writings permeate the boundaries of their genres and allow us to apply an existentialist critique of them. Another such story we’ll discuss today is the “Ship of Theseus”.
Like the Allegory of the Cave from last week, you might have heard of this popular thought experiment before. Often viewed as a paradox, this story was popularized by Plutarch, a Greek philosopher in the Roman Empire who is most famous for his biographies.
DE Weekly: Socrates, the Good, & the Allegory of the Cave
There are ideas and writings which are not explicitly existentialist in their nature, but to which, nevertheless, we can apply an existentialist critique. One such work is Plato’s The Republic.
The Republic is Plato’s most famous work. Written around 375 BC, it’s a Socratic dialogue in which Socrates is the main character, and discusses with his contemporaries such topics as justice, the order of city-states, and what constitutes a just man.
DE Weekly: Art, Death, & Impermanence
“We are thrust into the world without consultation”, writes Brian Greene, and “Once here, we are granted leave to embrace life for merely a moment.”
Why do we feel the need to create? Art, music, literature, something, anything at all?
DE Weekly: The Look, the Self, & the Other
In existentialism, consciousness is the key to understanding human existence. When discussing conscious beings––namely, humans––it helps to distinguish between two types of conscious beings: the Self and the Other.
In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “Being-for-others”, and how this can open us up to accept that we need to include others in our search for meaning. In short, a meaningful life must consider and include other people. It can’t be egocentric.
DE Weekly: Ego, Busyness, & Being-For-Others
One point we encounter again and again when reading many of the existentialists is that we are solely responsible for finding and creating meaning in our own lives. The reason we are tasked with this is because, according to the existentialists, there is no central, universal meaning out there.
This is a daunting task. How do we find and create meaning where there is none? The answer for me is probably different than the answer for you.
DE Weekly: Mind, Matter, & Eliminativism
One of the great contentions posited in existentialism is that, in a world devoid of inherent meaning, we are responsible for making meaning in our own lives. Through acceptance of the absurdity of life and radical ownership of our own choices, this is possible.
Another contention of existentialism––and this one is more important, in my opinion––is that this reality is not a bad thing. This is of ultimate importance to recognize, because it’s what distinguishes the philosophy from nihilism.