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.
DE Weekly: Merleau-Ponty, Behavior, & Sedimentation
In existentialism, as in any philosophy, there are established truths which are endorsed by most of its influential thinkers. The absurdity of life, the acceptance of death, and the ability to make our own meaning are some examples of this. Sedimentation is another.
Along the same vein as facticity, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, sedimentation is a concept that represents another force in our lives that influences the way we live and interact with the world around us.
DE Weekly: Life, Death, & Certainty
“Life and death are two sides of a coin. But which of the two is more certain?” The answer to that question, as we know, is death.
That question came from Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India. I included some quotes of his from his appearance on an episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast in my newsletter a few weeks ago, and there’s some more insight from Modi I’d like to include this week, too.
DE Weekly: Heidegger, Dasein, & Temporality
“Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing? That is the question,” wrote Martin Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics. “. . . this is obviously the first of all questions,” he continued.
Heidegger was right; questioning our being certainly is the “first” of all questions, for every other question about the nature of being arises from it.
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”.