DE Weekly: Free Will, Good Faith, & Bruce Almighty
Free Will is at the center of existential philosophy. The existentialists agreed: as humans, we possess a radical freedom which allows us the opportunity to create meaning in our lives through our own choices. This opportunity is not to be taken lightly, however; with this level of freedom comes real responsibility.
Why did Jean-Paul Sartre say we are “condemned” to be free? It is for this very reason. Being as it is that we are responsible for our choices, it implies that we are responsible also for how our choices affect other people.
DE Weekly: Consciousness, Faith, & Free Will
The major question the existentialists sought to answer was, “What is the meaning of life?” Complementary to that question is another: does life even have meaning? Of course, they weren’t the first philosophers to ask this question. People had been thinking about this for thousands of years before them.
There are a lot of different ways to approach the potentiality of a grand, overarching meaning to life itself. Existentialism attempted to ground meaning in what we can actually see; it placed our perception above all else and used it to explain what might give each of our lives meaning.