DE Weekly: Art, Angst, & Existential Aesthetics
Sometimes, I will be reading something, or watching something, or I’ll simply see something and think to myself, “There is something existential about this.” Perhaps it is just me, and the amount of time I spend with the philosophy––but, I’ve seen others make similar observations, so maybe it is something inside of all of us to some degree.
Existentialism is called what it is because of its emphasis on existence: how humans exist and operate in the world as unique beings.
DE Weekly: Values, Moral Relativism, & Existential Ethics
Last week, I introduced Emmanuel Levinas, the twentieth-century French philosopher who posited ethics as “first philosophy.” To him, this meant that the force fundamentally underpinning all of philosophy is our ethical responsibility.
Before anything else, Levinas argued, we are first of all called into existence to be unconditionally obligated to serve others. Our first act as a Self, then, should be to consider the Other.
DE Weekly: Time, Eternalism, & Illusion
Over two millennia ago, the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle concocted a paradox called the “Paradox of Time,” found today in his Physics. In this paradox, we are asked to consider how time can really and truly exist.
Aristotle’s time paradox says that time is composed of non-existent states, the past and the future. These non-existent states are separated by a vanishing present; as soon as each moment of the present passes, it is gone to the past.
DE Weekly: Barron, Modern Thought, & the Influence of Ideas
Last week, I wrote about Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, a book explaining how perception of the modern world is dominated by “simulacra,” or “copies without originals.” Baudrillard argues we endure a “hyperreality,” wherein signs replace reality and our perception is defined by said signs.
If you haven’t read last week’s newsletter yet, I highly recommend doing so to get caught up on what I’ll be discussing this week.
DE Weekly: Epictetus, Amor Fati, & Memento Mori
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” This quote comes to us from Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher who lived in first century Rome.
Epictetus was a teacher of philosophy who, under the Emperor Domitian, was banished for teaching philosophy. He later founded a school of philosophy in Nicopolis.
DE Weekly: Rope, Hitchcock, & the Übermensch
Existentialism explored what would be required of us in a world without meaning. What would we do––and what should we do––if there were really no inherent meaning, no natural moral order to adhere to?
Some existentialists came up with sound answers; Albert Camus espoused personal responsibility and a good faith search for meaningful ways to live honestly and fully.
DE Weekly: The Good, the True, & the Beautiful
What lies at the core of every philosophical inquiry, every invented line of thinking, and every word on every page of every philosophical treatise ever written? I would argue that philosophy’s aim throughout human history has been to ascertain “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.”
The Good, the True, and the Beautiful is a classical philosophical concept with roots in Ancient Greece, conceptualized by Socrates and later by Plato and Aristotle.
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: 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.