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.