DE Weekly: Kierkegaard, Surrender, & the Leap of Faith
“Who am I, and what is my fate?” In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about how existentialism sought to answer this question through examining all facets of existence. I introduced the French philosopher and Catholic theologian Blaise Pascal, and his philosophical argument commonly referred to as “Pascal’s wager.”
To refresh your mind (or to catch you up to speed), Pascal’s wager is an argument that posits we, as humans, engage in a gamble regarding the existence of and our belief in God, a belief which ultimately defines our fate.
DE Weekly: Pensées, Reason, & Pascal’s Wager
Existentialism has arrested the thoughts of readers because the questions it poses are fundamental to our existence. Joining all questions into one, readers are forced to ask themselves, “Who am I, and what is my fate?”
Centuries before the existentialist authors we normally think of came around, a French philosopher and Catholic theologian named Blaise Pascal lived and wrote on the same existential questions.
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.
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: 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: 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.