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: Simone de Beauvoir, Sedimentation, & Blank Slate Theory
One of the themes you will see repeated in existentialist texts is that we are born into this world with a radical freedom, “thrown” totally free into life to make whatever we like of it. If there is no inherent meaning to life, the existentialists argue, that means we are free to find and create our own meaning.
How simple is it, though, to create meaning in our lives? Is there anything blocking our path, standing in our way? It turns out, there is.
DE Weekly: Rumination, Feeling Stuck, & Letting Go
As humans, we have a tendency to think about the past. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, when we dwell on the past for long enough, we can be prone to feeling regret. We can want time back that we can’t have; we can yearn for time that is no longer ours.
I recently listened to an episode of the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson that featured a psychologist named Dr. Rick Hanson, who shared a story about a Buddhist monk.