DE Weekly: Merleau-Ponty, Behavior, & Sedimentation
In existentialism, as in any philosophy, there are established truths which are endorsed by most of its influential thinkers. The absurdity of life, the acceptance of death, and the ability to make our own meaning are some examples of this. Sedimentation is another.
Along the same vein as facticity, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, sedimentation is a concept that represents another force in our lives that influences the way we live and interact with the world around us.
DE Weekly: Life, Death, & Certainty
“Life and death are two sides of a coin. But which of the two is more certain?” The answer to that question, as we know, is death.
That question came from Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India. I included some quotes of his from his appearance on an episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast in my newsletter a few weeks ago, and there’s some more insight from Modi I’d like to include this week, too.
DE Weekly: Heidegger, Dasein, & Temporality
“Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing? That is the question,” wrote Martin Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics. “. . . this is obviously the first of all questions,” he continued.
Heidegger was right; questioning our being certainly is the “first” of all questions, for every other question about the nature of being arises from it.
DE Weekly: Sartre, Facticity, & Transcendence
Throughout their rigorous study of the human condition, the existentialists introduced and coined key words to represent the important concepts of their philosophies. Two of these key concepts are facticity and transcendence.
Facticity refers to the concrete facts of an individual’s existence––birthdate, birthplace, physical appearance, the social class one is born into––which are inescapable and cannot be changed.
DE Weekly: Past, Present, & Future
“Life can only be understood backwards;” wrote Søren Kierkegaard in his journals, “but it must be lived forwards.”
This is one of Kierkegaard's most famous entries, and rightly so; I’d wager all of us have at one point or another reflected on our past and thought, “If only I had known…” or, “If only I had done that instead of this…”.
DE Weekly: Chalmers, Descartes, & The Hard Problem
There are easy problems and there are hard problems. In life, the hard problems seem to permeate generations and stump even the most prolific philosophers. Existentialism deals, in large part, with mostly “hard” problems.
There is perhaps no such harder “problem” as consciousness. It’s so hard, in fact, that it’s sometimes referred to as “the hard problem of consciousness”, or even just “the hard problem”.
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.
DE Weekly: Identity, Plutarch, & the Ship of Theseus
Last week, I wrote about how certain stories and writings permeate the boundaries of their genres and allow us to apply an existentialist critique of them. Another such story we’ll discuss today is the “Ship of Theseus”.
Like the Allegory of the Cave from last week, you might have heard of this popular thought experiment before. Often viewed as a paradox, this story was popularized by Plutarch, a Greek philosopher in the Roman Empire who is most famous for his biographies.
DE Weekly: Socrates, the Good, & the Allegory of the Cave
There are ideas and writings which are not explicitly existentialist in their nature, but to which, nevertheless, we can apply an existentialist critique. One such work is Plato’s The Republic.
The Republic is Plato’s most famous work. Written around 375 BC, it’s a Socratic dialogue in which Socrates is the main character, and discusses with his contemporaries such topics as justice, the order of city-states, and what constitutes a just man.
DE Weekly: Art, Death, & Impermanence
“We are thrust into the world without consultation”, writes Brian Greene, and “Once here, we are granted leave to embrace life for merely a moment.”
Why do we feel the need to create? Art, music, literature, something, anything at all?