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: 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.
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: Cynicism, Meaning, & Smiling Friends
There are many roads that lead to existentialism. What piqued my interest at first was how the philosophy presented itself to me during what I would call my “quarter-life crisis.” I had a feeling of listlessness, uncertainty, and dread about how my life was going to unfold in the years to come.
For me, what I saw in existentialism offered hope: a way out and a way forward of this hopelessness I was feeling.
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: Hamlet, Shakespeare, & Fortune
Should we capitalize on our free will, or resign ourselves to what fate has in store for us? Is it better to take things into our own hands, or let nature run its course and whatever happens, happens? Does whatever we choose to do––does anything we choose to do––make a difference?
Such are just a few questions explored and answered in some fashion by William Shakespeare in his longest play, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
DE Weekly: Tolstoy, Master and Man, & Sacrifice
It is often told by people who have had near-death experiences that, in the moment when you think you are going to die, you reflect on your entire life, with everything truly important rising to the top of mind.
I imagine it’s the same for those on their deathbed; in their final moments on this earth, some (hopefully peaceful) reflection and contemplation of one’s life would come to mind.
DE Weekly: Kafka, The Metamorphosis, & Absurdity
What if one day you woke up and everything changed? Not because of anything you did, or of anything anyone else did to you, but for no reason at all. Even worse, what if you woke up and you weren’t you anymore?
Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis deals with an extreme example of just such a scenario.
DE Weekly: Hesse, Siddhartha, & Oneness
Have you ever felt like the life you’re living is not enough? Like you aren’t satisfied with the way things are? Like there has to be more than this? I suspect you have, just as I have.
This feeling of wondering is a driver of a lot of existentialist thought; the existentialists themselves were searchers, both of meaning and purpose. So, too, were their contemporaries who did not buy into existentialism, but other philosophies and answers to life.
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.