✪✪✪ Existentialism And Creationism: The Meaning Of Life
Politics vary, but each seeks the most individual freedom for people within a society. He sets them free from the evil that they have brought upon themselves, if they will it, believe, and call upon him. The Stephen Sondheim Reference Guide. Saint Herman Press 1 September We are better cyp iapt principles live meaningful everyday instead of doing something Corey Johnson Weekend Jail Summary in order Existentialism And Creationism: The Meaning Of Life to achieve a future goal. It holds that, as there is no God or any other transcendent force, the only way to counter this nothingness and hence to find. In other words, our source of existence must be related Existentialism And Creationism: The Meaning Of Life something mysterious and unfamiliar.
3 MINUTE Philosophy - Existentialism and purpose of life
Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is possible that the creaking floorboard was simply the movement of an old house; the Look is not some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the Other sees one there may have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that person. It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive him. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off.
In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom. It can also be seen in relation to the previous point how angst is before nothing, and this is what sets it apart from fear that has an object. While one can take measures to remove an object of fear, for angst no such "constructive" measures are possible.
The use of the word "nothing" in this context relates to the inherent insecurity about the consequences of one's actions and to the fact that, in experiencing freedom as angst, one also realizes that one is fully responsible for these consequences. There is nothing in people genetically, for instance that acts in their stead—that they can blame if something goes wrong. Therefore, not every choice is perceived as having dreadful possible consequences and, it can be claimed, human lives would be unbearable if every choice facilitated dread.
However, this does not change the fact that freedom remains a condition of every action. Despair is generally defined as a loss of hope. If a person is invested in being a particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding citizen, and then finds their being-thing compromised, they would normally be found in a state of despair—a hopeless state. For example, a singer who loses the ability to sing may despair if they have nothing else to fall back on—nothing to rely on for their identity.
They find themselves unable to be what defined their being. What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the conventional definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when they are not overtly in despair. So long as a person's identity depends on qualities that can crumble, they are in perpetual despair—and as there is, in Sartrean terms, no human essence found in conventional reality on which to constitute the individual's sense of identity, despair is a universal human condition.
When the God-forsaken worldliness of earthly life shuts itself in complacency, the confined air develops poison, the moment gets stuck and stands still, the prospect is lost, a need is felt for a refreshing, enlivening breeze to cleanse the air and dispel the poisonous vapors lest we suffocate in worldliness. Lovingly to hope all things is the opposite of despairingly to hope nothing at all. Love hopes all things—yet is never put to shame. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision.
Existentialists oppose defining human beings as primarily rational, and, therefore, oppose both positivism and rationalism. Existentialism asserts that people make decisions based on subjective meaning rather than pure rationality. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical free will and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard advocated rationality as a means to interact with the objective world e. Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena — "the Other" — that is fundamentally irrational and random.
According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress feelings of anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserted, thereby relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the Look" of "the Other" i. An existentialist reading of the Bible would demand that the reader recognize that they are an existing subject studying the words more as a recollection of events.
Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing these commandments upon them, but as though they are inside them and guiding them from inside. This is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life—or the learner who should put it to use?
Although nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one another since both are rooted in the human experience of anguish and confusion that stems from the apparent meaninglessness of a world in which humans are compelled to find or create meaning. Existentialist philosophers often stress the importance of angst as signifying the absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move that is often reduced to moral or existential nihilism.
A pervasive theme in existentialist philosophy, however, is to persist through encounters with the absurd, as seen in Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" [58] and it is only very rarely that existentialist philosophers dismiss morality or one's self-created meaning: Kierkegaard regained a sort of morality in the religious although he wouldn't agree that it was ethical; the religious suspends the ethical , and Sartre's final words in Being and Nothingness are: "All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory or impure reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane.
We shall devote to them a future work. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They focused on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience.
Like Pascal , they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also considered the role of making free choices, particularly regarding fundamental values and beliefs, and how such choices change the nature and identity of the chooser. Nietzsche's idealized individual invents his own values and creates the very terms they excel under. By contrast, Kierkegaard, opposed to the level of abstraction in Hegel, and not nearly as hostile actually welcoming to Christianity as Nietzsche, argues through a pseudonym that the objective certainty of religious truths specifically Christian is not only impossible, but even founded on logical paradoxes.
Yet he continues to imply that a leap of faith is a possible means for an individual to reach a higher stage of existence that transcends and contains both an aesthetic and ethical value of life. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also precursors to other intellectual movements, including postmodernism , and various strands of psychotherapy. However, Kierkegaard believed that individuals should live in accordance with their thinking.
The first important literary author also important to existentialism was the Russian, Dostoevsky. Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a Humanism , quoted Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis. Other Dostoyevsky novels covered issues raised in existentialist philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishment , the protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an existential crisis and then moves toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by Dostoyevsky himself. In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers explored existentialist ideas. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo , in his book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations , emphasized the life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract rationalism.
Unamuno rejected systematic philosophy in favor of the individual's quest for faith. He retained a sense of the tragic, even absurd nature of the quest, symbolized by his enduring interest in the eponymous character from the Miguel de Cervantes novel Don Quixote. A novelist, poet and dramatist as well as philosophy professor at the University of Salamanca, Unamuno wrote a short story about a priest's crisis of faith, Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr , which has been collected in anthologies of existentialist fiction. Another Spanish thinker, Ortega y Gasset , writing in , held that human existence must always be defined as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of his life: " Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia " "I am myself and my circumstances".
Sartre likewise believed that human existence is not an abstract matter, but is always situated " en situation ". Although Martin Buber wrote his major philosophical works in German, and studied and taught at the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt , he stands apart from the mainstream of German philosophy. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in , he was also a scholar of Jewish culture and involved at various times in Zionism and Hasidism. In , he moved permanently to Jerusalem. His best-known philosophical work was the short book I and Thou , published in Two Russian philosophers, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev , became well known as existentialist thinkers during their post-Revolutionary exiles in Paris.
Shestov had launched an attack on rationalism and systematization in philosophy as early as in his book of aphorisms All Things Are Possible. Berdyaev drew a radical distinction between the world of spirit and the everyday world of objects. Human freedom, for Berdyaev, is rooted in the realm of spirit, a realm independent of scientific notions of causation. To the extent the individual human being lives in the objective world, he is estranged from authentic spiritual freedom.
Marcel, long before coining the term "existentialism", introduced important existentialist themes to a French audience in his early essay "Existence and Objectivity" and in his Metaphysical Journal Harmony, for Marcel, was to be sought through "secondary reflection", a "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" approach to the world, characterized by "wonder and astonishment" and open to the "presence" of other people and of God rather than merely to "information" about them. For Marcel, such presence implied more than simply being there as one thing might be in the presence of another thing ; it connoted "extravagant" availability, and the willingness to put oneself at the disposal of the other.
Marcel contrasted secondary reflection with abstract, scientific-technical primary reflection , which he associated with the activity of the abstract Cartesian ego. For Marcel, philosophy was a concrete activity undertaken by a sensing, feeling human being incarnate—embodied—in a concrete world. In Germany, the psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers —who later described existentialism as a "phantom" created by the public [68] —called his own thought, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Existenzphilosophie. For Jaspers, " Existenz -philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself This way of thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker".
Jaspers, a professor at the University of Heidelberg , was acquainted with Heidegger, who held a professorship at Marburg before acceding to Husserl's chair at Freiburg in They held many philosophical discussions, but later became estranged over Heidegger's support of National Socialism Nazism. They shared an admiration for Kierkegaard, [70] and in the s, Heidegger lectured extensively on Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the extent to which Heidegger should be considered an existentialist is debatable. In Being and Time he presented a method of rooting philosophical explanations in human existence Dasein to be analysed in terms of existential categories existentiale ; and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the existentialist movement.
Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus , who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely read journalism as well as theoretical texts. Sartre dealt with existentialist themes in his novel Nausea and the short stories in his collection The Wall , and had published his treatise on existentialism, Being and Nothingness , in , but it was in the two years following the liberation of Paris from the German occupying forces that he and his close associates—Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others—became internationally famous as the leading figures of a movement known as existentialism.
Beauvoir wrote that "not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us"; [74] existentialism became "the first media craze of the postwar era. By the end of , Camus' earlier fiction and plays had been reprinted, his new play Caligula had been performed and his novel The Plague published; the first two novels of Sartre's The Roads to Freedom trilogy had appeared, as had Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others. Works by Camus and Sartre were already appearing in foreign editions. The Paris-based existentialists had become famous.
Sartre had traveled to Germany in to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger , [76] and he included critical comments on their work in his major treatise Being and Nothingness. Heidegger read Sartre's work and was initially impressed, commenting: "Here for the first time I encountered an independent thinker who, from the foundations up, has experienced the area out of which I think. Your work shows such an immediate comprehension of my philosophy as I have never before encountered.
In the s, Sartre attempted to reconcile existentialism and Marxism in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason. A major theme throughout his writings was freedom and responsibility. Camus was a friend of Sartre, until their falling-out, and wrote several works with existential themes including The Rebel , Summer in Algiers , The Myth of Sisyphus , and The Stranger , the latter being "considered—to what would have been Camus's irritation—the exemplary existentialist novel. In the titular book, Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth of Sisyphus to demonstrate the futility of existence.
In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll to the bottom again. Camus believes that this existence is pointless but that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it. The first half of the book contains an extended rebuttal of what Camus took to be existentialist philosophy in the works of Kierkegaard, Shestov, Heidegger, and Jaspers. Simone de Beauvoir , an important existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre's partner, wrote about feminist and existentialist ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity. Although often overlooked due to her relationship with Sartre, [83] de Beauvoir integrated existentialism with other forms of thinking such as feminism, unheard of at the time, resulting in alienation from fellow writers such as Camus.
Paul Tillich , an important existentialist theologian following Kierkegaard and Karl Barth , applied existentialist concepts to Christian theology , and helped introduce existential theology to the general public. His seminal work The Courage to Be follows Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and life's absurdity, but puts forward the thesis that modern humans must, via God, achieve selfhood in spite of life's absurdity. Rudolf Bultmann used Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's philosophy of existence to demythologize Christianity by interpreting Christian mythical concepts into existentialist concepts.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty , an existential phenomenologist , was for a time a companion of Sartre. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception was recognized as a major statement of French existentialism. However, in later years they were to disagree irreparably, dividing many existentialists such as de Beauvoir, [61] who sided with Sartre. Colin Wilson , an English writer, published his study The Outsider in , initially to critical acclaim.
In this book and others e. Introduction to the New Existentialism , he attempted to reinvigorate what he perceived as a pessimistic philosophy and bring it to a wider audience. He was not, however, academically trained, and his work was attacked by professional philosophers for lack of rigor and critical standards. Stanley Kubrick 's anti-war film Paths of Glory "illustrates, and even illuminates The film examines existentialist ethics, such as the issue of whether objectivity is possible and the "problem of authenticity ". Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Japanese science fiction animation series created by the anime studio Gainax and was both directed and written by Hideaki Anno.
This, in turn, leads him to a better understanding of humanity. Existential perspectives are also found in modern literature to varying degrees, especially since the s. Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea [92] was "steeped in Existential ideas", and is considered an accessible way of grasping his philosophical stance. Eliot , Hermann Hesse , Luigi Pirandello , [39] [40] [42] [94] [95] [96] Ralph Ellison , [97] [98] [99] [] and Jack Kerouac , composed literature or poetry that contained, to varying degrees, elements of existential or proto-existential thought. The philosophy's influence even reached pulp literature shortly after the turn of the 20th century, as seen in the existential disparity witnessed in Man's lack of control of his fate in the works of H.
Dick , Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk all distort the line between reality and appearance while simultaneously espousing existential themes. Sartre wrote No Exit in , an existentialist play originally published in French as Huis Clos meaning In Camera or "behind closed doors" , which is the source of the popular quote, "Hell is other people. The play begins with a Valet leading a man into a room that the audience soon realizes is in hell.
Eventually he is joined by two women. After their entry, the Valet leaves and the door is shut and locked. All three expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize they are there to torture each other, which they do effectively by probing each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant memories. Existentialist themes are displayed in the Theatre of the Absurd , notably in Samuel Beckett 's Waiting for Godot , in which two men divert themselves while they wait expectantly for someone or something named Godot who never arrives.
They claim Godot is an acquaintance, but in fact, hardly know him, admitting they would not recognize him if they saw him. Samuel Beckett, once asked who or what Godot is, replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play. The play examines questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in human existence. Comparisons have also been drawn to Samuel Beckett 's Waiting For Godot , for the presence of two central characters who appear almost as two halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass time by playing Questions , impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other or remaining silent for long periods of time.
The two characters are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world beyond their understanding. They stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the implications, and muse on the irrationality and randomness of the world. Jean Anouilh 's Antigone also presents arguments founded on existentialist ideas. Produced under Nazi censorship, the play is purposefully ambiguous with regards to the rejection of authority represented by Antigone and the acceptance of it represented by Creon.
The parallels to the French Resistance and the Nazi occupation have been drawn. Antigone rejects life as desperately meaningless but without affirmatively choosing a noble death. The crux of the play is the lengthy dialogue concerning the nature of power, fate, and choice, during which Antigone says that she is, " Esslin noted that many of these playwrights demonstrated the philosophy better than did the plays by Sartre and Camus. Though most of such playwrights, subsequently labeled "Absurdist" based on Esslin's book , denied affiliations with existentialism and were often staunchly anti-philosophical for example Ionesco often claimed he identified more with 'Pataphysics or with Surrealism than with existentialism , the playwrights are often linked to existentialism based on Esslin's observation.
A major offshoot of existentialism as a philosophy is existentialist psychology and psychoanalysis, which first crystallized in the work of Otto Rank , Freud's closest associate for 20 years. A later figure was Viktor Frankl , who briefly met Freud as a young man. The existentialists would also influence social psychology , antipositivist micro- sociology , symbolic interactionism , and post-structuralism , with the work of thinkers such as Georg Simmel [] and Michel Foucault. Foucault was a great reader of Kierkegaard even though he almost never refers this author, who nonetheless had for him an importance as secret as it was decisive.
An early contributor to existentialist psychology in the United States was Rollo May , who was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard and Otto Rank. One of the most prolific writers on techniques and theory of existentialist psychology in the USA is Irvin D. Yalom states that. Aside from their reaction against Freud's mechanistic, deterministic model of the mind and their assumption of a phenomenological approach in therapy, the existentialist analysts have little in common and have never been regarded as a cohesive ideological school. Gebsattel, Roland Kuhn, G. Caruso, F. Buytendijk, G. Bally, and Victor Frankl—were almost entirely unknown to the American psychotherapeutic community until Rollo May's highly influential book Existence —and especially his introductory essay—introduced their work into this country.
A more recent contributor to the development of a European version of existentialist psychotherapy is the British-based Emmy van Deurzen. Anxiety's importance in existentialism makes it a popular topic in psychotherapy. Therapists often offer existentialist philosophy as an explanation for anxiety. The assertion is that anxiety is manifested of an individual's complete freedom to decide, and complete responsibility for the outcome of such decisions.
Psychotherapists using an existentialist approach believe that a patient can harness his anxiety and use it constructively. Instead of suppressing anxiety, patients are advised to use it as grounds for change. By embracing anxiety as inevitable, a person can use it to achieve his full potential in life. Humanistic psychology also had major impetus from existentialist psychology and shares many of the fundamental tenets. Terror management theory , based on the writings of Ernest Becker and Otto Rank , is a developing area of study within the academic study of psychology. It looks at what researchers claim are implicit emotional reactions of people confronted with the knowledge that they will eventually die.
Also, Gerd B. Achenbach has refreshed the Socratic tradition with his own blend of philosophical counseling. Walter Kaufmann criticized 'the profoundly unsound methods and the dangerous contempt for reason that have been so prominent in existentialism. Ayer , assert that existentialists are often confused about the verb "to be" in their analyses of "being". Wilson has stated in his book The Angry Years that existentialism has created many of its own difficulties: "we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom , we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of its own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole".
Many critics argue Sartre's philosophy is contradictory. Specifically, they argue that Sartre makes metaphysical arguments despite his claiming that his philosophical views ignore metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse criticized Being and Nothingness for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself: "Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics.
Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory". Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Philosophical study that begins with the acting, feeling, living human individual. For the logical sense of the term, see Existential quantification. For other uses, see Existence disambiguation.
Not to be confused with Essentialism. Main article: Existence precedes essence. Main article: Absurdism. Main article: Facticity. This section may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts , without removing the technical details. November Learn how and when to remove this template message. Main article: Authenticity. Main article: Other philosophy.
Main article: Angst. Main article: Despair. See also: Existential crisis. See also: Positivism and Rationalism. See also: Atheistic existentialism , Christian existentialism , and Jewish existentialism. See also: Existential nihilism. See also: Martin Heidegger. Main article: Existential therapy. Abandonment existentialism Disenchantment Existential phenomenology Existential risk Existential therapy Existentiell List of existentialists Meaning existential Meaning-making Nihilism Self Self-reflection. Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved 2 March Oxford English Dictionary Online ed.
Oxford University Press. Subscription or participating institution membership required. Nietzsche: A Biographical Introduction. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York: Penguin. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Oxford Companion to Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Introduction to Modern Existentialism. New York: Grove Press. Existentialism: From Dostoyevesky to Sartre. New York: Meridian. Existentialism - A Very Short Introduction. ISBN Basic Writings of Existentialism. Modern Library. In Edward N.
Zalta ed. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Summer Edition. Kierkegaard's attack upon "Christendom". Existentialism: basic writings. Hackett Publishing. The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism , Cambridge, , p. JSTOR London: Penguin Classics. Retrieved 12 January From Plato to Derrida. Rethinking Existentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 16 November The Sartre Dictionary. Edited by David Farrell Krell Revised and expanded ed. OCLC Existentialism: A Beginner's Guide.
Oxford: One World. The A to Z of Existentialism. Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre. Retrieved 26 March Understanding Existentialism: Teach Yourself. Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness. University of Illinois Press. Living Masks: The Achievement of Pirandello. University of Toronto Press. Retrieved Psychoanalytic Review. PMID People who believe in existentialism have faith in their own personal choice and responsibilities regardless of traditions, ethnic rules or any laws. The philosophy of Existentialism is a broad concept. Hence, it is identified in various ways and that means there is no single and definite answer when asked about what it really is.
However, several things are definite about Existentialism. The philosophy does not believe in the following ideas: Making a good life is not about wealth, honor, and pleasure Individuals are controlled by social structures and values Individuals accept what they get in life and they think that is enough Individuals believe that things are made better by science People are transformed by external forces and not by their own choice.
This is why there is no definite or universal conformity in a subjective set of beliefs and ideals. Even politics show discrepancies. However, politics try to find the majority of individual freedom inside a society. Existentialism made a great impact on the society. As a way to cope up with desperation, philosophers found a new way of thinking. Existentialism was born introducing a different way of reasoning and thinking. As mentioned earlier, existentialism came out of various philosophical, political and religious ideologies, and so are its proponents. Great existentialists have their own individual ideologies such as agnostic relativist, amoral atheist or religious moralist.
Among these great existentialists are Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus.
As individuals we all have the freedom to choose our own path and that is what life is all about. As creator would not tupac keep ya head up things without meaning, life should have a meaning. Lovecraft's 'The Call of Cthulhu ' ".