Hurray for existentialism

[SinCityBaby]

Happy Birthday to Søren Kierkegaard!

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

 

[IndieSnob]

He should have banged Regine.

 

[SinCityBaby]

Yes, but then it could have affected all that wonderful, angst ridden, and tortured philosophy that came from him not having her...

 

[IndieSnob]

And he took the cheap way out by saying it just took a leap of faith to believe.

Too bad he and Nietzsche never got to go a few rounds in a boxing ring.

 

[pointless]

skide dansk kusse.

i have no idea if that makes sense, but it amuses me.

 

[IndieSnob]

You're saying he was a pussy ass Dane?

 

[pointless]

close enough.

 

[IndieSnob]

Fucking nihilists.

 

[pointless]

absurdist, god damn it.

well, not really, but it sounds fun so let's go with that. also, camus was the only one of those fuckers who could write anyway.

fucking boring cunts.

 

[SinCityBaby]

And he took the cheap way out by saying it just took a leap of faith to believe.

Too bad he and Nietzsche never got to go a few rounds in a boxing ring.

This. I hated Kierkegaard for just this reason, especially since my prof worshiped at his alter and pandered to the Sunday School teacher sitting at the head of the class...

 

[SinCityBaby]

absurdist, god damn it.

well, not really, but it sounds fun so let's go with that. also, camus was the only one of those fuckers who could write anyway.

fucking boring cunts.

I prefer Camus when it comes to existentialists, but Sartre was very well written as well...

 

[pointless]

i'm sorry, but since i only slept an hour last night all i can manage in response to your statement about sartre is fuck you and fuck your mother.

 

[IndieSnob]

While Sartre wasn't as bad as some of the stuff I've read, I'd rather be forced to listen to Nickleback for 100 hours straight rather than reading Being and Nothingness again.

OK, so maybe that's a stretch.

I'd take the Nickleback over reading Being & Time. Fucking sein and dasein.

 

[SinCityBaby]

We'll chat when you've slept I love finding out why someone dislikes something so much - sometimes it even changes my mind about it.

 

[SinCityBaby]

I really didn't want to bring Heidegger into it...blech.

 

[IndieSnob]

Fine, we'll discuss Husserl than.

 

[SinCityBaby]

Now you're just being cruel.

 

[ms_ann_thrope]

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

 

[parodyluvr75]

Yes, but then it could have affected all that wonderful, angst ridden, and tortured philosophy that came from him not having her...

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

Kierkegaard

 

[SinCityBaby]

That would be why I forgive him for the whole leap of faith thing...

 

[parodyluvr75]

Strength of the absurd...

 

[Sean]

absurdist, god damn it.

well, not really, but it sounds fun so let's go with that. also, camus was the only one of those fuckers who could write anyway.

fucking boring cunts.

Decent goalkeeper, too.

 

[KingOrfeo]

And he took the cheap way out by saying it just took a leap of faith to believe.

Too bad he and Nietzsche never got to go a few rounds in a boxing ring.

Nietzsche was an invalid . . . Yeah, too bad!

 

[KingOrfeo]

I read once that Ayn Rand would have preferred to call her Objectivist philosophy "Existentialism," but the name was already taken.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Existentialism:

Existentialism is the philosophical concept that existence precedes essence. This is contrasted with the Platonic idea of the Forms, in which essence precedes existence. (According to Platonic ideas, there is a form of every tangible object, and the object itself is simply an imperfect copy of the form. This idea can also be applied to intangible concepts such as that of justice.)

To put this in quasi-Christian terms, an existentialist does not think they were born with an immortal "soul" - if there is any such attribute to a person, it is developed throughout life.

The origins of modern existential thought are developed and explored in a thread of philosophical and literary works from Søren Kierkegaard (who famously declared that "Truth is Subjectivity") and Friedrich Nietzsche (who famously declared that "God is dead"), through Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, to the French writers Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, and playwrights Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett (and Sartre again).

In the 20th century

Existentialism peaked in popularity, both in serious philosophical thought and popular culture influence, from the 1950s to the 1970s. In terms of popular culture influence, a lot of novels and films during the period formed their premises around what the writers thought existentialism was about:

* life is meaningless
* you create your own reality
* we are doomed to be free
* being and experiencing are preferable to following a moral code or some purpose in life
* human potential is unlimited even though there is no ultimate meaning to it.

These lines of thought make existentialism somewhat related to (although not the same thing as) nihilism and egoism. Existentialism in some ways was a philosophy ready-made for the post-World War II era, during which people struggled to make sense of the evils that had just occurred and tended to hold grand purposes in life in disdain (seen as having led, among other things, to communism and fascism). After the 1970s, academic philosophers moved away from existentialism into other influences such as postmodernism.

Further reading
Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, (1958), Barrett, William, Doubleday (Anchor paperback 1962), New York. ISBN-10: 0385031386 - A good overview of the history of existential thought.
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, (1975), Walter Kaufmann (editor), Plume/Meridian. ISBN-10: 0452009308 - by the man who brought us a great series of translations of Nietzsche's works.