Existentialism: A Beginner's Guide - by Thomas Wartenberg
ISBN: 1851685936Date read: 2024-10-14
How strongly I recommend it: 5/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)
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Light introduction to Existentialism. Points to some more important works, and gives some context.
my notes
Being free forces you to take complete responsibility for what you do.
It’s totally up to you.
This responsibility can seem overwhelming.
You remake the world according to your own design.
Existentialists value individuality.
First-person singular, rather than plural.
‘Why am I here?’ rather than ‘Why are we here?’
Existentialists sought to counter the tendency to live guided by standards valid for all.
People have to work out fundamental questions as individuals.
Hence, distrust of the general and their admiration for the particular.
Camus’s novel, The Stranger, continues to introduce young people to some of the basic ideas of Existentialism.
Nothing is more essential to us than our freedom.
Freedom is so important to humans that we would prefer to go insane rather than accept the idea that our actions are completely determined.
I’ll do something stupid, unexpected, just to show you that I am different - that my actions are not determined.
Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus: Being and Time.
You are free to make your nature.
You are not determined by your past, but always have the option of changing how you act.
You can decide to climb mountains because you do not want to be a person whose life is determined by fears.
To be in contact with nothingness, (refusing everything), to determine how things might have been otherwise.
Only the human being is what it is not and is not what it is.
You can change and make of yourself something different from what you appear to be at any time.
You are also creating yourself to be, in the future, something that you, now, are not.
People perpetrate social evil not because they have evil aims, but because they think they are better than other people and know what is best for them.
They believe they have unique access to ‘the truth.’
As a result, they believe that people who do not comprehend their ‘truth’ need to be guided.
Freedom is actually a source of much of our trouble and pain.
Most people would prefer to live a life without the pain resulting from possessing freedom.
Better to be a satisfied fool than Socrates, troubled but free.
We have abandoned the gods by no longer giving them control over our actions.
There is a great deal of security to be had from seeing oneself as simply following someone else’s orders.
The Catholic Church stressed the importance of rituals.
Protestantism focus on interior lives of people as more significant than their external behavior
“It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.”
This is often seen as laughable in these days of seemingly unbridled competition.
Claiming that what matters are not external factors which are not completely within one’s control, but the internal attitudes one takes to one’s actions.
Emphasis on intentions rather than actions encourages you to deceive yourself about why you do what you do.
Freedom is difficult for humans to bear.
Because we are free, we have to accept responsibility for our actions. There is no one else to blame.
Our freedom to transform the circumstances of our existence and remake the world and ourselves in accordance with our own ideas.
Once you become aware that you are in a certain state, you no longer fully inhabit that state.
When you become aware of what you are feeling, you feel alienated from that feeling.
It was sort of act you were putting on.
Human beings have developed a range of different ways to slough off responsibility for their actions.
God is a prime example.
There are way more commandments than just those ten.
The Old Testament actually lists 613 commandments that determine virtually every aspect of a person’s life.
The religious observant do not have to decide which norms of conduct adhere to.
Moral rules are determined for them.
No freedom to decide whether or not to obey the rules.
Understand how people benefit existentially from giving up control over their own lives.
Purely dyadic (twotermed) relationships are impossible, for we are always aware of the possibility of being observed by a third person, the ‘other’ who takes us out of our primary ways of being.
This explains why Sartre thinks that ‘hell is other people’: Their look pulls us out of our own world and turns us into an object in theirs.
Unable to be fully present doing our projects, incapable of embracing them as meaningful.
We acquire a self-consciousness that makes us doubt their validity.
Existentialism can be thought of as a form of radical empiricism.
To call something an absolute evil is to say that it is so horrible it cannot be redeemed or justified in relation to something else.
Kant was so worried that he would not finish explicating the Critical Philosophy that he adhered to a rigid schedule.
The basic feature of religion was its positing of things that were absurd, that is, contrary to reason.
Calling a religious belief ‘absurd’ is not a way of denigrating it, but a matter of describing a specific feature of it: its violation of the norms of human reason.
Existentialists’ use the concept of the absurd as, partially at least, a technical term with a very specific meaning.
To say that something is absurd is to say that it contradicts reason.
It’s a mistake to say that nature is indifferent, for this suggests that nature has that very minimal attitude toward what happens, one situated midway between cruelty and compassion, as if it just didn’t really care what its effects on human beings were. Nature is simply incapable of having any attitude about what it brings about. It simply is what it is.
What’s absurd is that we are creatures who demand reasonableness of a universe that cannot provide it.
Man is a useless passion.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Sisyphus is happy. His scorn for Zeus and the fate to which he has been consigned allows him to take control of his own situation.
Sisyphus is able to choose a different way of interpreting his situation.
One impetus to conformity is the denial of death.
An authentic action is one you do in full awareness of your freedom.
When you act authentically, you have to accept complete responsibility for what you do, and not attribute the action to any form of influence or compulsion.
Your freedom requires you to respect and support the freedom of others.
While the anti-Semite may be ignorant about many features of Jewish culture, this cannot explain why she favors the oppression of Jews.
I know very little about the Inuit, for example, but think they deserve the same respect due any human being.
Without the presence of the Jew there would be no one whom the anti-Semite could use to secure her sense of her own superiority.
Without the Jew, she would be forced to either invent a replacement or face her own life without this strategy of denial.