Existentialism

Reading about existentialism on the web, I felt as though I had come to the limits of my intellectual potential. Nonetheless I was able to figure out that existentialism was about defining the human individual as the starting point for a philosophy that describes conditions of thinking, acting, feeling and living. A person is their actions and it lays out a basis for their responsibility. Existentialism writings often feature cases involving “the Other and the look” about intersubjectivity and objectivity which is best described by Sartre: “a man is peeping at someone through a keyhole. At first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. This is an example of the existentialist concept of facticity, where an individual decides to remain true to his past thus being defined by it or employ the existentialist concept of freedom and become inauthentic to one’s past, choosing to become something else.

Existentialism posits that existence precedes essence and presents arguments that originate with the human individual as the basis for describing the universe in which we find ourselves. I found trying to figure out the meaning of this philosophy to be a very entertaining way to spend my time and very helpful in trying to figure out what is meaningful to me and how I am defined by the nature of my thoughts, but what I learned most was the only meaning life has is what I choose to give it.

To touch on that last point, a perfect example of giving meaning to our lives was Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, not just the way they wrote about existentialism, but also through their personal lives. Jean-Paul Sartre in his book Critique of Dialectical Reason sought to reconcile existentialism and marxism, he took part in the student revolution strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience- Simone de Beauvoir wrote about existentialism and feminism, they were the living embodiment of the principles of existentialism where the person is defined by their actions and it is through these actions that give our lives meaning; for Sartre it was Marxism; for Beauvoir it was feminism.

Since man has started congregating in mud huts our earliest civilizations sought to define the nature of man. First through ethics by classifying what we are not to do through sin. With the arrival of the philosophy of existentialism we can now complete the process that ethics has started: not by telling ourselves what we are not to do, but by telling ourselves what we should be doing. Existentialism is the embodiment of the French expression “joie de vivre” and can best be understood by this sentence from Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road - "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."