Category: Existentialism
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The Religious Side of Camus
Albert Camus, one of the luminaries of French existentialism, died on this day in 1960, in a car crash. He was 46. Had he lived, he might have become a Christian. Or so it seems from Howard Mumma, Conversations with Camus. This second-hand report is worth considering, although it must be consumed cum grano salis. See…
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The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu
I have been re-reading Thomas Nagel's seminal paper, "The Absurd," which originally appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, October 1971, and is collected in Nagel's Mortal Questions (Cambridge UP, 1979, 11-23.) Damn, but it is good. Nagel is one of our best philosophers. He's the real thing. Nagel's central contention is that human existence is…
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Henri the Feline Existentialist
Henri 2, Paw de Deux Henri 1
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Lev Shestov’s Irrationalist-Existentialist Reading of the Fall of Man
It is important to distinguish between the putative fact of human fallenness and the various theories and doctrines about what this fall consists in and how it came about. The necessity of this distinction is obvious: different philosophers and theologians and denominations who accept the Fall have different views about the exact nature of this event or state.…
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Kierkegaard on Immortality
S. Kierkegaard/J. Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson and Lowrie tr., Princeton UP, 1941, pp. 154-155, emphasis added): All honor to him who can handle learnedly the learned question of immortality! But the question of immortality is essentially not a learned question, rather it is a question of inwardness, which the subject by becoming subjective must…
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Action and Existenz: Blondel and Heidegger
Commentators on Maurice Blondel have often noted the similarity of his thought to existentialism. Blondel’s concept of action, for example, is remarkably similar to the concept of existence that we find in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre and other existentialists. Herewith, a brief comparison of action in Blondel’s L’Action (1893) with Existenz in Heidegger’s Sein und…
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Nausea at Existence
Existence is often 'invisible' to analytic types well-versed in logic, for existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana sagely remarked in Scepticism and Animal Faith (Dover, 1955, p. 48) It is so odious, in fact, that they need to mask it under the misnamed 'existential' quantifier. So I need to resort to extreme…
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How Roquentin Relieved His Nausea
By listening to this song. Art reveals pure ideality sans existence.
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Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part One
Suppose we divide theories of the meaning of human life into the exogenous and the endogenous. According to the exogenous theories, existential meaning derives from a source external to the agent, whereas on endogenous theories, meaning and purpose are posited or projected by the agent. Classical theism provides an example of an exogenous theory of…
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How Sartre Saw the USA
Jean-Paul Sartre's "Americans and Their Myths" appeared in The Nation in the issue of 18 October, 1947. The article concludes: The anguish of the American confronted with Americanism is an ambivalent anguish; as if he were asking, "Am I American enough?" and at the same time, "How can I escape from Americanism?" In America a…