Existentialism

[Moros]

A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.

I used to adhere to this particular ideology. It's the one thing I got from my father. I still read a lot of books pertaining to it - partcularly Camus, Sartre, Kafka.

It's a beautifully tragic way of life - that's what it is - it transcends idea. but it is hollow.

Some good primers:

Camus - The Stranger
Camus - The Plague
Sartre - Being and Nothingness
Sartre - No Exit
Kafka - The Trial
Kafka - The Metamorphosis

I picked up a small paperback with an odd cover and a cracked binding and squinted to read the book’s first few lines, among the most famous in 20th-century literature: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure..."
I spent the next two hours sitting on the basement’s cool concrete floor, ripping through Albert Camus’ seminal existentialist novel The Stranger. By the time I had finished that relentlessly compelling tale of gratuitous murder and vague redemption -- "all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration," read the book’s last words -- my sense of the world had been shattered into a thousand pieces.

"Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it
was when Camus first recounted it". --Ben Guterson

 

[Blissman]

Existentialism can also represent confusion, as in existentialist agnst. This can lead to conventional faith.

 

[foolsparade]

osel, you might want to read The Myth of Sisyphus, by Camus. I personaly find existentialism less "hollow" to use your word than religion, mainly Christianity. The ideology of Christianity was based on nothing and in the end accomplishes nothing. A will to nothingness, existentialism rejects nihilism, while Christianity creates it, then embraces it and finally advocates it.

 

[Existential1]

Hi.
My christian journey is existential. I am dyslexic: and i feel that this dyslexic nature, my existential subcription, and my vision of Jesus; are all one and the same thing. Existentialism has much to do with direct experience, with the empirical, and with taking an absolutely personal responsibility. I follow Jesus in, to the best of ability, seeking to do as he did: seeking to take on the same faith; and to pursue the same mission, the redemption of the human project. The redemption i might imagine securing could be very limited: if i can, for a moment, lift another from a depression; and succeed in so doing, through reliance on faith in god: then my person and my biography has, in that moment, been spent in following Jesus, and, in that moment Jesus returns to the earth, to the human project. The existential in christianity, perhaps does not square up to the big battalion Kingdom project: perhaps it does something else; perhaps with the humility as to personal contribution to human redemption, and as to god manifestation, that is often associated with St Francis of Assisi.
Thank you to those who posted these comments, to which i here reply; perhaps we only travel usefully, when we travel somewhat together, even if in the tension of some disagreement as to detail.
Take care, and god bless.

 

[Moros]

osel, you might want to read The Myth of Sisyphus, by Camus. I personaly find existentialism less "hollow" to use your word than religion, mainly Christianity. The ideology of Christianity was based on nothing and in the end accomplishes nothing. A will to nothingness, existentialism rejects nihilism, while Christianity creates it, then embraces it and finally advocates it.

I've read them all. I still do. I wasn't raised Christian; I was raised on Kafka.

 

[pmarquette]

Jesus : A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience of a believer walking in a unbelieving world ....
in a hostile or indifferent universe, to strive to obtain what makes no sense , when all about you disagree with purpose , means , method ...
regards human existence as unexplainable, except for the creation , oversight , and intervention of a personal God ...
and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts. as the sole means of our salvation .....

 

[Existential1]

The existential can, perhaps, be a determined empiricism.
If the Christian experience were to depend on the assumption of God being somewhat defined, say as person and Deity: what occurs when that assumption is suspended?
What do we have to determine toggling that assumption on and off? What if the experiences and outcomes were very different, depending on whether that assumption were so toggled on or off?
It doesn't make much practical difference to me? Jesus still remains my crucial model; it is the map of his faith that i follow; his humanity i still seek, because it works best: his way of managing the relation between human and god remains perfect; his grasp of faith and love remains exemplary.
But there is a challenge in the existential: and perhaps it has to do with facing us with our assumptions; our taking of them, the nature of them and what follows from them, and the dissolving of any authority for our assuming, beyond our own act of assuming.
Faith is miraculous, is sufficient for the genesis of anything in the human project: faith puts assumption to work holistically and systemically; faith, working in and through god, gives us all the person and the biography we have. Jesus shows what can be secured, in going with faith: Jesus is a faith master; a faith athlete.
Yet, while the existential has never effectively competed with Jesus: it does ask awkward questions about the forms that Christianity can take, as an individual and social practice. That doesn't really effect Jesus; his faith working secures him as justified in his own achivements: but it does work into the authority beyond faith, that Christians may sometimes be tempted to seek for that faith. The propensity of some Christianity to favour conversion, witness, prosletysing; to mutate their faith into a universal prescription and metaphysic; to take their own assumptions as granted and unassailable; to change the vision of faith, into the conviction of objectivity and transcendent fact: has not all that left the Christian project open to the critical strength of the existential method, of rigorous empiricism.
Perhaps, where the following of Jesus remains grounded in faith; then the christian remains impervious to the scepticism of existential perspective: faith simply takes matters beyond what the existential can critically address. Perhaps, where Jesus becomes part of a project grounded in an authorised conviction: then that conviction will always be forced to submit to existential method, which can soon bankrupt its apparent objectivity and facticity; revealing it always as having the same foundations in assumption, as does every other human perpsective: perhaps the existential simply takes the puff out of some conviction, leaving it somewhat hollow.
Perhaps existentialism is some sibling of faith; some autistic, or negative correlate of faith. The existential, perhaps, criticises what is not faith; faith is impervious to its criticism: perhaps the existential is a health or housekeeping tool of faith; it tests the currency of putative faith, and soon rejects what, while masquerading as faith, is actually something else, such as conviction.
Maybe conviction is something we are all prone to; maybe it is part of something integral to human process, that while legitimate in its own terms, is just not part of a god project. When we speak of walking on water, as coming as little children, of love as the currency and blood of the god project of Jesus, of redemption of human project: then the feel and texture, the intuitive suggestion, is of faith.
Existentialists, perhaps not Sartre and De Bouvoir(sp!), always seem to have been immensely impressed by genuine and authentic faith: they always seemed to realise that the hollow they had scoured out of the heart of conviction, had to be filled; was filled, in the many humable creatures who passed them by, as they existentially figured.
No existentialist biographically encountering Jesus, could be other than absolutely impressed by him: no existentialist could leave such encounter, with even the smallest mote of reductive dismissal of him; and any existentialist of any composure, would readily anticipate such an outcome. No existentialist would quible that Jesus was other than a son of god.
Yet the existentialist can find problems in the projects of Peter and Paul. Often the Church, the interpreted Bible, the whole apparatus of Christian conviction, the whole industry of conviction and righteousness: while perfectly legitimate in its own right, and for the purposes that it sets itself; stands between the existentialist and Jesus.
Perhaps those who remain outside the christian communion are significantly existentialists: not necessarily pawns of the Devil, or crass materialists, or athiests, ot those who chose close pleasures rather than the promise of god; but simply those who no longer view much of what passes for Christianity, and the sponsored narrow path of Righteousness, as a route that might take them to Jesus.
Existentislism, perhaps, may not mark those who would make faith hollow: but, rather might indicate those in the market for faith, those who genuinelly have a soul that hungers and thirsts; those so sensitive to empirical veracity, that the water of life that they would drink of, must first have passed every test of reasonable and required scepticism.

If the detail of my witness offends any other: then that is unintended, and must be apologised for.
It is just that Jesus is so important: that unless my approach to him remains real; then my faith will become anemic.

Take care, god bless.