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Existentialists have been perennially concerned with questions about the very meaning of life, questions that tend to come to the fore when we have become unmoored from our everyday anchorage.
ideas point to something where as things themselves, objects, just are.
The hunger for truth ought to be something more than intellectual curiosity; it ought to be a hunger for truths that build you up, that make you a better human being,
Camus describes life as a collision between human beings who have an innate craving for meaning and a universe that is as indifferent as rock, utterly devoid of meaning. No matter, Camus counsels that we should put the revolver back in the drawer. Consciousness of absurdity is worth the candle, for as Camus pronounces, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” or laughter.
Kierkegaard decrees that the objective thinker is actually a suicide,8 because we are actually spirits, and the person who continuously strives to think about life from a disinterested perspective systematically chokes the self-interest that is the animating force of his or her spirit.
So for Sartre, we are who we choose to be. We define ourselves by our choices,
Kierkegaard observed that, from a worldly point of view, despair seems like it is over something, like losing a spouse or not achieving your dream. But it only seems that way. As I will later explain, Kierkegaard taught that despair is always despair over the self, as in I don’t want to be myself, or I don’t want to be this self.
would be to uncover those initial experiences and learn that while it might have been reasonable to feel anxious about being angry as a child, it is no longer appropriate.
Unlike most members of the philosophy guild, Kierkegaard did not reduce the emotions to inner clouds obscuring the beatific light of reason. For Kierkegaard, anxiety has a cognitive component. It helps us to know ourselves. It informs us that we are beings who have choices, who choose ourselves.
Kierkegaard describes anxiety as “the dizziness of freedom.” In anxiety I can come to understand that I am free, that I am a creature fraught through and through with possibilities. That freedom, the necessity to constantly make choices, to realize this possibility and close down another, is a font of anxiety.
We have dreams (possibility) about what we could be, and then there are the facts of our concrete situation (necessity).
To summarize, Kierkegaard and all those in his lineage prescribe that we make friends with this devilish mood or feeling, for it has unique and fundamental instruction to offer. And yet, if we panic about those feelings of panic, anxiety can be our undoing and sadly enough, the flight from it can become the axis around which our lives orbit, when that axis ought to be the project of becoming our true and authentic self.
A Buddhist teacher once told me that all the self-improvement regimes were tinged with violence since they all presupposed a lack of self-acceptance, that you are not good enough to start with.
Kierkegaard wants us to understand that while we might not have much choice in how we feel at a given time, we have control over and responsibility for the way we relate ourselves to those feelings.
That awareness prods him to recollect the eternal while he is in time. By “recollect” Kierkegaard means that the earnest person does not just “remember” God, he makes himself contemporary with the eternal. Though his life is measured by the hourglass, he sustains a connection with that which is outside of time and unchanging.
Both underscored the individual’s relation to God over the individual’s relation to the ecumenical institutions mediating our relationship with God.
More than liberation, death resets our priorities. What seemed a matter of indifference before now assumes a new significance.
our capacity to absorb and tolerate the full weight of grief is part of becoming an authentic human being.
but for Heidegger a human being is essentially an opening in being itself—an opening in which being questions the meaning of being.
When Nietzsche implores, “Become who you are,” like Heidegger he is prodding us to create ourselves. For Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger, we are a witch’s brew of culture, feelings, experiences, and evaluations, and we create ourselves out of this mélange, as though our lives were an artwork.
Consciousness of the absurd is supposed to remove the sting from the absurd. The gospel according to Camus teaches that denizens of death row, which means all of us, should be freed from the fetters of worries about figuring out the best kind of life. The cosmos is chaos. There is no right way to live: “one life is as good as another” and just as meaningless.
Camus termed “philosophical suicide.” Those who figuratively strangle themselves escape the feeling of absurdity by imagining there is something transcendent, something in Plato’s heaven or in the Judeo-Christian hereafter that will make sense of the toil and moil of the fact that we battle for years, struggle to make our daily bread, are lanced with loss, grief, heartbreak, then suddenly, all is over, we are gone.
