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October 21 - November 18, 2023
in this reality, the one we must live, there was no option to have done differently, and there is no other way for things to go. Every decision you’ve made was the best and only decision you could’ve made at the time with the information you had and the state of mind you were in. And every condition of life that either these decisions led to or that are fundamental to life in general, you have no control over and cannot change.
Resenting or fighting against what has happened to you or because of you only brings additional misery into the now, exasperating the problem and creating more to resent and resist.
The true challenge and task of life, for Nietzsche, is to fall in love with what you are actually experiencing right now, as it is, in all the ways it is.
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
sometimes the only way to experience the beauty of things is to think about things in a beautiful way.
his first book, titled On the Heights of Despair,
Even in writing about the futility and meaninglessness of life and its endeavors, the power of the creative process can, in some sense, save the writer from the very content of their own work, paradoxically making the futility and meaninglessness of life that they discuss somewhat less futile and meaningless.
Cioran was sort of an antiphilosophy philosopher.
it is more or less death specifically that both causes the futility of life as well as poses the inevitable limit to all reason within it.
his most famous work, The Trouble with Being Born, he discusses how since death necessarily follows from birth, it is actually the memory of our birth that is the tragic problem of life, and not death in and of itself.
any philosophical attempt toward an understanding or solution, for Cioran, can only be a contemplation on failure.
human endeavors are almost always synonymous with failure.
encourages us to love the absurd uselessness for what it is, how it is, and to use it against itself and live anyway.
In the words of Cioran: When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one’s life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.
can those who accept and embrace failure and disaster ever really fail or be struck by either?
the last true failure being the failure of optimism. From there, we become, as he put it, “invincible victims.”
The philosophy of nihilism, with which he is generally associated, denies the value of all things. But can a nihilist philosophy be expressed as a philosophy and remain a nihilist philosophy?
The process of forming meaning, it seems, can perhaps not be escaped, even by one the greatest so-called nihilists.
“Everything that is formulated becomes more tolerable.”
Cursed with the gift of consciousness, we are all inescapably forced into a beautiful confrontation of the void and the absurd inevitability of creating meaning and somethingness out of it.
“[We are] simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”
He is known for his uniquely dark, disorienting, and surreal writing style— a style and quality so particular to him that anything that resembles it has come to be known as Kafkaesque.
Kafka continued writing on the side, producing some of his most notable pieces, including The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.
In 1924, he died of tuberculosis at age forty-one.
Kafka would become one of the most prominent literary and philosophical figures of the twentieth century.
How many Kafkas have lived and died without ever sharing their voice with the world; voices that would have changed it forever? How many people never know who they’ll be after they’re gone?
the term Kafkaesque refers to the bureaucratic nature of capitalistic, judicial, and government systems—the
one of Kafka’s most famous novels, The Trial,
The crux of Kafka’s work seems to be the tension created by this confrontation with the absurd—a conflict in which a character’s efforts, reasoning, and sense of the world are met with an inescapable senselessness.
Kafka’s take on the human condition, which could be characterized as the unyielding desire for answers about and conquest of the existential problems of anxiety, guilt, absurdity, and suffering, paired with an inability to ever really understand or control the source of these problems and effectively overcome them.
Kafka is suggesting that the struggle to find solace and understanding is both inescapable and impossible.
don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
Kafka wrote: I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy . . . Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books.
paraphrase existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, we will begin to face the problem of choosing what we do with what’s been done to us.
Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most widely recognized and cited thinkers of existentialism,
initially fashioned by individuals like Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky,
further popularized by individuals including Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger,
In Sartre’s lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism, he famously summarized the primary principle of existentialism with the ...
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Essence, here, means the qualities of a thing that cr...
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We exist with the innate desire for reasons—reasons for what we do, who we are, why we are, and so on.
According to Sartre and many others, there is no predetermined meaning or reason to human life. There is no authority figure designing us or our lives. And there is no essence to our existence prior to our existence.
life exists for itself. Beyond itself, it is intrinsi...
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If we are not made with a specific purpose prior to existence, we create our purpose through our existence.
through the choices we make and the actions we take in life, we create who we are and what life means.
“Man,” Sartre said, “is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his a...
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The byproduct of this, of life’s inherent meaninglessness, is an inherent freedom: the freedom to choose who we are, ho...
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existential problem: the anxiety or angu...
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deflect nearly all the responsibility of choice onto others and the circumstances of our life. Sartre referred to this as bad faith—a form of lying to ourselves and denying our basic freedom.
choosing to not choose is still a choice.
the fundamental existential choice: to choose or not to choose. In this choice, one either harnesses the anguish of human freedom or relinquishes it, either builds a life of intention or lives a life of complacency.
