Existentialism?

[originofopinion]

What does an Existentialist have to believe in.

What are the best Existentialist works, like books.

Who was the first to start using this philosophy.

[mel]

What does an Existentialist have to believe in.

Very little...or a lot, depending on who you ask. My knowledge of existentialism is extremely limited, and most people generally called existentialists don't want to be associated with the philosophy so it's kind of a grab bag on the literature, and who was the first to start using it. It depends on how broadly you define it, whether you take the authors at their word, and a myriad other factors, but one of the more accessible works I've read on the subject is Sartre's piece: "Existentialism is a Humanism" which you can access here (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm).

Edit: One of Sartre's more famous works concerning existentialism is "Being and Nothingness" which is a monster of a book, and it can be difficult to get through if you aren't philosophically inclined. You should probably also have an understanding of phenomenology before you approach it. It would also be worth reading Heidegger's "Being and Time" before approaching Sartre, as he drew on him as an influence heavily. Despite that he isn't really an existentialist, you may also have it suggested that you read Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus", which is definitely more accessible than the others, and isn't a bad read, and it is related to existentialist thought even where it can't necessarily be roped into that category.

[Decolonize The Left]

What does an Existentialist have to believe in.

Existentialists generally believe that life, as we know it, is ultimately meaningless and the human being must cope with this fact and create his/her own meaning. This can be referred to as the existential human condition.


What are the best Existentialist works, like books.

The 'main' existentialist thinkers are Kierkegaard, Hiedegger, Sartre (and to a lesser extent Camus), and Nietzsche.

Works are Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Heidegger's Being and Time, Sartre's Being and Nothingness (I would recommend Nausea as an easier read), Camus' The Stranger (widely considered the premier existential novel), Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov.

Nietzsche was writing before existentialism was even a term, and hence cannot in the least bit be considered an existentialist (Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky are considered founders). He was considered a strong pre-cursor to existentialism and one might begin with his work On the Geneology of Morals.


Who was the first to start using this philosophy.

The term was coined by Marcel in the 1940s though the philosophy itself - if it can be called that - could be said to have begun with Nietzsche.

- August

[Muzk]

I'm an existentialist. Now I know, thanks to this thread!


Seriously, all those words I've learned on revleft melt my brain

[black magick hustla]

6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
(Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?


Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus



-Wittgenstein

[black magick hustla]

Existentialists generally believe that life, as we know it, is ultimately meaningless and the human being must cope with this fact and create his/her own meaning. This can be referred to as the existential human condition.

Life lacks sense because life is not a proposition. Nor it is a machine made with some purpose. It makes no sense to speak of rocks having a sense, or trees (unless the universe was a language used by God to speak).

However, I think the existential discourse on it - "creating your own meaning" is silly and self defeating. Do you create "meaning" for rocks or the "stars"? We are only forced to argue about the meaning of life because other people had argued before that it actually has it. Existentialism is just pandering to the same discourse.

[black magick hustla]

I like more existentialist literature than philosophical works on it. You cannot philosophize about something that cannot even be uttered (the sense of life). Beyond some technicalities, like proving that technically life has no sense because it is not a proposition, I do not understand how these french folks manage to write 500 page tomes, making use of all this jargon.

[JimFar]

Concerning existentialism, I think I concur with the stance that the Canadian philosopher Kai Nielsen took in his 1971 textbook, Reason and Practice: A Modern Introduction to Philosophy. In one chapter of that book, he provided a discussion of existentialism and continental philosophy. He found much of continental philosophy, especially that of Heidegger and Jaspers, to display most of the same faults that he found in traditional speculative metaphysics. He seemed sympathetic to the idea that Heidegger may have been a clever fraud, but nevertheless Nielsen found in existentialism an attempt to deal with important aspects of human experience, which cannot be and should not be ignored by philosophers. He holds existentialist literature in higher esteem than he does formal existentialist philosophy. That is, he perceived more value in the novels and plays that Sartre wrote than his formal philosophical writings such as Being and Nothingness. Nielsen does consider both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to have been very profound philosophers, from whom much can be learned by analytical philosophers. That's an opinion (especially in regards to Nietzsche) that I would concur with too.

[Hiero]

Life lacks sense because life is not a proposition. Nor it is a machine made with some purpose. It makes no sense to speak of rocks having a sense, or trees (unless the universe was a language used by God to speak).

However, I think the existential discourse on it - "creating your own meaning" is silly and self defeating. Do you create "meaning" for rocks or the "stars"? We are only forced to argue about the meaning of life because other people had argued before that it actually has it. Existentialism is just pandering to the same discourse.

Actually if I remember properly, nature is the one thing that meaning defined at it comes into existence.

A tree exists to be a tree. It's meaning is pretty obvious.

Things that we build, like a table, it's meaning preceds it's essence. We build a table so we can put out food on it, that is it's meaning.

Humans on the other hand have no preconceived meaning, in a atheistic sense. Their existence precedes their essense. Now whether through free will or baid faith we choose our essence, or through some discourse we get our essence scribed on us or we are interpellated towards a structure or authority and gain meaning is the real debate.


I like more existentialist literature than philosophical works on it. You cannot philosophize about something that cannot even be uttered (the sense of life). Beyond some technicalities, like proving that technically life has no sense because it is not a proposition, I do not understand how these french folks manage to write 500 page tomes, making use of all this jargon.

To be blunt, that is because you're a empiricist/positivist. You are not going to understand a whole seires of philosophy, anthropology and sociology. My best advice would be to start with linguistics, as it is considered the more scientific of the bunch.

[black magick hustla]

Actually if I remember properly, nature is
the one thing that meaning defined at it comes into existence.


A tree exists to be a tree. It's meaning is pretty obvious.

This is pretty old school platonic thinking. Plato thought that the purpose of an object is to be as close as possible to its form i.e. a tree to correspond the most perfectly to the "form of the tree" it assigns a purpose to an object when the only thing that can have a "purpose" are the creation of minds. For example, a machine might have the purpose to produce shirts, etc.

So a tree is there, or a tree exists. A tree has no purpose whatsoever. A tree has no meaning whatsoever. The word "tree", depending in the context, has a sense but the sense of the sign is entirely a social construction to be used in discourse.





Things that we build, like a table, it's meaning preceds it's essence. We build a table so we can put out food on it, that is it's meaning.

I would not call it a meaning, unless the table is a sign uttered to communicate something. It has a purpose though.

[Quore]Humans on the other hand have no preconceived meaning, in a atheistic sense. Their existence precedes their essense. Now whether through free will or baid faith we choose our essence, or through some discourse we get our essence scribed on us or we are interpellated towards a structure or authority and gain meaning is the real debate.[/Quote]

Humans have no meaning because they are not propositions. They are not signs. Nor humans have a purpose, because they were not created by a god that will grant them one. The rest is philosophical complication, and can be dissolved by clear thinking.




To be blunt, that is because you're a empiricist/positivist. You are not going to understand a whole seires of philosophy, anthropology and sociology. My best advice would be to start with linguistics, as it is considered the more scientific of the bunch.

Actually, I am a philosophy minor, I know a lot of the jargon. I am not an expert on critical theory, but I have some grasp of what it is about. I found a complete university course of critical theory, Saussare, Levi Strauss, Freud, Lacan, etc so I do have some grasp on structuralist and poststructuralist thought. The problem is that a lot of it is either aprioristic, or nonsense in the technical term. For example, all the talk of "the "I" being a fantasy" when a person enters the MIRROR STAGE/Imaginary and then the Symbolic, is at best aprioristic, at worse (and probably more accurate) nonsensical. Take a close glimpse at the use of the language- we understand the meaning of "I" perfectly fine in social discourse, and yet, this man claims that the words he is using are already illusions.

[black magick hustla]

Concerning existentialism, I think I concur with the stance that the Canadian philosopher Kai Nielsen took in his 1971 textbook, Reason and Practice: A Modern Introduction to Philosophy. In one chapter of that book, he provided a discussion of existentialism and continental philosophy. He found much of continental philosophy, especially that of Heidegger and Jaspers, to display most of the same faults that he found in traditional speculative metaphysics. He seemed sympathetic to the idea that Heidegger may have been a clever fraud, but nevertheless Nielsen found in existentialism an attempt to deal with important aspects of human experience, which cannot be and should not be ignored by philosophers. He holds existentialist literature in higher esteem than he does formal existentialist philosophy. That is, he perceived more value in the novels and plays that Sartre wrote than his formal philosophical writings such as Being and Nothingness. Nielsen does consider both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to have been very profound philosophers, from whom much can be learned by analytical philosophers. That's an opinion (especially in regards to Nietzsche) that I would concur with too.

Human all too human is a great work. I also don´t dismiss "existentialism" in its totality but I dismiss the idea that someone can present an argument for it. Existential writers at best can "show" what are these problems by a direct appeal to emotions, in the same way poetry and music can "show". However to say that they can offer a perfectly formal, argument in line to contingent propositions (or in fact any propositions at all, because a lot of existential arguments are "synthetic apriori" as Kant would say and I consider synthetic apriori propositions to be nonsense) is at best pure pretention. Existential literature is one of my fav. type of literature.

[black magick hustla]

To add, I think Wittgenstein, in a certain sense, is an existentialist. The idea that we must dissolve philosophy in order to carry on with "important issues" has a strong existential tinge. Wittgenstein was a very moral man, whether one agrees with his values or not. There is a reason why after writing the Tractatus he gave off his absurdly big capital and went to teach math to peasants. He argued that the realm of the ethical, mystical, and aesthetical transcend the logical limits of the world, and as such, they are part of some sort of "wordless" truth that can only be grasped if they are self-evident to one.

[ZeroNowhere]

To add, I think Wittgenstein, in a certain sense, is an existentialist. The idea that we must dissolve philosophy in order to carry on with "important issues" has a strong existential tinge. Wittgenstein was a very moral man, whether one agrees with his values or not. There is a reason why after writing the Tractatus he gave off his absurdly big capital and went to teach math to peasants. He argued that the realm of the ethical, mystical, and aesthetical transcend the logical limits of the world, and as such, they are part of some sort of "wordless" truth that can only be grasped if they are self-evident to one.Well, at least at the time of the Tractatus.

[black magick hustla]

Well, at least at the time of the Tractatus.

I honestly don´t think there is such a big break between the tractatus and PI. I think the break is the idea that you can reduce what are sensical propositions to some logical theory of language (for example the picture theory). I don´t think its such a big break really - I think the importance of the tractatus lies in its use/mention distinction - which W generalzed to concerning not only the "picture theory" language game, but all sorts of language games. However, in later W the sense of a proposition does not depend on some sort of "picture theory" but the social context from where the proposition arised. I doubt Wittgenstein dropped the idea that there are some issues with life that cannot be expressed in ordinary language (the ethical, the aesthetical) but that are neverthless important.

[Led Zeppelin]

Life lacks sense because life is not a proposition. Nor it is a machine made with some purpose. It makes no sense to speak of rocks having a sense, or trees (unless the universe was a language used by God to speak).

Sartre never claimed that non-conscious material things like rocks or trees "have a sense" or are "things with a purpose". In fact he extended that to humans as well, so I have no idea where you take that notion from; it's not from Sartre.

The point of Sartre is that whatever thing has the purpose humans give to it. A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree, we can if we so desire make tables or stone blocks out of them, then they are tables and stone blocks, etc.


However, I think the existential discourse on it - "creating your own meaning" is silly and self defeating. Do you create "meaning" for rocks or the "stars"?

Uh, you seem to have terribly misunderstood Sartrean existentialism.

It is absurd to say that people make up their own subjective meanings for everything in total isolation of human experience, or the facticity of humanity. It is more absurd to say that Sartre believed this to be the case.

When he says that "humans create their own meaning" he is talking about them creating their own meaning about things they actually have a choice in creating. So not about "what are trees" or "what are stars", but "what am I going to eat today" or "what are my life goals".

Those things humans decide for themselves, and it is so that humans "give meaning" to their own lives. It is in that context Sartre was using that concept.


We are only forced to argue about the meaning of life because other people had argued before that it actually has it. Existentialism is just pandering to the same discourse.

Actually Sartrean existentialism ends that discourse by declaring it null and void.

When Sartre says that people determine the meaning of their own lives, and that they should be conscious of this and not live in "bad faith", then he is saying that the whole talk of "meaning of life" is not an objective philosophy, but a subjective choice. A choice limited by the material conditions we find ourselves in, of course.

[black magick hustla]

The point of Sartre is that whatever thing has the purpose humans give to it. A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree, we can if we so desire make tables or stone blocks out of them, then they are tables and stone blocks, etc.

I was not talking about sartre tbh, nor I was claiming that I disagree with him. I am just talking about a technical issue - and replying to Hiero. What I was talking is that rocks dont have a sense intrinsically, which hiero apparently disagreed with.




Uh, you seem to have terribly misunderstood Sartrean existentialism.

It is absurd to say that people make up their own subjective meanings for everything in total isolation of human experience, or the facticity of humanity. It is more absurd to say that Sartre believed this to be the case.
I didnt say that.


When he says that "humans create their own meaning" he is talking about them creating their own meaning about things they actually have a choice in creating. So not about "what are trees" or "what are stars", but "what am I going to eat today" or "what are my life goals".

Again, i was not claiming to counter sartre in this particular issue. Although in my opinion, those questions you posed have nothing to do with "meaning" or "purpose". They are simply questions one asks oneself without necessarily having to make an appeal to some sort of philosophical argument. again once the philosophical issues are dissolved, one can intuit those "trascendental issues" automatically, without having need to verbalize them or write them down, as if everything we do has to be explained in words. (by verbalize them, i mean making some sort ofargument that sounds legit and still think we are making sense - rather i think this things are more suitable for literature, music, poetry, etc)




When Sartre says that people determine the meaning of their own lives, and that they should be conscious of this and not live in "bad faith", then he is saying that the whole talk of "meaning of life" is not an objective philosophy, but a subjective choice. A choice limited by the material conditions we find ourselves in, of course.

i think the use of subjective and objective is problematic. For example, human discourse is essentially social constructed, however there are objective elements in it. For example, kant argued a few centuries ago that the realm of "phenomena", even if its not things in themselves, its objective because its shared by the human community. If we take the gist of the kantian argument, and distill it from its nonsense (the whole talk about phenomena and things in themselves is frankly nonsense) and instead talk about how linguistic discourse is shared by the human community, and thus it has an element of objectivity (instead of objects in the mind, which we cant never know about except ours, because they are not in the public domain while language is) then we have an argument. Rather than arguing that the "meaning of life" is subjective, it makes more sense to say that there there is no "meaning" at all (and thus all the talk about creating or not creating meaning is dissolved, you cant create meaning about life because it is not language). Furthermore the sense and meaning of a proposition is kindof universal and thus objective (shared by the community) (and by the proposition i dont mean only the written thought, but the whole context - i.e. it is quite clear what does "Santa Claus isnt real) mean in the context of a father saying that to his son. If one has an individual meaning then there is no meaning at all, it is an appeal to some sort of "private language" which is not shared and because it is not shared it is not even a language and thus it is meaningless.

[Hiero]

This is pretty old school platonic thinking. Plato thought that the purpose of an object is to be as close as possible to its form i.e. a tree to correspond the most perfectly to the "form of the tree" it assigns a purpose to an object when the only thing that can have a "purpose" are the creation of minds. For example, a machine might have the purpose to produce shirts, etc.

So a tree is there, or a tree exists. A tree has no purpose whatsoever. A tree has no meaning whatsoever. The word "tree", depending in the context, has a sense but the sense of the sign is entirely a social construction to be used in discourse.

I made a huge error, I mean to say essence. A tree is a tree, it's essence and existance are present at the same time. But a Human is never just a Human, as there is no human nature.

That sort of changes everything what I said. Meaning is different to essence, existentialism was a challenge to old philosophical and religious thinkings about fate, essence, soul and human nature.

The general idea I get from Sartre is that human is born without a essence, they create it after existence.


Actually, I am a philosophy minor, I know a lot of the jargon. I am not an expert on critical theory, but I have some grasp of what it is about. I found a complete university course of critical theory, Saussare, Levi Strauss, Freud, Lacan, etc so I do have some grasp on structuralist and poststructuralist thought. The problem is that a lot of it is either aprioristic, or nonsense in the technical term. For example, all the talk of "the "I" being a fantasy" when a person enters the MIRROR STAGE/Imaginary and then the Symbolic, is at best aprioristic, at worse (and probably more accurate) nonsensical. Take a close glimpse at the use of the language- we understand the meaning of "I" perfectly fine in social discourse, and yet,
this man claims that the words he is using are already illusions.

Well I am not a philosophy majore I am an anthropology major, it's all jargon to me or words in a context I don't understand, I don't understand what apriostic means,.

However I think can still tell you're style is still positivist or empiricist. Which I think clouds alot of undersandings of humans, because I have come to a conclusion there is a pyhsical world, but also a human world; the mediate or symbolic that is inbetween humans and humans and humans and nature, which can not be measured as such and only tested over time in human structures and with the aid of linguistics.


Humans have no meaning because they are not propositions. They are not signs. Nor humans have a purpose, because they were not created by a god that will grant them one. The rest is philosophical complication, and can be dissolved by clear thinking.

I would say humans are signs. The most obvious example has been shown by Levi-Strauss in kngship systems. Kingship terms work the same as the linguistic sign, a term for instance father's brother has the phonetic value and also information attached to it. With the kingship name it carries with it rules of authority and incest. Humans are comprised of human matter but also information.

[berlitz23]

Existentialism disregards the fundamental constituents of existence, especially language and all the creative aspects of life, it is a philosophy that advocates fixed stable identities which is truly the bedrock for marginalization and exclusion. I don't accept the distinction between a human life that is free and responsible for its own becoming, and a nature which is merely in-itself and determined. All life is constant becoming, including inorganic, organic and even virtual life. We need to do away with the idea that nature merely is while man decides his being where We can see all nature as deccision, as creatively responding to the forces that confront and cross it. Our languages, our genes, our bodies, our desires, historical forces, social forces, all these things intersect and constantly mutate in such a way that what we are cannot be traced back to single point of origing or intent.

[Led Zeppelin]

Existentialism disregards the fundamental constituents of existence, especially language and all the creative aspects of life, it is a philosophy that advocates fixed stable identities which is truly the bedrock for marginalization and exclusion. I don't accept the distinction between a human life that is free and responsible for its own becoming, and a nature which is merely in-itself and determined.

You clearly do not know anything about existentialism based on your description of it above which is actually the complete opposite of what it is, so what you say on the matter is irrelevant.

[berlitz23]

Actually I do have a comprehensive grasp on existentialism, it is contingent on what your calling "existential"

[black magick hustla]

I made a huge error, I mean to say essence. A tree is a tree, it's essence and existance are present at the same time. But a Human is never just a Human, as there is no human nature.

Again, to speak of "nature of tree" and "nature of human" in the way you are framing it is platonic. In certain contexts, it makes sense to speak of the nature of a tree, as it is in scientific discourse. It might make sense in scientific discourse to speak of the nature of a human, its phisiology, the structure of their brain, their ability to create languages, etc. However, in scientific discourse, the use of these words is strictly instrumentalist . i.e it is just convenient. However, to make a metaphysical claim i.e. “the nature of a human”, and what makes a human “human” is nonsensical. It refies this words, as if this words contain intrinsic information about the world. It makes more sense to analyze ordinary language, and how might people use the word “human” and then you might ask yourself what do people mean when they talk about “human”. It makes very little sense to extrapolate this words and elucidate about them without establishing some sort of frame of reference (as scientists do). In philosophy, in the sense “the nature” of something is used is almost always strictly teleological – i.e. what is the universal purpose of a “tree”, or a “human”(this use can all traced to plato). In this sense, humans have no nature, nor trees, nor rocks. The problem of philosophy is that they start playing with analogies and reify them, without understanding the contexts that gave birth to the use of these words.


Well I am not a philosophy majore I am an anthropology major, it's all jargon to me or words in a context I don't understand, I don't understand what apriostic means,.
Aprioristic means that a proposition is fabricated without proving that it is true or false by comparing it to the world. For example, “all bachelors are unmarried” is a textbook example of aprioristic. Some people argue mathematics are aprioristic too.
“aprioristic” statements are not necessarily bad, but they dont say anything about the world. They only work within human mental constructions. To claim that Lacan is saying anything worthwile about psychology is wrong because he is only working within his syntatical systems.


However I think can still tell you're style is still positivist or empiricist. Which I think clouds alot of undersandings of humans, because I have come to a conclusion there is a pyhsical world, but also a human world; the mediate or symbolic that is inbetween humans and humans and humans and nature, which can not be measured as such and only tested over time in human structures and with the aid of linguistics.

Actually, one can know about “signs and symbols” by looking at how people use them.




I would say humans are signs. The most obvious example has been shown by Levi-Strauss in kngship systems. Kingship terms work the same as the linguistic sign, a term for instance father's brother has the phonetic value and also information attached to it. With the kingship name it carries with it rules of authority and incest. Humans are comprised of human matter but also information.

I read some lectures on Levi-Strauss. He makes a crass error, confusing human structures with language. Just because the sense of “brother” at a particular kinship might include something about incest and authority, does not mean that the “physical” brother is some sort of a sign. That is just crass relativism.

[pierrotlefou]

@the thread creator. You should check out Sartre's Between Existentialism and Marxism.

[BakuninFan]

Read Sartre's "Critique of Dialectical Reason". An unfinished, two-volume, collosus of a work, Sartre reconciles Marxism/dialectical reason while still defending existentialism, humanism, and regecting Hegelianism.

[spiltteeth]

dada Take a close glimpse at the use of the language- we understand the meaning of "I" perfectly fine in social discourse, and yet, this man claims that the words he is using are already illusions.

Well, I'm going to throw some love Lacan's way. I know many consider him an absurd charlatan, which is reasonable, but Lacan wasn't talking of the 'I' a subject uses in social discourse. In fact, a subject has a relationship with his "I" even when he/she is not speaking or in dialogue with another person. "I" in an 'illusion' in the sense that it is a misapprehension, a misunderstanding. You can say Lacan says nothing about the world and be correct, because he's talking about our relationship with the world and ourselves.
You may think in social discourse people generally know what you mean by 'I' - a self, but in a different social discourse -a radically communistic one for instance, people would be using 'I' differently. The early Christians (and their Jewish forbearers) understood that their persons, their selves, were not defined via interiority, but by relationally; through their relationality with God, with neighbor, and with their environment. There was no existent self independent of these relationships. Thus, ethically, the only thing that constituted Reality was how one behaved relationally.
In pre-modernity, the self is only constituted through an interior relationality with God. The person does not really exist outside this relationship. (Likewise, pre-modern reality was believed to be an advancement on the Biblical where Reality is described in terms of a historical telos leading toward salvation revealed to a chosen people, Israel, by their god, YHWH. Persons still do not have a ʻself.ʼ ʻPersonhoodʼ is constituted entirely through oneʼs relationship with their family and tribe.)
Today, the self exists as an autonomous, self-directed being, entirely constituted through the interiority of the person.
I would argue, weather or not you agree with Lacan, that a new way of 'being' - a different way you relate to yourself and therefore other people, is an extremely important issue for communism. Obviously I believe Lacan can be utilized to understand this process.