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Philosophy isn’t what it used to be. Gone are the days of the 4-hour debate over lunch on the merits of ethics, aesthetics and or metaphysics. Gone are the days of heated discussions over breakfast lattes on the philosophical traditions of existentialism versus rationalism. But we do still have a duty to think big and to ponder the great questions. So, why not become a part-time, if not professional, existentialist?
From the Guardian:
I was a teenage existentialist. I became one at 16 after spending birthday money from my granny on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. It was the cover that attracted me, with its Dalí painting of a dripping watch and sickly green rock formation, plus a blurb describing it as “a novel of the alienation of personality and the mystery of being”. I didn’t know what was mysterious about being, or what alienation meant – although I was a perfect example of it at the time. I just guessed that it would be my kind of book. Indeed it was: I bonded at once with its protagonist Antoine Roquentin, who drifts around his provincial seaside town staring at tree trunks and beach pebbles, feeling physical disgust at their sheer blobbish reality, and making scornful remarks about the bourgeoisie. The book inspired me: I played truant from school and tried drifting around my own provincial town of Reading. I even went to a park and tried to see the Being of a Tree. I didn’t quite glimpse it, but I did decide that I wanted to study philosophy, and especially this strange philosophy of Sartre’s, which I learned was “existentialism”.
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I am convinced that existentialism should be seen as more than a fad, however, and that it still has something to offer us today. In a spirit of experiment, here are 10 possible reasons to be an existentialist – or at least to read their books with a fresh sense of curiosity.
1 Existentialists are philosophers of living
2 Existentialists really care about freedom
3 (Some) existentialists have interesting sex lives
4 Existentialists tackle painful realities
5 Existentialists try to be authentic
6 Existentialists think it matters what we do (and may stay up all night arguing about it)
7 Existentialists are not conformists
8 Existentialists can be fun to read
9 Existentialists also write about unconventional subjects
10 Existentialists think big
Read the entire article here.
Video: Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion, Monty Python. Courtesy of Monty Python / BBC.
Image: From left to right, top to bottom: Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre. Courtesy: Wikipedia. Public Domain.