Monday, September 29, 2008

existential perspective (better look alive)


Existentialism is a philosophical movement which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to it being created for them by deities or authorities or defined for them by philosophical or theological doctrines. It emerged as a movement in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, foreshadowed most notably by nineteenth-century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka also described existential themes in their literary works.

It took explicit form as a philosophical current in Continental philosophy, first in the work of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in the 1930s in Germany, and then in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s and 1950s in France. Their work focused on such themes as "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, and nothingness" as fundamental to human existence. Walter Kaufmann described existentialism as "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life"


Thank you Wikipedia.

Good discussion tonight boys. Y'all should read my blog more often.

Life as a human, very confusing. Life is confusing enough, but putting it in that context only makes things more blurry. Paradoxically, it is the only thing that makes sense; all we have. And if we focus little on meaning, and more on day-to-day (at least for me), life is much simpler.

Perhaps it's the drugs, but life bothers me less now than before. But, more so as before that, when I was ignorant. Yet, it was hardly bliss, seemingly so at the time. Now, in retrospect, possibly, but objects appear closer in the mirror, so, ya know....





It breaks!

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