A few months ago a subscriber suggested I make a video on existentialism, so here it is!
Existentialism is a European philosophy from the mid 19th and 20th centuries, which attempts to answer the questions humans have attemped to ask and answer for thousands of years: what is the purpose of life. Many believe, due to mainstream thinking, that the existentialist believes there is no purpose to our lives, but that is actually wrong – they would say our purpose is to create and cultivate our purpose.
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Script:
Existentialism is a European philosophy that began in the mid-19th and 20th centuries and became popular following the horrific years of WWII, when many began to doubt the traditional idea of a moral deity based on the terrifying atrocities committed during the war.
The first philosopher to have actually identified as an existentialist is probably Jean-Paul Sartre who said that “what all existentialists have in common is the fundamental doctrine that existence precedes essence.” What he means by this is that we are all born without any kind of collective purpose. We are born independent individuals rather than the labels, stereotypes, etc. that society or our family or whoever, decide to put on us. Our purpose or essence as Sartre describes is not what others place on to us, but instead ours to create through our own consciousness.
The misconception here is that one might think they can define themselves as whatever they want, and thus be whatever they want. But the reality is that while we may believe we are of a certain essence, we are in fact defined by our actions, and are responsible for them. So if a person believes they are kind, but acts cruelly, the existentialist will then define that person by their act, as cruel. Sartre states that “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges us in the world –and defines himself afterwards.”
Another key idea in existentialism is the idea of the absurd. The absurd is the idea that the world is meaningless and in its meaninglessness the whole “bad things don’t happen to good people” flies out the window. In fact there is no such thing as a bad or good person or a bad or good situation. What happens, just simply happens. We are born into a world where our actions lack any coherent purpose, a world in which we are searching for meaning in a meaningless world.
In contrast to what most of us think, Sartre believed that the amount of freedom we have is horrifying. The fact that the world is meaningless means that there are no guidelines or moral code to live by. The best thing to do he states is to live authentically. By this he means that one has to create him or herself based on their true self – rather than the external pressures of the world – and then live accordingly. In today’s world this might mean acting in opposition to the idea that we should grow up, go to college, find a good job, start a family, buy a house, send your kids to college, and then retire – something that many of us are often pressured to do by our society, teachers, parents, and even government.
Again in existentialism only you can assign meaning to your life. The only wrong thing you can do is to live in-authentically, against your own essence.
