Annabel Abbs follows Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts over the horizon. A few years ago I bought the book A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros (2014). This entertaining volume featured a parade of thinkers for whom walking was profoundly important: Thoreau, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Kant; even Gandhi, Kerouac and Rimbaud made appearances. Walking, Gros suggested, was …
Greg Artus contemplates (dis)embodiment, Zoom life and social media, through the ‘Looks’ of Sartre, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. In this past year of severe restrictions on physical social interaction, everyone seems to have been made starkly aware of the importance of what some existentialists would call Being-with-Others. A social life conducted through screens has shown people …
Sam Kelly says Jean-Paul Sartre was the Hunter S. Thompson of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is perhaps the most famous exponent of existentialism. His philosophy asserts that human beings are cursed with the impossible burden of having to make decisions without any higher justifications. There is no God or other transcendent force to dictate what …
Gary Cox considers the problematic side of freedom, from the edge of a cliff. Many of the central themes and concepts of existentialism – freedom, choice, responsibility, bad faith, anxiety, despair, and absurdity – originated in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), in such ground-breaking works as Either-Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept …
Eva Cybulska asks who Oedipus thinks he is. The myth of Oedipus is very old. It first appeared in written form in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. Aeschylus and Euripides wrote plays about the hero, as did Julius Caesar, Ovid and Seneca, and more recently Andr é Gide and Jean Cocteau. But the greatest version of …
Sam Morris on the existential choice we all face. The 4th January 1960 was an overcast and drizzly day in northern central France. Albert Camus was returning to Paris with his publisher Michel Gallimard and Gallimard’s wife and daughter in a powerful four-door sports car, a Facel Vega. The Vega was infamous for its rear …
Robert Harries says that playing this game is a Sisyphean task, and represents the human spirit up against a meaningless fate. In 1984 in the former Soviet Union, a computer engineer by the name of Alexey Pajitnov created the mega-selling computer game, Tetris. Its format, known to everyone who has ever played a games consol, …
Richard Oxenberg gives a poetic introduction to Heidegger’s Being and Time. so much depends upona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the white chickens William Carlos Williams In order to appreciate Heidegger’s thought it is necessary to see it in relation to the Western metaphysical tradition from which it has emerged. This would be true, of course, …
Philip Villamor rethinks Albert Camus’ famous rock’n’roll parable. The gods condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain. It is an unending sequence of events: he arduously pushes the rock up the mountain, the rock rolls back down, Sisyphus follows it back down and then begins the task again. Yet …
Dan Sinykin says that Kierkegaard is worried about you. Preface: For the love of God, consider this a primer, a warm-up, a teaser, but certainly not a substitute for the work analyzed within. One is a ragtag attempt at accessible jottings about the other, which is a timeless masterpiece on the human condition. You can …
We Have Spirit, Yes We Do! We Have Spirit, How ‘Bout You? Read More »