What school of thought do you follow? Do you consider yourself a Stoic? What is your favorite philosophy?
I get these types of questions on a daily basis.
The short answer is that I do not fully subscribe to any single school of thought or belief system.
However, I always say, if it isn’t already obvious from my writing, that I relate the most to existentialist thinkers and those who have preceded and inspired them.
But existentialism is not a school of thought. There is no set of beliefs, answers, or rules that all existentialists share. What existentialists have in common are the questions they are concerned with. That’s why we have atheist existentialists like Camus and Sartre, Christian existentialists like Paul Tillich, and every other type of existentialist in between.
Existentialism is a broad term and can be approached from multiple different angles. Thinking about what would be the best way to make the case for why I think you should care about existentialism, I decided to take an unconventional angle.
Instead of giving you the history of the existentialist movement and turning this into a dry lesson on the history of philosophy, I want to show you why I’m so interested in existentialism by talking about arguments against it.
In "Existentialism is a Humanism," Sartre lays out what he believes are the 3 main arguments against existential thinking.
In this essay, I want us to take a look at the first two of these arguments and Sartre’s responses to them. The third argument is no less interesting or important. However, I believe it to be material for a separate essay.
The first complaint is that existential thinking promotes "desperate quietism" and leads to a kind of paralysis.
Our freedom and responsibility, especially as they are laid out by Sartre, seem so overwhelming that it becomes almost impossible to make decisions and take actions. The idea that our freedom is directionless, as Sartre claims, and that any direction we take is essentially a product of our freedom, is dizzying and makes it harder to move through life. If there is no a priori basis for our choices in life and for the direction that we take, then all that we are left with is a life composed of our ongoing choices and our responsibility for the choices that we make. And that’s terrifying.
Now let’s take a look at Sartre’s response.
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