But what is beautiful and revealing about... Camus (and Sartre, too) is precisely their refusal either to dismiss the question [of life's purposes and meanings] or to despair at the answer. They provoke an irresolvable tension, not between reason and passion but between our passionate commitments and our awareness that, nevertheless, our lives are ultimately not in our hands.
A collaborative search for wisdom, at Middle Tennessee State University and beyond... "The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'"-William James
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
"Dismal" existentialism?
Some think existentialism is bleak or despairing or (in Mitchell's word) "dismal," because it insists that we're each personally responsible for all our choices, and that those choices define human nature and possibility.The late Robert Solomon didn't see it that way. Check out his cameo in the film Waking Life, on this point. His book The Joy of Philosophy also addresses it:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.