An Imbecile's Guide to Existential Philosophy (A Follow-Up)

Greetings to you, Dear Reader. It's a pleasure to teach philosophy to you again. As you may remember, we left off on the topic of existential angst with my promise of explaining how certain famous philosophers decided that we can override it. This is a "feel good" lesson; the tenets of which I do not agree with integrity to my brand of existential nihilism. So, without further ado, we'll get started.

An old man and a little girl walk into a forest. The little girl says, "I'm scared." The old man replies, "You're scared? I have to walk out of this forest alone!"

Subjectivity, Dear Reader. As you may remember from the last post, Kierkegaard gives us the concept of angst, which is the inescapable pull of despair upon the self, whether in the position of the aforementioned old man or the little girl. We live in a world of expectations, both original and foreign, towards which we feel responsible. Should we feel responsible? Let's start with philosophy's mustachioed punk-rock rebel, Friedrich Nietzsche.

In Nietzsche's work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he speaks of an over-man who is unfaltered and unfazed by the otherworldly non-truths of theologians and idealists, making his own "meaning" in life through his this-worldly will to power. In other words, a person who thinks for herself and impresses her own will upon society. In other other words, Superman; supposing that Superman is one who impresses his will (truth, justice, and the American way) upon others (typically criminals, as it occurs). Nietzsche, in spite of Superman, does not believe in morality.

Whoa! What? No morality? Let's not take that out of context. We get value judgements not unlike morality in Nietzsche's views; specifically, the life-affirming versus the life-denying. These terms, to oversimplify, address whether one says "yes" or "no" to life. For example, the businesswoman who demands pay equal to that of her male co-workers is life-affirming, while the priest who instructs churchgoers to when harmed is life-denying. Suffice it to say that humility is no longer and issue of morality, but rather is the life-denying choice of the sycophant.

On to Marty Heidegger, a supremely difficult philosopher to study. Fortunately, his existential views can be summarized in one word: care. "That's simple enough," you might say, but you know better than to accept existential theories at face value, don't you? If so, skip ahead to the next paragraph. Heidegger is concerned with care because it is the essence of being... you know, in time. A static reality (the self) subjected to a fluxuating continuum (time) which doesn't exist. Naturally, we must consider our own deaths in order to uphold this worldview, for a life without death is utterly meaningless because of its non-completion and (fast-forwarding to French existentialism) vapid with ennui. If we care about something in respect to our inevitable and ever-encroaching doom we have some "meaning" in our life. The cowardly military grunt who shoots himself so as to not be redeployed agrees just as much as the battle-hardened officer. They both do what they think is right in terms of what they care for above other things.

So there's this guy who was a POW in France during World War II. He read Heidegger's magnum opus, Being in Time, during his imprisonment. You may already adhere to his ideology, whether or not you're aware of his works. His name was Jean-Paul Sartre. He smoked a shitload of tobacco and believed that life is what you make of it. To clarify, he believed in being-for-itself (writing your own story, which is what you, Dear Reader, are so passively doing right now) and being-in-itself (your epic comic tragedy, only completed upon your own death) as two separate things. It's like the difference between Forrest Gump serving in Vietnam as opposed to Forrest Gump telling his story at a bus-stop bench. One is complete, insofar as it has been done, while the other is begging resolution. In your life, however, you may not have the priviledge of recounting your memoirs. You might be lined up against the wall with so many others and undeservedly executed via firing squad after Homeland Security fails to do its job. Maybe you'll find yourself at the business-end of another nation's ICBM and you'll be a casualty of nuclear warfare. There's your life story, but did you write it?

Memento mori, motherfuckers.