If there were a concrete and appreciable version of each person, ready at any time to assess, then the concept of dread would have less terrible implications. The fact is, when penetrated by the nothing of pure possibility, the reach of this nothing is beyond almost all conception. There never really is an individual, just some ongoing process of change. The nothing alienates the individual further than from mere others and the world. The nothing of dread brings into its fold, the individual. The individual supports this nothing and yet must determine itself on such grounds. Whereas before, we had the Kierkegaardian maxim of individual as truth, we now have no grounds for determining anything. The actor has forgotten his/her lines and must now choose them every moment.
As such, we must move onto a more concrete and grounded conception of the individual to explore the synthesis of Camus and Kierkegaard. Perhaps a synthesis already has purchase in the absurd. "The absurd depends as much on man as on the world…it is all that links them together."2 The absurd, as witnessed by the individual, affords a better vantage of human existence. The absurd links a creator of the nothing, to his/her respective nothing. Simply feeling absurd asserts the state of individuality. "Everything turns upon dread coming into view. Man is a synthesis…but a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third factor."3 It is time to more fully uncover the meaning of these quotes. The individual has been defined as a synthesis of forces: mind and body. However, mind and body have no purchase without a grounding factor, in which the synthesis must take place. In the absurd, we find a complete synthesis of conscious being, witnessing the world as a feeling.
This grounding factor is world, both material and immaterial. The material world incorporates all objects. The immaterial world incorporates ideologies, and any other crowd-like doctrines of truth. Both of these worlds come to the individual as one, as "everything" once dread has come into view. So, in the act of realizing nothing, the pure possibility of further possibility, and so on, ad infinitum, there exists everything. This is the reason the crowd contains "untruth." Coming to what one believes is true, there exists an endless multitude of possibilities, each dependant on the individual and vice versa. So, any received truth, is necessarily an untruth; it brings everything into the nothing. The untruth of the crowd is the conclusion without the work, the decision without a decider. It bears none of the characteristics of an accomplishment, a courage.
Earlier, we saw that Kierkegaard equated fleeing into the crowd as "cowardice," and moving towards individuality as "courage." It is now more clear why this is so. To flee to the crowd is to take a possibility already established and accepted. One says goodbye to the nothing by accepting everything. There is no fear in it. To take one's own path, however, means to hazard oneself as a wager to the nothing, in which the possibility of further possibilities relies on each confrontation. Each decision is the decision to keep deciding. Worlds arise and fall in each confrontation. There is courage in each rise and fall.
Lastly, we return to the metaphor, provided by Camus, of life and world as stage, and individual as actor. Is this metaphor apt? Let us see. On a stage, all is preordained....
The implications of this concept are enormous and profound. Just as Kierkegaard reverses the Hegelian construct of the universal being over the individual, the inner is placed by Kierkegaard in a position of supremacy over the outer. It has already been shown that faith can make acts moral to the individual performing them even when universal ethics would condemn the same act. Universal ethics are an element of the outer,
On the other hand, Schopenchauer argues that because happiness is fundamentally unobtainable, humans are faced with a life of disappointment, which thus leads to the disconnect that causes suicide. However, if both of these philosophers' theories on the cause of suicide were taken at face value, it would be surmised that every human would commit suicide and thus the extinction of the human race would be inevitable. Yet, this is
Foremost, though, is the Nietzschian concept that freedom is never free -- there are costs; personal, societal, and spiritual. To continue that sense of freedom, one must be constantly vigilant and in danger of losing that freedom, for the moment the individual gasps a sigh of relief and feels "free" from contemplating freedom, tyranny will ensue. He believed that it was the internal cost that contained value. This, however,
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Existentialism: A History Existentialism is a philosophical school of thought that addresses the "problem of being" (Stanford Encyclopedia, 2010). Existentialist questions involve the nature of man in relation to the universe, the subjective nature of "I" versus the objective "we," the creation and measure of meaning in a world with no intrinsic meaning, standards of morality in the absence of Divine Law (God), and the creation and measure of success in
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