#antonia case

[justascribbla]

Why would anyone think, 'You know, I only have four thousand weeks here on this glorious earth, and I'm going to use those God-given hours to drive a forklift, nurse the sick, drive a bus, or teach a class. I'm going to limit my holidays to four to six weeks a year, and the rest of the time, I'm on task.'

Antonia Case, Flourish.

[scientificphilosopher]

Existentialist philosophers teach us that we alone are responsible for creating a meaningful life in an absurd and unfair world.

To say that we have absolute freedom to pursue our life’s meaning presumes that there is nothing getting in our way. But this isn’t always the case.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, existentialist author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir notes that as children we shoulder no responsibility; we live in a ready-made world with ready-made values. As we mature and become acquainted with our freedom we can begin to take matters into our own hands. However, many of us revert back to our childhood ways, trading freedom for security. Why?

Some of us are cut off from our goals; many of us are manipulated into pursuing desires that are not ours. We can be willed towards fruitless endeavours and therefore excluded from creating a meaningful future for ourselves.

The problem is that the oppressed often don’t know they are oppressed; they view the world as one that cannot change, as “a natural situation”. The only escape, according to de Beauvoir, is revolt. “The oppressed can fulfill his freedom as a man only in revolt.”

As de Beauvoir famously stated: “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.” For de Beauvoir, life is one of continuous change, an unstable system in which balance is continually lost and recovered. For her, inertia is synonymous with death. [full article]

[unnewsworthy]

There is a quiet undercurrent in modern life, a yearning for a time when we worked with Mother Earth to survive, to build, to create. It rises to the surface during such activities as gardening, home renovations, cooking, and hammering things together in the shed – small moments of creation, a peaceful retreat from the cacophony of Factory Earth in operation.

Antonia Case, 'Factory Earth', New Philosopher Issue #4: Work.