#existentialist philosophy

[hiyutekivigil]

[13thpythagoras]

"...I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day out in the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; that one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be engulfed, every hill shall be exalted and every mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains and the crooked places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.

With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to climb up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father’s died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!”

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that, let freedom, ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi and every mountainside.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

[imaginationstimulation]

"Either/Or" : Existentialism, Poetry, Elliott Smith and Søren Kierkegaard.

Either/Or is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, released on February 25, 1997.

The title of the album derives from the Søren Kierkegaard book of the same name (Either/Or), reflecting Smith’s interest in philosophy, which he studied at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Smith has long been associated with the Danish philosopher, and was once introduced as him at a concert in 1996.

Smith propelled into the international spotlight after three of the songs from this album were incorporated into the Good Will Hunting soundtrack.

*

from the album's 2nd track, Alameda:

Walk down Alameda Brushing off the nightmares you wish could plague me when I'm awake So now you see your first mistake was thinking that you could relate

The lyrics imply that whoever he is addressing here wishes that he keep suffering, so that he can keep creating art. This sentiment is found in a Kierkegaard quote from Either/Or:

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”

Alameda's lyric goes on to address that problems arise when a person thinks of themselves as the same as everyone else. This emphasis on subjectivity is a common existentialist trope beginning with Kierkegaard’s Truth is Subjectivity.

*

Søren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist philosopher living in the 1800s in Denmark. What is existentialism? It’s the idea that individuals are ultimately free to make their own choices, and are therefore responsible for their own life in this strange world.

People who believe in the sovereignty of the individual are one step away from also being a poet. What individualists and poets have in common is their care for and focus on the subjective, personal experience of life.

[Recalling] Kierkegaard’s words on what it means to be a poet:

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ — that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”

Existentialism presents reality as the individual versus the universe — you and your free choices against the infinite strangeness of existing. Very often this comes across as a negative experience. The world is so big, and we individuals are so small. This leads us to anguish.

Most people stay stuck there, in anguish. But the poet... has the power to channel that pain into poetry, music. In other words, the poet takes the raw and painful experience of existing, and reshapes it into something beautiful for himself and to share with others.

What is a poet? Someone who bears the cross of their suffering, and then transmutes that suffering into blissful music. What a skill to learn.

[katiejay]

Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious, each person can only believe what he recognises to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not because they are useful, which is not in dispute here, but also when it comes to happiness. There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of being myself, which allows me to not to have an opinion, there is no inner-life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history, both personally and collectively, we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people. Reason does not lie behind us, nor is that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inherited. Yet we are no more able to reach them definitively than we are to give up on them. It is understandable that our species, charged as it is with a task that will never and can never be completed, and at which it is not necessarily being called to succeed, even in relative terms, should find this situation both cause for anxiety and a spur to courage. In fact, these are one and the same thing, for anxiety is vigilance it is the will to judge, to know what one is doing and what there is on offer. If there is no such thing as benign fate than neither is there such a thing as its malign opposite. Courage, consists in being reliant on oneself and others to the extent that, irrespective of differences in physical and social circumstance, all manifest in their behaviour and their relationships that very same spark which makes us recognise them, which makes us crave their assent or their criticism. The spark which means we share a common fate.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception

[scientificphilosopher]

“There is a certain refreshment of perspective to be had from revisiting the existentialists, with their boldness and energy. They did not sit around playing with their signifiers. They asked big questions about what it means to live an authentic, fully human life, thrown into a world with many other humans also trying to live. They tackled questions about nuclear war, about how we occupy the environment, about violence, and about the difficulty of managing international relations in dangerous times. Many of them longed to change the world, and wondered what sacrifices we might or might not make for such an aim. Atheist existentialists asked how we can live meaningfully in the absence of God. They all wrote about anxiety and the experience of being overwhelmed by choice — a feeling that has become ever more intense in the relatively prosperous parts of the twenty-first-century world, even while real-world choices have shut down alarmingly for some of us. They worried about suffering, inequality and exploitation, and wondered whether anything could be done about these evils. As part of all these questions, they asked what individuals could do, and what they themselves had to offer.”

–Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café

[thoreau-in-making]

- Jean-Paul Sartre (nausea)

[darlinngninawrites]

When you're a child, you very easily resign yourself to being regarded as of little account, but at seventeen things change. You begin to want to have a definite existence, and since you still feel the same inside yourself, you foolishly have recourse to external guarantees.... You seek the approbation of others, you write down your thoughts, you compare yourself with accepted models.

-Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay

[hiyutekivigil]

“beginning to think is beginning to be undermined”

albert camus, the myth of sisyphus