November 9

Today begins our foray into existentialism. This 20th-century, (primarily) Franco-German school of philosophy brings us from imperial Rome to the eve of Hitler's Third Reich. We'll explore this school's theory of the good life through the work of one of its founders: Simone de Beauvoir. Other members, proto-members, and post-facto members include: Franz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Tran Duc Thao, Blaise Pascal, Friedrich Nietzche, and Soren Kierkegaard.

Existentialism's radical content is deeply indebted to its radical methodology. This school arises out of the 19th-century development of the phenomenological method. Phenomenology gives us our slogan for today: "To the things themselves!" Most famously developed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, phenomenology challenges one of the most basic foundations of European philosophy: the distinction between "what is" and "what appears to be." From Plato on, European philosophy sought to get under the illusory appearance of reality and develop true, certain knowledge about its abstract, objective, static atoms: about the essence of goodness, of pleasure, of my self, of society. But phenomenology insists that this moves our focus from reality––which is comprised of particular, concrete, dynamic things that appear before us, are inaccessible beyond those appearances, and unfold through time––to a make-believe, abstract world of unchanging essences.This method of philosophy returns to reality: on the things themselves, as they appear before me and you right now, right here. Existentialism develops when phenomenologists began to turn their focus towards human existence: human beings, too (they argued), cannot be abstracted from their real, particular existences in favor of some essence of "human nature" or "the meaning of human life".

For Beauvoir, philosophy is a way of coming-to-accept the strange, unmanageable, and incomprehensible dimension of human existence: its fundamental ambiguity. She does not consider that ambiguous existence to be meaningless or value-less (it is possible to live a good life), but believes that it lacks any meaning besides those we create in our actual concrete lives; and that, since meaning is something each individual creates through living, there is no objective, universal metric we could use to ascertain if a life is good or bad (meaningful or meaningless) beyond the sense of meaning/value, or meaninglessness/valuelessness, that the person living that life experiences.