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Existential Block Party

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Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche, who died suddenly
when a miniature buffalo became glued to his mouth


I've been touring the existentialists this month during my morning workouts, and I've really enjoyed listening to their perspectives and ideas.

As always with listening to college lectures from the Teaching Company, it takes some patience and a change in the way you use your iPod -- no longer is it entertaining you while you do other things, but now it's teaching you. You have to pay closer attention, and sometimes the slog gets boring.

The tape series is called "No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life" and the lecturer is Robert Solomon.

Hey -- with a title that includes the meaning of life, what more do you need?

I'm almost finished, and it's been a great romp. What do I get out of this? I learn to appreciate some really great ideas from the masters. For example, Nietzsche question of eternal return. As Solomon tells his personal story:

While he was a medical student at the University of Michigan, Solomon recounted how he stumbled as if by chance into a crowded lecture hall. He was rather unhappy in his medical studies at the time, and was perhaps seeking something different that day. He got precisely that. The professor, Frithjof Bergmann, was lecturing that day on something that Solomon had not yet been acquainted with. The professor spoke of how Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return asks the fundamental question: "If given the opportunity to live your life over and over again ad infinitum, forced to go through all of the pain and the grief of existence, would you be overcome with despair? Or would you fall to your knees in gratitude?"

It's a profound question, and because of it Solomon decided to switch to philosophy: specifically the existentialists.

Up until now, I thought of the existentialists as basically dark, nihilists. Nietzsche was famous for his phrase "God is dead". Existentialists, to me, were goth-type characters who saw no point in life besides their own existence and very little point in that. Part of this, quite honestly, comes from popular literature. I remember reading a couple of Dean Koontz books where the criminal was a completely amoral, vicious killer who thought that only what he created (death and terror) were valuable things. He was an artist of crime, the kind of guy that would get along great with Hannibal Lecter.

But all of that is wrong. It's a common misunderstanding of existentialism. Existentialism is about not following the herd. It's about living completely inside your own life and being completely responsible for the things you do -- no excuses. When Nietzsche said that "God is dead" he wasn't making an atheistic comment. He was echoing similar comments going back to Augustine. He is making a case that organized religion can no longer work to provide us a moral code in the modern world. We are each individually responsible. Simply pointing to a cleric somewhere and letting him do your thinking for you is no longer acceptable. Religion has to go back to its roots of being personal. Religion, or rather philosophy in general, doesn't work. Each man has to be ultimately responsible for his life.

You can take that as nihilism, as some do -- there's not much point in anything. Nietzsche felt that there was something beyond religion, a "will to power" that motivated people. Other existentialists felt that understanding the limits of the external upon the individual didn't make values, morals, God, and the rest go away, it just meant that we longer had the excuse of letting somebody else do our thinking for us. If we wanted a God, it had to be a personal God, not some creation made by hundreds of years of theology.

It's a powerful and life-changing concept, one that I instinctively understand but never really heard it expressed like this. These are the lectures I wish I had heard when I was 17 and questioning the religion I was brought up in. I wonder if I could have understood it then.

Solomon died at the Zurich airport two years ago this month. It would have been nice to email and thank him for such a great series.

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This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on January 23, 2009 1:22 PM.

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