Heard of it but never fully understood it. I tend to get mixed reviews on what it is
Like some people say that it goes nowhere.
Why should it go anywhere?
That’s just what I heard people say about it, but I don’t really understand what it is
First off Machinaforce I would give up on trying to understand Existentialism. Even if you get it I don’t think it’s practical to follow or useful to understand.
Existentialism is a view or philosophy on what is the nature of reality.
The essence of existentialism is that each of us as individuals determine what reality is for ourselves.
Ponder the following paragraph and decide if existentialism is for you:
Existentialist deny any essential human nature in the traditional, rational, or religious sense, insisting that individuals create their own characters through free, responsible minded mechanisms. Although they recognize outside influences, existentialists insist that each self determines it’s own human nature.
Some good writers in this theme: Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Harold Pinter. I understood it as the basic absurdity and pointlessness of existence, a kind of atheism if you will, but very interesting nonetheless. I was learning about it about the same time as the Police album Synchronicity came out, so I always liked the two ideas in my head.
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About twenty five years past the philosophy degree but here is what I recall about it.
It is a European Philosophical tradition that strives to make sense of the world and find meaning through an individual’s place in history and culture. It is often offered as a response to the chaos and alienation in the modern world (as in early to mid twentieth century), and places value in an individual’s place in greater historical context. It is often religious or political in practice. Communism, Nazism, Rastafarianism are all examples of movements with strong existentialist elements. Not always as cool in practice as it sounds being discussed among hipsters.
It has roots in more analytical disciplines of epistemology and phenomenology. Look up Heidegger and Sartre for examples existentialist philosophers; also Husserl and Hegel as direct influences. Influences go further back through Kant and even Descartes.
An important point of existentialism is that there is no external agency to give us meaning, so we have to make the world meaningful for ourselves.
That’s usually presented as if it’s a bad thing: Oh, no! The world is formless and void, and the spirit of chaos moves across the face of the nothingness!
I, however, view it as a good thing: Nobody will be coming around to mark your papers. Nobody has the authority to demand that this is Right and this is Wrong, or to impose an ethical system on you which you cannot live with. There is no Justice, there’s just us. We make the system we live under, and we can make it so we can live under it. Are we perfect? No, but we can get better, because there’s nobody telling us we can’t.
Of course, I also accept that humans are social animals, and therefore have a kind of built-in morality all social animals possess which allows them to live in societies of a nontrivial size. We’re not blank slates, in other words, and even toddlers have a developed sense of fairness and right and wrong long before they have the language skills to elucidate it. (On the other hand, some people don’t have that innate moral sense, or have it beaten out of them as children, and society has to figure out how to deal with that minority.)
That’s news for us existentialists…
The heart of existentialism, for me, is authenticity. Looking at the world as it is, in all its meaninglessness, and facing up to that, rather than shaping comforting lies about it - whether that lie is “god”, or “logic” or “evo-devo”
The soul of it, on the other hand, is that existence precedes essence. That we become who we are as human beings, and should try and do that responsibly and consciously. Socrates got one thing right - the unexamined life is not worth living.
Here are some things existentialism is not: atheism, rationalism, positivism, nihilism… One can be an atheist existentialist, or an agnostic one, but it’s also very possible to be a theistic existentialist (vide Kierkegaard). Or none of the above, as I am. I’d argue that you can’t be an existentialist and be a rationalist, positivist or nihilist, though.
What? Care to justify this? Individuals may have embraced both (e.g. Mitläufer Heidegger, Sartre and Marxism for a time) that doesn’t mean there’s an existential underpinning to those movements, never mind “strong … elements”. I’m especially curious about how Rastafari* has “strong existentialist elements”
slight digression - note that a lot of Rastas (ETA: my brother is one) consider the term "Rastafarianism*" to be a bit offensive, they are generally against “isms” of any sort (see Bob on “ism schisms”).
To be honest it seems too much like nihilism. Also the authenticity bit seems like a lie to me. We never see the world as it is, science makes that clear.
We also don’t “become” who we are as humans so much as we are made by everything around us, we have little choice in the matter. Psychology seems to make that pretty clear. In that sense then existentialism becomes a comforting lie.
But that freedom is ultimately what makes life meaningless. Isn’t that why people look for purpose or have values that everyone agrees on? I mean, making your own meaning seems to make everything meaningless to me. Because you don’t have others to recognize the meanings you give things. It seems to me that as long as one person finds something meaningless then it is so, regardless of what you decide to “give it”.
By all that logic there is no one telling us that we should make a better system, or that we should care what happens to other people, or that we should live and not commit suicide. Seems rather disastrous. It’s almost like existentialism is against human nature.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Emerson, Thoreau, etc. Existentialism has been described as “the American religion.”
Perhaps the most famous excerpt from Emerson (in “Nature”) is: “There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
To me, that’s always summed it up pretty nicely.
I did a little googling, and the most helpful simple explanation I found was here: What Is Existentialism?
Are you sure you’re not thinking of “Transcendentalism”?
There are no values everyone agrees on. There are no values everyone can live with. There are values communities can agree on, which must be accepted to be part of that community, but, guess what: Those communities are entirely human-created, and have no special status in the Universe.
If you demand that meaning be universal before it can exist, then no meaning can possibly exist.
Existentialism is only against human nature if you think humans are incapable of coming up with meaning on their own. Humans are, on the contrary, amazingly good at coming up with meaning on their own. How often do we look at clouds and see shapes? How many cultures have developed their own constellations? (Damn near all of them, I’m sure.) Humans are meaning-making machines.
The best example is language. It’s a pretty well-accepted fact of linguistics that words are intrinsically meaningless. Most words, aside from obvious onomatopoeia (that is, words which attempt to mimic the sounds other things make), have no inherent connection to what they describe. How could they, after all, when the word for dog is “dog” in English and “perro” in Spanish? Nevertheless, humans created language, and enough humans agree on enough words and enough grammar to make languages useful to learn.
Humans thirst for meaning. We crave it. Luckily, we can also make our own, and make meanings we can deal with. Ultimately, our ideas have to connect back to reality if they are to be worth perpetuating, but we can experiment with what works best and figure out how reality works without needing to force it into a pre-ordained meaning we’re incapable of changing.
Besides, as I said, you seem to be assuming that humans are blank slates. We’re not. We’re social mammals, and as such we have certain mental instincts, such as empathy and a desire to live and a desire to communicate and form communities. Those instincts can be channeled in various ways, or destroyed through abuse, but they exist for most people and provide the foundation for the basic social frameworks humans have always created. Existentialism, therefore, exists within those parameters.
You seem to have blown past my point. I said there is nothing saying we should do such things. As for creating meaning, that’s not really true. Meaning is made for us these days. Most of what has meaning is just what we take that has been passed to us. If we were to question it then it would fall apart.
Subjective meaning is the same as there being no meaning. Meaning only exists if it’s universal. As long as someone finds something to have no meaning, then it will have no meaning no matter how much you try to give it one. Meaning is worthless without others to acknowledge the meaning of said thing.
And humans are for the most part a blank slate. Cooperation has to be learned and the bit about being social animals isn’t really true. Those aspects of the brain have to be triggered before they happen. Social behavior isn’t instinct, it’s learned. Even the matter of what to do with empathy must be learned (if not empathy itself). Even the desire to live is a drive rather than an instinct (which is why people can overcome it). The bit about desiring to form communities is also learned, it’s not automatic.Edge.org
Everything we have today is essentially learned through history. Hence it is common things we can agree on. Language is supportive of my “universal” meaning. If language were entirely subjective then it would be worthless. You couldn’t communicate anything to people.
It sounds like they give humans too much power
I seem to remember a Monty Python skit about several English housewives seeking out Sartre to explain himself and his philosophy. It was all over in seconds, once they actually located him. How difficult CAN it be? 
Those sound a lot like answers I got in college. In other words, Existentialism is whatever each of us decides it is. I can live with that.