For the beginners I point to a graduate philosopher that used Rick and Morty to explain existentialism as Camus saw it:
False dichotomy - there are any number of alternative possible frameworks.
Are you including your own brain in “everything around” you? Because I’m not a mind-body dualist so this explanation doesn’t work for me.
The “illusion” of free will you propose is functionally no different from actual free will, since it is impossible for us to introspect all our influences, so it is no challenge to existentialism. We can act as though we have free will, so we do, in fact, have free will. We only have the “illusion” if you postulate some omniscient outside observer. But such doesn’t exist, and we do exist.
Existentialism is what you have left after you eliminate everything that isn’t existentialism.
Existentialism is what Existentialists believe.
Go wash your bowl.
[QUOTE=kunilou]
“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
– Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)
[/Quote]
You’ve tied yourself into a tight little conundrum there. It seems to me you’re saying there are only values (and therefore, morality and ethics and the laws that come from them) if there is common agreement by a group.
Aldo Leopold was a conservationist. He might ask, if you were a hermit, would you have a code of behavior? If you were hunting for food, would you kill an endangered species, or would you hunt longer knowing you could find something more plentiful? Would you dump your waste into a creek and let it flow downstream rather than digging and maintaining a latrine?
Since you aren’t part of community, you aren’t part of its value system. What do you choose to do, and why?
So … probably no existentialist animists then, eh? Guess I’m out. 
But I do agree that ultimately, you can’t count on life to necessarily be good or satisfying *** for you*** simply because you have subscribed to society’s or some other person’s prescription for happiness and fulfillment. The kind of life that makes many people happy, or one that they tell you SHOULD make you happy, even so may not be the right kind of life for you.
I think if you can be a Christian existentialist, you could definitely be an animist one.
Not only that, it’s also self-contradictory. If “meaning and value to just one is the same as nothing”, then how can “the more widely held something is the more value it has” be true? 0 + 0 + 0, … = 0.
Ultimately it is this -
Regards,
Shodan
Also, the weather will change to autumn in about 6 weeks. And that feels nice.
Except you exist in a world with many other individuals so living the life that you want isn’t going to happen often. Too many wills clashing with each other just causes disaster.
That is actually not contradictory. I’m saying that if something has meaning to just you then it’s the same as being meaningless. It only has meaning of a group recognizes it as having meaning.
Isn’t that going to happen anyway?
Regardless of whether I’m an existentialist, I already live in a world where many other individuals have wills that clash with each other – and some of them are existentialists! So what’s the relevance? In what way would it affect my decision about whether to live life as an existentialist?
You state that as if it’s just a known fact.
Where did you come by this remarkable conclusion?
Because value only matters when other recognize it as well.
As for the wills, that just reinforces my point. It’s proof that people can’t always get what they want and lack control there, and makes existentialism less workable. People have to learn that life isn’t about getting what you want.
[QUOTE=Machinaforce]
I’m saying that if something has meaning to just you then it’s the same as being meaningless. It only has meaning of a group recognizes it as having meaning.
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How large of a group does there need to be in order for something to gain meaning?
If just one person finds meaning in something, that is meaningless. If only four people find meaning in something, is it still meaningless? What if that group of four was 1 family? Does this single family finding meaning in something, such as Christian faith, suddenly become meaningless if their entire state of a million people (all others are devout Muslims) think that faith in Christ is meaningless?
It matters to me regardless of what some group opines. And whenever I’m making a decision and acting accordingly, it’s hardly relevant to me that some group would pop in to say “but we don’t recognize the value”: that’s not going to make me suddenly abandon what I’m doing, it’s not a factor.
Well, (a) by that logic, in a community of existentialists, I suppose you’d have to knuckle under and go with the flow, because there’d be oh-so-many wills in favor of existentialism and you’d just be the lone holdout with a ‘meaning and value to one is the same as nothing’ belief that you’d abandon, right?
But (b) who cares that you can prove that people can’t always get what they want? Does existentialism say otherwise? I know Sartre said that people have to decide for themselves whether or not to, like, join the French Resistance – but I wasn’t aware that he said people also get to decide which side will win a war. Maybe I missed it? Because, man, that would be a silly philosophy, and one could disprove it by simply noting that people can’t always get what they want.
But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.
- Mick Jagger.
It would actually not be possible to have a community of such people.
Another alleged fact! Instead of mentioning where you get the first one from, you just throw a second one right out there, huh? Thrilling stuff!