Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST (Join here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life. (A space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living!) This Friday, we begin our exploration of Existential philosophy with Irrational Man by William Barrett, initially published in 1958.
Check out our bookshelf below for previous and future reading.
A Study in Existential Philosophy
As discussed in How to Think Like an Existentialist and How to Be Yourself — Like Nietzsche, Existentialism is challenging to define. Existentialist thinkers explored issues related to meaning, purpose, anxiety and authenticity, freedom, absurdity, and the value of human existence.
Among the earliest figures associated with Existentialism are philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the 20th century, prominent existentialist thinkers included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Paul Tillich.
In the short book, What is Existentialism? Beauvoir described the first error as believing Existentialism can be distilled to “one of two immediately efficient, simple expressions.” But, if one must, we could think of Existentialism as a form of philosophical inquiry exploring the problems of human existence.
Listen to my conversation with Skye Cleary (author of How to Be Authentic) to learn more about Existentialism, authenticity, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Selected Passages
Existentialism was merely a symptom of their imprisonment in the narrowness of their own discipline. Never was the professional deformation more in evidence. The divorce of mind from life was something that had happened to philosophers simply in the pursuit of their own specialized problems. Since philosophers are only a tiny fraction of the general population, the matter would not be worth laboring were it not that this divorce of mind from life happens also to be taking place, catastrophically, in modern civilization everywhere. It happens too, as we shall see, to be one of the central themes of existential philosophy—for which we may in time owe it no small debt. […]
— William Barrett, Irrational Man
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