Sartre used this to mean that you have to accept the full weight of your freedom in light of the absurd. You have to recognize that any meaning in your life has, is given to it by you. And if you decide to just phone it in, and follow a path that someone else has set whether it's your teachers, your government, or your religion then you have what he called bad faith, a refusal to accept the absurd.
If you live by bad faith, you're burying your head in the sand and pretending that’s something out there has meaning, meaning that you didn't give it. Which brings us to this week's Flash Philosophy. Let's go to the Thought Bubble:
Start to explain these ideas through an anecdote about one of his students, who faced a difficult decision. The young man was at a crossroads in his life. He could join the military during wartime, and go off to fight for a cause that he believed in. And he wanted to do this. He thought was right. But he also had an elderly mother who was all alone, except for him. If he went to war, he'd leave her behind, and that seemed wrong. So he could stay with her, and let others fight for justice, or he could go off to war, and leave his mother to herself, and likely never see her again. The young man felt a sense of duty to both his cause and to his mother, but he could only serve one. Moreover, if he went to war, he'd just be a very small part of a really big cause. His contribution probably wouldn't be great, but he would be contributing to something that would affect millions of people. But if he stayed behind, he’d makes an enormous difference in just one person's life.
So, what's the answer? Sartre said the whole point of this young man's decision was that no one could give him an answer.
In fact, there was no answer, until the man chose one for himself. No moral theory could help him decide, because no one else's advice could lead him to a decision that was truly authentic.
So his choice, no matter what it was, was the only true choice, provided that he made it authentically, because it was determined by the values he chose to accept. A lot of people think existentialism paints a pretty bleak picture of the world.
In fact, the French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus went so far as to say that the literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.
But most existentialists would remind you that the world, and your life, can have meaning, but only if you choose to assign it. If the world is inherently devoid of purpose, you can choose to imbue it with whatever purpose you want.
So, no one can tell you if your life isn't worth anything If you, say, don't have children, or don't follow a lucrative career path, or achieve whatever standards your parents told you to. And this works not just on an individual scale, but on a global one too.
If the world is going to have any of the things most of us value like justice and order we're going to have to put it there ourselves. Because, otherwise, those things wouldn't exist. So, a worldview that looks bleak to some, may to others seem almost exhilarating.
Today. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did learning about essentialism and its response, existentialism. We talked about John-Paul Sartre and his ideas about how to find meaning in a meaningless world.
for:阅读练习生
乙亥年七月初六
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