Through this video I understood that existentialism was essentially the idea that everything and nothing gives our lives meaning. I thought that this belief could be taken in two very different way depending on the person following this belies.
An optimistic person could say that since nothing matters anyways, I can just do anything I want to do without the judgement of others. On the other hand, a pessimistic person might say that since nothing matters, nothing they do matters, and therefore, it doesn’t make sense to do anything at all.
I think that finding what gives our lives is an already difficult enough task. Adding onto that, having to think about if we choose to take an optimistic or pessimistic approach was a very difficult thing to do.
I don’t know what gives my life meaning currently, maybe the future, but I would like to take a more optimistic approach if I were to follow this belief.
Notes from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaDvRdLMkHs&ab_channel=CrashCourse
Existentialists say that anything can give your life meaning. However, at the same time, nothing can give your life meaning.
Plato and Aristotle believed that everything has an essence — a certain set of core properties that are necessary or essential — for a thing to be what it is, including us. They also believed that humans have an essence before they were born, and part of what it was to be a “good human” was to follow our essence.
Friedrich Nietzsche believed in Nihalism, the belief in ultimate meaninglessness of life.
Jean Paul Sartre Asked questions such as “what if we were born without a hardwired purpose?” “what if it is for us to find our own purpose?”
This became the framework for existentialism. Existence preceds essence, we write our own essence through the way we choose to live. But we do not have a path we needed to follow. This also meant that our actions or presence lack any real inheret importance, an fundamental component of exitentialism.
To existentialists, absurdity is the search for answers in an answerless world.
This belief became especially popular after WW2 when people abandoned beliefs
Sartre then explored the absudance of freedom in this world. He thought that since there are no guidelines, each of us had to design our own moral code. He felt that it is important to live authentically and those who didn’t had bad faith.