I’m all for exploring the feeling of existential angst – the absurdity of life, alienation, solitude, etc (heck aren’t these all just SO wonderful?-) – but I find it far more effective and meaningful to do this in the form of fiction, not philosophy.

I do love Sartre and others for helping to take the blinders off of mankind – while it’s terrifying to live in a world without absolute meaning, it’s reality – and I love how Sartre understands that meaninglessness does not translate to anarchy or “anything goes”, on the contrary, as Baskin says in the introduction, his most significant tenet was that we “must be conscious of our freedom to choose and concerned with the effect our choice will have on all men”.

However, if you are going to pick this book up, for most I would suggest just reading Part 1, “The Humanism of Existentialism”, as from Part 2 (“the Problem of Nothingness”) on it is dense and quite dry, better suited for those who truly love the study of philosophy.

Quotes:
“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
…
Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.”

“The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoievsky said, ‘If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.’ That is the very starting point of existentialism.”

“…but if I’ve discarded God the Father, there has to be someone to invent values. You’ve got to take things as they are. Moreover, to say that we invent values means nothing else but this: life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.” ( )

The rare book I could not finish. Once in a while its good to read a difficult book. But I woke up yesterday morning thinking, life is just too short to spend a couple of weeks on this. The first chapter on Humanism and Existentialism was very good. (You are what you do and you're responsible for it). But I got very lost in being and nothingness. ( )

French, Existentialism ( )