Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. Affinities with Kierkegaard and Sartre are patent. He shares with these philosophers (and with the other major writers in the existentialist tradition, from Augustine and Pascal to Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche) an habitual and intense interest in the active human psyche, in the life of conscience or spirit as it is actually experienced and lived. Like these writers, he aims at nothing less than a thorough, candid exegesis of the human condition, and like them he exhibits not just a philosophical attraction but also a personal commitment to such values as individualism, free choice, inner strength, authenticity, personal responsibility, and self-determination. However, one troublesome fact remains: throughout his career Camus repeatedly denied that he was an existentialist. Was this an accurate and honest self-assessment? On the one hand, some critics have questioned this “denial” (using the term almost in its modern clinical sense), attributing it to the celebrated Sartre-Camus political “feud” or to a certain stubbornness or even contrariness on Camus’s part. In their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist, and in certain respects (e.g., in his unconditional and passionate concern for the individual) as an even truer specimen of the type than Sartre. On the other hand, besides his personal rejection of the label, there appear to be solid reasons for challenging the claim that Camus is an existentialist. For one thing, it is noteworthy that he never showed much interest in (indeed he largely avoided) metaphysical and ontological questions (the philosophical raison d’etre of Heidegger and Sartre). Of course there is no rule that says an existentialist must be a metaphysician. However, Camus’s seeming aversion to technical philosophical discussion does suggest one way in which he distanced himself from contemporary existentialist thought. Another point of divergence is that Camus seems to have regarded existentialism as a complete and systematic world-view, that is, a fully articulated doctrine. In his view, to be a true existentialist one had to commit to the entire doctrine (and not merely to bits and pieces of it), and this was apparently something he was unwilling to do. A further point of separation, and possibly a decisive one, is that Camus actively challenged and set himself apart from the existentialist motto that being precedes essence. Ultimately, against Sartre in particular and existentialists in general, he clings to his instinctive belief in a common human nature. In his view human existence necessarily includes an essential core element of dignity and value, and in this respect he seems surprisingly closer to the humanist tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition of skepticism and relativism from Nietzsche to Derrida (the latter his fellow-countryman and, at least in his commitment to human rights and opposition to the death penalty, his spiritual successor and descendant).

EXISTENTIALISM AND DEATH*Existentialism is not a doctrine but a label widely used to lump together several philosophers and writers who are more or less opposedto doctrines while considering a few extreme experiences the beststarting point for philosophic thinking. Spearheading the movement,Kierkegaard derided Hegel's system and wrote books on Fear andTrembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and The Sickness unto Death, which is despair, ( 1849). Three-quarters of a centurylater, Jaspers devoted a central section of his Psychology of Weltanschauungen (1919) to extreme situations (Grenzsituationen),among which he included guilt and death. But if existentialism iswidely associated not merely with extreme experiences in generalbut above all with death, this is due primarily to Heidegger whodiscussed death in a crucial 32-page chapter of his influential Beingand Time (1927). Later, Sartre included a section on death in hisBeing and Nothingness (1943) and criticized Heidegger; and Camusdevoted his two would-be philosophic books to suicide (The Mythof Sisyphus, 1942) and murder (The Rebel, 1951).It was Heidegger who moved death into the center of discussion.But owing in part to the eccentricity of his approach, the discussion influenced by him has revolved rather more around histerminology than around the phenomena which are frequently referred to but rarely illuminated. A discussion of existentialism anddeath should therefore begin with Heidegger, and by first givingsome attention to his approach it may throw critical light on muchof existentialism.2Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, begins with a 40-pageIntroduction that ends with "The Outline of the Treatise." Weare told that the projected work has two parts, each of whichconsists of three long sections. The published work, subtitled "FirstHalf," contains only the first two sections of Part One. The"Second Half" has never appeared.* This essay was written for The Meaning of Death, edited by Herman Feifel,to be published by McGraw-Hill in 1960.75Of the two sections published, the first bears the title, "Thepreparatory fundamental analysis of Being-there." "Being-there"(Dasein) is Heidegger's term for human existence, as opposed tothe being of things and animals. Heidegger's central concern iswith "the meaning of Being"; but he finds that this concern itselfis "a mode of the Being of some beings" (p. 7), namely humanbeings, and he tries to show in his Introduction that "the meaningof Being" must be explored by way of an analysis of "Being-there."This, he argues is the only way to break the deadlock in the discussion of Being begun by the Greek philosophers?a deadlock dueto the fact that philosophers, at least since Aristotle, always discussed beings rather than Being.1 To gain an approach to Being, wemust study not things but a mode of Being; and the mode of Beingmost open to us is our own Being: Being-there. Of this Heideggerproposes to offer a phenomenological analysis, and he expresslystates his indebtedness to Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological school (especially on p. 38). Indeed, Being and Timefirst appeared in Husserl's Jahrbuch f?r Philosophie und ph?nomenologische Forschung.It is entirely typical of Heidegger's essentially unphenomenological procedure that he explains "The phenomenological method ofthe inquiry" (?7) by devoting one subsection to "The concept ofthe phenomenon" and another to "The concept of the Logos," eachtime offering dubious discussions of the etymologies of the Greekwords, before he finally comes to the conclusion that the meaningof phenomenology can be formulated: "to allow to see from itselfthat which shows itself, as it shows itself from itself" (Das was sichzeigt, so wie es sich von ihm selbst her zeigt, von ihm selbst hersehen lassen). And he himself adds: "But this is not saying anythingdifferent at all from the maxim cited above; 'To the things themselves!'" This had been Husserl's maxim. Heidegger takes sevenpages of dubious arguments, questionable etymologies, and extremely arbitrary and obscure coinages and formulations to say in abizarre way what not only could be said, but what others beforehim actually had said, in four words.1 My suggestion that the distinction between das Sein and das Seiende be rendered in English by using Being for the former and beings for the latter hasHeidegger's enthusiastic approval. His distinction was suggested to him by theGreek philosophers, and he actually found the English "beings" superior to theGerman Seiendes because the English recaptures the Greek plural, ta onta. (Cf.my Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p .206.) All translations from theGerman in the present essay are my own.76In Being and Time coinages are the crux of his technique. Hecalls "the characteristics of Being-there existentials [Existenzialien].They must be distinguished sharply from the determinations of theBeing of those beings whose Being is not Being-there, the latterbeing categories" (p. 44). "Existentials and categories are the twobasic possibilities of characteristics of Being. The beings that correspond to them demand different modes of asking primary questions: beings are either Who (existence) or Which (Being-at-handin the widest sense)" (p. 45).It has not been generally noted, if it has been noted at all, thatwithout these quaint locutions the book would not only be muchless obscure, and therefore much less fitted for endless discussionsin European and South-American graduate seminars, but also afraction of its length?considerably under 100 pages instead of438. For Heidegger does not introduce coinages to say briefly whatwould otherwise require lengthy repititions. On the contrary.While Kierkegaard had derided professorial manners and concentrated on the most extreme experiences, and Nietzsche wroteof guilt, conscience, and death as if he did not even know ofacademic airs, Heidegger housebreaks Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche'sproblems by discussing them in such a style that Hegel and Aquinasseem unacademic by comparison. The following footnote is entirelycharacteristic: "The auth. may remark that he has repeatedly communicated the analysis of the about-world [Umwelt] and, altogether, the 'hermeneutics of the facticity' of Being-there, in hislectures since the wint. semest. 1919/20" (p. 72). Husserl is alwayscited as "E. Husserl" and Kant as "I. Kant"?and his minions dutifully cite the master as "M. Heidegger."How Kierkegaard would have loved to comment on Heidegger'soccasional "The detailed reasons for the following considerationswill be given only in . . . Part II, Section 2"?which never saw thelight of day (p. 89). Eleven pages later we read: "only now thehere accomplished critique of the Cartesian, and fundamentally stillpresently accepted, world-ontology can be assured of its philosophicrights. To that end the following must be shown (cf. Part I, Sect.3)." Alas, this, too, was never published; but after reading the fourquestions that follow one does not feel any keen regret. Witnessthe second: "Why is it that in-worldly beings take the place ofthe leaped-over phenomenon by leaping into the picture as theontological topic?" (I.e., why have beings been discussed insteadof Being?) Though Heidegger is hardly a poet, his terminology77recalls one of Nietzsche's aphorisms: "The poet presents his thoughtsfestively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could notwalk" (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 54).If all the sentences quoted so far are readily translatable intoless baroque language, the following italicized explanation of understanding (p. 144) may serve as an example of the many more opaquepronouncements. (No other well-known philosophic work containsnearly so many italics?or rather their German equivalent whichtakes up twice as much space as ordinary type.) "Understandingis the existential Being of the own Being-able-to-be of Being-thereitself, but such that this Being in itself opens up the Where-at ofBeing with itself" (Verstehen ist das existenziale Sein des eigenenSeink?nnens des Daseins selbst, so zwar, dass dieses Sein an ihmselbst das Woran des mit ihm selbst Seins erschliesst). The following sentence reads in full: "The structure of this existential mustnow be grasped and expressed still more sharply." Still more?Heidegger's discussion of death comes near the beginning of thesecond of the two sections he published. To understand it, two keyconcepts of the first section should be mentioned briefly. The firstis Das Man, one of Heidegger's happier coinages. The German wordman is the equivalent of the English one in such locutions as "onedoes not do that" or "of course, one must die." But the Germanman does not have any of the other meanings of the English wordone. It is therefore understandable why Das Man has been translatedsometimes as "the public" or "the anonymous They," but sinceHeidegger also makes much of the phrase Man selbst, which means"oneself," it is preferable to translate Das Man as "the One." TheOne is the despot that rules over the inauthentic Being-there of oureveryday live

Forone thing, it came at a moment in the early 1960s when the intellectualhegemony of existentialism - virtually universal in the immediate postwar years - was giving way to that new intellectual passion calledstructuralism.

i want to begin by talking about the imagine nature which is the first of those three natures um it's really tempting when i look at a flower like a rose um a nice red rose 00:35:22 to think that the color the redness is right on the rose unless you are extremely accomplished when you look at a red rose you see the color right out there in the rose and 00:35:34 you assume that your eyes are simply detecting color that is in the rose actually that can't possibly be true color is something that emerges um as 00:35:45 john pointed out this morning through the interaction of our sense faculties and whatever is happening outside of them and the color emerges in our minds but we imagine things to exist outside of consciousness just as we perceive 00:35:58 them and that nature that we ascribe to the objects of our experience is their imagined nature it's an imagined nature because we project it out there even though on reflection we each know 00:36:11 that the redness can't possibly be painted out there in the rose footnote it's uh equally stupid to think that when we detect the redness we're detecting in inner red paint that 00:36:23 somehow um is just detected by an inner eye i assure you that when you look inside your brain you will find no such inner red paint

Had blotted out man’s image and his cr

Then it was that the thought of death burst into my daily life. I would measure the years separating me from my end I would look for examples of men of my age who were already dead. And I was tormented by the thought that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I had no idea. Frankly, was what I was doing worth continuing?

some bullshittersbullshit because they are naı ̈ve, biased, or sloppyin their handling of statements. They do notrealize they are crafting or spreading bullshit.There is a primary need therefore to be alert tothe possibility of bullshit. While accepting itsubiquity, one must avoid becoming so accustomedto bullshit as to be indifferent to its presence. Inother words, it is necessary to develop a healthycynicism about the possibility of bullshit.

:Husserl; Heidegger; Merleau-Ponty; fenomenologi;

Camus follows Sartre's definition on the absurd, absurd is "That which is meaningless. Thus man's existence is absurd because his contingency finds no external justification".[71] The absurd is created because of the realization of man, who is placed into an unintelligent universe, that human values are not founded on a solid external component; or as Camus himself explains, the absurd is the result of the "confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world".[74] Even though absurdity is inescapable, Camus does not drift towards nihilism. But the realization of absurdity leads to the question: why someone should continue to live? Suicide is an option that Camus firmly dismisses as the renunciation of human values and freedom. Rather than, he proposes we accept that absurdity is a part of our lives and live with it.

On the other hand, Camus focused most of his philosophy around existential questions. The absurdity of life, the inevitable ending (death) is highlighted in his acts, his belief that the absurd – life being void of meaning, or man's inability to know that meaning if it were to exist – was something that man should embrace, his anti-Christianity, his commitment to individual moral freedom and responsibility are only a few of the similarities with other existential writers.[69] More importantly, Camus addressed one of the fundamental questions of existentialism: the problem of suicide. He wrote "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide" Camus viewed the question of suicide as arising naturally as a solution to the absurdity of life.[70]

Newport’s basic theme: we fell into our habits of using phones, social media, email, web-browsing etc without making conscious decisions about what our priorities were.

Sartre argued that a central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that they are individuals—independently acting and responsible, conscious beings ("existence")—rather than what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, or other preconceived categories the individuals fit ("essence"). The actual life of the individuals is what constitutes what could be called their "true essence" instead of there being an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define them. Thus, human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life.[27]

While the predominant value of existentialist thought is commonly acknowledged to be freedom, its primary virtue is authenticity.[6] In the view of the existentialist, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation, confusion, or dread in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.[7] Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.[8][9]

If in observing the present state of the world and life in general, from a Christian point of view one had to say (and from a Christian point of view with complete justification): It is a disease. And if I were a physician and someone asked me “What do you think should be done?” I would answer, “The first thing, the unconditional condition for anything to be done, consequently the very first thing that must be done is: create silence, bring about silence; God's Word cannot be heard, and if in order to be heard in the hullabaloo it must be shouted deafeningly with noisy instruments, then it is not God’s Word; create silence! Ah, everything is noisy; and just as strong drink is said to stir the blood, so everything in our day, even the most insignificant project, even the most empty communication, is designed merely to jolt the senses and to stir up the masses, the crowd, the public, noise! And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale. Yes, everything is soon turned upside-down: communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point in regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than---rubbish! Oh, create silence!” Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination 1851 p. 47-48 Hong 1990

How much that is hidden may still reside in a person, or how much may still reside hidden! How inventive is hidden inwardness in hiding itself and in deceiving or evading others, the hidden inwardness that preferred that no one would suspect its existence, modestly afraid of being seen and mortally afraid of being entirely disclosed! Is it not so that the one person never completely understands the other? But if he does not understand him completely, then of course it is always possible that the most indisputable thing could still have a completely different explanation that would, note well, be the true explanation, since an assumption can indeed explain a great number of instances very well and thereby confirm its truth and yet show itself to be untrue as soon as the instance comes along that it cannot explain-and it would indeed be possible that this instance or this somewhat more precise specification could come even at the last moment. Therefore all calm and, in the intellectual sense, dispassionate observers, who eminently know how to delve searchingly and penetratingly into the inner being, these very people judge with such infinite caution or refrain from it entirely because, enriched by observation, they have a developed conception of the enigmatic world of the hidden, and because as observers they have learned to rule over their passions. Only superficial, impetuous passionate people, who do not understand themselves and for that reason naturally are unaware that they do not know others, judge precipitously. Those with insight, those who know never do this. Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, (1847) Hong 1995 p. 228-229

What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

One must first learn to know himself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σεαυτόν). Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, sinister traveling companion — that irony of life, which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing (Socrates) just as God created the world from nothing. But in the waters of morality it is especially at home to those who still have not entered the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tumbles a person about in a horrible way, for a time lets him feel happy and content in his resolve to go ahead along the right path, then hurls him into the abyss of despair. Often it lulls a man to sleep with the thought, "After all, things cannot be otherwise," only to awaken him suddenly to a rigorous interrogation. Frequently it seems to let a veil of forgetfulness fall over the past, only to make every single trifle appear in a strong light again. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome temptation's power, there may come at almost the same time, right on the heels of perfect victory, an apparently insignificant external circumstance which pushes him down, like Sisyphus, from the height of the crag. Often when a person has concentrated on something, a minor external circumstance arises which destroys everything. (As in the case of a man who, weary of life, is about to throw himself into the Thames and at the crucial moment is halted by the sting of a mosquito.) Frequently a person feels his very best when the illness is the worst, as in tuberculosis. In vain he tries to resist it but he has not sufficient strength, and it is no help to him that he has gone through the same thing many times; the kind of practice acquired in this way does not apply here. (Søren Kierkegaard's Journals & Papers IA Gilleleie, 1 August 1835)

The common thread in the literature of the existentialists is coping with the emotional anguish arising from our confrontation with nothingness, and they expended great energy responding to the question of whether surviving it was possible. Their answer was a qualified "Yes," advocating a formula of passionate commitment and impassive stoicism.— Alan Pratt[1]

it is in the power of man, by his own pains and industry, to forward the perfection of-his nature.

views that are familiar in existentialism.

, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.

Freedman also points out how Siddhartha described Hesse's interior dialectic: "All of the contrasting poles of his life were sharply etched: the restless departures and the search for stillness at home; the diversity of experience and the harmony of a unifying spirit; the security of religious dogma and the anxiety of freedom."[8]