Thomas Flynn (2)

Oh dear, it looks as if I’ve been bandying around the term ‘existentialist’ without really knowing what it means…
In the Preface to my latest adventure with the Very Short Introductions series, Thomas R. Flynn tells me that most people associate existentialism with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the Left-Bank Parisian cafés where they hung out. And the problem with that is that existentialism tends to get ‘packaged’ as a cultural phenomenon of a certain historical period which tends to get linked to the problems of that era and not really relevant to our own. Flynn is on a mission to correct that because he says that existentialism is a way of doing philosophy that is still current.
So his first chapter, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ is about demolishing the idea of philosophy as a doctrine or system of thought. Philosophy, he says, and I agree with him in principle, is about addressing the issues in our lives and examining the human condition. (The problem is, IMO, that some philosophy is very difficult to engage with incomprehensible, (yes, Wittgenstein, I’m looking at you) and some of it is dead boring and long-winded (yes, Rousseau I’m looking at you too.) But philosophy can be illuminating and helpful as I’ve found by reading Peter Singer, Damon Young, Alain de Botton, and more recently Simon Longstaff. It can also be very annoying when it seeks to justify political or economic ideas I disapprove of. (See my review of On Equality at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1407097578?book_show_action=false&from....

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/12/03/existentialism-a-very-short-introduction-by-...… (mer)

Recently two different people have said to me in response to remarks of mine: “That’s very existential.” Both people used the word differently. I thought that one of them was incorrect but then I asked myself: do I really understand what existentialism is? I went first to the Oxford Dictionary and then to Wikipedia but did not find a clear definition. The next step was to order this book. I have read several of these Oxford University Press “Very Short Introductions” and they have been marvellous. All perfectly lucid and, with concentration, easy to follow.
Flynn’s book, sadly, was not as good as the others. He writes much about precursors of existentialist theory, much about how existentialism overlaps with other philosophies, and much about what existentialism is not. I had my pencil ready to highlight what existentialism actually is but even that did not work to my satisfaction. To give Flynn his due, I think he was asked to define a philosophy the entirety of which is difficult to pin down.
In the end I went back to Google and found a definition that sort of matches up with Flynn’s book and is sort of what I thought existentialism was in the first place.
“Existentialism is an atheist philosophy of human freedom conceived in terms of individual responsibility and authenticity. Its fundamental premise, that ‘existence precedes essence’, implies that we as human beings have no given essence or nature but must forge our own values and meanings in an inherently meaningless or absurd world of existence. Obliged to make our own choices, we can either confront the anguish (or Angst) of this responsibility, or evade it by claiming obedience to some determining convention or duty, thus acting in ‘bad faith’.… (mer)