Sixty-five years after his untimely death at age 46, Albert Camus remains one of the leading lights of existentialism, a philosophy that has its roots in the 19th century’s version of dark brooding intellectuals—names like Kierkegaard, Neitszche, and Dostoevsky. But existentialism really hit its stride in Post-World War II Europe, and the Algerian-born, French-identified Camus was and arguably remains its most eloquent spokesperson. Camus was born in 1913 in Algeria when it was still under the colonial rule of France. His father was a peasant fieldworker who died in battle in World War I when Camus was just a year…
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Some 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus penned a line, “Ethos anthropoi daimon,” which most translators and the popular world of pithy, poetic phrasemakers have settled on meaning, “Character is destiny.” It’s a compact framing of what may be the most important truism applied to human beings and the struggles they endure to lead a meaningful and worthy life. To wit: Above all and in the end, a person’s character will hold sway in how they conduct themselves and how they affect other people through the course of their lives. Recently it occurred to me that the phrase…
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“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.” —From Friedrich Nietzsche‘s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (1883) The older I get and the more I am able to look back on history writ large, and the more I see that the age-old tussle between form and chaos, chaos and form, will be with us till the very end of time. (Although the question of whether there will ever be an end to time is itself a tussle among physicists…
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“If you are ever bored or blue, stand on the street corner for half an hour,” writes the visual artist and spare-time existential philosopher Maira Kalman in “The Principles of Uncertainty,” her wholly original, whimsical, disarmingly profound color-splash-of-a-book that caught my eye on a display table a few years ago in one of those small, impeccably curated bookshops in rural Maine, and which I finally got to reading this week. What you will see and experience on that corner, she says on a previous page that sets up her suggestion above, is “The People. Everyone looks so exalted, or so…
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French philosopher and playwright Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 play, “No Exit,” envisioned a hell devoid of searing flames, torture devices or red-eyed devils pitchforking inhabitants for eternity. But that doesn’t mean the punishment for unredeemed sinners wasn’t awful beyond imagining. Sartre instead placed multiple people in a locked room—in this case, two women and one man—carefully selected to provoke maximum and mutual psychological discomfort upon one another by picking astutely at the scabs of the moral failings that landed each of them in this dreaded situation, yes, for all eternity. “Anything but that!”, we can hear ourselves saying in sympathy with…