Come on, let’s not forget that historically existentialism in the 20th century was in part a reaction to the horrors of World War II. Folks like Camus, Sartre and deBeauvoir were in ways large and small embedded in the French resistance to Hitler and the Nazis.
In fact, in my opinion, the best account of existentialism as a substantive philosophy “out in a particular world” is conveyed in Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Blood Of Others. Basically it is an attempt to flesh out the moral ambiguities embedded in a world that she interpreted philosophically in The Ethics Of Amibiguity.
On the other hand, I suspect your own “to-do” list revolves more around the objectivist credo: “one of us” vs. “one of them”
Me? As I once noted previously here…
[b]I was born and bred into the belly of the working class beast…worked in the shipyards, the steel mills. And then the army…Vietnam. Six plus years of college. 25 plus years of political activism. Marriage. Parental responsibilities. Paying the bills. Intellectual pursuits of all sorts.
I’ve had ample opportunity to actually “test” the ideas I’ve bumped into. And then to come up with new philosophical configurations all my own.[/b]
How about you? How do you connect the dots here between what you think philosophically and the depth of your own experiences?
What on earth does that mean though? Your own “steady ship” in my view is largely a world of words.
That’s why [your protestations to the contrary] you only really feel comfortable in this exchange up on the skyhooks. You come down to earth only long enough to remind me that “in the future” your own “progressive” behaviors will be the norm. Or, if not, the species is doomed.
Or so it seems to me.
From my vantage point the subject [in the is/ought world] revolves around the ideas that I raise here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176529
Whereas, in my opinion, your own narrative regarding “I” revolves more around the ideas I raise here:
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296
And until you intertwine your conflicted interactions with others in an exchange that is more in alignment with my own abortion trajectory above, we are likely to remain out of sync.
Perhaps, but what the objectivists then do is to anchor “I” here [in the is/ought world] to one or another font/foundation: God, reason, deontology, ideology, nature.
One or another intellectual rendition of this:
1] I am rational
2] I am rational because I have access to the ideal
3] I have access to the ideal because I grasp the one true nature of the objective world
4] I grasp the one true nature of the objective world because I am rational