Category: Thinking

Since my library books and Ama­zon order haven’t arrived yet I start­ed reread­ing David Coop­er’s Exis­ten­tial­ism last night. I picked this up at a table in the fac­ul­ty build­ing at Notre Dame many years ago. This was a very cool table. Profs would drop what­ev­er books they no longer had a use for there for oth­er profs [and pirat­i­cal stu­dents like myself] to snatch. Unfor­tu­nate­ly I did­n’t find out about this table until my junior year, there­by miss­ing two years of poten­tial­ly awe­some library build­ing.

In any case, apart from a few copies of The New York­er whose cov­ers I cov­et­ed until I threw them out, this vol­ume is the only one I can actu­al­ly be cer­tain came from the holy table. Com­ing as it did, post- my exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy course, this book has served as a refresh­er since that day. Last night, the same sec­tion that always catch­es my eye caught my eye last night in the same sec­tion. If you use Ama­zon’s Search Inside This Book fea­ture and go to page three you can read it for your­self and a bit more. I’ll still excerpt the crit­i­cal point.

…to quote Kierkegaard again, ‘an exist­ing indi­vid­ual is always in the process of becom­ing.’ …no com­plete account can be giv­en of a human being with­out ref­er­ence to what he is in the process of becom­ing. … “As Hei­deg­ger puts it, the human being is always ‘ahead of him­self’, always unter­wegs (“on the way”). …Unlike the stone, whose essence or nature is ‘giv­en’, a per­son­’s exis­tence, writes Orte­ga y Gas­set ‘con­sists not in what it is already, but what it is not yet…Existence…is the process of realizing…the aspi­ra­tion we are.’

This is always a good reminder for me when I get frus­trat­ed about the dif­fi­cul­ty in real­iz­ing my aspi­ra­tions. As long as I exist, I’ll be in the process of becom­ing some­thing new. Sat­is­fac­tion and must arise from the jour­ney while moti­va­tion must arise from the des­ti­na­tion, even if nev­er reached. That’s almost exact­ly the point of Camus’s The Myth of Sisy­phus.

My appli­ca­tion and under­stand­ing of this idea does­n’t bind ful­ly to a pure exis­ten­tial­ism [which prob­a­bly does­n’t exist], but it works well enough for me.