Existentialism
Notes
Existentialism asks the questions that rational inquiry cannot easily answer: What is worth wanting? What makes a life meaningful? How should we face a world without predefined purpose?
Meaning as Construction
The foundational existentialist move is to deny that meaning is given. Value and Meaning maps this territory — from the claim that life has no predefined meaning to the constructivist response: meaning is not discovered but authored through introspection, commitment, and authenticity. This includes how mortality sharpens choices, and how different philosophical traditions (pragmatism, Taoism, resonance theory) account for what makes something genuinely worth pursuing.
Freedom and Its Limits
Existentialism is inseparable from the problem of freedom. Freedom and Agency traces two forms — negative freedom (absence of constraint) and positive freedom (actual capacity to pursue what matters) — and the three ways agency collapses: surrender to external forces, paralysis by infinite options, and objectification. Free will is examined: whether it can survive determinism, and what it means to act from genuine self-knowledge rather than mere preference.
Being a Subject
To exist authentically is to resist reduction to an object. Subjectivity articulates what it means to be a conscious, responsible agent — not fixed or quantifiable but capable of growth, transcendence, and proactive self-direction. The risk of the opposite — losing oneself to an external ideal and becoming its instrument — is equally part of the picture.
Acceptance and the Path Through Resistance
Not all existentialist responses to the human condition involve striving. Acceptance and Effortless Action draws on Stoicism and Taoist philosophy to show how excessive effort can backfire — and how accepting what cannot be controlled, even loving one's fate (amor fati), is itself a form of existential mastery rather than resignation.
Philosophers
Ralph waldo Emerson (philosopher) Simone de Beauvoir (philosopher) Soren Kierkegaard (philosopher) Jean-Paul Sartre (philosopher) Friedrich Nietzsche (philosopher) Arthur Schopenhauer (philosopher) Isaiah Berlin (philosopher)
Books
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (book) On the Shortness of Life (book) Man's Search For Meaning (book) Ethics of ambiguity (book) Beyond Good and Evil (book) Freedom and Circumstance (book) The Second Mountain (book) The Art of Being (book) Tao Te Ching (book) A Significant Life (book)
Other MOC
Personal identity (Map) Wellbeing (Map)