Existentialism is an attitude that recognizes the unresolvable confusion of the human world, yet resists the all-too-human temptation to resolve the confusion by grasping toward whatever appears or can be made to appear firm or familiar (Robert Solomon)

Useful take-aways from existential thinking

  • Accept your own mortality
  • There is no objective meaning to life, only the subjective meaning you build for yourself (and must constantly rebuild in every moment of your existence); become who you are (Nietzsche)
  • Embracing these two facts can make you incredibly free, but it is overwhelming and most humans deny their own freedom

The serious man denies his own freedom by narrowing the scope of life; he assigns himself goals and values that he considers absolute (valuable in and of themselves)

  • The serious man is dishonest because he masks himself the process by which he must constantly deny his own freedom; by masking the fact that he freely establishes the value of the end he pursues, he makes himself the slave of that end
  • Certain individuals can live in the universe of the serious in all honesty; for example, the lack of economic means makes the world appear as given

The nihilist recognizes that things don’t have value in and of themselves, but fails to build his own subjective meaning

The adventurer (Nietzsche’s overman) builds his own subjective meaning and asserts his existence but fails to take into account that of other men

  • Every project unfolds in a human world and affects men. Other men build the world for us, they endow it with human significations. Our projects can only be defined by their interference with the projects of others. Man can only find meaning for his existence in the existence of other men
  • By refusing to recognize that his subjectivity transcends itself towards others, the adventurer encloses himself in a false independence and contempt for other men that can push him to tyranny