EXISTENTIALISM SIMPLIFIED!

Well the mercury is rising everyone...CAT is just a month away!Lately I have been thinking that although we talk a lot about the reasoning and verbal section of CAT, we focus hardly on the most ubiquitous section in CAT English i.e.Reading Comprehension.We know different terms like eclectic reading ,nuances of reading,mind mapping et al but truly speaking hardly a few must have seriously done any of these.I call RC your best buddy in CAT because you can rely on it even if you have not put in a lot of effort. Over the years,CAT has had comprehensions from various realms like philosophy,history,religion,psychology etc.The passages based on philosophy are the eyesore of everybody as the pressure of the CAT environment doesn't let anybody concentrate and get to the crux of the matter.My suggestion would be to skip such passages but you should have a little insight on them , in case you have no better option.

Today one of my students asked me about EXISTENTIALISM.Though I had a preliminary idea about it and knew about Sartre,Kierkegaard and Nietzsche et al but then I wanted to simplify the entire concept....so Google came to my rescue.I read a few things which I wanted to share with all of you.Existentialistic ideas came out of a time in society when there was a deep sense of despair following the Great Depression and World War II. There was a spirit of optimism in society that was destroyed by World War I and its mid-century calamities. This despair has been articulated by existentialist philosophers well into the 1970s and continues on to this day as a popular way of thinking and reasoning.

Existentialism in the broader sense is a 20th century philosophy that is centered upon the analysis of existence and of the way humans find themselves existing in the world. The notion is that humans exist first and then each individual spends a lifetime changing their essence or nature. In simpler words, existentialism is a philosophy concerned with finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. The belief is that people are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life as they make choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlook. And personal choices become unique without the necessity of an objective form of truth. An existentialist believes that a person should be forced to choose and be responsible without the help of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions. Existentialism stresses that a person's judgment is the determining factor for what is to be believed rather than by arbitrary religious or secular world values.

An existentialist could either be a religious moralist, agnostic relativist, or an amoral atheist. Kierkegaard, a religious philosopher, Nietzsche, an anti-Christian, Sartre, an atheist, and Camus an atheist, are credited for their works and writings about existentialism. Jean-paul Sartre is noted for bringing the most international attention to existentialism in the 20th century. Each basically agrees that human life is in no way complete and fully satisfying because of suffering and losses that occur when considering the lack of perfection, power, and control one has over their life. Perhaps the most prominent theme in existentialist writing is that of choice. Humanity's primary distinction, in the view of most existentialists, is the freedom to choose. Existentialists have held that human beings do not have a fixed nature, or essence, as other animals and plants do; each human being makes choices that create his or her own nature. According to Sartre,choice is central to human existence, and it is inescapable; even the refusal to choose is a choice. Freedom of choice entails commitment and responsibility. Because individuals are free to choose their own path, existentialists have argued, they must accept the risk and responsibility of following their commitment wherever it leads.

Kierkegaard held that it is spiritually crucial to recognize that one experiences not only a fear of specific objects but also a feeling of general apprehension, which he called dread. He interpreted it as God's way of calling each individual to make a commitment to a personally valid way of life. The word anxiety (Angst) has a similarly crucial role in the work of Martin Heidegger; anxiety leads to the individual's confrontation with nothingness and with the impossibility of finding ultimate justification for the choices he or she must make. In the philosophy of Sartre, the word nausea is used for the individual's recognition of the pure contingency of the universe, and the word anguish is used for the recognition of the total freedom of choice that confronts the individual at every moment.

Existentialism is a vast and profound subject but I have tried to highlight the main points and the pillars of the philosophy. It is a very interesting area if you get into the details , nevertheless if you get a comprehension based on it,I am sure you will be able to sail through atleast a couple of questions.

Another topic of interest is the Civil Wars...so my next post shall carry some gyan on that.In the meantime all of you are free to ask about any other topic.Till then Happy Reading!!!