Joyous (pragmatic, stoic) existentialism

In Love with Life: Reflections on the Joy of Living and Why We Hate to Die by John Lachs

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2489645.In_Love_with_Life

An absurd exit

"…In 1960, at the age of forty-six, he was killed in a car crash. He was carrying a return train ticket at the time. As many (including Sartre) have pointed out, the greatest proponent of absurdism suffered an absurd death…"

https://literaryreview.co.uk/inside-the-outsider

The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus (Translated from French by Ryan Bloom) - review by Joanna Kavenna

Making of hell a heaven

Late in my professorial career, I keep discovering philosophers I'd never heard of. Is this guy any relation to Fred?

"…[John] Macmurray devotes as much space to spelling out an alternative to the egocentric bias of Western philosophy as he does to arguing against its theoretical bias. Regarding the theoretical bias, he concludes that 'I do' is more foundational than 'I think'. Regarding the egocentric bias, he argues that the fundamental unit of personal reality is not 'I', but 'you-and-I'. We can note a connection by observing that 'I do' implies a 'you' interacting with an 'I', but Macmurray's two criticisms remain distinct. Macmurray didn't argue for the importance of positive personal relationships, he started from it, observing that the most valued thing in our lives is the relationships central to them, giving our lives meaning. Sartre said "Hell is other people": Macmurray could equally have said "Heaven is other people." Both are true, but Macmurray is more inclined to dwell on the positive…"

Jeanne Warren
Philosophy Now
Oct/Nov '25

The true joy in life

I keep encountering this wonderful George Bernard Shaw monologue on the internet, actually a hybrid of his 1903 play Man and Superman and one of his speeches. Its repeated meming evidently is due to Jeff Goldblum's impressive recitation from memory. Definitely worth remembering and repeating.

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."
― George Bernard Shaw

At your age I looked for hardship, danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely. I did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward was, I had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live…

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy…

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

Life is no "brief candle" for me.

It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

Perpetual gratitude

Preventive meaning

"The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself."

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

https://substack.com/@misanthropist/note/c-179601188?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The Loved Ones

I read this in a secular spirit, whatever Wendell's intentions: the permanent world is this one, but inverted. As Emerson said: "there is no other world." But there are other ways to take it. And my dear departed are indeed present, ever more-so as time goes by. And I am ever less absent. I begin to inhabit what Richard Ford calls the Permanent Period.