Existentialism: Preventive meaning

Friday, November 21, 2025

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

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Texts Fall '26

Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger,... Mariana Allesandri, Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves through Dark Moods... Irvin Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept...Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction... The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction... RECOMMENDED (& on library reserve): Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe... Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters... Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife... Soren Kierkegaard, tba... William James, What Makes a Life Significant; Is Life Worth Living; On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings; tba...

Existentialism is a Humanism (1946)

My purpose here is to offer a defence of existentialism against several reproaches that have been laid against it. First, it has been reproached as an invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair. For if every way to a solution is barred, one would have to regard any action in this world as entirely ineffective, and one would arrive finally at a contemplative philosophy. Moreover, since contemplation is a luxury, this would be only another bourgeois philosophy. This is, especially, the reproach made by the Communists... J-P Sartre, continues: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm

The Essence of Humanism (1905)

Humanism is a ferment that has ’come to stay.’ It is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight. Some writers are strongly conscious of the shifting, others half unconscious, even though their own vision may have undergone much change. The result is no small confusion in debate, the half-conscious humanists often taking part against the radical ones, as if they wished to count upon the other side... William James, continues: https://www.authorama.com/meaning-of-truth-6.html