Leaps & boulders

“At the end of his 1895 address “Is Life Worth Living?,” the pragmatist philosopher William James tells his audience to take a leap of faith: we may never be certain that our lives have a meaning, but maybe they do. Why not take a chance on this “maybe”? Day in and day out, we take more mundane leaps of faith. For example, I promise to meet a friend at her apartment; while I may be killed on the highway on my way there, I may not, either. I hope to see her later, and that hope animates my choice to get on the road. Why not adopt a similar faith in life’s worthwhileness? I used to balk at the idea of a leap of faith. I sided with Albert Camus over Søren Kierkegaard, whom he mercilessly critiques in the first part of the Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, Kierkegaard recognizes the absurdity of the human condition— “the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.” Yet, Kierkegaard, by calling on us to take a leap of faith, eliminates the absurd. In contrast, Camus says, “Being able to remain on the dizzying crest—that is integrity and the rest is subterfuge.” Instead of the leap of faith, Camus proposes a different image: Sisyphus rolling the boulder endlessly up a hill, only to see it fall back down. Camus advocates grit over faith. Plant your feet firmly on the ground, disregard all hope of a future reward, and keep at it...” https://open.substack.com/pub/celineleboeuf/p/leaps-of-faith?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The existential self

What does Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, mean by describing the self as a relation that relates to itself? Why does Heidegger insist on using the term Dasein rather than writing about subjectivity? What does Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence” mean for a theory of the self? This video investigates existentialist themes in these three thinkers’ approaches to the self and identity. I touch on self-relation (the topic of my upcoming book on existential phenomenology), nothingness, anxiety, and authenticity. The unifying theme throughout these thinkers’ approaches to the self is the idea that the self is both situated and free… Ellie Anderson https://open.substack.com/pub/ellieanderphd/p/the-existential-self-kierkegaard?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Thinketh again

… The “good” side of his thought ledger seems to contain such stereotypically manly virtues as power and certainty and control. Every man, he writes, must “manfully control his thoughts. … Doubts and fears should be rigorously excluded.” (It’s a little like “The Secret,” but for men.) With total confidence, Allen swaggers right into some very ugly ideas. “The truth is that oppressor and slave are cooperators in ignorance,” he writes, “and, while seeming to afflict each other, are in reality afflicting themselves.” I shivered in recognition — it’s the kind of pseudo-intellectual rationalization of evil you can still find all over modern social media…

What I discovered, in my brief experiment in thinkething, is that, in the absence of clear definitions of “good” and “bad,” it is easy to prune the garden of your thoughts into self-serving shapes. But I believe we have some responsibility to make our thoughts correspond to reality — not just to expect reality to swing its huge weight around, magically, to align with our thoughts. This is especially true now, in the vortex of chaos we call 2026. Maybe this will sound like bragging, but I would rather be unhappy and weak and full of self-doubt than dishonest and cruel and puffed up with false certainty. If I ever write a self-help book, I think I will call it “As a Man Muddles Through the Disappointing Confusion of True Self-Knowledge.” Maybe, a hundred years from now, it could be a best seller, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/magazine/man-thinketh-book.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Not just consumers of a degree but creators of an education

…Perhaps this is why A.I.-enabled cheating does not seem to be a problem at Deep Springs. At other schools, students can tell themselves that they are, at worst, only cheating themselves. Students at Deep Springs learn to see themselves not as consumers of a degree (an individual good), but as creators of an education (a collective good). It’s important, too, that when second-year Deep Springers, as they’re known, make decisions about admissions and the curriculum, they know they are shaping a school that will exist when they are no longer there.

Deep Springs is unique, but it isn’t singular. Berea College is a selective four-year liberal arts school in Kentucky, one of 10 federally recognized work colleges in the United States. Founded in 1855 by abolitionists, it was the South’s first interracial, coed college. Today, its 1,500 undergraduates pay no tuition, and as at Deep Springs, they all work a campus job — at least 10 hours a week. At Berea, they receive pay to put toward housing and living expenses...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/opinion/deep-springs-college-ivy-league-education.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

You become what you do

🎶Do-be-do-be-do… “It is not just what a person shall do. What a person ‘shall become’ is ‘fixed by the conduct of this moment…’” Philip Davis, William James

Thoughts renew, life shifts

Philip Davis, “William James” (OUP 2022):

The Good Life Paradox

Matthew Hammerton points out that a meaningful life and a life that goes well for you might not be the same thing.

Picture two people on their deathbeds. The first lived comfortably, surrounded by loving family and friends, enjoying diverse pleasures and achievements throughout a long life. The second dedicated herself entirely to fighting injustice, achieving remarkable social change, but at great personal cost. Who lived the better life?

Your answer might depend on what you mean by ‘better’. Philosophers have long recognized that when we call a life ‘good’ we can mean different things. So we could be talking about a life’s moral goodness – how virtuous the person was – or its prudential goodness – how well the life went for the person living it. But there’s a third dimension we often overlook: how meaningful the life was. This gives us three distinct questions we can ask about any life: 1. Was it morally good? 2. Did it go well for the person living it? 3. Was it meaningful?

These questions pull in different directions. A morally exemplary life might involve suffering for others’ sake, making it less prudentially good. A meaningful life might also require sacrifices that reduce personal well-being. Understanding these tensions can help us navigate our choices about how to live.

Is Meaning Just Well-Being in Disguise?

Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. When we examine what makes lives meaningful, we find striking similarities to what makes lives go well. Theories of both meaning and well-being come in subjective and objective varieties, appealing to overlapping goods, such as love, knowledge, achievement, and aesthetic experience. This raises an uncomfortable question: Is ‘meaning in life’ just another way of talking about well-being? Perhaps then when someone complains that their life lacks meaning, they’re really just saying it lacks important components of well-being.

Consider the parallels. Subjective theories of well-being say your life goes well when you’re satisfied, your desires are fulfilled, or you experience pleasure. Some theories of meaning make identical claims about meaningfulness. Objective theories of well-being point to goods like knowledge, love, and achievement as being valuable for the person who has them. Theories of meaning point to exactly the same goods as sources of life’s significance.

This similarity is puzzling. If meaning and well-being are genuinely distinct, why do their theories look so alike? The most obvious explanation is that they’re actually the same thing – that ‘meaning’ is just a fancy way of talking about certain aspects of well-being…

https://philosophynow.org/issues/171/The_Good_Life_Paradox

Robert Frost, Existentialist

More Everything Forever

 Does anything more threaten to derange our understanding of human existence, its meaning and possibilities, than AI and "Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity"? Or to disrupt our proper relation to the rest of nature? This might just be a suitable title for both Existentialism and Environmental Ethics.

Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, science writer Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.

More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are. g'r

“If we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There is no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can't heal the world. We have to do that ourselves.”

quotes

What A.I. Kant Do

“…I think A.I. is a false mirror,” said Drew Lichtenberg, the dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here and a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. “It reflects back answers to black-or-white questions, but it does little to help explain the human experience the way art or philosophy can.”

He said he was shocked that students last semester were hungry for difficult plays and philosophical readings with no clear answers. “They were particularly into Kant and his ‘Analytic of the Sublime,’ Nietzsche and existential nausea, Camus and the myth of Sisyphus,” he said, adding that the cool reason of A.I. comprehends, but the seething imagination of art apprehends...”

Maureen Dowd

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/opinion/ai-liberal-arts.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Recurrent zest

“… From your Jamesian vantage point, there’s a rich contrast available here. James’s account of habit and the stream of consciousness suggests that repetition at the neurological level is what allows novelty at the level of experience — habit frees attention for the new. And his pragmatic pluralism resists both the Kierkegaardian demand for a single leap to faith and the Nietzschean demand for total affirmation. For James, the recurrence of similar experiences might be the very medium of growth — not a trap to escape, but the texture of a life progressively enriched by what William kept calling zest. Which is a very different answer to the problem of the aesthetic stage than either Kierkegaard or Percy gives.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“ https://claude.ai/share/94c225b2-8c92-4439-a750-47ed6bb16829

Repetition and rotation, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Percy

https://claude.ai/share/94c225b2-8c92-4439-a750-47ed6bb16829

Simone de Beauvoir

 

William James‘s existential pragmatism

“Modern experience—an ambiguous enough term, to be sure, and one that will require subsequent definition—is the bond among these philosophers. The roster of names we have given is hardly complete, but surely sufficient to indicate that Existentialism is not a passing fad or a mere philosophic mood of the postwar period but a major movement of human thought that lies directly in the main stream of modern history. Over the past hundred years the development of philosophy has shown a remarkable enlargement of content, a progressive orientation toward the immediate and qualitative, the existent and the actual—toward “concreteness and adequacy,” to use the words that A. N. Whitehead borrowed from William James. 

Philosophers can no longer attempt, as the British empiricists Locke and Hume attempted, to construct human experience out of simple ideas and elementary sensations. The psychic life of man is not a mosaic of such mental atoms, and philosophers were able to cling to this belief so long only because they had put their own abstractions in place of concrete experience. Thus Whitehead himself, who as a Platonist can scarcely be lumped with the Existentialists, nevertheless shares in this general existential trend within modern philosophy when he describes philosophy itself as “the critique of abstractions”—the endless effort to drag the balloon of the mind back to the earth of actual experience. 

Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be labeled an Existentialist. Indeed, at this late date, we may very well wonder whether it would not be more accurate to call James an Existentialist than a Pragmatist. What remains of American Pragmatism today is forced to think of him as the black sheep of the movement. Pragmatists nowadays acknowledge James’s genius but are embarrassed by his extremes: by the unashamedly personal tone of his philosophizing, his willingness to give psychology the final voice over logic where the two seem in conflict, and his belief in the revelatory value of religious experience. There are pages in James that could have been written by Kierkegaard, and the Epilogue to Varieties of Religious Experience puts the case for the primacy of personal experience over abstraction as strongly as any of the Existentialists has ever done. James’s vituperation of rationalism is so passionate that latter-day Pragmatists see their own residual rationalism of scientific method thereby put in question. And it is not merely a matter of tone, but of principle, that places James among the Existentialists: he plumped for a world which contained contingency, discontinuity, and in which the centers of experience were irreducibly plural and personal, as against a “block” universe that could be enclosed in a single rational system. 

Pragmatism meant something more and different for James than it did for Charles Sanders Peirce or John Dewey. The contrast between James and Dewey, particularly, sheds light on the precise point at which Pragmatism, in the strict sense, ends and Existentialism begins. A comparison between the earlier and the later writings of Dewey is almost equally illuminating on the same point. Dewey is moving in the general existential direction of modern philosophy with his insistence that the modern philosopher must break with the whole classical tradition of thought. He sees the “negative” and destructive side of philosophy (with which Existentialism has been so heavily taxed by its critics): every thinker, Dewey tells us, puts some portion of the stable world in danger as soon as he begins to think. The genial inspiration that lies behind his whole rather gangling and loose-jointed philosophy is the belief that in all departments of human experience things do not fall from heaven but grow up out of the earth. Thinking itself is only the halting and fumbling effort of a thoroughly biological creature to cope with his environment. The image of man as an earthbound and time-bound creature permeates Dewey’s writings as it does that of the Existentialists—up to a point. Beyond that point he moves in a direction that is the very opposite of Existentialism. 

What Dewey never calls into question is the thing he labels Intelligence, which in his last writings came to mean simply Scientific Method. Dewey places the human person securely within his biological and social context, but he never goes past this context into that deepest center of the human person where fear and trembling start. Any examination of inner experience—really inner experience—would have seemed to Dewey to take the philosopher too far away from nature in the direction of the theological. We have to remind ourselves here of the provincial and overtheologized atmosphere of the America in which Dewey started his work, and against which he had to struggle so hard to establish the validity of a secular intelligence. 

Given Dewey’s emphasis upon the biological and sociological contexts as ultimate, however, together with his interpretation of human thought as basically an effort to transform the environment, we end with the picture of man as essentially homo faber, the technological animal. This belief in technique is still a supreme article of the American faith. Dewey grew up in a period in which America was still wrestling with its frontier, and the mood of his writings is unshaken optimism at the expansion of our technical mastery over nature. Ultimately, the difference between Dewey and the Existentialists is the difference between America and Europe. The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.” — Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett

Kierkegaard

It’s the birthday of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (books by this author), born in Copenhagen (1813). He was the youngest of seven children, a sickly boy, and his father used to take him for imaginary walks indoors during bad weather, describing all kinds of wonderful and imaginary sights. Kierkegaard’s father was a wealthy wool merchant who had retired young, and when he died he left his son enough money to be financially independent for the rest of his life. Kierkegaard was a homebody, and rarely left Copenhagen. He enjoyed going to the theater, taking carriage rides out into the country, and chatting with people — even servants and laborers — that he met while strolling the streets. He wrote, “I had real Christian satisfaction in the thought that, if there were no other, there was definitely one man in Copenhagen whom every poor person could freely accost and converse with on the street.”

Kierkegaard is widely considered the father of existential philosophy. His work touched not only philosophy, but also theology, psychology, literary criticism, and fiction. He also came up with two concepts that are commonplace to us today: one is “subjectivity,” the idea that we all perceive the world — and “truth” — differently; and the other is the fact that faith is not possible without doubt. One must doubt the existence of God to have faith in the existence of God. Belief without doubt is just credulity. He published several books at his own expense, including Either/Or (1843), Works of Love (1847), and The Sickness Unto Death (1849). He published many works under a variety of aliases: Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio, Anti-Climacus, Hilarius Bookbinder, and Vigilius Haufniensis. He did so, he said, to disavow his own authority. He would adopt a “character” who wrote about a particular philosophical viewpoint, and then would adopt another persona to explore the opposing viewpoint.

Kierkegaard wrote: “It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards.”

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-tuesday-may-5-2026/

Very Short Introductions

• Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (978-0192804280) 
• The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (978-0199532179)