Podcast
Philosophize This!
The book explores the concept of existentialism through the experiences of its main character, who grapples with the absurdity of existence and the lack of preordained meaning in the world. Sartre uses examples like the character's reaction to a chair and a chestnut tree to illustrate this feeling of absurdity.
if anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered in good faith that it was nothing. Simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature.
— Episode: Episode #086 ... Sartre and Camus pt. 1...
Episode: Episode #086 ... Sartre and Camus pt. 1 - Freedom
The book explores the concept of existentialism through the experiences of its main character, who grapples with the absurdity of existence and the lack of preordained meaning in the world. Sartre uses examples like the character's reaction to a chair and a chestnut tree to illustrate this feeling of absurdity.
if anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered in good faith that it was nothing. Simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature.
Existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category. It was the very paste of things.
This root was needed into existence or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished.
The diversity of things, their individuality were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted leaving soft monstrous masses all in disorder, naked in a frightful obscene nakedness.
I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn't need to move in order to see behind the trees, the blue columns and the lampposts of the bandstand and the veleta. In the midst of a mountain of laurel, all these objects, how can I explain? They inconvenienced me. I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way with more reserve.
