Existentialism

The Ethics of Ambiguity Simone de Beauvoir, 1947 Executive Summary De Beauvoir’s project in this book is to derive a genuine ethics from existentialism, a project she had argued, in a 1945 lecture, could not be grounded in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. If existence precedes essence, if there is no fixed human nature, no God-given purpose, no external ground for morality, how do we decide how to live? De Beauvoir’s answer is that the ambiguity of the human condition is not a problem to be solved but a tension to be inhabited. We are both free and situated, both individual and social, both the authors of meaning and dependent on a world we did not make. The thesis: genuine freedom requires willing the freedom of others, and the refusal to face this is the source of most moral failure. ...

Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883–1885 Executive Summary Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the most misread book in the Western philosophical tradition, appropriated by fascists, misquoted by motivational speakers, and dismissed by professional philosophers who distrust its literary form. What it actually is: a philosophical prose poem in which Nietzsche’s fictional prophet Zarathustra descends from a mountain to announce that God is dead, that the values built on that foundation are collapsing, and that humanity faces a choice between the last man (comfortable, unchallenging, content) and the Übermensch, the one who creates new values in the absence of inherited ones. The thesis: the death of the old moral order is not a catastrophe to be mourned but a challenge to be met, and the only honest response is the courage to create. ...