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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi
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To: accountclosed who wrote (22276)4/17/1999 10:08:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly  Read Replies (1) of 71178
 
I always thought that the nothingness meant that you could create your being into whatever you valued. It was a positive message.

I find the definition of existentialism to be among the slipperiest. (Not your definition of existentialism, but all of them). One problem of 'creating your being into whatever you value' is that such a system makes moral norms contingent upon what you like; there's no outside absolutes to judge the preferences themselves. So a culture might decide that "blood and soil" is the ultimate good, like some folks did in Germany earlier this century. Martin Heidegger, an existential phenomenologist as was Sarte, was a committed Nazi. While this doesn't apply to Sarte, it nevertheless doesn't violate anything within the existentialist system. Heidegger was becoming what he valued, and too bad for the untermenschen.

On the individual level, as opposed to the cultural, I find existentialism to be bleak. It's got nothing at its core. And all the grand ideas like justice, the Good, and so on become just nonsense.
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