Existentialism has celebrated the freedom to create our own lives,
liberated from anxieties coming from external doctrines.
In other words: nothing outside of us can tell us how to live.
We exist, that's all. Then we build our lives from the inside out.

Sartre and Camus pushed existentialism to extremes.
For Camus, the absence of preexisting absolute codes
makes us face our ultimate choice: why live at all?
Why not commit suicide?
Our freedom is as absurd as our destiny, he argued.
We are like the mythical Sisyphus
condemned by the gods to push a rock up a mountain
and let it roll down only to start all over again.
In the face of death, our day to day tasks seem absurd.
We are all strangers in life.
Yet Camus imagined Sisyphus happy.
For Camus, the existential choice is to decide
to live in the face of life's absurdity.
And this absurdity comes from the senseless nature of life.
Where are we going? Why?

For Sartre,
the discovery of our existential condition gives us nausea.
Life is dirty as mud.
We have as much right to life
as the roots of a chestnut tree anchored deeply in the earth.
Nothing makes sense by itself.
We have to pull ourselves up from the mud by our bootstraps,
and create our lives from scratch.
We are what we do, and that's that.
We have to negotiate the hell of existence to build lives worth living.
Sartre's grim portrait of the existential condition had a shock value
meant to awaken us from any false sense of philosophical security.

The existentialism of Camus and Sartre was rooted in war-torn Europe,
when the cream of Western culture seemed to have gone mad.
What could have gone so wrong?
Europe had fallen victim to its own grandiose ideologies. It could happen again.
A protection from the totalitarian power of doctrines
was to show how totally absurd they were to begin with.

Could we now envision a more human existentialism?
Yes, this sense already has roots in history.
Call it a festive sense of life, as opposed to a doctrine-oriented sense of life.
This new existentialism embraces many things
such as pragmatism, flow, play, emergence, interactive life.
The view is quite simple (and quite complex in its consequences as well):
Strive to enjoy life with consideration.
The rest is an unknown from which we get no mandates. That's all. That's plenty.
The problem is how to live in harmony with others and with our environment,
while enjoying the life we have.
To do this and remain at peace with ourselves is no easy task.
Our way of life has to be renegotiated on a daily basis.
A sense of living as an interactive process
could help us navigate more at ease
and in creative ways which celebrate what we are.

Openings (recent entries appear first)

Existentialism does not deny religion, as Kierkegaard and the theologian Paul Tillich have argued. But religion should not have the weight of a doctrine. What pertains to life has to be negotiated in living rather than theological terms.

Karl Jaspers imagined that existentialism is best pictured in boundary conditions of extreme hardship or solitude which break with existing dogmas. Yet the new media, paradoxically, breaks similar boundaries in a positive way. New existentialism comes from a pragmatic sense of optimism rather than as a reaction to gloom.

The lost center of postmodernism is celebrated in the new media with its native sense of decentering and fluidity. The problem of domination by concealed dogmatic authorities has receded. Ideologies are all out in the open. Assumptions and preconceptions are spelled out. We pick and choose what we want.

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