subject: The Various Opinions On The Human Condition [print this page] The absurdity of the human condition knows no bounds. It is really a Sisyphean task, and one can only hope for enough joy in it to keep on on. So we find any number of distractions, from faith to hedonism to family, all of which has its veneer of respectability dependent on the society.
Existentialism is typically connected with its most outstanding proponents, usually brooding and even pessimistic, from Ingmar Bergman to Jean-Paul Sartre, and also can claim among its leading lights such great souls as Erich Fromm, Viktor Frankl, Richard Taylor, Hermann Hesse, and Krishnamurti, whose revelations are "sunlit" despite accounting for the full record of human unhappiness.
Erich Fromm is best known for his eminently readable treatise The Art of Loving which offers a view of love radically unlike any ever espoused. Among his many startling insights is the proven fact that many people think only in terms of being loved, while love is properly about being loving. Viktor Frankl identifies a sense of purpose, or meaning, as being the first force to human existence after the most immediate needs of food, shelter, and clothing are met.
His ideas are put to the harshest test possible first-hand in a series of nazi death camps where the psychiatrist is a captive the subject of the most savage of abject deprivation and humiliation. Such revelations from an educated delicate man who has literally been to hell and back are worth considering!
Richard Taylor ( Good and Evil ), Hermann Hesse ( On Trees ), and Krishnamurti ( Commentary on Living ) all share a grounded outlook that's at once easy without being simplified. Taylor talks about the purpose of life, while Hesse's essay talks about life without end or purpose. Krishnamurti also avoids talks of should, ought, must, preferring instead to focus on understanding what is. The second two are way more mystical in flavor but no less profound in insight, and while some of these names are not names commonly connected with the existential cannon the difficulties they deal with , not to mention the insights they offer, can only enrich our understanding of the human condition which is to say, help us know ourselves.
Taylor observes that conceptions of the good life have been set up on rationality rather than desideration. By way of this crucial understanding, he's able to show that points to consider of life's purpose are necessarily flawed unless we consider that the question is not one to be fixed through rationalization alone, an attitude shared by Hesse and Krishnamurti.
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