Group 3 Post: Recap and Moving Foward

FQ: Does Flanagan believe that, "the good," "the true," and "the beautiful" are Platonic forms (Eidos) or natural categories?

DQ: The word 'harmony' is often used in reference to eudaimonia; however, there is a prominent scientific angle of nature as chaotic, and not balanced. This, coupled with an absurdist or existential view of subjectivity being in conflict with the objective world, weaken a sense of life or human flourishing as naturally being harmonious. In this case then, is it up to us to manipulate our perceptions to make our life project balanced and harmonious, or is the harmony in a certain acceptance of the chaos? Likewise, we could also ponder if the term "harmony" is not in conflict at all, and if this is a merely verbal conflict, with meaning being lost as it is translated from philosophy to philosophy.

Recap: Last week our beloved Dr. Oliver dare say the friendly fellow Sartre didn't reconcile the social aspects of Marxism with his humanist brand of existentialism. Of course, my primary concern with that being, well if he didn't do it, than who did? (And who could've been in a better position to do so than the political prisoner, Jean, himself who famously bellows, "I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men."

The separation of the existentialist view, in any sense, from the social community of man seems to be a bit unfounded. As in a broad sense, the existentialist only experiences his conflict in relationship. That is to say, in relationship to another subject, object, concept, experience, phenomena, or of course the universe itself. This is the view elucidated by Camus in the Myth of Sisyphus as he declares, "Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world." Of course, the world, is not some ambivalent abstract astral apparatus. It is a composition of us, of our experiences, of the objects, concepts, and phenomena we come into contact with. Thus, it is only in relationship, in social interdependence, that the existentialist "problem," is even born. Of course, "problem," incurs a more negative connotation than one such as Sartre would infer. To Sartre, we must remember that Existentialism is a Humanism. It is also a note of fact. One's subjective pity over the fact of the absurd is duly noted, but not necessarily substantial. Likewise, one's reduction of the project to a pity party, and subsequent blind eye, does not make the fact go away. The existentialist project is not the project of a pity party for recognizing something that was already there. Instead, it is a practical project, a project that says in light of this fact, here are prescriptive methods to transcend it and find eudaimonia in each other and ourselves.

- Schwarzwald