Ethan

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The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

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(page 170 of 336)
"Becker’s recounting of Freudian psychoanalysis and the immediate and direct influences of Freud, in addition to selective biographical information and occasional laugh out loud quips - have made this book far more enjoyable than I ever would have expected. Most people see Freud and roll their eyes, I was the same way. Can’t wait to read more of his detailing of prescriptive heroism." — May 31, 2022 07:49AM

May 31, 2022 07:47AM

Ethan’s Quotes

“I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later.”
― Mitch Hedberg

52 likes

“Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms...”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

tags: freedom, life, love, respect, truth, wisdom

21 likes

“What is to come? What does the future hold? I don’t know, I have no idea. When from a fixed point a spider plunges down as is its nature, it sees always before it an empty space in which it cannot find a footing however much it flounders. That is how it is with me: always an empty space before me, what drives me on is a result that lies behind me. This life is back-to-front and terrible, unendurable.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

4 likes

“The nihilist attitude manifests a certain truth. In this attitude one experiences the ambiguity of the human condition. But the mistake is that it defines man not as the positive existence of a lack, but as a lack at the heart of existence, whereas the truth is that existence is not a lack as such. And if freedom is experienced in this case in the form of rejection, it is not genuinely fulfilled. The nihilist is right in thinking that the world possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him to justify the world and to make himself exist validly. Instead of integrating death into life, he sees in it the only truth of the life, which appears to him as a disguised death. However, there is life, and the nihilist knows that he is alive. That’s where his failure lies. He rejects existence without managing to eliminate it. He denies any meaning to his transcendence, and yet he transcends himself. A man who delights in freedom can find an ally in the nihilist because they contest the serious world together, but he also sees in him an enemy insofar as the nihilist is a systematic rejection of the world and man, and if this rejection ends up in a positive desire destruction, it then establishes a tyranny which freedom must stand up against.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

tags: existentialism, meaning, nihilism, nihilist, purpose, transcendence

9 likes

“[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]

One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.”
― Jürgen Habermas