Existensialist values

In an Intoduction to Existensialism, Olson tells there is three values in traditional philosophy, pleasure, wealth, and fame. We have condamned life by pursuing the meaning of life.

- First, the atteintment of such goals depends only in small part upon the efforts of the individual himself. External circumstances almost too numerous to catalogue and almost wholly beyond the individual's control may thrwat him at any moment.

- Second, no matter how succesful you have been, you cannot be secure in your possesion. Anything may cause you to lose thing that you have in a single day.

- Third, even if you are attained and secured the goals you already set for yourself, the satisfaction you experienced would be short-lived and he would soon revert to a life of painful striving.

The desire for this material goods is more like an itch. There is momentaty satisfaction is fullfilled, as there is when one scracthes an itch. (p.4)

Love, he says, is a symbol of want or need, not a completion or fulfillment. To love is to desire, and to desire is to seek; but nobody seeks that which he already possesses. We seek only that which we lack. The lover may, of course, enter into possession of the body of the beloved, but even then he is inflamed by the desire to perpetuate his good fortune and continues to seek a future happiness, which as future is beyond his grasps. (p.7)

 

A man may pretend to have made a free choice without anguish, but if so it is only because the stakes are pretty and in the true sense of the word he has not chosen at all. Without having known suffering a man may write a clever or a pretty poem, but not a great one. Similarly, a man may be in love without having known suffering, if to be in love is to be infatuated or simply to be faithful husband and father. But in the former case what passes by the name of love is simply a nervous itch; in the latter case, a routine or habit. In its essence love is an attitude of care and concern for being whose death or desertion its always possible and would be an irreparable personal loss. As Kierkegaard put values in our live, he wants a value which he is prepared to live for which, if necessary, he is willing to die, "Let others complain that the age is wicked," he cried, "my complaint is that it is wretched, for it lacks passion." Or, in the words of Nietzche: "The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously." It is not blindness to danger, but the intense awareness of danger which makes the blood mount. (p.18)