"In Plato's Symposium, a character called Aristophanes gives an account of love. He tells us that human beings originally had doubled bodies, with two heads, four arms and four legs. As a punishment for threatening the gods, however, Zeus cut each of them in half. Now, these half humans, with just one head and one pair of arms and legs, find themselves adrift in the world, searching for the other half of themselves that would make them whole."
"For the existentialist, however, this feeling of incompleteness points to a fundamental truth about being human. For them, we are this tension. We are thrown into the world we haven't chosen, but we are still responsible for the sense we make of our lives. This is what the existentialists mean by the slogan: existence precedes essence - there's no script of our lives."
"We become who we are through what we do, in a world defined by contingency and transience. Aristophanes here gives us the comforting illusion that there is some essence or meaning to our lives given before we exist - that there is someone out there who will resolve the tensions of being human by making us whole, if only we can find them."
Plato's Aristophanes myth portrays humans as originally double-bodied beings split by Zeus, producing half humans who search for their missing halves and thus origin of love as desire for unity and wholeness. Existentialism interprets the same feeling of incompleteness as an inherent aspect of human existence: thrownness, contingency, and responsibility to create meaning. The existentialist slogan 'existence precedes essence' asserts that no prewritten script defines lives and that identity emerges through action. The myth can offer a comforting illusion of a pre-given essence or a destined other who resolves human tensions. Existentialists view such stories as covering over rather than resolving fundamental tensions.
Read at The Conversation
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]