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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=78100

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Sitaram/message/939?source=1

Ich bin ein Berliner" - John F. Kennedy

(quite literally, according to some people (though others will
dispute), "I am a jelly doughnut", what JFK really should have said
is "Ich bin Berliner")

============================

If you want money more than anything, you'll be bought and sold.

If you have a greed for food, you'll be a loaf of bread.

This is a subtle truth: whatever you love, you are.

- Rumi

====================

Existentialism will not take man as the end, since man is still to
be determined. We have no right to believe that humanity is
something to which we could set up a cult. Existentialism is not
despair. It declares that even if God did exist, that would make no
difference. - Sartre, "Existentialism is a Humanism"

Sitaram comments:

Buddhism also declares that whether or not God (or Gods) exists
makes no difference. We are still confronted with the same
fundamental truth and problem, that life is suffering. And we cannot
look to anyone else or anything else to deal with this problem. It
is a problem we must solve for ourselves. It is our koan. Our life
is our koan.

Excerpts from Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism"

"Once freedom has exploded in the soul of man, the gods no longer
have any power over him" Sartre- The Flies

The essence of Existentialism is perhaps best expressed by

Gloria Gaynor:

I am what I am
And what I am needs no excuses
I deal my own deck
Sometimes the ace
Sometimes the deuces
Its one life And there's no returning, no revising
One life and so its time to open up your closet

Existentialists state frankly that man is in anguish unable but to
choose. Like Abraham, who obeyed the angel, but had to first choose
if it was really an angel, and if he was really Abraham. We are
abandoned by God, left alone without excuse, to interpret alone such
signs as there are. Even when we seek advice, it is we who choose
who to ask. We must despair of help from outside our will, or beyond
the possibilities of action.

This is what Kierkegaard called "the anguish of Abraham". You know
the story: an angel commended Abraham to sacrifice his son. But
anyone in such a case would wonder if it really was an angel and if
they were really Abraham. Who, then, can prove that I am the proper
person to impose my conception of man upon mankind? There will be no
signs to convince me. It is I who must decide whether the voice is
that of an angel. If I regard a certain course of action as good, it
is I who choose. When a military leader sends men to their deaths,
he may have his orders but at the bottom it is he alone who chooses.

We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say
that man is condemned to be free. The existentialist thinks that man
is responsible for his passion- he cannot find help in some sign
vouchsafed upon earth for his orientation: for he will interpret the
sign as he chooses. As Ponge has truly written "Man is the future of
man" As an example of abandonment, I will refer to the case of a
pupil of mine (Sartre). He lived alone with his mother, his father
having gone off as a collaborator and his brother killed in 1940. He
had a choice - to go and fight with the Free French to avenge his
brother and protect his nation, or to stay and be his mother's only
consolation. So he was confronted by two modes of action; one
concrete and immediate but directed only towards one single
individual; the other addressed to an infinitely greater end but
very ambiguous. What would help him choose? Could the Christian
doctrine?

To whom does he owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the
mother? Which is the more useful, to fight for the whole community
or help one particular person to live? Who can give an answer to
that one a priori? No one. Nor is it given in any ethical scripture.
The Kantian ethic says, Never regard another as a means but always
as an end. Very well, if I remain with my mother, I shall be
regarding her as an end but treating those who fight on my behalf as
a means. And the converse is true.

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