Ideas of the Great Philosophers

After our discussion of philosophical meanings of Invisible Man, I've become interested in philosophies, especially existentialism that shares many of my thoughts and perceptions formed and sculptured during high school years. I began doing a research on my own, but the websites on the Internet didn't seem to provide enough information (maybe it was because I don't like reading online posts; they hurt my eyes!), so I ended up buying a book, Ideas of the Great Philosophers by William S. Sahakian and Mabel Lewis Sahakian.

This is the excerpt from the book that I found interesting about one of the concepts of existentialism: 

Existentialists do not believe in a rationally ordered reality, but in a subjective, irrational human existence, whose decisions, choices, and behavior are executed independently of reason. Subjective man is motivated by feeling, anxiety, irrational impulses, which override whatever decision his rational forces can rally. Existence is not rational, but permeated with intense feeling, anxiety, forlornness, abandonment, despair, which become man's criteria for knowing truth. 

It's an intriguing way of thinking, that what we believe to be rational is really irrational since our perceptions depend on our feelings and other surroundings from our existence. This belief came to me as truth as I went through years in high school. From only four years of maturity process, I saw various, perhaps too many, kinds of people who all think differently. Individually analyzed, everyone walking on this planet has their own way of thinking and conceiving ideas. The "truth" we believe in varies, therefore forming different rationale.

For instance, a group of people can call a person mentally disabled for being an example of oddity. Then, think about it the other way; for that person, those people in the group could be the lunatics! Clearly, we all think we're "normal". The person who sets a criteria for being "normal" is us, which comes from our brains, from our conceptions of the truth, where we are placed as a standard that determines or judges others' value. 

So maybe nothing is really "rational", even the math problems that are considered strictly logical. It's just a fun, complex concept to think about.


-Chloe K.