We learned that we are not at the center of what we now call the universe, and that it is much, much older than we thought.” We learned that we are alone in the cosmos, on a completely insignificant speck of space dust, more or less.
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“We are left alone, without excuse”-he famously wrote in his 1946 essay “ Existentialism is a Humanism”-“This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.” Freedom is a burden without gods, devils, or software engineers to fault for our actions, or any predetermined course of action we might take, each of us alone bears the full weight of responsibility for our lives and choices.Įmerging from comforting visions of humanity as the center of the universe-says the narrator in the video above from philosophical animation channel Kurzgesagt-“we learned that the twinkling lights are not shining beautifully for us, they just are. This was the early view of Jean-Paul Sartre. But in either case, the question inevitably arises: how is it possible that there is any such thing as true freedom? The idea that free will is an illusion has haunted philosophical thought for at least a couple thousand years.īut in the existentialist view, the real fear is not that we may have too little freedom, but that we may have too much-indeed that we may have the ultimate freedom, that of conscious beings who appeared in the universe unbidden and by chance, and who can only determine for themselves what form and direction their being might take. The first scenario gives millions of people comfort, the second… well, maybe only a handful of cult-like Silicon Valley techo-futurists. In a much more recent iteration, we inhabit an unimaginably complex computer simulation, in which every thing-ourselves included-has been created by all-powerful programmers. Nothing can occur without the knowledge and sanction of the omnipotent creator god.
In one account of human affairs, an all-powerful deity rules over everything.
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