All existentialists have followed the teachings that stress the importance of passionate individual action in deciding questions of both morality and truth. They have insisted, accordingly, that personal experience and acting on one’s own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth. As a result, the understanding of a situation by someone involved in that situation is superior to that of a detached, objective observer. This emphasis on the perspective of the individual agent has also made existentialists suspicious of systematic reasoning. Existentialist writers have been deliberately unsystematic in the exposition of their philosophies, preferring to express themselves in aphorisms, dialogues, parables, and other literary forms.
Despite their anti rationalist position, however, most existentialists cannot be said to be ir rationalists in the sense of denying all validity to rational thought. They have held that rational clarity is desirable wherever possible, but that the most important questions in life are not accessible to reason or science. This quote expresses a man who uncovers a document that exhibits a crime of family and treachery. A man who had made a fortune overseas had come back to his hometown, with his where his mother and sister had been running a small hotel in the village where he was born.
He decided to surprise them but he stayed in their hotel under an assumed name. At dinner he showed them his fortune and still not knowing that the man was their family they murdered him for his money. When his wife came the next day and revealed his identity they both committed suicide. The anonymous man who had read the newspaper article stated that in a sense the tragedy was unbelievable but also in a sense he feels it was justifiable for the man was asking for trouble playing foolish tricks.
The Essay on Common Sense Paine And Americas Most Important Leaders Of The Protest
Over the centuries, one of the most important tools available to protesting groups was literature. Some of the most famous protest literature in the world has its roots in American history. For example, some great American authors of protest literature include Thomas Paine, Thomas Nast, John C. Calhoun, and Martin Luther King. Through eloquent, sometimes subtle means, these authors became the ...
An individual who has no feelings of shock and disgust in reference to this story is one who does not feel or care, therefore having an existentialist frame of mind. Like Mersault when his mother died, like Mersault when he shot an Arab man, like Mersault when he went to prison, he was nonchalant, unapologetic and he simply was not phased. The anonymous man in the story, the reader of the article, had the audacity to even say the man who was murdered by his family for money in the newspaper article deserved what he got which was a hammer in his skull.
