Episode #230 ... Hope as an Existentialism (Ernst Bloch)

Stephen West· Host0:00

Hello everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!, patreon.com/philosophizethis, philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis, and more stuff posted on there as the book gets closer to being published next year. Thanks for all the support to this podcast and philosophy in general. I hope you love the show today. So taking in ideas that fall under the category of existentialism basically guarantees you're gonna come across certain terminology. What I mean is there's words commonly thrown around in this space when trying to describe the human condition and all the bad stuff that's possible there, words like despair or anxiety, nausea, alienation. There's many more of these, and you've no doubt heard all these words before. And what you also may have heard is that when it comes to a lot of these philosophers that fall under the label of existentialism, common way you'll hear their work described is that they're framing this piece of existence in terms of a lack or a negation. And what's meant when someone says this is that when it comes to these negative feelings we experience, like described with despair, nausea, and the like, we feel these things because there's something lacking that's causing these experiences. Many examples of this I could give. Maybe if you're Sartre, what's lacking is a fixed essence as to what it is to be a person, and the lack of that essence causes a lot of problems for you as a human being. Maybe if you're Kierkegaard, it's the lack of rational certainty or ultimate meaning. Maybe not having those things has consequences in how you feel sometimes too. If you're Heidegger, maybe what's lacking is an obvious stable ground