23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Excellent Introduction, July 30, 2008
This review is from: Existentialism For Dummies (Paperback)
Chris Panza is an old philosophy professor of mine, so I was able to review this material before publication. Since authenticity is nowhere more important than in a review on existentialism, I make that disclosure up front. Thankfully, I can attest that the book serves as an excellent introduction.
First, you should know that Dr. Panza is one of the most popular (and challenging) professors at Drury University because he brings a deep passion to teaching. Students love him and his lectures have a crazy ability to stick with you years after leaving the classroom. The good news is that his teaching style translates well into the Dummies format, meaning that you've got a personal copy of the wonderful examples and anecdotes he used in the classroom.
I was skeptical about how well existentialism would fit into a Dummies book. I've used other books in the series on investing and a few other topics, and I've always been impressed with the authors and the presentation... but existentialism? Thankfully, this title continues the tradition of quality. It takes a complex subject and boils it down into a manageable -- and, more importantly for the topic, relevant -- format.
None of the Dummies books are comprehensive treatises on their subject, but they are concise and can act as a foundation for further study. No one will put this book down without a sharper understanding of what it means to be human.
Get this book if you're interested in a life that means something. Existentialism isn't pedantic philosophy, as this book shows... it's about living.
-Jason Swadley
University of Chicago
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Very Fine Piece of Work, and Not just for Dummies, February 20, 2009
This review is from: Existentialism For Dummies (Paperback)
As a self-proclaimed existentialist, I thought it was about time to understand what it is I profess to believe in. For some reasons (not all obvious even to me) I have gravitated to the Existentialist Philosophers, because their explanations of the world just feels more right, more honest and closer to "ground truth" to me than any other philosophies. And also I guess, because, once one has sampled Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Ernest Becker, and Cornel West, unless he is profoundly religious or insane, he is likely to be completely absorbed by their deeply passionate (and, Heidegger aside) clearly explained views. So I chose to start at the bottom and work my way back up to the top of the ladder.
I was thus quite pleasantly surprised to discover this very fine "How To" book for dummies summarizing beautifully all one needs to know about my newly adopted philosophy, Existentialism. With what I already knew from sampling other readings, this book put all of the fragments of the puzzle in place, into one coherent framework. And for that I will forever be grateful to these authors.
What is Existentialism?
It is according to this book a philosophy that says essentially that the world in the raw is absurd. When the doctor spanks air into our lungs, we wail because we have come fearfully into a disordered, isolated, alienated, stress-producing, cold, dependent and basically neurotic and profoundly absurd world. It is absurd for the ten reasons outlined in this book and for so many others not mentioned, not the least of them being that the world is not teleological: that is, it has no purpose whatsoever. And once here, we flounder around purposelessly and aimlessly in darkness in search of light through meaning, and whether or not we find it, we then die. That's it, period; end of story: As Ernest Becker puts it so elegantly in the book of the same name, life is "The Birth and Death of meaning." That's all there is to it period.
As we try to navigate our way around in the darkness, we create our own meaning as a way of trying to make sense of a fearful, cold and disordered world. But this attempt by us only makes the world even more absurd. Our mind, mostly through the perceptions it affords us as a window onto reality, is the only survival tool we come into the world equipped with. And as we harness the fruits of our perceptions, we immediately began to reify them, trying to get beyond and transcend their limitations: the neurotically filtered reality that our own mind has created. Nothing could be more absurd than trying to "pretend" that this self-defined representation crafted out of the language of our perceptions, mostly to ward-off fear and disorder, somehow is the same as reality itself?
We thus learn to play "pretend reality games" fashioned out of language. We train ourselves socially and culturally to believe that these exercises in the formulation of meaning through language, somehow transcends the very symbols that give those same meanings, life and form. Existence for us thus seems like little more that a child's game played with the symbols of language.
Yet, deep in our heart of hearts we know that the meaning we make through language is not all there is. We know that no matter how much we may reify them, and try to stretch them beyond their own limited boundaries, our meanings are but a desperately delusional trick we have learned to play on ourselves. A great deal of the life of humans is thus about creating such "reality tricks" and "playing such reality games" to fool ourselves about the "truth" of the reality "out there." In the end, all of our "reality projects" are guaranteed to fail. They are in the end just self-imposed tricks to give us the illusion that we can somehow transcend the ultimate limitation: our finitude. They are, it is safe to say, profoundly and intentionally self-delusional.
As the comedian Richard Pryor has put it best: The ultimate test is whether we can survive death? So far, no one we know has passed that test. So no matter how sophisticated and complex our neurotic machinery may be, or the reality games that it spews, become we know that in the end our immortality tricks will not work. We can invent myths, in which we make ourselves its heroes; and we can build elaborate monuments to ourselves, but in the end there are no tricks or immortality projects that will allow us to overcome death. Existentialism reminds us that our reality, our meanings and our elaborate language games are just individual or collective self-defined projects in self-delusion, and little more. And in the end, that is of course the ultimate absurdity.
Despite being unable to overcome death, we must nevertheless be responsible to ourselves, and muddle through life trying to live an authentic life in the gap between the fearful reality "out there" and the meanings we make to negotiate the larger reality. We cannot overcome death by painting pretty word pictures, or by building monuments to ourselves. No matter what other philosophies say, no matter what the religious prophets say, no matter how expensive our headstones may be, death will not go away. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. The only hope is that we negotiate the journey honestly facing the truth of both the reality "out there" and our inner limitations; and to do both without fear and self-delusion.
Five Stars
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This Book is Kick Butt, November 17, 2008
This review is from: Existentialism For Dummies (Paperback)
This book is absolutely amazing. It's like Martin Luther translating the Bible from Latin for me. I've read the existentialists but never could fully grasp them.
Now that I understand this thinking, it's given me a lot more confidence in life.
I just finished Thus Spoke Zarathustra and could really understand what was being said.
I think this book even with the wacky title is a really important book written for the layman and those who don't have a chance to study with really good professors like Panza and Gale.
Thank you so much for writing it.
As for the Dr. who wrote that this book is disappointing and you should read Walter Kauffman, I read Kauffman before reading this, but there was a lot of points Kauffman made which I couldn't fully grasp. This book is great for starting at the ground level and then moving up. I can now understand some of the points Kauffman was making that I didn't understand before.
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