Jean-Paul Sartres Extentialism & Taoism and the Movie Fight Club Essay

Man had to believe in something. That something was an ordering principle. And this was essential; it appeared, because the scientific temperament appeared not to assure man but to trigger him to drift even more aimlessly. Mankind needed a new book of lessons and a teacher as well. Humanity required it. What had occurred to produce such a yearning? Where was Reason? Where was God? With all the gods dead and buried, with nobody to believe in, the existentialists turned to humanity itself to unearth new values. While they acknowledged the nihilistic tendencies of bourgeois civilization, they were not themselves nihilists. They preserved a faith in humanity; a faith that guided them to the belief that only man could comprehend and resolve the tribulations of mankind. Existentialism sketched on a number of earlier ideas and one of its lasting strengths was that it survived to take in nearly two centuries of European thought into one composition. It was a perennial philosophy. It was th e fundamental Nietzcsheanism. As Sartre once wrote, "existentialism is an attempt to draw all the consequences from a consistent atheist position."(Sartre, 1962) According to Sartre, it had been Dostoevsky who had created that if God did not exist, and then anything would be allowed. This, in a nutshell, is the starting point, not the consequence or objective, of existentialism. If one really comprehends the sense of modern godless man's plight, one is at first condensed to nausea and despair. All of the human kind must go through that awful sense of depression that escort’s ones’ insight into the human condition and ourselves. Man is alone because he cannot be in contact with others. He finds himself in a world in which he is completely alien to othe... ...re consistent. And if person can be neither correct nor incorrect, how will he be able to be admired or held responsible, and how can he be accountable? References Bell, Ross Grayson: Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club novel. Edward Norton Yale Interview on Fight Club. May 14, 2003 www.chuckpalahniuk.net official website Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le nà ©ant, 1943) Translated and quoted by Maurice Natanson A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre's Ontology (1951) Sartre Jean-Paul  Existentialism is a Humanism (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, Lecture given in 1946 Source: Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman, Meridian Publishing Company, 1989 http://members.aol.com/scissorside/jean.htm Boobbyer, Philip: Identity: Post Modernism Global Express UK. 1996-2003 http://globalexpress.initiativesofchange.org/issue6/inout.html