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Reflection — An Honest Take 8 min

Honest Take — Before You Begin

Honest Take — Module 6: Existentialism Without God #

This is the first module that costs something to read. I want to say so directly, because if you find it heavier than the previous ones, that is the design, not a sign that something has gone wrong. Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus with the question of suicide because he believed any philosophy that cannot face that question is an evasion. He was right. The dichotomy of control and the Stoic operating system you built in Module 5 are remarkable instruments, and they leave the most demanding question entirely untouched. The Stoics assumed life was worth living. The existentialists are the first major Western tradition to ask whether the assumption holds, and to argue that the answer is not given — it has to be authored, in your specific situation, by you, with the recognition that nothing in the universe will validate the authoring.

I want to flag an omission I am uncomfortable with. I cut Simone de Beauvoir from the spine and put her in the reference list. The Ethics of Ambiguity is, in my honest reading, the most rigorous existentialist ethics in the canon — better than Sartre's in important ways, because she takes seriously the dependence of human beings on each other in a way Sartre's earlier work does not. The reason I cut her is reading-load arithmetic — five primary texts in this module is already at the upper edge — and I made the call that Bakewell would carry de Beauvoir's argument well enough. I am not entirely sure that was the right call. If, after finishing the spine, you have appetite for one more text, make it The Ethics of Ambiguity. De Beauvoir is the existentialist who held up best in the second half of the twentieth century, and she did so partly because the others were trying to be heroes and she was trying to be honest.

About Camus versus Sartre: Camus is more useful for this curriculum. Sartre is the more systematic philosopher; Camus is the better writer; and you are reading them, per the curriculum's stated purpose, to learn how to live. For that purpose, Camus's clarity wins. The Stranger will affect you more than The Myth — the novel does the work the essay points at. Most readers come away from The Myth able to repeat its arguments and unable to act on them; they come away from The Stranger unable to articulate what just happened to them and changed by it anyway.

About Frankl: he is overcited and underread. The line about the why that bears almost any how appears in most motivational feeds, quoted by people who never read past chapter three. The first half of Man's Search for Meaning is the Auschwitz memoir; the second half is logotherapy, a genuinely useful clinical theory that most quoters never reach. Read both halves, in order — the witness sections are what earn the meaning-making frame, and skipping to the theory is how the book gets reduced to a poster. His distinction between meaning and happiness — meaning is what is left when happiness is taken away — is the operationally most useful concept in the module, and Module 14 will return to it.

Two practices, both uncomfortable on purpose. The "why not suicide" checkpoint will be hard to write, and the discomfort is appropriate. The first version will be unsatisfying — tentative, possibly verbose, definitely revisable. Save it anyway, and do not show it to anyone for at least a year. The version you write at the Module 14 capstone will be substantially better, and the comparison between the two will itself be informative. People who skip this checkpoint, or write a paragraph and call it done, are usually avoiding it because the question is real; the avoidance is the missing of the point. And Sartre's bad faith is the most useful concept here for a working engineer: the claim that humans flee the responsibility of their freedom by pretending they had no choice — adopting the role of the employee, the parent, the maintainer, the provider, and acting as if the role determined the behavior, when the role was chosen and the choices within it are still real. Bad faith is everywhere in professional life. The engineer who blames the codebase. The founder who blames the market. The parent who blames the schedule. None of these claims are entirely wrong; none are entirely right; within all of them, choices are still being made, and naming them as choices is the existentialist responsibility. You will catch yourself in bad faith within a week of finishing this module. The catching is the practice.

A note on what I am not saying. I am not telling you existentialism is more complete than Stoicism, and I am not telling you that life is meaningless and you must construct meaning — that is a strawman popular in undergraduate seminars and almost nowhere else. I am telling you, with the full honesty this format requires, that existentialism is the only philosophical tradition built explicitly for the epistemic situation many readers of this curriculum are in — atheist, post-religious, rational adult — and that its failure modes (over-emphasis on choice, under-emphasis on constraint, the masculine-heroic posture) are well-documented and avoidable. Read the texts as material, not advocacy. The synthesis is yours.

Conclusion #

Module 6 adds the second frame. After it you have two complete operating systems for living without religious metaphysics — Stoic alignment with what is, and existentialist authorship of what is. Both are useful; both are incomplete in their own ways. Module 7 adds a third instrument that addresses what both leave unaddressed: the question of what attention is, prior to any judgment or any choice. The frames arc reaches its full shape at the end of Module 8, and Part III tests all of it against the conditions it was built for.

Predictions #

  • The Stranger will affect you more than The Myth. Meursault will lodge in you in a way the philosophical argument cannot; you will find yourself thinking about the trial scene weeks later, while doing something unrelated.
  • Frankl's logotherapy will prove more directly usable in daily life than Sartre's existentialism. That is the right reaction — the translation from philosophy to clinical practice was Frankl's work, not Sartre's.
  • Bakewell will be the surprise winner of the module — the book that does the most structural work. Most readers underestimate her on first encounter and recognize it later.
  • The "why not suicide" checkpoint will be painful to write, and the first version will be unsatisfying. Save it. The capstone version will be sharper, and the comparison will be the real data.
  • You will catch yourself in bad faith within a week of finishing the module — probably about a work decision, a conversation you have been avoiding, or a constraint you have been pretending was imposed on you.
  • Camus's "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" will strike you as both true and insufficient. That is the right reaction; the line carries real work and cannot carry everything, and the rest of the curriculum addresses what it cannot.
  • The journal you started in Module 5 will gain a new question — what stance am I taking today toward what is given — and the addition will feel small but be load-bearing.