Short Philosophical Musing

 

I used to think, influenced by the world, that Nietzsche was the polar opposite of Christianity. Now, I don’t think so.

Consider these quotes:

  

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”

“You are – your life, and nothing else.”

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

“Life has no meaning a priori … it is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”

“Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”

 

These are the words of a man whose book I have behind me. I spent $20 of my slave wages on it seven years ago but have yet to crack it. This man’s thought was presented to me in several college courses, and I have had to write essays on said words for a grade. The man is a philosopher called Jean-Paul Sartre, and he is one of the founders of a school of thought known as existentialism, a philosophy that both attracts and repels me in equal measures.

The last quote, about living on one’s knees, struck me. I went to confession this morning. I spoke to a kindly old priest anonymously through a veiled window and listed my sins, in kind and in frequency (and often in embarrassment) and was absolved by a man acting in persona Christi. Then I went out in front of the tabernacle and did my penance and spoke internally from my heart to the Lord of the Universe, on my knees.

How utterly pitiable this man Sartre never encountered something like this. True, he lived through World War II in occupied France, a thing I cannot conceive, yet so did millions of others who survived, if only by the fact they fell to their knees before God. A man named Karol Wojtyla, who lived through World War II in occupied Poland, provides a perfect example of this.

But life is a mysterious thing, and so many aspects of it are not privy to us. Sartre allegedly had a death-bed conversion. And I may read Being and Nothingness, the book stacked in the pile behind me, at some undetermined point in the future.