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The ambiguity of the human condition knows no bounds. It is really a Sisyphean task, and one can only hope for enough joy in it to resume on. So we find any quantity of distractions, from faith to hedonism to family, all of which has its veneer of respectability dependent on the society.

Existentialism is typically associated with its most outstanding proponents, usually brooding and even pessimistic, from Ingmar Bergman to Jean-Paul Sartre, and also can claim among its leading lights such great souls as Erich Fromm, Viktor Frankl, Richard Taylor, Hermann Hesse, and Krishnamurti, whose revelations are “sunlit” despite accounting for the full record of human unhappiness.

Erich Fromm is well known for his eminently readable treatise The Art of Loving which offers a view of love radically unlike any ever espoused. Among his many alarming insights is the proven fact that many individuals think only in terms of being loved, while love is properly about being loving. Viktor Frankl identifies a sense of purpose, or meaning, as being the first force to human existence after the most immediate needs of food, shelter, and clothing are met.

His ideas are put to the harshest test possible first-hand in a chain of nazi death camps where the psychiatrist is a prisoner subjected to the most brutal of abject deprivation and humiliation. Such insights from an enlightened sensitive man who has literally been to hell and back are definitely worth considering!

Richard Taylor ( Good and Evil ), Hermann Hesse ( On Trees ), and Krishnamurti ( Commentary on Living ) all share a grounded outlook that’s at once simple without being simplistic. Taylor talks about the purpose of life, while Hesse’s essay talks about life without end or purpose. Krishnamurti also avoids talks of should, ought, must, preferring instead to concentrate on understanding what is. The second 2 are way more mystical in flavor but no less profound in insight, and while some of these names aren’t names commonly associated with the existential cannon the difficulties they deal with , not to mention the insights they offer, can only enrich our appreciation of the human condition which is to say, help us know ourselves.

Taylor observes that conceptions of the good life have been founded on rationality rather than desideration. By way of this crucial insight, he’s ready to show that issues of life’s purpose are inevitably flawed unless we consider that the issue is not one to be resolved through rationalization alone, an angle shared by Hesse and Krishnamurti.