Life Between the Lines

Final Project. How do The Stranger and Nausea reveal differences and universalities in existentialist thought? Camus and Sartre are often used as interchangeable representations of existentialism, a philosophy underscoring the inherent absurdity of life but the ability of humans to define their own meanings. However, although Camus and Sartre both contributed largely to the meaning of the existentialist movement, the two differed on their individual views of existentialism, with Camus even refusing to refer to himself as a true existentialist (although much of his work contains existentialist undertones). As representations of these two great thinkers, writers, and philosophers, The Stranger and Nausea  are widely considered to be chef-d'oeuvres of Camus and Sartre, respectively. In these works, Sartre and Camus define their own existentialist (or near-existentialist, if you asked Camus) philosophies, and in turn also defined the existentialist movement and philosophy. Thus, i...

As we watched today's TedEd video on Descartes's cogito, I was reminded of an idea I saw once in a textbook: that Descartes's famous cogito, ergo sum  was never originally written in that manner, even though it was often referred to as such to preserve the "originality" of the phrase. No, instead, it had been written as je pense, donc je suis , dowsed in what was once considered to be a common man's language, even though French nowadays is associated with pretentiousness. In a fun stroke of coincidence (or perhaps not...), Waiting for Godot  was also originally written in French as En attendant Godot , Beckett's original masterpiece that he later translated to the English version with which we more commonly associate the playwright. But, as referenced in my last blogpost, pieces can change meanings as they're translated from one language to another, and even though Waiting for Godot is a self-translation, the play is not immune from this effect.  I fou...