When I first began to learn of existentialism, I was a boy still in high school. At that time I felt like I had a fairly good grasp of the concept based of the body of work that I had read, namely a play (No Exit) and a short novel (The Stranger). Something this school of thought really connected with my teen-aged angst. Suddenly life felt bleak.
I went off to college and read more, discovering the harsh works of Rand and Nietzsche. Oh my god! Thou art dead! That and if I'm not the one sticking it to people, they're going to stick it to me and rightly so.
After the university, I went back to the basis of the modern existential movement, Sartre and Camus. My universe, with it's dead god and horrible people changed once again. It wasn't until my late 20's that I could even begin to understand what these two men had been saying, and more importantly that they weren't saying the same things that Rand and Nietzsche were. God was not dead, god had never been. Or maybe god had been and still was, but was as separate from us as the cold blackness of the cosmos.
For the first time in my personal examination of existentialism, I was able to separate the religion form the philosophy. My bleak world view began to lighten up and even allow for true happiness. One might also argue that I was finally letting go of (some of) my teen-age angst. Far be it for me to reduce philosophy to neuro-psychology, but I will (should) admit that they both my exist without negating the other.
The revelation was that life had meaning after all. It had the meaning that not only I had assigned to it, but the meaning that my culture, both personal and at large, had assigned to it. Life has meaning because my mom cared enough about to raise me to an age where I could fend for myself. My mother could do this because other mothers and fathers and teachers and coal miners and bakers valued the life that was started with my birth and the birth of others in our culture.
Existentialism took on a whole new aspect, becoming a personal philosophy of inclusion. It was the ultimate tool of empowerment - society made it possible for me to get to a point where I could take it or leave it and believe as I may.
The problem with this empowerment brought me full circle back around to No Exit. I finally understood the play with a deeper meaning, not just that hell is other people, but hell is of my own creation because I am bothered by these other people. Hell is still hell, but the degree of suffering ultimately rests with me.
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