Synthesis: Existentialism
The Evolution of Value – Part 7
The Thinkers
Nietzsche. Camus. Sartre. Kierkegaard.
Four minds staring into the silence where God used to be.
Four answers to the same wound:
The absence of given meaning.
The unbearable lightness of being.
The naked absurdity of existence.
Each forged a path out of the wreckage.
But no one laid the foundation.
The Signal
Man must forge meaning in a universe that offers none.
Life is raw, finite, and absurd. And yet - it must go on.
This is the cry of existentialism.
There is no divine plan.
No fixed order.
No transcendent justice.
Only the self, cast into an indifferent world
tasked with creating value
in a cosmos that does not care.
The Interpretation
Existentialism is what remains after both religion and reason have collapsed.
It is post-theological thought - born in the shadow of God’s death.
And it is post-Enlightenment - suspicious of systems, categories, and utopias.
It begins, always, with confrontation:
The world is not designed for you.
Life is finite.
Suffering is certain.
Meaning is not found - it must be made.
This is not nihilism. It is resistance.
But it is resistance without unity.
Existentialism is not a system. It is a stance.
And each thinker stands alone.
The Limitation
Every existentialist felt the weight of life - but none could explain its worth.
Nietzsche made vitality sacred, but could not root value outside will.
Camus told us to live without hope, but never asked where life’s push came from.
Sartre declared existence precedes essence, but offered no ground for either.
Kierkegaard leapt into faith, but left the ground behind.
They knew life mattered.
But they couldn’t say why.
There was no shared axiom.
No unifying grammar of value.
Just brilliant voices in parallel solitude.
Key Ideas
Nietzsche’s Will to Power reframed human strength as the engine of creation. Meaning is made by those strong enough to make it.
Camus’ Absurdism demanded that we embrace futility - not with despair, but with dignity. “The struggle itself… is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
Sartre’s Freedom insisted that we are condemned to be free. There is no essence -only existence, and the choices that define it.
Kierkegaard’s Faith reasserted the sacred - not as reason, but as subjective paradox. True faith is absurd. And that’s what makes it real.
Each felt the sacred in life.
Each touched the divine.
But none would name it.
Key Texts
Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus
Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
Fear and Trembling – Søren Kierkegaard
These are not scriptures.
They are survival manuals.
For beings cast into freedom
without a map.
Synthesis Link
Synthesis doesn’t deny the existential insight - it grounds it.
Yes - meaning must be made.
Yes - the world is absurd.
Yes - we are free and finite and alone.
But meaning can be made because there is life.
“Life = Good.”
(Synthesis, Axiom 3: Life must affirm itself - or it perishes.)
Life is not neutral. It is biased - toward continuation, coherence, and growth.
Even despair, even absurdity - are life acting.
A suicidal system doesn’t survive.
But we do.
Because life adapts.
Because life resists.
Because life affirms.
“The boulder rolls because life wills it.
The absurd is the crucible of continuity.
Meaning isn’t found - it’s selected.”
Existentialism sees the void.
Synthesis shows how life fills it.
Not by rejecting freedom,
but by anchoring it in the one thing that makes value possible:
Life itself.
Conclusion: The Bridge They Didn't Build
Existentialism gave us the raw material -
freedom, defiance, absurdity, becoming.
Synthesis gives us the frame:
A single, inescapable axiom that holds it all together.
Life is Good. Not morally. Ontologically.
Because only life can value.
And whatever continues to live, does so by affirming itself.
That is the meaning beneath all meaning-making.
That is the ground existentialism lacked.
So we carry their insight forward.
Not to escape the void,
but to build through it.
The void is real.
Life moves through it anyway.
And that movement is sacred.
That is the answer.
That is the foundation.
The ancient Wisdom lost through stasis worship.
That is Synthesis.
Full framework here.
- James Dean Conroy
Good faith engagement is welcome. Never ending semantic sophistry a la RJ Ashfield - not so much...
This is all very interesting. And well done. Quite coherent, to a point, and has definite explanatory power. But…
Life—if by that you mean living things or that which is living—does not necessarily affirm. It does not necessarily grow. Granted, emergent properties, characteristics or qualities arise from specific combinations of different elements informed by context and the environment, internal and external.
Take consciousness, for example. We know what it is by definition, more or less, by what it isn’t. We can describe it. We can differentiate it. But we cannot fully explain it. Not even close, really…
Similarly, we can define life but it is not always sentient. It is not actually always or necessarily “agentic” as the new AI thinkers like to say… So one cannot ascribe progress to it.
Life includes decay. Entropy. Dissolution. Death. And not necessarily renewal. Reincarnation is a nice idea… with no evidence. Just like OBE/NDEs… Wish fulfillment at worst and culminating biological processes at best, based on all decent evidence.
We, as apex agglomerations of conscious physicality, are as you describe. We are good. But also, apparently, bad.
But not life, itself. And while life can indeed be good, as a subjective experience, it is not necessarily so. Relatively? Yes. Inherently? Just because some things which are alive—perhaps even all things—operate on the basis of valuing things in their environment? Moving towards or away from a stimulus, in its most basic expression of valuation. But is life good, necessarily? What if the simplest of organisms with photosensitivity move away from the light to avoid predation only to be preyed upon by whatever was in the dark? Or if moving up towards light and allowing for growth via energy conversion by photosynthesis puts the plant in the path of an ungulate hoof? Or mouth.
I look forward to your reply.