Change and Existentialism.

To all of you, that have been around!

This year is about to end and it has been the year of the all the changes... either in the world, or in our simple life's, change was the constant...

Well, maybe it isn't only the year of 2008 but personnaly i felt the Change, more than ever...

An infinity of possibilities undermines our lifes. Being in such a state of doubt and fear i started to realize many of my ideas about life are under the spectrum of the existencialist vision.

In this link in wikipedia, I found some ideas about freedom, reason and absurd and i would like to highlight the points with which i agree the most.

Freedom

The existentialist concept of freedom is often misunderstood as a sort of liberum arbitrium where almost anything is possible and where values are inconsequential to choice and action. This interpretation of the concept is often related to the insistence on the absurdity of the world and that there are no relevant or absolutely "good" or "bad" values. However, that there are no values to be found in the world in-itself doesn't mean that there are no values: each of us usually already has his values before a consideration of their validity is carried through, and it is, after all, upon these values we act. In Kierkegaard's Judge Vilhelm's account in Either/Or, making "choices" without allowing one's values to confer differing values to the alternatives, is, in fact, choosing not to make a choice - to "flip a coin", as it were, and to leave everything to chance. This is considered to be a refusal to live in the consequence of one's freedom, meaning it quickly becomes a sort of bad faith. As such, existentialist freedom isn't situated in some kind of abstract space where everything is possible: since people are free, and since they already exist in the world, it is implied that their freedom is only in this world, and that it, too, is restricted by it.

What isn't implied in this account of existential freedom, however, is that one's values are immutable; a consideration of one's values may cause one to reconsider and change them (though this rarely happens). A consequence of this fact is that one is not only responsible for one's actions, but also for the values one holds. This entails that a reference to "common values" doesn't "excuse" the individual's actions, because, even though these are the values of the society the individual is part of, they are also his own in the sense that s/he could choose them to be different at any time. Thus, the focus on freedom in existentialism is related to the limits of the responsibility one bears as a result of one's freedom: the relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency, and a clarification of freedom also clarifies what one is responsible for.

Reason

Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as fundamental, existentialists oppose themselves to rationalism and positivism. That is, they argue against definitions of human beings as primarily rational. Rather, existentialists look at where people find meaning. Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them rather than rationally. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard saw rationality as a mechanism humans use to counter their existencial anxiety, their fear of being in the world: "If I can believe that I am rational and everyone else is rational then I have nothing to fear and no reason to feel anxious about being free."

Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena — "the Other" — that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder us from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress our feelings of anxiety and dread, we confine ourselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserts, thereby relinquishing our freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the look" of "the Other" (i.e. possessed by another person - or at least our idea of that other person). In a similar vein, Camus believed that society and religion falsely teach humans that "the Other" has order and structure. For Camus, when an individual's consciousness, longing for order, collides with the Other's lack of order, a third element is born: absurdity.

The Absurd

The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world beyond what meaning we give to it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. This contrasts with "karmic" ways of thinking in which "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad thing; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a good person as to a bad person. This contrasts our daily experience where most things appear to us as meaningful, and where good people do indeed, on occasion, receive some sort of "reward" for their goodness. Most existentialist thinkers, however, will maintain that this is not a necessary feature of the world, and that it definitely isn't a property of the world in-itself. Because of the world's absurdity, at any point in time, anything can happen to anyone, and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the Absurd.

So, and concluding... there are no good and bad things, and eventhough we have our own will, we are mainly guided through irrationality and therefore we do things that seem not to make sense, but which are the way to seek meaningful targets as long as we are within a system that does not return on a causal/effect basis. Chance is a part of life and bad things happen to good people and so does the opposite. I would say that we influence very little our own freedom and, under a broad vision we are limitted by our world, but in fact we are limited also by our body, our surroundings, the others, the time, and so, our spectrum of options is rather very limitted despite the notion of infinity that our perception entails.

Confusing? Consultant main belief: If you can't convince them, confuse them!

Something like this...