The case against — and the case for living without certainty. Epicurus and Lucretius freed people from fear of the gods; Hume dismantled miracles and design; Nietzsche diagnosed the death of God; Camus asked how to live in a silent universe; the Buddha taught a path without a creator. Note the range: some here are atheists, some sceptics, some deists (Voltaire), some pantheists (Spinoza), some non-theists (the Buddha). See also God & Faith.
Map of Influence
who answered whom, inside this roomThinkers & Authors
12
Gautama Buddha
The prince who left his palace to seek an end to suffering, awoke under the Bodhi tree, and taught the Four Noble Truths, the Middle Way and no-self (anattā).
Epicurus
The gentle materialist who taught that pleasure — understood as the absence of pain and fear — is the goal of life, and that death is nothing to us.
Lucretius
Roman poet whose single masterpiece, On the Nature of Things, set Epicurean atomism to hexameter verse — and, rediscovered in 1417, helped kindle modernity.
Michel de Montaigne
The inventor of the essay, who made himself the subject of his book — sceptical, curious, tolerant, candid — and asked, “Que sais-je?” — What do I know?
Baruch Spinoza
The excommunicated lens-grinder of Amsterdam who identified God with Nature, wrote ethics in the form of geometry, and found freedom in understanding necessity.
Voltaire
The wittiest man of the Enlightenment — playwright, historian, satirist and campaigner against intolerance — whose Candide demolished Leibnizian optimism and whose cry was “Écrasez l’infâme!”
David Hume
The great Scottish sceptic who showed that causation, the self, and induction cannot be justified by reason — and that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The great pessimist, who said the thing-in-itself is blind, insatiable Will, that life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom, and that art, compassion and renunciation are our only escape.
Karl Marx
Philosopher, economist and revolutionary who turned Hegel’s dialectic into historical materialism — the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philosopher with a hammer who announced the death of God, unmasked the genealogy of morality, and called for new values — the will to power, eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, amor fati.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The face of French existentialism — existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, and hell is other people.
Albert Camus
Algerian-born novelist and essayist of the absurd and of revolt — “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
Works
2
Candide
Voltaire’s comic philosophical tale, in which a naïve young man and his optimist tutor suffer every disaster the eighteenth century could offer — ending with “we must cultivate our garden”.
The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus’s essay on the absurd — why not suicide? — ending with the image of Sisyphus pushing his rock, happy.
Ideas
1Great Scenes
2Rebellion — Returning the Ticket
Ivan tells Alyosha true stories of tortured children and declares that no future harmony could be worth one child’s tear — so he respectfully returns his ticket.
The Madman with the Lantern
Nietzsche’s parable of the madman who runs into the marketplace at noon with a lantern crying “I seek God!” — and announces that we have killed him.
Themes
1Coming to the Library
6 pages being writtenVoices
quotations from this traditionDeath is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.
Nothing can ever be created by divine power out of nothing.
nullam rem e nilo gigni divinitus umquam
So great the evils that religion could prompt.
tantum religio potuit suadere malorum
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getödtet!
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
What does not kill me makes me stronger.
Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Hat man sein warum? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem wie?
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati — that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.
Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
Become who you are.
Werde, der du bist.