Friday, October 3, 2014

Existentialist Day

One of my favorite (and least favorite) things about philosophy is that once you learn about a new philosophical idea, you can't help but encounter it wherever you look.  And existentialism really exemplifies this phenomenon.

For example, let's look at one of my favorite philosophical films Groundhog Day starring the one and only Bill Murray as Phil Connors, a grumpy man who gets caught in a time loop and has to live the same boring, meaningless day over and over again.  No matter what he does, he cannot escape it.  Even if he wakes up and kills himself, he just gets to jump to the next morning and keep on living his absurd life.

When you look at it, his predicament seems a little familiar.  It sounds a lot like what our buddy Sisyphus has to deal with: immortality without hopes of escape and a life seemingly devoid of meaning.  But, if we want to believe what Camus has to say about Sisyphus, is is Sisyphus is happy because he is able to acknowledge his fate, to accept it and mentally move on, so to speak.

So, after a good deal of time, Connors is able to come to the same blissful conclusion that Sisyphus does: it doesn't matter what he does, his life wont change.  He feels he is condemned to relive Groundhog Day over and over, and that is just how it has to be.  So he starts being a good person, even though in the grand scheme of things it appears to be pointless.  He saves people, learns piano and french, and gives a kick-ass speech about Punxsutawney Phil for the newscast.  He does it because he is assigning meaning to those tasks, and that's what makes them important --  not because there is any inherent meaning, but because of the whole existence precedes essence idea.  And in the end, he is able to become free after learning these lessons.  But he didn't have to become free in order to be happy.  Much like Sisyphus, Connors would have been content to stay in his little Groundhog Day world forever, because he recognized the absurdity of the situation and accepted it.

If you're more interested in the deeper ideas at work behind Groundhog Day (Trust me, there are a lot of philosophers who can be associated with this movie), I encourage you to look up more essays/analyses online.  There are some good ones about the movie in the context of Aristotelian ethics and Nietzsche's own existentialist ideas.

Don't you just love philosophy?

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