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The first English use of the expression "meaning of life" appears in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), book II chapter IX, "The Everlasting Yea". [1]Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle.
Humans, in contrast, have the ability to remember. This enables them to create culture. On the other hand, individual memories and collective records are always a burden. Once this burden becomes too great, the capacity of a person or people to survive is inhibited. In Nietzsche's eyes, history is therefore both a necessity and a threat.
The proposition that existence precedes essence (French: l'existence précède l'essence) is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence (the nature) of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence (the mere fact of its being). [1]
Humankind: A Hopeful History (Dutch: De Meeste Mensen Deugen: Een Nieuwe Geschiedenis van de Mens) is a 2019 non-fiction book by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. It was published by Bloomsbury in May 2021. [4] It argues that people are decent at heart and proposes a new worldview based on the corollaries of this optimistic view of human beings.
[2] [3] The phrase was subsequently quoted and incorporated into the speeches and writings of prominent figures throughout American political and social history. It has been called an "immortal declaration", and "perhaps [the] single phrase" of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance."
Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that life has no objective meaning or purpose. [1] The inherent meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism, where one can potentially create their own subjective "meaning" or "purpose".
"The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature." [5] Thus: History does nothing, it "possesses no immense wealth", it "wages no battles".
Standing, as all living beings are, before this dilemma of the will to live, a person is constantly forced to preserve his own life and life in general only at the cost of other life. If he has been touched by the ethic of reverence for life, he injures and destroys life only under a necessity he cannot avoid, and never from thoughtlessness.