Who is your favorite Existentialist?
Your list isnt Thoreau enough. My sense of unyielding melancholy brings ALL the existentialists to the yard.
He was quite the rebel, too!
All of the listed are not Existentialists. I choose Camus for numerous reasons. Camus' "Letter to a German Friend" was cathartic and a watershed in graduate school. I had not even read his novels at that point.
My favorite is not on the list: It is Viktor Frankl
Quotes:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
What is to give light must endure burning.
I quite enjoy William James, as a sort of proto existentialist
Metallica.
Definitely an unexpected response.
No. Just no. An adequate band that stole profusely from Deep Purple. Metallica even admitted to doing so. That makes them less esoteric and more gypsies, tramps, and thieves. Maybe they could Cher the stage.
@Beowulfsfriend You won't get much of an argument from me. Metallica also openly stole from a lot of great bands that weren't getting recognition. Their legacy is really that they brought heavy metal out into the light. After all, they were the second band to win a heavy metal grammy; when they thanked Jethro Tull for not making an album that year...beautiful!
@Diogenes1972 I bought my son a book "Metallica and Philosophy, to try to expand his mind a bit. He never read it, but I found it rather interesting. Their lyrics touch on many existential themes.
@Untamedshrew and how many books that your parents read, did you? My nearest in age sister gave me books to read in mass. Later in life, once I was teaching and writing, she even gave me an ee cummings book to add to my collection, since it gave her a headache. I did read Jaws after my Mom did.
My one son said he did crack open a book I had chosen his senior year in HS for winning the English award; he did so after earning a PHD in mathematics and was teaching college, including a freshman math course on How to Write About Mathematics.
@Beowulfsfriend every now again, my spawn take my advice or share my tastes.
@Untamedshrew I have read some if my kid's selections. Wicked was an excellent book, that I would have never picked up until my daughter suggested it. I have read others, also.
If I were going to take a popular musician as an introduction to existentialism it would more likely be Leonard Cohen