Wise men say, only fools

I've been sitting here thinking about existentialism (and consequently, existentialist philosophers and writers of the 19th and 20th centuries) for the last hour or so. The problem I have with philosophers of the last 500 years or so is that they almost exclusively come from the European intellectual elite and most were born into something other than poverty and abject physical toil as their existance.

It is easy to sit around and expound on the merits of the individual and his ultimate responsibilities to himself and the world around him when you do not have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. If nothing else, these people, if not possessing their own wealth, became the babbles of the wealthy aristocracy. If you are a kept intellectual concubine, it's relatively easy to sit around day to day and expound for their pleasure.

Perhaps I see these men (and yes, they were mostly men) in a different light than the artists and musicians of their day. Although most of them were trinkets of the wealthy who sustained them, at least the common man can hear a wafting of Bach and be moved in his soul, or glance upon Edvard Munch's work and say to himself, I see me in that face. I often wonder if Mr. Munch is turning in his grave knowing that his most famous piece has become a Halloween mask because of a horror movie. I am sure that Ed was not only an expressionist, but also an existentialist, if nothing more than at cocktail parties. Had he not lived with such abject emotional depression, he might actually find this amusing.

I remember the first time I heard the word existentialism. It was from Sue Winchester who had decided at age 17 that she was an existentialist. I decided that she must be right as she had won that full scholarship to USC and I had nothing more than pell grants to sustain me. Of course, 6 months later, she was in Camarillo doing time for being a paranoid schizophrenic. So much for the ultimate individual and his ultimate responsibilities to himself eh?