Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This.

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So taking an ideas that fall under the category of existentialism basically guarantees

you're going to come across certain terminology.

What I mean is there's words commonly thrown around in this space when trying to describe

the human condition and all the bad stuff that's possible there.

Words like despair or anxiety, nausea, alienation.

There's many more of these, and you've no doubt heard all these words before. And what you also may have heard is when it comes to a lot of these

philosophers that fall under the label of existentialism, common way you'll hear their work

described is that they're framing this piece of existence in terms of a lack or a negation.

And what's meant when someone says this is that when it comes to these negative feelings

we experience, it could describe with despair, nausea, and the like, we feel these things

because there's something lacking that's causing these experiences.

Many examples of this I could give.

Maybe if you're SART, what's lacking is a fixed essence as to what it is to be a person, and the lack of that essence causes a lot of problems for you as a human being. Maybe if you're Kirkagard, it's the lack of rational certainty or ultimate meaning. Maybe not having those things has consequences in how you feel sometimes too. If you're high digger, maybe what's lacking is an

obvious stable ground of being that we can clearly define. The point is, it's the lack of something

that explains many of the difficult spots we find ourselves in. But the guy we're talking about

today, Ernst Block, well, he's not technically an existentialist because he would go on to do far more

than that in his later work.

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