You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
36 reviews for:
The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age
Gordon Marino
3.57 AVERAGE
36 reviews for:
The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age
Gordon Marino
3.57 AVERAGE
reflective
medium-paced
There are a couple of gems here, some fodder for later rumination, but I was hoping for something more cohesive. It's more a collection of ideas, mostly from Kierkegaard, that have helped the author put his own depression and anxiety into perspective.
This is actually a book about the author and Kierkegaard, with some other existentialists briefly mentioned.
This is basically "Your Dad Explains Kierkegaard to You After a Couple Beers". It's a genial, plain-spoken, kinda corny and soul-baring description of Marino's interactions with SK and other existentialists over the course of his lifetime, from his rough-and-tumble youth up to his present occupation as director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf (the role in which I am familiar with him and the reason I picked this up). The result is somewhere between self-help book and bull session during your favorite prof's office hours. Marino talks frankly of his struggles with depression and anxiety and tries to tease out the ways that SK offered him a lifeline from sinking into that abyss. Marino doesn't sugar-coat his own behavior and tries to offer an honest account of his own short-comings in his search for the authentic life.
What I most admired about this account was the spirit of humility; Marino is willing to admit that he might not have the answers to the big questions, and that in fact there might not be any to find in an objective sense. I was chiefly struck by his complicated relationship with faith and his attempts to explore whether his own dialectic of rejection of, and yearning for, belief was in some sense a more authentic mode of faith than the blind believer.
He grapples with the stuff that matters, with chapters on death, love, faith, morality, etc. He considers several thinkers throughout the book, including Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Plato, Aristotle, and others, although he focuses mostly on Kierkegaard. While I didn't learn much new from this book, I came away feeling like I'd had an engaging conversation on important topics and interesting thinkers with someone passionately interested in finding his subjectivity in this life. And what more can you really ask from a book than that inspired conversation?
What I most admired about this account was the spirit of humility; Marino is willing to admit that he might not have the answers to the big questions, and that in fact there might not be any to find in an objective sense. I was chiefly struck by his complicated relationship with faith and his attempts to explore whether his own dialectic of rejection of, and yearning for, belief was in some sense a more authentic mode of faith than the blind believer.
He grapples with the stuff that matters, with chapters on death, love, faith, morality, etc. He considers several thinkers throughout the book, including Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Plato, Aristotle, and others, although he focuses mostly on Kierkegaard. While I didn't learn much new from this book, I came away feeling like I'd had an engaging conversation on important topics and interesting thinkers with someone passionately interested in finding his subjectivity in this life. And what more can you really ask from a book than that inspired conversation?