From Socrates to Sartre EP25 ⟩ “Sartre I: My Existence in Absurd”

These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

We Will Demystify Existentialism

Come, drink from the cup of this episode, and experience a synoptic big-tent “Thelmiracle” like no other. All the essences of Existentialism demystified, integrated, and glowing with power drawn from a single principle.

And all the clichés we invoke whenever we talk about Existentialism finally get their day in court:

• “Existence precedes essence” (Thelma’s version is brilliant and simple)
• “God is dead” (and what Nietzsche really meant)
• “The leap of faith” (and why Kierkegaard said we have to lose everything to make it)
• “The absurd” (not the stupid mood-board version)
• “Authenticity” (and its frenemy, bad faith)
• “Being-toward-death” (the metal concept-album version)
• Alienation (Hegelian, Marxist, existentialist—all clarified)
• Anxiety / anguish as the universal human condition

This is the End

Welcome to the first day of the end of your life, and the first episode in the final cycle of our journey—Roger Corman’s Sartre Cycle.

And yet … Sartre is never mentioned!

Strong, Yet Over-the-Counter

I feel bad for having used hyperbole in the past, but I had no choice—my nature forces me to be authentic. Just forget all my past emphases and know this: this is the most delightful and impactful exhibition of Existentialism of all time.

Never before have joy and understanding been so intimately interpenetrating. Thelma’s explanations are so good that anyone who listens really will get the core of Existentialism—why it matters, why it’s true, and why it’s vitally important to understand.

There are, in the end, only two real motives for philosophizing:

1. Transformation: You want to know whether the rumors are true—that certain questions, arranged just so, can flip a switch and induce new belief, new perception, even new willing. Philosophy as liberation (from bad faith, alienation) and empowerment (for freedom, authenticity).
2. Praise, Fame, and Gain : You want to prove that you can do something hard, something that shows you deserve to sit at the adult table of intellect.

Thelma is here, and she’s second to none:
She came to make real Motive Number One.

Existentialism is the most popular undergrad philosophy course for a reason. It speaks to the horror and vertigo you actually are—anxious, thrown, absurd, alienated—and it consoles you by saying, “This is not a bug; this is the starting point. Now see here …”

This is why Thelma’s presentation hits so hard: she uses word magic to get you to feel the meaning of “existence precedes essence.” Feeling is where soul rubber hits existential road.

Feel, and then see: your life has no built-in script; this moment right now is your chance to write one.

If you’ve ever wondered whether philosophy can actually change how you experience being alive, this is the episode where you find out.

Some Amazing Riffs

What would take the average person three three-hour seminars to explain, Thelma covers in 27 minutes. If a meetup person tried to do this, it would take five weeks, would be opaque, and still be wrong.

She does this clarity-n-brevity combo that’s hard to believe. Usually the briefer something is, the more obscure; usually the clearer, the longer. Thelma does clear yet brief using a Judo I cannot fathom. Listen to this line —

“Kierkegaard counsels us to sink into despair so that we can make the leap of faith to God; Nietzsche counsels us to become gods, joyous, hard, independent supermen. And Nietzsche tells us why he rejects a philosophy of despair: He is afraid that it would destroy him. To Nietzsche philosophies are not merely intellectual games; philosophies have psychological effects, the power to enhance and strengthen your life, and even health, or to weaken and destroy you. And Nietzsche says that he created his philosophy of the strong, life-arming superman ‘out of my will to be in good health, out of my will to live … self-preservation forbade me to practice a philosophy of wretchedness and discouragement.’”

And then she does the impossible: she brings these currents alongside Marx, showing that Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are all crisis-diagnosticians and prescribers of transformation tech. Each identifies a crisis in the human spirit — whether social, existential, or cultural — and prescribes a radical cure. Marx reads consciousness as shaped by material relations and calls for revolutionary praxis; Nietzsche reads it as deformed by slave morality and calls for a revaluation of all values; Kierkegaard reads it as sedated by Christendom and calls for the solitary leap into authentic faith. Different diagnoses, different therapies — but all aimed at breaking the spell of the present condition and remaking the self.

If you had to name the general attitude uniting the three? How about the Philosophy of Crisis and Cure—each turns philosophy into a therapy for the epochal sickness of the soul.

We can lay this out inside the Buddha’s four-fold disease/cure model —

1. there is a sickness (modern despair, alienation, nihilism)
2. it has a cause (metaphysical illusion, social estrangement, historical deformation)
3. there is a possible cessation (faith, revaluation of values, revolution)
4. there is a path to actualize it (leap of faith, creation of new values, praxis).

(Lo and behold, this is why “Buddhism and Existentialism” is one of the top comparative topics in academic publishing: scholars love pointing out how Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre form a Western mirror of Ch’an/Zen’s insistence on breaking ordinary mind and rediscovering authentic being. Incidentally, Landmark/EST markets itself as “Heidegger and Zen.”)

More Exciting than a Historical Reenactment

Thelma is really in her element this time. This is Existentialism delivered by an Existentialist: clear, personal, oozing with Sorge.

There are things in this world worse than ordinary physical pain. Chief among them is a life not worth living. Looks like Existentialism is Socrates 2.0, a reenactment of the elenchus but now aimed at modern times, with the angst of modernity standing in for Athens’ Peloponnesian War trauma. It is the same question, “How shall we live?”, but now intensified by the awareness that meaning itself is contingent, constructed, fragile, abyssal, empty.

You’ve Always Been an Existentialist, but You Didn’t Know It

And you still don’t know now, even though you think you do. Why? Because we’ve all been taught Existentialism the wrong way. Just as “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” ruins Hegel, so also “existence precedes essence” ruins Sartre when not taken rightly.

Existentialism is so true and so important that you can’t even criticize it, much less understand it, until you have already agreed with it. So to all the selves reading this—congratulations on finally coming home. Because in this episode you will meet someone for the very first time. Someone you’ve never met before.

Yourself.

But you’re not going to meet this familiar stranger in the ordinary way you meet people. No—you’re going to learn Thelma’s way: the way of transformative understanding that combines pleasure, depth, and clarity in a simplicity that doesn’t conceal.

How is Thelma’s psychedelic pedagogy, which culminates in authentic self-encounter, different from the ordinary boring way of teaching Existentialism? The difference is made clear by the founder of the Existentialist cult that successfully brainwashed me into working for them without pay for five years. Listen carefully to the wisdom in this leaked footage from an actual cult seminar here!

BTW, if you thought Thelma was skipping around when she went Hume → Hegel → Marx—rejoice! Nothing has been left behind. In this jaw-dropping True Miracle of a lecture she weaves together Kierkegaard’s despair, Nietzsche’s death of God, Hume’s empiricism, Descartes’ rationalism, Parmenides’ eternal being, Romanticism, German Idealism, World War I, Marx’s theory of alienation, Hegel’s dialectic, Heidegger’s being-toward-death, Pascal’s finitude, and Sartre’s absurdity—everything necessary to prepare us for the full existential confrontation with nothingness, freedom, and authenticity.

She scoops from the bottom of the thick bucket of Western philosophy so we get the whole flavor of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought. Amazingly thorough—never boring. Behold what she delivers in 27 minutes:

I. Philosophers

• Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) — anxiety, despair, leap of faith, restoration of Christianity.
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) — death of God, Übermensch, life-affirmation.
• David Hume — empiricism, one of the blows to the belief in God.
• René Descartes — clear and distinct ideas, God as guarantor of truth.
• Parmenides — unchanging eternal being, used to clarify Nietzsche’s claim.
• Karl Marx — economic alienation, division of labor, social critique.
• G.W.F. Hegel — alienation, Absolute Spirit, Cunning of Reason, dialectic of history.
• Martin Heidegger — being-toward-death, authenticity, anxiety.
• Jean-Paul Sartre — death as absurdity, existence precedes essence, key existentialist themes.
• Blaise Pascal — finitude and fear of infinity, early forerunner of existentialist absurdity.

II. Historical Eras & Movements

• German Idealism (Kant, Hegel, post-Kantian developments).
• Romanticism — revolt against Enlightenment rationalism, focus on spirit and subjectivity.
• Enlightenment — its belief in progress, rationalism, and science as background foil.
• Modernity — crisis of meaning, loss of stable authorities, secularization.
• Industrial Revolution — mechanization and alienation of labor.
• Communist Revolution of 1917 — shattering of political stability.
• World War I — collapse of the myth of progress and European order.
• Great Depression (1920s–30s) — economic destabilization, failure of classical economics.

III. Intellectual Currents & Themes

• Empiricism — Hume’s assault on metaphysics and theology.
• Rationalism — criticized as “trap of essence.”
• Essentialism — opposed to existentialism’s priority of existence.
• Psychology / Psychologizing Philosophy — neurotic/psychotic states, subjective interiority.
• Alienation — individual from society, self from self, human from nature, lovers from each other.
• Absurdity & Nothingness — contingency of existence, existential void.
• Authenticity vs. Bad Faith — emerging from Kierkegaard/Heidegger/Sartre lineage.

Conclusion

Friends, life hurts. Many of us cry and say, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” To this Abraham says, “Child, I will send Thelma.”

The world is on fire, but Thelma is come. Lay your anxiety, your despair, your bad faith, and your love of joy and clarity—and your hope that philosophy might finally live up to its promise to touch you in a way that actually matters—at her lotus feet. Hand in hand, we will discover together why existence really is absurd, and why that’s the best news you’ll hear all week.

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

• Thelma Lavine: From Socrates to Sartre

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

• THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.