The Glimpses Into Existence Lecture Series

plus a few bonus public lectures on Existentialist themes and thinkers

Back in the Fall of 2013, I was invited by the Kingston Public Library to give a set of monthly talks for the public spanning the entire year of 2014. At the time I was producing a number of videos on various Existentialist texts and thinkers, and that movement in philosophy and literature remains perennially of interest to the general public, so I decided to focus on Existentialism.

I proposed a series that we decided to call “Glimpses Into Existence”. We would start in January with a general overview about Existentialism, and an invitation to attendees to come back for the sessions in following months. Then, from February to December, each month we would focus on one important author who fit into the broad rubric of Existentialist philosophy and literature.

We videorecorded all of the sessions, and did so for several reasons. One was so that participants in the sessions could go back to previous ones they might have missed but wanted to see. Another was that it provided good online publicity for the Kingston Public Library, and helped to draw visitors to come to the sessions (including two younger people who drove over from another state). And a third was that they made for engaging videos in my own, at that time quite new, YouTube channel.

Deciding upon which eleven authors to feature proved a bit tricky. There were some who obviously belonged in there, for example the three 19th century “grandfathers” of Existentialism, namely Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. At the other end of the timeline, in the era Existentialism became associated with French philosophy, we had Marcel, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Camus. But that left four more slots to decide upon.

I settled on Shestov, Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, since each of them, in my view, are quite important in the broad currents comprising Existentialism, and I was confident about my capacity to bring my own knowledge of their works into engaging talks for non-academics. That meant, of course, leaving other authors out who I might have liked to have discussed, like Miguel de Unamuno, Martin Buber, or Frantz Fanon. But that’s so often the case, when you have a rich topic and only so much time to discuss it.

Here are the twelve videos from the Glimpses of Existence 2014 talk series:

• Lecture 1: "What is Existentialism?” — An Introduction

• Lecture 2: "Lessons of Socrates and Abraham” — Søren Kierkegaard

• Lecture 3: "Underground Men, Inquisitors, and Saints" — Fyodor Dostoevsky

• Lecture 4: “Overcoming Nihilism After The Death of God” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• Lecture 5: "Poetry, Solitude, Love, and Death" — Rainer Maria Rilke

• Lecture 6: "Everything is Possible. . . Even God" — Lev Shestov

• Lecture 7: "Trials, Castles, Insects, and Other Horrors" — Franz Kafka

• Lecture 8: "In Quest of the Human, and of Being" — Martin Heidegger

• Lecture 9: "Does My Freedom Make You Nauseous?" —Jean-Paul Sartre

• Lecture 10: "Becoming The Other" — Simone de Beauvoir

• Lecture 11: "Revolt in the Face of the Absurd" — Albert Camus

• Lecture 12: "Existentialist Faith, Hope and Charity" — Gabriel Marcel

While we were still living in the Hudson Valley in New York, I gave two other invited talks in 2014 and 2015 specifically focused on Rainer Maria Rilke, to two very different audiences

• "We Are Building God": Rainer Maria Rilke on the Divine (at the Unitarian Universalist Community of the Catskills)

• Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" and Boulud's "Letters to a Young Chef" (at the Culinary Institute of America)

We moved back to Milwaukee in 2015, and I was invited to give a few other talks at another local library (the Wauwatosa Public Library) about Existentialism. Those might be of interest as well, so here they are:

• Who Were the Existentialists? (and What Was It All About?)

• Existentialism, Anxiety, and Human Freedom