Description
“When it comes to living, there’s no getting out alive. But books can help us survive, so to speak, by passing on what is most important about being human before we perish. In The Existentialist’s Survival Guide, Marino has produced an honest and moving book of self-help for readers generally disposed to loathe the genre.†—The Wall Street Journal
Sophisticated self-help for the 21st century—when every crisis feels like an existential crisis
Soren Kierkegaard, Frederick Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other towering figures of existentialism grasped that human beings are, at heart, moody creatures, susceptible to an array of psychological setbacks, crises of faith, flights of fancy, and other emotional ups and downs. Rather than understanding moods—good and bad alike—as afflictions to be treated with pharmaceuticals, this swashbuckling group of thinkers generally known as existentialists believed that such feelings not only offer enduring lessons about living a life of integrity, but also help us discern an inner spark that can inspire spiritual development and personal transformation. To listen to Kierkegaard and company, how we grapple with these feelings shapes who we are, how we act, and, ultimately, the kind of lives we lead.
In The Existentialist s Survival Guide, Gordon Marino, director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College and boxing correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, recasts the practical takeaways existentialism offers for the twenty-first century. From negotiating angst, depression, despair, and death to practicing faith, morality, and love, Marino dispenses wisdom on how to face existence head-on while keeping our hearts intact, especially when the universe feels like it’s working against us and nothing seems to matter.
What emerges are life-altering and, in some cases, lifesaving epiphanies—existential prescriptions for living with integrity, courage, and authenticity in an increasingly chaotic, uncertain, and inauthentic age.
About the Author
Gordon Marino is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Professor Marino took his doctorate from the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. Before coming to St. Olaf in 1995, he taught at Harvard, Yale, and Virginia Military Institute.
A recipient of the Richard J. Davis Ethics Award for excellence in writing on ethics and the law, Marino is the author of Kierkegaard in the Present Age, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, and editor of the Modern Library’s Basic Writings of Existentialism and Ethics: The Essential Writings. In addition to his scholarly publications, Marino’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and many other national and international publications.
A former boxer, Dr. Marino has been a USA Boxing coach since 1995. He was the head coach of boxing at Virginia Military Institute and currently trains both amateurs and professionals in Minnesota. He is also an award-winning boxing writer for among other venues, the Wall Street Journal.
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