Well, I’ve almost finished the course (BTW, it is excellent) and I can see that I am an existentialist. That is, my own personal philosophy is Existentialism.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, I had absolutely no knowledge of this philosophical theory, or any familiarity with any of its popularizers or scholars. There is no way I could have picked up these ideas from study, or education, or experience. It is highly unlikely I have independently stumbled onto a way of looking at reality and the world which was first developed in Europe in the 1930s (although its precursors and roots go back a century or two earlier), I find it difficult to accept I worked out these concepts on my own; I normally am suspicious of “philazawfigal” speculation (as Richard Feynman liked to call it). Besides, some of the arguments and logic Sartre and Camus and others who pioneered Existentialism use are very complex and subtle. I have never been trained to think that way, and I am not familiar with it. I wonder how many of these insights have no referent at all, but are just artifacts of language–how much of what we understand about the world from the precursors of Existentialism; Kierkegaard was Danish, Nietzsche and Heidegger wrote in German, and Camus and Sartre were French, languages I do not know. Whatever those guys came up with is not a property of a specific tongue or culture, it can be successfully translated to others.

So the question is, how did I acquire these ideas? Did I absorb it subliminally, or subconsciously from writings of other Existentialists I might have been exposed to when they were discussing other topics?
Perhaps these ideas have simply saturated our culture and I have absorbed them without even realizing it, like I have acquired other modes of thinking peculiar to Western civilization. For example, I am aware I have made many ethical and moral assumptions and picked up many beliefs from Judeo-Christian thought, although I am an atheist. And although I share much culturally with the Greeks and Romans of antiquity, I also understand those people were fundamentally different from me. I can tell from their writings they didn’t think the way we do.

It makes you wonder, how much of what we believe, or know, or think we’ve figured out on our own is just second hand? Is a puzzlement.