Wednesday, April 01, 2015
Earth humor, ar! ar!
Starbucks tackles the biggest issue.
Apart from Starbucks caffeine paraphernalia, the quote also appears in innumerable "quotations" websites.
¶ 7:33 PM
Starbucks tackles the biggest issue.
Like its previous effort, the nationwide initiative centers on Starbucks baristas engaging customers in a conversation about death and dying in order to get them to reflect on their own mortality. Baristas will encourage customers to join in the discussion by writing the campaign catchphrase “We’re All Going to Die,” on cups at the point of sale.
While baristas will have wide latitude in how they approach this task, Starbucks has provided some suggested conversation starters and themes to engage customers. For example, they might invite customers to consider a printed passage from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who famously wrote: “If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life -- and only then will I be free to become myself.”I could not find that quote in the corpus, "squarely" only appears eight times - e.g., "difficulty of principle which must be squarely faced... to make visible precisely the origin and scope of the problem-domain of this science [philosophy], itself be scientifically discovered and determined." Hear, hear.
Apart from Starbucks caffeine paraphernalia, the quote also appears in innumerable "quotations" websites.
¶ 7:33 PM
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It looks like that quote is from "From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest" by T.Z. Lavine. The author doesn't use quotes but is summarizing the "existentialist" theme of death. For what it's worth, Lavine's book seems to be an introduction to philosophy geared toward high school students. Here's the entirety of the paragraph devoted to death:
"Related to the theme of nothingness is the existentialist theme of death. Nothingness, in the form of death, which is my final nothingness, hangs over me like a sword of Damocles at each moment of my life. I am filled with anxiety at times when I permit myself to be aware of this. At those moments, says Martin Heidegger, the most influential of the German existentialist philosophers, the whole of my being seems to drift away into nothing. The unaware person tries to live as if death is not actual, he tries to escape its reality. But Heidegger says that my death is my most authentic, significant moment, my personal potentiality, which I alone must suffer. And if I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life-- and only then will I be free to become myself. But here the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre begs to differ. What is death, he asks? Death is my total nonexistence. Death is as absurd as birth-- it is no ultimate, authentic moment of my life, it is nothing but the wiping out of my existence as conscious being. Death is only another witness to the absurdity of human existence" (Lavine, 332).
On the internet, if it sounds catchy, a paraphrase will be turned into a direct quote from a famous philosopher in short order. In this case, the misquote has been cited in such classics as "The Leader in You" and "On the Road to the Best Orgasm Ever".
"Related to the theme of nothingness is the existentialist theme of death. Nothingness, in the form of death, which is my final nothingness, hangs over me like a sword of Damocles at each moment of my life. I am filled with anxiety at times when I permit myself to be aware of this. At those moments, says Martin Heidegger, the most influential of the German existentialist philosophers, the whole of my being seems to drift away into nothing. The unaware person tries to live as if death is not actual, he tries to escape its reality. But Heidegger says that my death is my most authentic, significant moment, my personal potentiality, which I alone must suffer. And if I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life-- and only then will I be free to become myself. But here the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre begs to differ. What is death, he asks? Death is my total nonexistence. Death is as absurd as birth-- it is no ultimate, authentic moment of my life, it is nothing but the wiping out of my existence as conscious being. Death is only another witness to the absurdity of human existence" (Lavine, 332).
On the internet, if it sounds catchy, a paraphrase will be turned into a direct quote from a famous philosopher in short order. In this case, the misquote has been cited in such classics as "The Leader in You" and "On the Road to the Best Orgasm Ever".
With quotes and the internet, my experience is: if the quote doesn't show up on Wikipedia, then it probably cannot be traced back to the quoted.
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