Philosophical Dictionary

One meme sums up three theories of human nature: a feral brute for Hobbes, a cheerful innocent for Rousseau, and a crab in full panic for Freud. The real arguments are stranger. Rousseau never said “noble savage”, and Hobbes thought we lock our doors at night for a reason. Is there an essence of man at all?

A meme claims absurdists are nihilists who fell for their captor. Nietzsche’s notebooks split nihilism into a weary kind and a destructive kind, Camus warned that the absurd can make murder look indifferent, and Stockholm syndrome itself is a contested label. Is the joke unfair, or does it land a real hit?

Max Stirner said your head is haunted. God, morality, the state and even truth can become spooks, fixed ideas that give orders. Here is what a spook is, why Stirner called the pious fools in a madhouse, what his egoism means and why Marx and Engels wrote 300 pages against him. Was he right, or just haunted differently?

Is the dog a good boy? Depends on your ethical theory, says the meme. Nietzsche went further in 1873: truth itself is a mobile army of metaphors, and being truthful means lying by convention. He never published the essay, and his famous “no facts” line sits in a notebook. So did he hand us post-truth?

The “existence is suffering” meme seals a small leak with the biggest claim in Buddhism. The Buddha’s first sermon, SN 56.11, gives the first noble truth a list that includes not getting what you want, a summary clause most people skip, and three more truths that come with instructions. So what does dukkha mean?

It sounds like a riddle: you can do what you want, but you can’t want what you want. Schopenhauer meant the idea literally, and Einstein found it consoling. We trace the line to the 1839 essay behind it, unpack his theory of will, motive and character, and ask: if you never chose your wants, who is to blame?