8 - Obstacles

Summary

Chapter 8 describes four significant obstacles to acquiring meaning: unconscious motives, the lure of the crowd, dividedness, and constricted circumstances that produce suffering. The first is explained using Friedrich Nietzsche’s suspicion of the real motives of virtuous actions, the second by existentialists’ suspicion of crowds, the third by Soren Kierkegaard’s and Augustine’s idea of resistance to what is good, and the last by the constricted circumstances of women and black Americans. The realistic conclusion of the chapter is a middle ground between the debilitating pessimism of some existential writers and the easy optimism one sometimes encounters in religious people: sometimes people overcome these obstacles and sometimes they do not.