A philosopher's personal meditation on how painful emotions can reveal truths about what it means to be truly human Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision invites us to consider a different approach to life, one in which we stop feeling bad about feeling bad. In this powerful and disarmingly intimate book, Existentialist philosopher Mariana Alessandri draws on the stories of a diverse group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and writers to help us see that our suffering is a sign not that we are broken but that we are tender, perceptive, and intelligent. Thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldua, and Soren Kierkegaard sat in their anger, sadness, and anxiety until their eyes adjusted to the dark. Alessandri explains how readers can cultivate "night vision" and discover new sides to their painful moods, such as wit and humor, closeness and warmth, and connection and clarity. Night Vision shows how, when we learn to embrace the dark, we begin to see these moods-and ourselves-as honorable, dignified, and unmistakably human.

Traditional philosophizing has generally depended upon logic or reason as its primary or sole access to truth. Subjective experiences such as feelings, the passions, and emotions have typically been viewed as secondary, untrustworthy, or both. They have, at best, been seen as accompanying reason, at worse, as clouding our judgments and misleading reason, thus often becoming unworthy of any significant role or consideration within traditional philosophical research. The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling revisits how the movement of existentialism, specifically, the religious existentialists, has contributed to rethinking the role of subjective experience for philosophical enterprise as a whole, in contrast to the rationalist and idealist traditions. This rethinking of subjective experience is what the book characterizes as the redemption of feeling. Expanding our understanding of philosophical thought to include these subjective experiences opens the door for the possibility of a mode of philosophizing that views human experience as philosophically relevant, thus reframing the importance of feelings in general for philosophical inquiry. Through their considerations of a variety of thinkers, the contributors to this collection provide a fresh look at the contributions of twentieth-century existentialists, a rethinking of the very notion of existentialism, and a genuine exploration of the significance of subjectivity.