Ch.16 Existentialism

Soccio

Existentialism defined

• Asserts that the most important philosophical matters involve fundamental questions of meaning and choice as they affect actual individuals

• Comes to grips with the real problems of human existence:– Choice, freedom, identity, alienation, inauthenticity,

despair, & awareness of our own mortality• Champions of existentialism: Soren Kierkegaard

(Christian, 1813-1855) & Jean-Paul Sartre (atheist, 1905-1980)

Kierkegaard

• His works: Danish, ignored, used sarcasm/irony, engages and disturbs readers

• Denounced systematic consistency & coherence• Attacks conventional Christian theology, science,

& professional philosophy• Radical shift from objectivity to subjectivity• “The question is not what am I to believe (think,

understand), but what am I to do?

Kierkegaard: childhood

• youngest of 7 children, born in Copenhagen, Denmark• His devout Lutheran father felt constant guilt for two

sins: cursed God & slept with a maid after his wife died• Soren felt same sense of despair & melancholy over this

relationship with his infinite God• To Uni of Copenhagen to study theology but found

interest in philosophy & literature; lost interest in religion & estranged from his father

• Made peace w/ father & heard confession of 2 sins; went back to theology & passed exam w/ honor in 1840

Reward for Sacrifice to God?

• At 22, fell in love w/ 14 yr. old Regina Olsen & got engaged when she turned 17 but he broke up immediately

• Did try to get back with her but she went back to her ex-boyfriend

• Fear that his melancholy might harm her? Offered his love of Olsen as a sacrifice to God (as Abrahim offered Isaac)

• Abrahim got to keep Isaac & salvation; but he didn’t get to keep Olsen…what went wrong?

• How can I know what God wants me to do? He concluded that universal principles must give way to individual predicaments

What it means to be a Christian• Convinced that Christianity suffers from the same inauthenticity

– Means: nature and needs of the individual are ignored, denied, obscured, or made less important than institutions, abstractions, or groups.

• Authenticity: subjective condition of an individual living honestly and courageously in the moment without refuge in excuses and without reliance on groups or institutions for meaning and purpose.

• After his beloved bishop died, he broke from the church and published that the bishop was a witness to error, to false Christianity– Clergy and general public rose to defend the bishop

• He rejected any institutionalized religion of formulas, guarantees, security, and “group salvation”

• @ 42, fell on the way home from the bank, paralyzed from the waste down. Destitute, helpless, and weak, Soren Kierkegaard died quietly on 11/11/1855

The Gist of his philosophy• No amount of objective, systematic, abstract knowledge

could ever provide a meaning for life• Did not deny the value of objective knowledge, but

“objective facts” of life can’t account for its existential quality

• “but he does just what I do” after amassing objective facts, data, to understand what it means to be a Christian

• Objective understanding can’t give an individual a reason to live & can’t answer the question “What am I to do?”

Objective as Untruth• Complete objectivity and impartiality is impossible• “reason” is a mere abstraction, a noble-sounding term that

conceals an individual, subjective choice.• The vital issues of existence confront the complex,

individually existing self• Objectivity, by its nature, is cool, detached, impersonal.

Existence, however, is not:• Said Descartes & all those who followed his lead reduced

existence to believing: “I think, therefore, I am” – ignore the real predicament of actual existence: Deciding what

to do

The Present Age

• He attacked conformity: mass production, mass media, inflated objectivity and abstractions– The crowd overwhelms the individual– The mediocre, alienated individual feels frightened

and lost without collective identity & peer approval• Collective identity is always somewhat false because

one must betray part of oneself in order to fit in– Cease living our own lives & began living ‘ a kind of life’

http://twentytwowords.com/2012/02/13/a-lone-dockworker-refuses-to-raise-his-hand-in-the-nazi-salute-1936/

Age of Virtual Equality

• Rather than being ourselves, we tend to conform to an image or idea associated with being a certain type of person (belong to an abstraction)– A Christian, a Muslim, an age, an ethnicity, a gender

• We see others as abstract types & overlook individual qualities

• How can we be our true selves in an age dominated by ever more sophisticated ways of influencing our thoughts, feelings, and actions?

Sartre and the Age of Forlornness p441-457

• The century after Kierkegaard’s death: 2 monstrous wars• WWI: ugly underside of technological progress

– Mustard gas, heavy artillery delivered with near pinpoint accuracy, bombs dropped from airplanes

– Humans destroyed en masse• WWII: WWI paled in comparison to monolithic, impassive,

massive assault on humanity that occurred• Tens of millions have been systematically, impersonally,

efficiently eliminated– Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, “cripples”, “criminal types,

“degenerates”• Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Hiroshima

Hiroshima

Jean-Paul-Charles-Aymard Sartre• Lost his father as an infant; grew up with mom and

grandparents• Disturbed by mother’s Catholicism & Grandfather’s

Lutheranism• Taught philosophy for 10 yrs. • Academic philosophy disappoints him; elaborate

metaphyscial system and abstractions had no relevance to his “breathing” life

• Life is made up of difficult decisions and concrete experience & philosophy failed to address these living issues and choices.

Sartre influenced by Phenomenology

• Phenonmenology: consciousness is the basis of reality; provides descriptive analysis of consciousness in all its forms (Edmund Husserl 1859-1938)

• Sartre tries to find a way to live “alone, without God”: his novel called Nausea

• He found “a pulsating, ever-flowing monstrous nothingness” (Soccio, p.443).

Sartre: Existence is absurd• Sartre’s sense of the absurd shaped by WWII– Drafted in 1939, captured by Germans

• Saw France occupied by Germans = evil is not a mere abstraction; it is real and concrete

• Civilization and order are a thin veneer: at any moment “the beast” can break loose and reveal the “absurd”, which we deny through rationalizations in the form of abstractions and philosophical and religious beliefs

• Failure to face the absurd is always accompanied by excessive denial, which prevents us from recognizing evil for what it is– Holocaust/Nazi “made the obsolete frames of our thought

explode, the war, occupation, resistance, the years that followed

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=war+children+afghanistan&view=detail&id=277F821CC23673

18A7658F186F9613065B465936&first=1&adlt=strict

Sartre: The Celebrity Philosopher• After WWII, spoke out about injustice & personal responsibility• Simone Beauvoir was his lover & their ideas influenced each

other = role models for postwar intellects• accepted Marx ideas about economics and class based

determinism but criticized him for objectifying the individuals out of existence– Sartre wants to put the individual back at the focal point of Marxism;

grew disillusioned with Soviet communism• Flirted with Maoism but sided with student revolt in 1968 in

China• Spoke out against American “war crimes” in Vietnam• Never joined the Communist Party• Died in 1980

Sartre: Freedom and Anguish• The horror of Nazi occupation shattered any hope for an ordered universe

governed by a wise, powerful, and loving God• Concentration camps were scientific & rationally ordered• We pretend that facts dictate choices or that certain choices are “natural”

we obscure our own responsibility• Like it or not, we are free to choose “facts” or reject them, free to follow

nature or not, because we are free to define the facts and to define what is natural

• We are the totality of our actions• We do not have a given nature; we become a certain kind of person. • We are existentially free• There is no fixed self on which we build• Wrote Dead Exit: attacked hypocrisy, inauthenticity, and cowardice of

living for others (social self) rather than for one’s “authentic self”• Kierkegaard: we live through the crowd without actually existing

Taliban morality vs. Science

Query p. 446

• Indentify some common social types that form your own experience. What social type are you? Is it possible to be both a social type and an authentic self.

Forlornness• Nothing limits our choice: not chained by hereditary or

environmental conditioning; not science nor nature nor God: • God is truly dead: He does not answer us but remains silent

in the face of absurdity and horror. We face life alone…with absolute freedom and the chilling responsibility that accompanies it

• Atheistic existentialism refuses to compensate for the silence of God by substituting a glib scientific or philosophic idol

• Denounced secular ethics that attempt to take ethical values seriously in such a way that “Nothing will be changed if God does not exist”

Query

• Given the horror of our age__ the threat of nuclear annihilation, chemical weapons, terrorism, child abuse, rampant pollution, AIDs and cancer, homelessness, ecological disasters, and famine__which do you see as more horrible: the absence of God or the silence of God? Is God silent?

Condemned to Be Free p.448• We look to science to “cure” everything• We are not free not to be free; No excuses

– “I come from a disadvantaged background”– “I was drunk”

• Story: father collaborated w/ Nazis, older brother killed fighting Germans; upset mother but he was mom’s sole consolation; dilema: go fight Germans or stay w/ mom? – Who could help him choose? Christian doctrine?– Which is a greater good: vague abstraction of fighting a group or a concrete

good of helping a particular human to go on living?– Who can decide a priori?– No book of ethics can tell him

Anguish p.449• Individual choices impact all people: by creating an

image of the way others ought to be• What is universal is the freedom to act, but the

specific act is not universal– Consciousness = temperament & has incalculable

consequences• Should choose with eyes open & sense of

responsibility

Despair p. 452

• Being realistic stripped us of hoping that God, or society, or luck, or the general good will of others will come to our aid or rescue– Cut off from false optimism

Optimistic Toughness p.453• Sartre’s is a philosophy of actual, not potential• Sartre remind us of our power through “rigorously involved” in our

action• Once we stop waiting for God or others or fate to take actions, we

may be more inclined to begin to act for ourselves• From existential forlornness, anguish, and despair comes authentic

optimism, based not on wishful thinking and vague possibilities, but on tough truths and clear vision

• Turns our attention , and hence our lives, to the reality of here and now__not of fantasy of maybe there later.– Offers a basic formula for transformation = optimistic and hopeful

• To some, the loss of free will might be a small price to pay for being able to blame luck, hereditary, God’s plan, etc.– Sartre would say the loss of freedom comes the loss of human dignity

Comments on Kierkegaard & Sartre p. 454

• Two of the very few philosophers whose works are in virtually every popular bookstore

• Few philosophers to problems of our time so pointedly• They understand the dangers of deferring choices to

outsiders, to experts.• Attacks on using philosophy, religion, science, or anything

else as mechanisms of denial and escapism strike a chord with many

• Due to the power of “the crowd”, authenticity seems rare despite our freedom

• Kierkegaard against inauthentic faith, mass societies, blindly sterile objectivity

Criticism against Kierkegaard• Too much subjectivity & individuality• Unable to overcome his own alienation from science and objectivity• The presence of passion is no guarantee of authenticity

– Blind, uncontrollable passion can destroy individuality as surely as excessive abstraction

– Can lose ourselves in passion as well as in the crowd• Our danger today:

– Not too much passion but too much sentimentality masquerading as passion

– Not the risky leap of faith but the pseudosafety of mass-movement religion

– Not too much subjectivity but too much self-centeredness

Soccio’s comments on Sartres• We must choose with or without God• Not choosing is not an option• Warns us of the excuse-making and fatalism• Reminds us that we are not born cowards or heroes– We become what we do

• Until science explains all facets of the human condition, freedom will remain for us to use wisely or to squander

• We hope that knowledge will save us, that clearer thinking, better science, and managed social reform will make our world a better, decent place