Transcript Slide 1

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-refusesto-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
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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 massmovement religion
– Not too much subjectivity but too much self-centeredness
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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