ToBeAndNotToBe:ThisIsTheHumanCondition
LLI.ExistentialismCourseSpring2009
April 2 to May 21 Thursdays, 10am -12noon
Text: William
Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in
Existential
Philosophy paperback. $19.95 ISBN #9647121-5-6
Irrational Man: A Study in
Existential Philosophy (1958), Doubleday, Anchor Books paperback
(1962): ISBN 978-0-385-03138-7
Irrational Man: A Study in
Existential Philosophy Written by William Barrett | Anchor |
Trade Paperback | July 1962 | $13.95 | 978-0-385-03138-7 Reprinted 1990
314 pages
To Be and Not To Be - That Is the
Human Condition
Existentialism emerged as a philosophical and cultural movement in the
twentieth-century, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. We
will explore existentialism using short literary writings,
philosophical texts, films and a variety of historical and cultural
documents and artifacts. Our text, first published in 1958, may be
considered in fact a primary source of the movement. Philosophers and
writers we will read include Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka,
Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Buber, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Hemingway,
...
Classes include presentations, reflective writing, conversations,
optional reports, and virtual guest speakers and field trips.
We will balance the eight class sessions with treating two or more
figures, at least one philosopher and at least one prominent cultural
figure outside of philosophy.
Syllabus
PreClassPreparation/Assignment - read and prepare some questions about
the text: Part I: "The Present Age"
Class1 - Part I: "THE PRESENT AGE"
Assignment:read Part II THE SOURCES OF EXISTENTIALISM IN THE WESTERN
TRADITION
Class2 - THE SOURCES OF EXISTENTIALISM IN THE WESTERN
TRADITION Assignment: Read Ch 7 Kierkegaard
Class3 - Kierkegaard, Kafka, Bergman & Art of the Existential Era
Assignment: Read Ch 8 Nietzsche
Class4 - Nietzsche, Dostoevsky & Tolstoy
Assignment: Read Ch 8 Heidegger
Class5 - Heidegger, Husserl, Melville & Hemingway
Assignment: Read Ch 8 Sartre
Class6 - Sartre, Camus, Gide, Beckett
Assignment: Read Part IV: INTEGRAL VS. RATIONAL MAN
Class7 - Part IV: INTEGRAL VS. RATIONAL MAN, LLI Evaluation Forms
Assignment: Read APPENDICES: Negation, Finitude, and the Nature of Man
& Existence and Analytic Philosophers
Class8 - To Be and Not To Be - That Is the Human Condition,
Existentialism In the Post PostModern World - Reflections on the Course
and Discussion
Course Overview
- Syllabus (course materials and structure (organization)) : ≈ content
and order of the text
- Book: Title: Irrational Man: A Study in
Existential Philosophy - an irritating title on two counts: 1
the descriptor, 'irrational' 2 the biased term 'man'
- Book: Contents, Structure and Process: 314 pp - a good description
and summary at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_Man:_A_Study_in_Existential_Philosophy
CONTENTS
I: "THE PRESENT AGE"
1: The Advent of Existentialism 3
2: The Encounter with Nothingness 23
The Decline of Religion 24
The Rational Ordering of Society 29
Science and Finitude 36
3: The Testimony of Modern
Art 42
II: THE SOURCES OF EXISTENTIALISM
IN THE WESTERN TRADITION
4: Hebraism and Hellenism 69
The Hebraic Man of
Faith 73
Greek Reason 79
5: Christian Sources 92
Faith and
Reason 92
Existence vs
Essence 101
The Case of
Pascal 110
6: The Flight from Laputa 120
The
Romantics 123
The Russians:
Dostoevksi and Tolstoy 133
III: THE EXISTENTIALISTS
7: Kierkegaard 149
The Man
Himself 151
Socrates and
Hegel; Existence and Reason 156
Aesthetic,
Ethical, Religious 163
Subjective
and Objective Truth 170
The Attack
Upon Christendom 172
8: Nietzsche 177
9: Heidegger 206
1 Being 210
2
Phenomenology and Human Existence 213
3 Death,
Anxiety, Finitude 225
4 Time and
Temporality; History 227
10: Sartre 239
1
Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself 245
2 Literature as a
mode of action 250
3 An Existential
Psychology 254
[4 An Existential
Politics 261]
IV: INTEGRAL VS. RATIONAL MAN
11: The Place of the Furies 267
1 The Crystal
Palace Unmanned 268
2 The Furies
275
APPENDICES:
Negation, Finitude, and the Nature of Man 283
Existence and Analytic Philosophers 295
INDEX 307
My reflections on the text overview:
As could be expected, the book begins with the here and now, then goes
back to earliest roots, immediate precursors, major exponents. It
concludes with a fourth part and one of the two appendices resituating
us in the present and near future, the here and now, challenging us to
be fully and integrally present to our existence, our human condition.
The structure and titles of part one trigger a fanciful aside. If the
present age begins with an advent, might not the encounter with
nothingness and the witness of modern art be likened to the Christmas
coming and adoration of magi? Of course existentialism rather
consistently gets crucified. But let's imagine that the overflow
participation for this course is a resurrection of existentialism in
our time, occasioning us to live gloriously in the full presence of our
human condition, our existence here and now.
Course
Procedures & Processes:
- CoFacilitating: a function of ourselves and our
times
- To Cover OR Not To Cover: The Text (≈ sightseeing
in Europe)
- Close Reading - Personal Reflection &
Recording - Class Discussion
(Reading is thinking with the aid
of a book.)
- Trifocal Viewing: Now1 (1958) - Then (pre-1958) -
Now2 (2009)
- Consideration of the text as primary and secondary
source
- Philosophize (go beyond philosophologizing) - it's
in the existential tradition
- Shun Certainty - Question Authority (even your own)
- Live and Learn and Live (Test Tailor Try
Again) - Live Hypothetically, Tentatively
CONTENTS
ANNOTATED
I: "THE PRESENT AGE"
1: The Advent of Existentialism 3
3 the age of abstracted, subordinated humans >>> leading to
alienation and anxiety THIS IS A MAJOR THEME: ABSTRACTED vs EMBODIED
AND EMBEDDED
WB chooses a K passage about living absentmindedly ('mindfully' is
perhaps still a current pop term in contrast - I would suggest 'present
bodied' as a more complete opposite) "... the curiously remote position
to which modern society has relegated philosophy, and which
philosophers themselves have been content to accept."
3-6, also 10, 20 philosophizing Now1 (1958) - Then (circa 400BCE) -
(Now2 (2009))
3-4 "How does philosophy itself exist at the present time?"
"Philosophers today exist... know
thyself.... profess, confess, declare openly.... a professional...
déformation profesionelle...
5 "In ancient Greece... a concrete way of life, a total vision of man
and the cosmos in the light of which the individual's whole life was to
be lived." "...a passionate way of life... - difference of
Oriental and Occidental bother with philosophy -
6-7 specialization and scientism (Anglo-American ≠ European
philosophizing)
7-11 historical context
Now1 (1958 postwars period, fall of Europe) - Then (circa 400BCE
Peloponnesian War, fall of Athens & democracy ) - (Now2 (2009
Mid-East wars, 9/11, economic crash, falling of America as we knew it))
11-16 The European Continental Tree of Existentialism: French, German,
Nordic, Russian, Spanish
13 the idea-action separation
[Vision without action is merely a dream.
Action without vision just passes the time.
Vision with action can change the world.
--Joel Arthur Barker]
17 on religious faith: Meister Eckhardt quotation about the saint and
the bishop
16-17 Buber transition
17-22 Existentialism in context of other -isms: Judaism, Christianism
(Catholicism, Protestantism(Methodism, Lutheranism,...)), empiricism,
scientism, pragmatism, logical positivism, marxism
20 'overtheologized atmosphere of the America in which Dewey started
his work...' cf John M. Barry The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of
the Deadliest Plague in History: p 14: "...American universities had
nearly two hundred endowed chairs of theology and fewer than five in
medicine..." circa 1876
20: focus of this book: European Existentialism WHAT IS OUR COURSE
FOCUS?
2: The Encounter with Nothingness 23
23 outer explosion from inner tension
1. The Decline of Religion
24 loss of religion ≈ loss of culture [ ≈ loss of mother]
25 at home >>> homeless - 500 years of "stripping nature of
these projections ..." cf Ellen Miller, Like Being Killed, p 36:
Heimatlose
26: the cost-benefit balance of any change
26-27 medieval rationalism in context of faith and wholeness of living
27: Science-Protestantism-Capitalism at the gateway into the modern
world: the double standard society: On Sunday the 'whore of Reason' is
abhorred, from Monday through Saturday she is a wonderful bedfellow of
business; after all, she vies for representing one of the oldest
professions
28 from medieval Catholic faith >>> Protestant faith
>>> anxious faith in the face of Nothingness
2. The Rational Ordering of Society
29: the Protestant Ethic and Capitalism coerce the world for profit
30-31: rational organization of living and working - abstracting,
collectivizing (massifying) - externalizing >>> alienating
32: journalism (mass media) and its uses - Karl Jaspers, Man in the
Modern Age, Essay: 1931 - WWI 1914 axial date
33: failure of civilization >>> chaos
34: appearance can no longer hide reality >>> Wizard of Oz
& naked king effect - "Existential philosophy (like much of modern
art) is thus a product of bourgeois society in a state of dissolution."
35: a secular phase of history - homeless BUT... homeless from whose
point of view? - the medieval trope, Je meurs de soif auprès de
la fontaine, applies here - as on the first page of our text, humans
are living absent-mindedly on terra firma, Mother Earth.
Ballade For Richard Wilbur
and, thereby, for the Duke of Orléans
who offered a prize at Blois, circa 1457
for the best ballade employing the line'
Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine "
won belatedly by Richard Wilbur with his
poem with the refrain "I die of thirst, here
at the fountain-side."
Eagles wheel by the crags where lizards crawl
Castalia bubbles down the mountainside, '
But here, beside the darkened city-wall
The Genius of the Fountain's dreaded bride
Smiling, green-eyed, slim-hipped and velvet-thighed
Spoons up from somewhere in her hidden den
The poisoned waters with which all are plied
Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine. '
De la fontaine ... the phrase seems to recall
The founts where wisdom spoke to please and guide-
The anhc cicada fell dumb in the fall §
The crowing fox was smitten in his pride-
Fables whose faith our novels have denied
Rhyme m inevitable French again
Athirst for truth where morals multiplied
Je meurs de soif auprès de La Fontaine.
........................................... the maddened Saul
With something more than music, and he died
Ram from the palace courtyard fills the hall '
Drips into cups.where disused shadows hide '
Something is rotten.in the countryside
Within our sorrows and beyond our ken-
Ills are a deluge, yet our wells have dried
Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine.
Dick (au lieu du Duc), I have never vied
With you for any prize; yet we're tied, for when
You die of thirst, here at the fountain-side "
Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine.
36: quadruply alienated: from God, nature, society, self
3. Science and Finitude
36: IMAGINE all the terms and phrases of this ¶ blown randomly by
a chilly wind of events around a common center of human and
environmental finitude, the human condition - imagine the image of an
ant on a busy thoroughfare
37: reason in its refined scientific performance has even discovered
its limits, its finitude
37-40 math and science discover paradoxes frightening to reason:
Heisenberg, Bohr, Gödel, Skolem
41: ..."...a labor of denudation...'to the things themselves'...toward
a new truthfulness..."...
3: The Testimony of Modern Art 42
[[[all the arts:
Two dimensional work (* 2.1 Illustration * 2.2
Painting and drawing * 2.3
Comics * 2.4 Printmaking and
imaging * 2.5 Photography)
Sculpture Conceptual Art
Dance Theatre
Literature
Architecture Music Film ]]]
42 Yeats excerpt ladder≈great chain of being
controversy: Picasso and Joyce
43 from Manet to Matisse - inevitability of art - controversy,
irritation, bafflement - "SEVERAL SORE SPOTS": 1 difficulty obscurity 2
(44) simple but dislocated - perhaps really simple and clear, just not
what was expected or wanted or accustomed - eg, multiple face parts
> fragmentation
[ dislocated from our accustomed ordered worldview:
A place for everything and everything in its place
Meaning The notion that everything
should have a place to be stored in and that it should be tidily
returned there when not in use.
Origin The first printed citation
is from The Ohio Repository, Canton, Ohio, December 1827. It's in an
item titled 'Neatness', by Reverend C. A. Goodrich (who doesn't sound
like a barrel of laughs):
"There is as much meaning in the old adage, and the
observance of which let me urge you as a remedy for every degree of
evil I advert [sic] to - 'Have a place for every thing, and keep every
thing in its proper place.'"
Several of the early citations are from nautical contexts; which isn't
surprising considering the need to conserve space and promote tidiness
onboard ship. Here's an example from Frederick Marryat's Masterman
Ready; or the Wreck of the Pacific, 1842:
"In a well-conducted man-of-war every thing is in
its place, and there is a place for every thing."
Slightly earlier, a modified version of the phrase was in use in the
USA. This is from an item headed 'Brother Jonathan's Wife's Advice to
her Daughter on her Marriage', in the Hagerstown Mail, Maryland,
January 1841:
"A place for everything and everything in time are
good family mottos."
The phrase is typical of the uplifting homilies that were promoted
during the Victorian era (beginning 1837), e.g. 'cleanliness is next to
godliness' (circa 1880s). ]
3 content: bare, bleak, negative, nihilistic, shocking, scandalous,
unpalatable - the bare, bleak, negative, nihilistic content - but
have the previous content ideals worked so well?
44-45 Hemingway's passage from A Farewell to Arms:
45 modern art is a confession of spiritual poverty
"The triumph of Hemingway's style is its ability to break through
abstractions to see what it is one really senses and feels."
46 materials: commercial, industrial, utilitarian,discarded, found
art—more commonly called found object (French: objet trouvé) ,
the detritus of civilization
- "valid irruptions of the irrational" ... "expansion of the
possibilities of art and an almost greedy acquisition of new forms from
all over the globe." [art's avant-garde entry into globalization Beta
.01] - Dadaism & Dali: Mona Lisa
47 REPRESENTATION IN ART IS THE EXCEPTION - "That canon [the canon of
Western art] is in fact only one tradition among many, and indeed in
its strict adherence to representational form is rather the exception
in the whole gallery of human art." >>> "...a different and
more comprehensive understanding of the term "human" itself..." -
western civilization breaks from within and without - modern art breaks
out and beyond...
48-49 "Cubism is the classicism of modern art:.. a radical flattening
of space - a painting from within asserting one's own subjectivity as
an independent value in itself -
50 existentialism in literature -
flattening:
1 flattening out of planes
time instead of space JJ TS Eliot Ezra Pound Faulkner
2 flattening out of climaxes
no preselected foreground and background cubism abolishes pictorial
climax - art is anticlimactic ≈ so in literature, shift from the
classical plot to the narrative, the story - BUT in JJs Ulysses the
irony of ending: Molly Bloom is BOTH horizontal AND climaxing with her
repeated YESes, quote a bit, like Rob Reiner's mother in When Harry
Met Sally: 'I'll have what she's having.' - Don't you want some
of what she has?
a shift of focus from the rational ideal order of things TO 'the things
themselves'
dense, opaque, unintelligible
52-53 the Quentin Compton suicide scene in Faulkner's Sound and
Fury time an "inexhaustible inescapable presence" - the artists
focus on the horizon of temporal personal experienced time rather than
eternal objective abstract time
54-56 this flattening is similar to aspects of Oriental art -
approaching a form that is "just as formless or formal, as irrational,
as life itself."
56 3 flattening out of values - Cézanne
eg the cell walls in L'Étranger or the opening scenes in
LeClézio's Le Procés-verbal -
59-62 image of man in modern art: no clear-cut image, many images
but all deconstructing the traditional icon of man from Greek or
medieval art - man is bare, a cipher [ the elliptical human] - cf
Beckett
[Beckett's outstanding achievements in prose during the period were the
three novels Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies) and
L'innommable (1953; The Unnamable). In these novels—sometimes referred
to as a "trilogy", though this is against the author's own explicit
wishes[26]—the reader can trace the development of Beckett's mature
style and themes, as the novels become more and more stripped down,
barer and barer. Molloy, for instance, still retains many of the
characteristics of a conventional novel—time, place, movement and
plot—and is indeed, on one level, a detective novel. In Malone Dies,
however, movement and plot are largely dispensed with, though there is
still some indication of place and the passage of time; the "action" of
the book takes the form of an interior monologue. Finally, in The
Unnameable, all sense of place and time are done away with, and the
essential theme seems to be the conflict between the voice's drive to
continue speaking so as to continue existing and its almost equally
strong urge to find silence and oblivion. It is tempting to see in this
a reflection of Beckett's experience and understanding of what the war
had done to the world. Despite the widely-held view that Beckett's
work, as exemplified by the novels of this period, is essentially
pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out in the end; witness, for
instance, the famous final phrase of The Unnameable: 'I can't go on,
I'll go on'.[27]]
Hemingway, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"
63 as existential philosophy is the intellectual expression so do
culture art and literature of the period manifest existential themes in
intuitive and imaginative expression:
1 critical: "...both start off from the sense of crisis and of a
break in the Western tradition."
64 2 extrarational: from rational animal to irrational human - from an
intelligible to an opaque, inexplicable, absurd world
3 Problematic: from mystery to problem - from faith to reason and
unreason - from child of God to stranger, from native to alien, from
essential and fixed to existential and contingent, from eternal to
temporal
4 an art spontaneously aroused and subordinate to a vision
5 cosmetic external power and cosmic internal poverty
64-65 The image of man which emerges: powerful appearance -
impoverished substance - an advance of civilization - a decline of
culture - the Wizard of Oz effect: the wizard is us, the king has no
clothes
the call to integrate exaltation and humiliation, pride and humility
(cf Pascal's thinking reed), being and nothingness
So the focus of this course is to understand how to be and not to be,
That is the challenge.
II: THE SOURCES OF EXISTENTIALISM IN THE WESTERN TRADITION
4: Hebraism and Hellenism 69
69-70 Matthew
Arnold in his Culture and Anarchy, a
series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill
Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book in 1869 with a preface was added in 1875,
creates a bipolar oppositional matrix of values: energy and
intelligence, Hebraism and Hellenism, doing and knowing. WB furthers
the matrix with further bipolar values: practice and theory, moral man
and intellectual man, ...
70 Then WB notes the significant "outside the framework" point
which Arnold makes: the beauty of the idealism of Hellenism, its
"sweetness and light".
71 But Arnold is compelled to further note Socrates' equal comfort with
the dark side of human nature; he "is
terribly at ease in Zion."
72 WB refines Arnold's
facile bipolarities by indicating some of the dark corners of Greek
thought and culture.
1. The Hebraic Man of
Faith 73
73-WB sees the new opposition as asymmetrical. After stating the
Greeks' "critical and philosophical reflection...to examine a
religion...," he says "The Hebrew, however, proceeds not by way of
reason but by the confrontation of the whole man."
74 "The relation between Job and God is on the level of existence
and not of reason. Rational doubt never enters Job's mind..." [sounds
like the religions that insist on one having a relationship with Jesus
to be a true Christian]
75 "Faith as a concrete mode of being of the human person precedes
faith as the intellectual assent to a proposition, just as truth as a
concrete mode of human being precedes the truth of any proposition." [See Michael Polanyi's
concept of tacit knowledge in his book, Personal Knowledge: Towards a
Post-Critical Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-67288-3 , 1958 - there are other
similar bipolar matrices: stated belief vs lived belief, the talk is
not the walk, ... they all emphasize the action component of a concept
that is fully a part of one's life and not just one's 'propositional'
(academic, theoretical,...) knowledge apparatus. See ahead also p
79
..."Protestantism ... could produce only a pallid replica of the
simplicity, vigor, and wholeness of this original Biblical faith."
76 "The idea of eternity - eternity for man - does not bulk large
in the Bible beside the power and frequency of the images of man's
mortality." This manifests in a passionate integrated present
existence. Contrast the ideal existences of Plato which aim at a
really 'real' life detached from the here and now. (see and
relate this idea with the reference to St Paul and Unamuno, p 94 "The
problem of death lies at the center of the religious
consciousness-Unamuno was really following St. Paul when he argued
this-and at the center of much more of the philosophic consciousness
than this consciousness itself realizes. Plato believed in the
eternal Ideas because he was afraid to die." see also Freud's
attribution of motivation for the origin of religious consciousness and
particularly immortality in God.)
77-78 WB outlines how this thinking "carries us beyond Arnold's simple
contrasting of moral man with intellectual man.....to sum up:..." and
he proceeds to highlight six contrasting features of Hebraism and
Hellenism:
1 man of faith <> man of reason
2 concrete, individual man living here and now <> detached
abstracted man living in the eternal
[ consider Socrates' words as cited by Plato (if we can trust his
historical accuracy): "The unexamined life is not worth
living." ( Apology 38a) true or false?]
Of special value to me here is WB's line referring to the importance of
the Greek's discovery (or should we say invention) of "the universal,
the abstract, and timeless essences, forms and ideas": "The
intoxication of this discovery (which marked nothing less than the
earliest emergence and differentiation of the rational function) led
Plato to hold that man lives only insofar as he lives in the eternal."
WB further develops this thought on pp 80-81
[see also psychologist Julian
Jaynes 1976 book The Origin
of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,]
3 Greek detachment <> Hebraic commitment
4 the Greek's clear concept of eternity <> the Hebraic "rather
shadowy concept" mostly and ironically "embodied" in the concept of God
5 Greek valuing of logic (contrast mythos, ethos) <> Hebraic
scorn for intellect and reason as prideful - also aural <> visual
≈ the Greek ear and the Jewish eye
6 Greek identity of beauty and goodness <> Hebraic sense of human
limitation, sin and hence ugliness
78-79 "What is important is to make
clear the central intuition that informs each of these two views of
man." While one of the two 'motives' may be central to Hebraism or
Hellenism their whole motivation is mixed and inclusive of both
intellect and passion, thinking and doing, the true and the good.
[In reflection on this section I wonder if WB might have better
been served by comparing likes instead of apples (Hellenism as a
philosophy) and oranges (Hebraism as a religion). Both Hellenism and
Hebraism (as is existentialism) are a way of living and a way of
thinking. The Greek logos might better be compared with the Hebraic law
- both just specialized areas of their cultures. The Hebraic
source of the law, its soul (as WB contests) is a complete living
relationship with God just as the Greek life fully lived included its
mythos and ethos, its Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and
Solon.]
[Also thanks to one of our class participants, ???, our attention is
brought to WBs omission of the Arabic contributions to Western
civilization, culture and philosophy, for example, as part of the
great Assimilation
of Greek and Arabic knowledge during the Renaissance -
not to mention the current influence of Arabic and Islamic values.]
[For a correction and expansion of my comment about the zero coming
from the Arab world see the Wikipedia article on zero and its history
section, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero#History]
So now in the here of the USA we experience the influences of three
religious and cultural superpowers merging with our Greco-Roman
culture: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
When we come to the section on Christianity we might wonder if it
wasn't so successful because Paul and John fused Hellenistic
intellectual attractions/abstractions with traditional Hebraic
wholistic actions.
2. Greek Reason 79
79 Western philosophy as a footnote to Plato
80 Plato's career ≈ Death of a Poet
not only dramatic biography but momentous history: "In Plato rational
consciousness as such becomes, for the first time in human history, a
differentiated psychic function." - contrast human development in
India and China
81 During the time span from Heraclitus and Parmenides to Aristotle,
circa 480-322 BCE humans become RATIONAL animals.
[note the bottom ¶ on Heraclitus and Parmenides in which WB points
out the Greek for I 'know' is oida,
perfect form of 'to see' (I have seen) and how this modifies our
earlier simplistic contrast of Greek aurality and Hebraic visuality.]
81 This time period marks the shift of emphasis from big mystic dreams
to the "sobriety of science".
82 Hard for us to grasp how momentous a development this was!
Philosophy as a major advance in the evolution of consciousness!
82-83 The Platonic celebration of reason highlights both the benefits
and drawbacks of this leap forward. The Myth of the Soul in Phaedrus.
83-84 This progress to rationality is also featured in Plato's Allegory
of the Cave in The Republic!
84 Pure thought! How good is this? OR would you rather have some of
that? ie what the older lady customer wanted in watching Sally at the
lunch table.
[Again two roads diverge... Must we choose between this or that or can
we eat our cake and have it too??]
From Plato's cave myth of light and dark to the Platonic rationally
engineered curriculum. Contrast learning and wisdom in the Eastern
cultures.
85 Universals and Ideas vs the individual, the single one - In a
Platonic world: eternal over temporal, universal over particular,
reason
over non-rational, essence over existence.
This is what existentialism rebels against. that individual embodied
beings are second class citizens
86 contrast other Greek traditions, represented by Socrates, of
philosophy as the love of wisdom, that is, an integrated living passion
for knowing.
86 Distinguish Plato's thought from his thinking: "...it remains
existential in its conception of the activity of philosophizing as
fundamentally a means of personal salvation."
Philosophizing is passionately loving wisdom - a lifelong commitment.
For Plato Socrates embodied this ideal and he dominates the early
Platonic dialogues.
But as Plato grows up and increasingly systematizes his thinking, the
dialogues become monologues and essays and Socrates is relegated to a
"shadowy abstract reasoner."
87 Plato's different personae in The Sophists, The Laws, and the
Parmenides come to the fore - the student Plato has come to overshadow
even object to the philosophy of his teacher. "In his least poetic
dialogue, The Laws, he advises the death penalty for those whose
thought opposes the religious orthodoxy of the state--the very crime
for which Socrates had been put to death by the Athenian orthodoxy and
in revolt against which Plato himself had taken up his own career as a
philosopher!"
87-88 Aristotle and philosophy as "a purely theoretical and objective
discipline."
Checking the Balance Sheet: "The foundations of the sciences, as the
West has known them, had been laid, and this was only possible because
reason had detached itself from the mythic, religious, poetic impulses
with which it had hitherto been mixed so that it had no distinguishable
identity of its own." >>> the abandonment of the body of man
88-89 Aristotle's similar life trajectory: to ever increasing
rationalism, though more reality-based than Plato's idealism.
As WB says it: "Reason, Aristotle tells us, is the highest part of our
personality: that which the human person truly is. One's reason, then,
is one's real self, the center of one's personal identity. This is
rationalism stated in its starkest and strongest terms
—that one's rational self is one's real self—and as such held sway over
the views of Western philosophers up until very modem times."
90 "The connection between theoretical reason as the highest human
function and the possible completeness of its vision of the cosmos is
an intrinsic one: the latter secures the supreme value of the former."
BUT "What happens, however, to this view that the highest man is the
theoretical man if we conceive of human existence as finite through and
through—and if human reason, and the knowledge it can produce, is seen
to be finite like the rest of man's being?..."
What follows is WBs clear and devastating summary of the road (or
rather loss of a road) leading to (or rather resulting in)
existentialism.
Are we not back to where we began with the epigraph to the section, The
Testimony of Modern Art: Yeats' rag and bone shop?
BUT isn't this also a good place for woodshedding? [a musician's term
meaning "going off
to practice." It's typically used by jazz musicians to suggest a
devotion to getting
it right. Etymology: probably from the former use of
woodsheds for private practicing Date: 1936
OR, pilgrims, to continue our metaphor of traveling, choosing paths in
woods, might we be in a human situation now where there are no paths,
just woods to explore freestyle, the forest existential?!
5: Christian
Sources 92
1
Faith and Reason 92
92 Christianity: a developing Hebraism having to cope with Greek reason:
faith beyond reason? against reason? with reason?
93 What is faith and is it irreconcilable with reason?
vital vs rational
Christianity: a foolishness to Greeks, a scandal to Hebrews
The key paradox or mystery: somewhat the incarnation, but more so the
resurrection of Christ
94 This central fact of Christian faith focuses on an equally central
issue in philosophy: the problem of death (for Plato, Paul, Kierkegaard
[Freud])
94-95 Existential precursors: Tertullian (150-225 CE) and Augustine
(354-430 CE)
Augustine's historic watershed shift in questioning life's meaning: from
95-96 What is man? >>> Who am I?
96 Augustine's duality (tension) like duality-tension of the medieval
world held in religion's container until the modern period
96-97 for example, the problem of evil - compare views: Augustine,
Leibniz, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dostoevski
"...theodicy for what it is, the tragicomedy of rationalism, in
extremis."
Again the theme of homelessness and the insecurity of the human
condition enters.
98-99 the faith<>reason duality-tension hold together in frail
balance during the middle ages, the age of faith - but there are a few
outbreaks: the theologians vs dialecticians controversy - Peter Damiani
(1007-1072) asserts the immeasurability of God and faith -13th and 14th
centuries: the great synthesis of faith and reason - but a fragile and
temporary construct
100 Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and his crowning synthesis, Summa
Theologica - but despite these integrative, harmonizing efforts,
breakouts occurred: the Voluntarism vs Intellectualism controversy:
Duns
Scotus (1265-1308)
101 Aquinas vs Scotus - intellect vs will - WB provides an excellent
summary paragraph and rises a bit above the opposing bipolarities in
distinguishing the existence of the whole living thinker as more than
any of the products of her thought
[Might we rise higher and question even the existence, or at least the
validity, of such conceptual entities as reason and will? Think
neuroscientifically and of embodied realism.]
2 Existence vs Essence 101
101 WB again confronts us with a matrix of polarities: Existence vs
Essence ≈ Aquinas vs Scotus ≈ Dominicans vs Jesuits ... and then there
is Jacques Maritain
102 WB introduces the Existence vs Essence problem and promises an
extended treatment later.
Ortega y Gasset..."man has no nature, only a history."
Are essences fixed or dynamic? And with respect to what forms of
nature, if they differ in their mode of being in different species?
103: Two parts of the problem:
(1) Does existence have
primacy over essence, or the reverse?
(2) In actual existing
things is there a real distinction between the two?
As abstractly as these questions are stated they involve life and death
consequences.
103
Plato's Essences = Ideas = Reality ... any particular, physical,
individual existing thing represents a fall from what is Platonically
Real
104-105 Essentialism has seemed to have the upper hand in Western
Civilization - WB resumes the Duns Scotusvs Thomas Aquinas
argument: which holds primacy: essence or existence. -The argument
continues in a form of debate between the Jesuits (Scotus, Suarez..)
and Dominicans.
106 The argument is revelatory, according to Etienne Gilson, and forms
the roots of modern philosophy.
107-108 WB takes a bit of a bird walk here waxing two pages on Catholic
philosophical and theological oppositions related to essence and
existence and a theoretical as opposed to a legalistic approach to the
problems.
108-109 Invoking Husserl's
emphasis on "the things themselves" WB then turns to the
existentialists who have developed from Husserl's original
influence.and pauses at various impasses in either essentialist or
existentialist positions.
110 WB then foreshadows his treatment of Heidegger in Chapter 9 who
will rise above the horns of the essentialist-existentialist bull and
address modern experience in a fresh way - "a very radical adventure."
3
The
Case of Pascal 110 WB states that ""Philosphers breed
ideas..." but he realizes clearly that in turn philosophers are bred
out of the many elemens of a historically conditioned geographically
located culture... which leads him to introduce...
111 Blaise
Pascal, (June 19, 1623, at Clermont, France – August 19, 1662),
a real existentialist, in WBs opinion, certainly a 'modern' man
in contrast with those thinkers who preceded him. What especially makes
him modern is his sense of homelessness, of relative insignificance.
112 WB relates how Pascal describes humanity trying to ignore its
condition by habit and diversion.[ See Eric Berne for similar 'current'
viewpoints.]
113 Pascal as a whole human being, a thinker and writer beyond the
classifications of psychologist, philosopher, scientist. [≈
Shakespeare, Kierkegaard]
114 Pascal's two lives integrated into one person, his distinction
between the mathematical and the intuitive mind, a major contribution
to Bergson and successsive thinkers.
115-116 Pascal' keen understanding of the limitations of reason [eg 277
The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.] His dedication,
like Kierkegaard, to the study and advocacy of religion.
116-117 WB believes that Pascal is one of the best to communicate a
sense of the human condition, its contingency, its being on the border
of non-being, its finitude.
118 Our affinity with Pascal in feeling homeless while at home in the
world, resting on Mother Earth. What irony is the human condition!
119 The Enlightenment's initial and long running success overshadowed
Pascal's sober accounting of the whole human and human condition.
Perfectibility and Progress and Reason ruled.
But poets and artists best sense what Pascal expresses! They pave the
way for the successive groups of philosophers, scientists, engineers of
the new day, the next day, the modern age. They sensed and fortold the
dark times which the dark side, the underbelley of the Enlightenment
was foreshadowing
6: The Flight from Laputa 120
120-123 WB opens by featuring the descendents of the 'Whore of Reason'
as depicted by Jonathan
Swift's Gulliver's Travels,
inhabitants of the Zepplinlike floating island of Laputa.
The
Romantics 123
123-124 Romanticism, an escape from Laputa -
124-125 William Blake
125-126 William Wordsworth
126-128 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
128-130 Goethe and Faust
130-132 French Romantics-Symbolists: Baudelaire and Rimbaud
132-133 Primitivism: Rimaud, Gaugin, D.H. Lawrence - Adumbations of
Nietzsche
The
Russians: Dostoevksi and Tolstoy 133
133-136 Russia's unique conditions as a culture for the two giant
harbingers of Existentialism: Dostoevksi and Tolstoy
136-140 Dostoevksi: Memoirs from the
House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamozov, The
Possessed, Notes from Underground, The Idiot.
141-146 Tolstoy: Anna Karenina, War
and Peace, The Death of Ivan
Illyich, My Confession.
146 WB: "All the foregoing refugees from Laputa..." What an impressive
range and variety of humans who manifest a conerted disgust with the
human costs of reason and progress and who advocate a fullness of
living in one's own time and space.
III: THE EXISTENTIALISTS
NB: There is no intro to Part III on existentialists in general. Here's
a bit of one:
Beginning with the use of a stellar mnemonic (and willing to suffer the
slings and arrows of those existential Hamlets who accuse me of
Polonian doddering)...
The Big Dipper: If we consider the handle of the Dipper as its back
side, then going from the front bottom of the Dipper's face or front to
the top front you begin a line which if extended some five times as far
as Merak (its front bottom) is from Dubhe (its front top)(both stars
called the Pointers), you will
arrive at Polaris,
the North Star.
Now that we have the picture, picture and imagine if you will the North
Star to which the Big Dipper points as EXISTENTIALISM. And let's assign
to each of the seven stars of the Dipper one of the star
existentialists. My assignation goes as follows: Kierkegaard and
Heidegger form the front face and are the Pointers showing most clearly
the line to the North Star of Existentialism. Nietzsche and Sartre form
the back side and help hold the dipper's philosophical contents. Feel
free to choose for yourselves any other continental philosopher to be
the three stars that form the handle. You have a wide range of choices
from Spanish and French to German and Russian.
................................
Let's also remember that while this philosophical constellation is
clearly recognizable in our current cultural skies, it is instructive
from at least two other points of view:
1. It is minuscule in the existential expanse of the multiverses that
exist.
See the existdownloads
page for quite a perspective on our time-place in the universe from
Michael Frayn's The Human
Touch.
2. It is just our perception!
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dipper:
In North
America it is known as the Big Dipper because the major
stars can be seen to follow the rough outline of a large ladle or
dipper. This figuration appears to be derived originally from Africa,
where it was sometimes seen as a drinking gourd. In
the 19th century, runaway slaves would "follow the Drinking Gourd" to
the north and freedom.
A widespread
American Indian
figuration had the bowl as a bear. Some groups considered the handle to
be three cubs following their mother, while others pictured three
hunters tracking the bear. (For example, see
Abenaki mythology.) The Dipper appears
on some Tribal
flags.
AND WHILE I'M EXPATIATING ON WHAT WBs TEXT DOESN'T HAVE, I want to
mention the value of adding a companion chapter to this one on the
Existentialists; namely, Existentialism, summarizing and encapsulating
for vade mecum use the mother lode of Existentialism.
7: Kierkegaard
149
An excellent detailed summary of his life and work can be found at the online Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
149-151 Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11
November 1855) His intelligence - a mixed blessing - saved by his faith
- his place in the philosophical landscape of Germany - his his focus =
his power: go for the jugular
1 The Man
Himself 151
151 his deeply personal individualistic mode of
self-expressing=communicating - Fear and Trembling, "a
dialectical lyric" - personal confession becomes an embodied
philosophy, a philosophy in the flesh and bone displacing traditional
professional academic philosophy
152 his life mirrored in his works - WBs line: "The ultimate source of
Kierkegaard's power..." - his figure as a man - his 'comic irony'
153-156 his life crisis - his choice - its existential meaning in
opposition to Hegelian idealism - the 'reality of the negative' - K
outhamlets Hamlet - his unique, very UNIQUE INDIVIDUALITY
2 Socrates
and
Hegel; Existence and Reason 156
156-157 Kierkegaard as Socrates, the gadfly of his times - K's niche:
afflict the comfortable -
158-159 Kierkegaard vs Hegel ≈ Socrates vs Plato ≈ know nothing vs know
it all ≈ existence vs essence ≈ existentialism vs essentialism ≈
realism vs idealism ≈ practice vs theory ≈ territory ≠ map (on p 158 WB
invokes the Whorfian distinction between the map and the territory,
menu and meal, talk and walk, model and muddle)
159 Hegel's further audacity: to conjure reality from reason... using
his Hegelian T&A (pun intended) of Thesis - Antithesis >>>
Synthesis
160 by contrast Kierkegaard's existence "...was indeed our ordinary
human existence--concrete, personal, and finite--which he saw reason on
the point of ingesting into itself."
[I cannot emphasize enough just how the age had so exalted Reason
that man the rational animal had become in some respects no
earthly good. Consider this passage describing the French Revolution:
from The French Revolution
and First Empire By William O'Connor Morris, Andrew Dickson
White:
161 But Kierkegaard did even MORE than defeat Hegel's Reason with his
individual Reality - he defeats the whole rationalist-idealist
tradition as represented in Kant's Reason by his own Kierkegaardian Life
162 the irony of existence; it is for WB "...too general, remote, and
tenuous a property to be represented at all to the mind."
[I would rather say it is to individual, intimate, and immediate a
property to parse into reasonable elements...]... as WB seems to say
later in the same paragraph.
Kant as father of modern philosophy spawning Positivism and its related
or contending philosophies: pragmatism.. [This also tends to be one
originating point of the parting of two philosophical roads, one into
the Anglo-American analytic tradition, the other into the European
Continental tradition which embraces a variety of movements: German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such
as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics,
structuralism, post-structuralism, French feminism, and
the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and some other branches
of Western Marxism
162-163 Kierkegaard's bottom line: existence cannot, as Kant says, be a
concept and for the 'thinker' it has no use - BUT its meaning is
entirely different for Kierkegaard: it is the ground of all else, it is
our living being, here, now, and as long as we live - it is more than
can be captured by any mirror of reason. As Hamlet says, "There are
more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your
philosophy."
3 Aesthetic,
Ethical, Religious 163
163
3 levels of
existence: aesthetic - ethical - religious
163-164 the aesthetic level: the sensual: children, Epicureans, Dan
Juan, ... :the detached: contemplatives, intellectuals, philosophers
like Plato and Spinoza - each next level incorporates the previous -
the irony of the aesthetic is in choosing self he enters the ethical -
the aesthete's "piece of finite pathos in the face of the vast
nothingness stretching before and after his life."
164 the ethical level: WB writes that here also Kierkegaard makes a
unique and new contribution to traditional ethics discussions. In line
with the oppositional pairs cited in these notes for pp 158-159
Kierkegaard posits against the traditional analytical abstract
linguistic discussions his own integral, individual, personal, whole
being conversation. Kierkegaard is for lived situational ethics rather
than systematic professed ethics. WB clearly pinpoints Kierkegaard's
position: "The fundamental choice, says Kierkegaard, is not the choice
between rival values of good and bad, but the choice by which we summon
good and bad into existence for ourselves."
165-166 the religious level: often spoken of by Kierkegaard fused with
ethical: ethico-religious - Kierkegaard's imagined agreement with
Nietzsche's 'God is dead' premise, but deducing an opposite conclusion,
"that what is at stake in Christianity is our own eternal happiness and
not the maintenance of a morality that mayf be socially desirable or is
at least socially approved."
166 Kierkegaard's classicus locus of what distinguishes the religious
level: Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling.
166-167 how Kierkegaard differs from Dostoevski: fear and trembling
humility and doubt rather than callous arrogance and confidence
167 Kierkegaard's principle that the individual is higher than the
universal [compare Lawrence Kohlberg's
stages of moral development and his hypothetical identification of a
7th religious stage. Google +Kohlberg +moral +"stage 7"]
166-168 I intend to do a demonstration with these pages, using Fear and Trembling and
exemplifying the difference between secondary philosophologizing,
primary philosophologizing, and philosophizing,
168-170 Kierkegaard as a preeminent "psychologist of religious
experience". Here WB uses The Sickness Unto Death.
Herein he studies the "various modalities of despair". "Kierkegaard
advances two general principles in advance of nearly all current
psychologies: ....."
170 Kierkegaard's superior insight comes from his being a "subjective
thinker". [Relate this to philosophizing rather than...]
4 Subjective
and Objective Truth 170
170-171 WB avers that Kierkegaard makes the first major advance
regarding Truth since Aquinas -
Subjective
and Objective Truth ≈ informational knowledge and appropriated
knowledge ≈ possessed knowledge and lived knowledge ≈ truth of reason
and truth of the heart
As WB says, "Strictly speaking, subjective truth is not a truth that I have, but a truth tht I am."
171-172 But Kierkegaard is not alone in this view; he resumes a
tradition instantiated in Augustine (Consider his two famous formulas
(cf. Sermones, 43, 9) that express a coherent synthesis of
faith and reason: crede ut intelligas ("I
believe in order to understand") - believing paves the way to crossing
the threshold of the truth - but also, and inseparably, intellige
ut credas ("I understand, the better to believe"), Pascal
(who said, “The heart has
reasons that reason cannot know.”), and which will be greatly examined
and advanced by Heidigger.
5 The Attack
Upon Christendom 172
172 At the religious level of existence WB asserts that Kierkegaard
says "...we become really serious."...One is "engaged in the project of
his life" WB says then "It is quite fitting therefore that
the last act in Kierkegaard's life should have been a thoroughly
existential one: an atack upon the Christianity of his native Denmark,
and by extension, upon the public and acknowledged Christianity of the
whole modern world. ...where thinking had in fact become an existential
deed, as powerful as a blow of the fist..."
[ The Attack upon Christianty
(as it is titled in English translation) was originally a series of ten
pamphlets, each entitled The Instant
Numbers 1-10, only nine of which were published between May 24
and
September 24, 1955. The tenth The
Instant
was found on his desk when was taken to the hospital on October 2 and
died on November 11.]
WB alludes to Satre's later references to Kierkegaard in his uses of
the terms, les salauds and
life project.
173 WB then refers mistakenly to a previous work, The Present Age. He is quite
accurate however in stating how this work, a clear brief exposition of
Kierkegaard's social philsophy, presages so many later sociologists and
social philosopers who identify the fallout of civilization's progress:
massification by quantification.
Actually what Kierkegaard published on March 30, 1846 was Two Ages: A Literary Review. The
book was a critique of the novel Two Ages (in some translations
Two Generations) written by Thomasine Christine
Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd and discussed "The Age of Revolution"
and "The Present Age" - after which Kierkegaard sets forth his social
philsophy adumbrating future critcs of the crowd mentality, the
'rational ordering of society' by large numbers, subsequent alienation,
and the related collection of contemporary maladies of modern society.
173-176 Back to The Attack.
WB ays that Kierkegaard sees it making no sense "...in fact a gigantic
swindle to speak of Christian nations, Christian states, or even
Christian peoples: this is the sum and substance of Kierkegaard's
attack." - his direct style "among the greatest polemics ever written."
- Kierkegaard's great project of deinstitutionalizing religion ≈ the
work of Dostoevski - contrast Nietzsche >>> the need for both
individual and institution - after Kierkegaard religious writes pale in
comparison, appearing all too "symbolical, institutional, or
metaphorical..."
MB ends with refering to several other "religious Existentialists" but
none shine as brightly as Kierkegaard..."what a man! ... The Individual.
8: Nietzsche 177
No notes for this
chapter.
9: Heidegger 206
206 Thinking begins where reason leaves off [Fools rush in where angels
fear to tread.]
[This is the original form of the famous aphorism. The entire passage, from Part 3 of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism goes:
Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true,
There are as mad, abandon'd Criticks too.
The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read,
With Loads of Learned Lumber in his Head,
With his own Tongue still edifies his Ears,
And always List'ning to Himself appears.
All Books he reads, and all he reads assails,
From Dryden's Fables down to Durfey's Tales.
With him, most Authors steal their Works, or buy;
Garth did not write his own Dispensary.
Name a new Play, and he's the Poet's Friend,
Nay show'd his Faults--but when wou'd Poets mend?
No Place so Sacred from such Fops is barr'd,
Nor is Paul's Church more safe than Paul's Church-yard:
Nay, fly to Altars; there they'll talk you dead;
For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.
Distrustful Sense with modest Caution speaks;
It still looks home, and short Excursions makes;
But ratling Nonsense in full Vollies breaks;
And never shock'd, and never turn'd aside,
Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering Tyde!
A pious freethinker and a dense writer, Pope was
probably not innocent of the overtones of criticism of the church; watch the subtle play over "learned
ignorance" - someone who'se memorized vast texts (i.e. the Bible)
rather than learned to understand them - to plagiarism - to the preacher, "Nay, fly to
altars..." Are Pope's priests critics of God?
Another, far less inflammatory, explanation follows from four lines elided
following the cliche:
In vain you shrug, and sweat, and strive to fly;
These know no manners but in poetry.
They'll stop a hungry chaplain in his grace,
To treat the unities of time and place.
These lines would make the chaplains victims of criticism together with
the poets. It's interesting, in any case, to
consider why they might have been removed.]
206 H neither rationalist or irrationalist - rather a supra or
metarationalist. [Beyond the two paths in the yellow woods there's a
whole forest to be explored. Care for its exciting as well as its
worrying potentials.]
207 K, N, and H as progressively more powerful weaponry vs the arsenal
of Western Civilization ≈ Little Boy and Fat Man compared to the WMD
K & N "point up a profound dissociation, or split, that has taken
place in the being of Western man, which is basically the conflict of
reason with the whole man. ... the estrangement from Being itself is
Heidegger's central theme."
208 H digs deepest, gets at the roots ..."to Being itself." - his
Letter on Humanism (1947) - Hs picture of man, "an earth-bound,
time-bound, radically finite creature..."
209 Hs take on the death of God: simple and complete absence -
redemption in being in Being - more basic than theism or atheism
1 Being 210
210 the West's interest in beings and their definite and observable
traits - a pervasive positivism
"to be": cosmetic copula or cosmic condition
H works within the tradition to destroy it creatively
211 Sein und Zeit (1927) - "repetition": a constant radical
renewal - from this book develops his life work
from Blackwell Reference Online:
http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631190950_chunk_g978063119095019_ss1-2
Heidegger uses various terms for the
appropriate attitude to the past.
Wiederholung, ‘repetition, retrieval’, comes from wiederholen, which
has two senses: 1. ‘to repeat, reiterate, say or do again [wieder]’;
here the verb is inseparable, that is, it cannot appear as holen …
wieder, with other words intervening between the two constituents. 2.
‘to retrieve, get back [e.g. a ball]’; here it is separable. When
Heidegger speaks of ‘the necessity of a(n explicit) Wiederholung of the
question about being’ (BT, 2, 3), he means that we need to repeat it,
ask it again. He also uses it in a sense closer to 2: ‘By the
Wiederholung of a basic problem we understand the disclosure of its
original, so far hidden possibilities; by working these out we
transform it and the substance of the problem is first preserved’ (K,
204/139). His treatment of Kant exemplifies such repetition. He first
considers Kant's ‘grounding of metaphysics in its originality’,
presenting an interpretation that goes beyond Kant's words to his
‘unsaid’ thoughts: that reason and sensibility are rooted in
transcendental imagination, that imagination is the source of time, and
that Kant withdrew from this ‘abyss’ in the second edition of CPR (K,
126ff./87ff.). He then considers the ‘grounding of metaphysics in a
Wiederholung’ and presents not an interpretation, but a summary of his
own thought, drawing attention to its affinity
211 Why is there any indifference to Being? its ambiguity as noun and
verb - two major differences in being as indicated by linguistic
distinctions: Greek: to on - to einai
212 Latin: ens - esse French: l'étant -
l'être German das Seiende -das
Sein English: beings - Being
H proposes a shift in focus from "ontology
- the science of the thing-which-is" to einai-logy, which would be the
study of the to-be of Being as opposed to beings." - beings, not Being
has become the preoccupation of Western civilization
213 H "overturns the traditional applecart: Being is not an empty
abstraction but something in which all of us are immersed up to our
necks, and indeed over our heads. ... Our ordinary human life moves
within a preconceptual
understanding of Being, and it is this everyday understanding of Being
in which we live, move, and have our Being that Heidegger wants to get
at as a philosopher."
WB: "The whole aim of Heidegger's thinking is to bring this sense of
Being into light." [re: the wisdom of the body, Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_Being
The book centers on Nietzsche's idea of eternal return - that is, the idea that the
universe and all the events therein have all happened before, and will
continue to recur ad infinitum.
Kundera explores this idea, offering an alternate interpretation: each
of us has only one life to live, and what happens once will never occur
again. He calls this idea "lightness", and refers to the concept of
eternal return as "heaviness" or "weight".
from:
In describing the effect his idea of
"lightness" has on a person's life, Kundera says
Einmal ist keinmal
("what happens but once, might as well not have happened at all. If we
have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all").
By this logic, life is, ultimately, insignificant; in an ultimate
sense, no single decision matters. Since decisions do not matter, they
are light - that is, they don't cause us suffering. Yet simultaneously,
the insignificance of our decisions — our lives, our
being —
causes us great suffering. Hence the phenomenon Kundera terms
the
unbearable lightness of being:
because life occurs only once and never returns, no one's actions have
any universal significance. This idea is deemed unbearable because as
humans, we want our lives to mean something, for their importance to
extend beyond just our immediate surroundings. Due to the subject
choice, some critics have labeled this novel
modernist. Others see it as a celebratory
post-modern explosion of narrative craft.
213 WB backs up to Edmund Husserl under whom Heidegger studied, then
worked for nearly ten years, finally succeeding him in 1928 as
professor at Freiburg, remaining there for the rest of his life.
H learns the new method of phenomenology from Husserl and fashions its
method to his own philosophical focus.
Phenomenology:
from the Greek words phainómenon, meaning "that which
appears", and lógos, meaning "study". In Husserl's
conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the
structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of
consciousness,
zu den Sachen selbst to the things themselves: The
phenomenologist focuses not on things (which are 'bracketed' out
of focus, but on our
consciousness of things. (This is what Husserl means by "the things
themselves," by which he means the phenomena, or our conscious ideas of
things, not natural objects.)
213-214 Phenomenology was Husserl's way to rise above the impasse
between the realists affirming the priority of objectgs and idealists
affirming the primacy of subjects.
Husserl
was of great influence on a whole generation of philosophers: a few
include Heidegger, Sartre, Carnap, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler, Gödel,
Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Gadamer.
Where Heidegger takes Husserl's phenomenology to greater philosophical
depths come from his strong language background and passion. Heidegger
digs through the successive encrusted corruptions of words to get at
their original embedded and embodied experiential reference.
WB: "The word "phenomenon" - a word in ordinary usage, by this time, in
all modern European languages - means in Greek "that which reveals
itself." Phenomenology therefore means for Heidegger the attempt to let
the thing speak for itself."
Contrast H's accepting things to reveal themselves to Nietzsche's
coercive will to power over things.
215 H harvests even more etymological riches in word clusters of
phenomenology: phaos light, apophansis statement or speech, aletheia truth or unhiding or
revelation, something much wider and deeper than the propositional
truth of the analytic tradition.
216 WB: "intellectual truth is in fact a derivative of a more basic
sense of truth."
Heidegger's thoroughly anticartesian approach in contrast to Husserl'
[and Sartre's] dualistic tendencies.
WB reviews Descartes' "I think, therefore I am"as subjective and ego
prioritizing. Descartes' faithful recapture of the objective world
through faith in God.
217 WB identifies two other ghosts of subjectivism and solipsism in
referring to an incident involving David Hume and Leibniz' comment
about his monads having no window.
217 In fact Decartes' res extensa took the upper hand even in trying to
understand the nature of man, his body, even his "the ego, the I, is an
immaterial subsance, athinking substance" understood in terms of
physical realities. [Note in the middle ¶ of this page WB may not
be aware of his latent Platonistic baggage, seeming to allow humankind
to be "irremediably split off" from nature.]
H eschews all this Cartesianism. Humans are Being-in-the-world - man
doesn't need to look out of a perceptual window, he is already
out-of-doors. existing in the world, involved in it totally. "Existence
itself, according to Heidegger, means to stand outside oneself, to be
beyond oneself. ...my Being ... is spread over a field or region which
is the world of its care and concern."
[compare the wave metaphor, also the notion of control in PCT, if you
please - note also that ecstasy is not an unrelated work to exist, but
it does denote being 'out of it,' it being the body, rather than
'standing out' in Being as exist denotes.]
217-218 WB suggests the metaphor of Hs ontology being a "Field
Theory of Being"
218 DASEIN is Hs term used not only instead of man but for
consciousness - H is wanting to indicate some sense of Being that is
clearly preconceptual and primarily experiential, existential. H also
is wanting to avoid at all cost the Cartesian dualism.
218-219 Hs Dasein is an everyday being-in-Being; WB gives the example
of our names.
219 This is a completely different notion, my Being, my Dasein, as a
field, not an I-substance center.
[H calls the old mindset a gestell, a framing, which needs to be
replaced. See here George Lakoff's use of framing and frames.]
219 In this banal, public, everyday world H sees us as one among many,
not a private Self, not even a Self. "This everyday public quality of
our existence Heidegger calls "the One."." [das Man - 'They']
[Time to call attention again to Hs high regard for LANGUAGE and his
need to create new terms for new philosophical concepts. See, for
example, one
listing of key Heideggerian terms.]
220-224 WB presents some key Heideggerian terms and the new meanings of
existential living which they describe:
Throwness Geworfenheit - Foundnessn Befindlichkeit - That we find
ourselves in a given time-place existence.
H outlines 3 modes of B E I N G-in-the-world:
1 undifferentiated:a state of
2 inauthentic:
When a Dasein realizes his or her Throwness, choice enters: exchange
one given thrown role for another, realize that the One has defined all
given roles that can be played and keep playing, in the face of life's
end in death and the fear it engenders - this is Hs state of
Fallen-ness Verfallenheit - inautheticity Uneigentlichkeit
3 authentic
Or a Dasein can accept anxiety in the face of Nothing and
Be-toward-death! In the context of all life's possibilities being
defined by the One, death is the unique possibility one faces on one's
own - once this is realized, Dasein's relationship with the world
changes.
Given the Dasein realizes death on his or her own, the Dasein faces
life on his or her own. The transformation H calls Care Sorge. The
Dasein can make the most of her own possibilities no matter what
context Nähe of Being she finds herself in.
from What Heidegger Means by Being-in-the-World
by Roy Hornsby
(http://www.royby.com/philosophy/pages/dasein.html)
Heidegger (1962) used the term ‘concern’ as an ontological term for an
existentiale to select the Being of a possible way of
Being-in-the-world because he felt that the Being of Dasein itself was
to be revealed as ‘care’ (Sorge) and that because Being-in-the-world
fundamentally belongs to Dasein, its Being concerning the world is
fundamentally concern. Concern is the temporal meaning which
Being-in-the-world has for human beings and it is the time
configuration of human life which is the identical concern which human
beings have for the world. If human beings had no concept of time they
would have no reason to be engaged or implicated in the world in a
human way. It is the awareness of temporality which establishes that
the relationship that human beings have with the world is through
concern (Warnock 1970).
Not everything is possible for every human being. Every person’s
options are limited in one way or another and ‘concern’ is a way that
humans can decide what decision could be the correct one in order to
move from one condition to another. Choices are made in the world in
which humans exist surrounded by other humans. Human beings are
characterised by uniqueness, one from another, and this uniqueness
gives rise to a set of possibilities for each individual. All human
beings are continually oriented towards their own potential, among
which are the possibilities of authentic and inauthentic existence. If,
whilst moving forward, the standards and beliefs and prejudices of
society are embraced, individuals may fail to differentiate themselves
from the masses. This, Heidegger regarded as living an ‘inauthentic’
existence (Warnock 1970).
from Arendt and Heidegger by Dana Richard Villa
Next WB presents Hs 3 existentialia
- general qualities of Daseins, of human existence in contrast to the qualia normally given to either
living or nonliving things (beings) [What an innovative creation
differing from Aristotle's Categories or Locke's
primary and secondary qualities.]
1 mood Stimmung
Mood has the feel of attunement. It is
like the 'weather report' of Dasein's well-being in Being. H says the
fundamental mood is anxiety Angst ... "simply because in anxiety this
here-and-now of our existence arises before us in all its precarious
and porous contingency." NB: The mood H is describing is not
psychological nor anthropological but ontological.
2 understanding Verständnis
Openness is the understanding H is
describing. It is the ground upon which our intellectual understanding
is based. Beings lie open both revealed and partly concealed in the
'truth' aletheia. This is primary understanding.
3 speech Sprache
Language is the house that Dasein lives
in. It includes silence. It is the Dasein's communicative extension to
other Dasein's and to Being.
224 Hs 'Field Theory of Being' is also a 'contextual theory of Being.'
3 Death,
Anxiety, Finitude
225 I am to die. H emphasizes not only the personal inevitability that
is the last act of my living, but that at any moment of my day to day
living I might possibly die. My living is shot through with
possibilities of my dying. WB refers to Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich - we
might also remember this book's first lines recalling Kierkegaard's
anecdote of the absent-minded man who wakes up one day to realize he's
dead.
Hs Being-toward-death
Sein-zum-Tode According to Heidegger, being-toward-death is
attunement to
no-longer-being-in-the-world. Authentic being-toward-death is
attunement to death as an existential possibility. Inauthentic
being-toward-death is a lack of attunement to death as an existential
possibility. Being-toward-death is Angst insofar as it is an attunement
to death as a negation of the individualized being of Da-sein. Angst
may arise when Da-sein is faced with the possible annihilation of its
existence.
This openness to death "opens us to the essential projects by which we can make our
lives personally and significantly our own. Heidegger calls this the
condition of "freedom-toward-death" or "resoluteness"."
226 Being-toward-death brings also to Dasein his essential (he said
ironically) finitude! H plumbs the depths of this finitude more than
any philosopher before him. WB: "He is finite because his Being is
penetrated by non-Being." [recall Giacometti
sculptures]
WB writes: "Anxiety before Nothingness has many modalities and guises:
now trembling and creative, now panicky and destructive; but always it
is as inseparable from ourselves as our own breathing because anxiety
is our existence itself in its radical insecurity. In anxiety we both
are and are not, at one and the same time, and this is our dread. Our
finitude is such that positive and negative interpenetrate our whole
existence. ... He is finite because the "not"—negation—penetrates the
very core of his existence. And whence is this ''not" derived? From
Being itself. Man is finite because he lives and moves within a finite
understanding of Being. This means, among other things, that human
truth too is always penetrated by untruth. And here we have gone as far
as possible from Hegel and the philosophers of the Enlightenment, who
had hoped to enclose all truth in a system."
4 Time and
Temporality; History
227 Resuming the Giacometti images H shows "How our finitude discloses
itself essentially in time." WB then summarizes well how the past and
future negatively penetrate Dasein's moment to moment present. "They
are his finitude in its tempral manifestation." [In a sense we are not
in time; time is in us. We tick away til death do us end.]
228 Hs three tenses of time: the ekstasies
- joined in Dasein's temporality - here again Heidegger breaks out of
the mold of tradition, those 'mind-forged manacles'. If one again takes
a field approach, temporality is NOT sequential linear time, but always
already simultaneous time, yet still quite historical in its mood
Stimmung - which is properly and primarily Angst!
Hs time priority is the future tense, Dasein's future-facing, back to
the past is her orientation in the present.
229 H sees time as essentially historical - what does this mean? Both
the temporality and historicity of Dasein are internal and prior and
more basic to being-in-Being than their Cartesian counterparts of time
and history.
WB sees Hs thinking "more essentially historical than the thought of
any formal historian of philosophy."
230 WB sees Hs historical concern being "the history of the very Being
of the West."
WB outlines a perspective in two of Hs essays: "Plato's
Doctrine of Truth". in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.(ii.) New York:
Random House, 1962. pp. 251-270. (lecture given at Freiburg and revised
for publication in 1936 and again in 1942) OR
| 1931/32, 40 |
9 |
"Plato's
Doctrine of Truth" |
Pathmarks |
Thomas Sheehan |
and
The Nature of Truth
Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (lecture of 1937/38)
"The history of Being (for the West), Heidegger says, begins with the
fall of Being.." H pinpoints this time-place historical event in
Plato's allegory of the cave in his Republic. This is the shift
from phenomenon to idea, real to ideal, from perception to
abstraction,αλήθεια to ιδέα, truth to idea, mythos to logos (see
Pirsig). [We can leave the cave in our intellectual flights of fancy,
but the cave never leaves us in our being-in-Beiing.]
[Notice here also in just 2 pages WB has taken us through Hs notions of
time > history>truth.]
231 WB states how this Western shift began to distinguish itself from
the East which aligns more with the earlier Greek mythos.
The 'Greek project' has produced Western Civilization - what is its
cost-benefit analysis? in terms of civilization, in terms of culture,
in terms of humanness?
232 the progressive objectification and reification of nature,
including human nature, in Western Civilization (some of its milestone
figures: Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, (Schopenhauer) - its
massification accelerated - its product: technological man - 233 the
costs; loss of intimacy, sense of alienation - WBs slight detour on
art: Malraux's assertive art vs Hs receptive art approaches - 234
another Eastern sojourn: the Tao - the value of nonbeing, of Nothingness
235 WB seems to sense he's on another birdwalk because he begins this
page: ""But what is Being?" I
imagine the reader asking in perplexity..." - clear conceptualizing vs
"Think of me!" - aggressive reduction and abstraction vs receptive
letting it all in - WB describes this Dasein as "a sense of man as a
creature transparent and open to Being in every nerve and fiber of his
life; and this perhaps is as clear a sense of Being, the unutterable,
as any thinker in the West has yet given us." [ Think of James Joyce's
opening lines of the Proteus chapter of Ulysses: "Ineluctable
modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my
eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read..."]
236 WB turns to some of the criticism of H: his solitude - WB cites
Buber as a contrast
237 his light without heat - WB suggests an integration of the
Heideggerian ontological-epistemological and the Kierkegaardian
ethical-moral-religious.
238 WB hypothesizes on what places these philosophers will have in
history. [I imagine if K wanted 'Individual' to be on his gravestone, H
might want 'Being-in-Nonbeing' or, more humorously, 'Nothing like
Being-in-Death']
10:Sartre
239 Sartre's from The
Republic of Silence, 1947 : Resistance experience, freedom in
midst of oppression and extreme circumstances
At every instant we lived up to the
full sense of this commonplace little phrase: “Man is mortal!” And the
choice that each of us made of his life and of his being was an
authentic choice because it was made face to face with death, because
it could always have been expressed in these terms: “Rather death
than…” And here I am not speaking of the elite among us who were real
Resistants, but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and
day throughout four years, answered NO.
240 from What is Literature?
1947:
"...Evil cannot be redeemed." Sartre's
rejection of one kind of humanistic idealism (Leibnitzian). [see also
Voltaire's Candide]
241 Rimbaud's 'age of assassins' - les
salauds - Nausea dedicated to
Céline and depicting the nauseous encounter with a disgusting
life situation - call to action and heroism WB: "The essential freedom,
the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be take from a man, is to
say No. This is the basic premise in Sartre's view of human freedom:
freedom is in its very essence negative, though this negativity is also
creative." WB: "Consciousness and freedom are thus given together."
[contrast some alternatives: Melville's 1853 main character in the
novelette, Bartleby, the
Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street:"I would prefer not
to." and in Joyce's Ulysses
Molly's many "Yeses...."]
242 Sartre emphasizes this 'total and absolute' freedom of negation in
the face of all oppression and coercion short of rending a person
unconscious. - I don't thiink WB likes Sartre all that much because he
certainly sprinkles this chapter on him with a good number of
criticisms. He begins on this page describing Sartre as a kind of
"Descartes in the French
Resistance" where "Cartesianism could be incarnated in the life of
action."
242-243 WB goes on to explain how Sartre applies Descartes' Systematic
Doubt so that man is "beyond nature because in his negative capability
he transcends it." And even further then by his No he brings
Nothingness into Being as Descartes brought God back from his Doubt.
[After all, if the idealist is the subjective master of his own ship he
might as easily create an atheistic as well as a theistic world.]
244 In Sartre's creative NO man replaces God in creating a world as "a
basis for humanitarian and democratic social action."
[The following 4 sections, the last of which I added editorially,
outline the work of Sartre successeively as philosopher, writer,
psychologist and political activist.]
1
Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself 245
245 Being (être): Including both Being-in-itself and
Being-for-itself,
but the latter is the nihilation of the former. Being is objective not
subjective or individual.
Being-in-itself (être-en-soi):
Non-conscious Being. The Being of the phenomenon that is greater than
the knowledge that we have of it.
Being-for-itself
(être-pour-soi):
The nihilation of Being-in-itself; consciousness conceived as a lack of
Being, a desire for Being, a relation of Being. The For-itself brings
Nothingness into the world and therefore can stand out from Being and
judge other beings by knowing what it is not.
Sartre's "flying beyond ourselves, or else a perpetual falling behind
our own possibilities" show descent from Heidegger's notion of our
temporality focusing on the future, else we lapse into 'fallenness'.
245-246 WB outlines Sartre's 3 modes of 'not being ourselves': 1 on the
social level or role level, 2 on level of self-image, of not
being the person I want to be, 3 on the ontological level of
never being able to be all that I can be "because my being stretching
out beyond itself at any given moment exceeds itself. I am always
simultaneously more and less than I am." - here lies the angst of the
human condition - the to be and not to be that Sartre describes [ it is
still not as deeply embedded in our existence as Heidegger has found
and described it.] Sartre's "curious dialectical interplay" with these
two human potentialities.
246 WB says how Sartre displays "enormous ingenuity and virtuosity" in
interweaving these two notions in his principal 1944 work, Being and Nothingness, L'Être et le néant :
Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique 1943 - WB mentions
Sartre's debt to Heidegger and Hegel for various aspects of this work.
247 WB praises this work for being the best treatment of negation:
"Never in the thought of the West has the Self been so pervaded by
negation." WB likens it to the Anatman
of the Buddhist philsopher Nagarjuna - Then Sartre takes a next step
not unlike Nietzsche's will to power; Sartre moves from this freeing
condition of nothingness to a will to action and a movement to free
projects and a life project. Given his time and place it translates
historically into "revolutionary activity." [Might not "revolutionary activity" be the appropriate
action to take in any time and place, given the 'normal' conditions of
'fallenness,' bad faith,' and living among salauds?] - WB notes however
that Sartre's step of action, like that will to power of Nietzsche,
represents the last phase of subjective Western civilization trying to
coerce Being for man's own purposes.
248-249 WB develops Heidegger's criticism of Sartre on this point and
concludes that Sartre didn't understand Being at the 'bottom line'
which Heidegger identifies, but remains a Cartesian juggler of
subjective and objective beings, yielding a truth of the intellect more
than a truth of humanness.
249 WB ends on this page with how
Sartre molds his Cartesian existentialism into a new humanism which
just touches on the significant Sartre-Heidegger difference as
represented in:
1 Sartre's L'existentialisme
est un humanisme which is the book he crafted from a lecture
given on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris in order to
correct current misunderstandings about what existentialism was.
2. Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, written in 1947 in
response to questions circulating about the relationship of Heidegger’s
philosophy of Being to humanism, Christianity, Marxism, and the new
“philosophy of existence” expounded by Sartre, Jaspers, and others, has
been
called Heidegger’s “greatest effort.”
It was written at a time of great personal struggle for
Heidegger: he had
just been indefinitely banned from teaching following the Nazi
war-crimes
hearings, and he had undergone a kind of emotional breakdown as a
result.
Nevertheless, the Letter on Humanism virtually
catalogues the most
important strands of Heidegger’s entire later philosophy – the meaning
of
the history of Being, the way Heidegger sees to the re-awakening of
that
history, its relation to the philosophical tradition, the meaning of
action, the
role of technology, art, and language in the historical destiny of
Being, and
above all the need of a new thinking to prepare that destiny.
The essay contains some of Heidegger’s most memorable language.
In it, we can see especially clearly the role of reflection
about
language in preparing a new consideration of Being that will make the
leap
outside the tradition of metaphysics, which has hitherto determined all
of our
language. The quest for a new
language will be so important to Heidegger that he will even spell
important
words, like Being, in antiquated and strange ways, to show that he uses
them
outside the closure of metaphysics.
250 WB sides with Heidegger, seeing
Sartre as just continuing traditional humanism from Protagoras' famous "Man
is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and
of things which are not, that they are not"
through Pope's "proper study of mankind
is man"
and Marx's "root of mankind is man himself."
... but leaving man as rootless as before, needing the philosophical
farming that only Heidegger had done.
2 Literature
as a mode of action 250
WB points out the irony of the most professsional literary man of the
Existentialists is also "the most intellectualistic" and then dives
into a critical view of Sartre's literary taste in picking DosPassos as
the then greatest living writer and
251 Sartre's questionable ability to appreciate poetry. - WB further
suggests that: "The absence of the poet in Sartre, as a literary man,
is thus another evidence of what, on the philosophical level, leads to
a deficienccy in his theory of Being."
251 WB does shift to Sartre's poweful gifts as a writer: Nausea in 1938 may be his
best work in WBs opinion.
252 WB feels S may have tried to paint too large a panorama in his
later novels:
[I have to laugh as WB's line about S: "The man really writes too
much."]
252 WB similarly credits his early plays as the best: Les
Mouches (The Flies), 1943 - a modern version of the Oresteia
253 and Huis-clos (No Exit),
1944, which contains one of Ss most quoted lines, "L'enfer, c'est les
autres", usually translated as "Hell is other people".
3 An Existential
Psychology 254
254 WB finds S associating Being-in-itself with"images of softness,
stickiness, viscosity, corpulence, flabbiness...excessive fruitful,
blooming nature--the woman, the female" The Being-for-itself Sartre
associates with the masculine, choosing radical liberty and creating
projects.
254 from http://www.answers.com/topic/sartre-and-psychoanalysis
Sartre suggests an 'existential
psychoanalysis' in
Being and Nothingness (1943). In this text
he suggested that
Sigmund Freud's work (which he characterizes as "empirical"), in his
estimation, represents a provisional formulation, subject to critique,
of what he calls (more by reference to Søren Kierkegaard than to
Ludwig
Binswanger) "existential"
psychoanalysis.
He
postulates
the principle that the human being is a totality, expressed completely
through
fortuitous
conduct. "In other words there is not a taste, a mannerism, or a human
act which is not revealing" (p. 568). The goal, to
elucidate
the actual behavior of human beings, is based on "the fundamental,
preontological comprehension which man has of the human person" (p.
568). All conduct symbolizes and conceals, in various ways, the basic
choice of every individual subject. Each person must be unveiled and
revealed, as Sartre himself would attempt to do with Jean Genet (1952)
and Gustave Flaubert (1971-72). With this as a starting point, Sartre
moves on to discuss the similarities and differences between Freudian
psychoanalysis and what he calls
existential
psychoanalysis.
255-256 Sartre demonstrates his existential psychoanalysis at the time
of this book (later he treats other historical figures to this
existential psychoanalysis) with his book, Baudelaire, 1947,
published in the US in 1950.
256 WB next bothers himself with Ss "identification of mind with
Consciousness, with the Cogito..."
to the exclusion of the unconscious.
257 'The Other' is treated on this page. WB has S positing that "the
unconscious is the Other in oneself; and the glance of the Other is
always like the stare of Medusa, fearful and petrifying." This whole
page develops Ss thinking on this: the Cogito's subjectivity objectified
by the Other, the sado-masochism of objectifying relationships, WB
finds Ss psychology thus less than complete because WB says S hasn't
worked out the coexistence of Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself.
258 WB likens Ss consequent war of the sexes with Adlerian psychology
and a will to power and an anti-feminine psychology to boot.
258-259 Next WB treats Ss notion of liberty, a liberty of choice, of
negation and consequently of free action. Again WB faults S for not
including the whole human in his notion of liberty and action.
260 WB notes that Ss psychology has been created in an 'exceptional'
time and under 'exceptional' conditions. This may explain why it is so
masculine, assertive, and resolute in character. By contrast WB
describes the freedom of a religious man, like St Paul, accepting both
the rational and irrational into a wholeness of both self and the world.
260-261 WB lastly finds Ss psychology deficient in being so masculine
and unable to clarify women's psychology. WB places Simone deBeauvoir
in a similar anti-feminine viewpoint. Cartesian to the bone, Ss
psychology portrays man set separate from and against nature, including
other human natures. WBs last comment in this section is how as a
"projection of his own personal psychology" Ss Cartesian dualism yields
a less than complete or satisfying psychology.
[4 An Existential
Politics 261] [I have created starting with the last ¶ on p 261a
4th section because WB now is, I think, really talking about Ss life as
a political activist and public intellectual.]
262 S represents revolutionary action throughout his life. From his
checkered but long relationship with Communism to his participation in
a life of protests and causes, he always represents his radical freedom
and life of action.
262-263 WBs reference to a remark that shows how Kierkegaard's and
Sartre's extreme positions had occasionally the opposite effect on
people.
263 WBs last reflection in his treatment of S: it just might be
that if our world moves into the 'exceptional' extreme oppressions like
those under which S grew up, the last word that man may have to utter
is NO!
IV: INTEGRAL VS. RATIONAL MAN
11: The Place of the Furies 267
267 We return to whence we began: here-now, today's human and
philosophical situation - after a visit with four of the leading
philosophers of Existentialism who have shared with us the key ideas
and values of Existentialism. (A side note on the dangers of labeling,
stereotyping, ...)
WB: "In all existential thinking it is we ourselves, the questioners,
who are ultimately in question."
268 Our purpose has not been a survey or compendium of Existentialism
"but rather to deal with the more central question: What is the meaning of Existentialism?" - not
on the external level of a body of information, but in an internal
sense of what is happening now that it should come to this? "...wht is
happening within the Being of the West?"
1 The Crystal
Palace Unmanned 268
268-269 The American Irony: anti-intellectual but high on intelligence
(applied)
- practical rationalism > technological
society, bureaucracy epitomized, communication massified ... all
resulting in a very abstracted, consequently illusory (unconsciously
alienated) way of living.
270 Virtual Reality replaces Reality!
Rational ≠ reasonable! and leads to such absurdities as the Clean Air
Act, ...
271 Plus ça change, Plus c'est la même chose! [topos of
the ancients and moderns] - in a mortal world condition we better
estimate well just what we stand out (exist) for!
272 At the height of civilization are we bereft of culture? At
the height of our 'powers' are we powerless? Politics as usual needs to
be supplanted with a political philosophy rooted in a fully human
philosophy!
"The two chief contestants in the present international situation are
both rooted in the Enlightenment, so far at any rate as their
respecitive civilizations reflect any general conception of man." [That
was 1958 - what is it now, 2009?]
WB feels we were relatively innocent in 1958 - are we now? And the
question is, how questionable a being is human being?
273 anecdote of Sartre's impasse discussion with an American
...and in the other corner was Marxism... what now... fundamentalism,
capitalism, terrorism... but back then the ironic transition from
utopian marxist rationalism to communist realpolitik
274 Marxism as the ideology of communism, but Nietzsche's will to power
as its real driving force (pun intented)
WB "Behind the problem of politics, in the present age, lies the
problem of man, and this is what makes all thinking about contemporary
problems so thorny and difficult."
275 Existentialism is the counter-Enlightenment - Human finitude as
elaborated by Heidegger undercuts all Enlightenment claims. The truth
of reason which shines in the greater universe of darkness, this light
itself is deeply riddled with shadows - every truth is only partial.
2 The Furies
275
"Existentialism, as we have seen, seeks to bring the whole man--the
concrete individual in the whole context of his everyday life, and in
his total mystery and questionableness--into philosophy."
276 Existentialism seeks to study the whole human, not just our
rationality. It seeks to include and account as best it can for our
death, mortality, finitude, negation, anxiety, guilt and despair.
WB turns to the phenomenon in the West that as we tried to exist like
angels, we have become demonized. In trying to deny our earthly roots
we risk becoming no earthly good.
276-278 WB next relates our 20th century experience with that of the
Greeks as embodied and portrayed in one by its most eloquent citizens,
in the Oresteia plays of Aeschylus. The experience dichotomized
represents the conflicting forces of abstracting reason against
embodying human earthliness, masculine patriarchal assertiveness
against
feminine matriarchal acceptance. Resolution comes from a tie verdict of
compromise allowing all human elements to coexist.
279 WB expands on the Oresteian resolution by expressing how our reason
is less what makes us human than our humanness which has evolved to the
condition of reasonableness, only the latest (not necessarily last)
and relatively small stage of the evolution of living beings.
WB returns to the notion of our hubris in overemphasizing human reason
to the limitation of full human being. He again invokes the risk that
those who live as if they were angels without any faults too likely
become devils in their absolutism.
280 Our civilization's risk of running amuck out of our own sheer
cleverness (heightened but debasing (pun intended) rationality). Our
need to escape society's numbing tendencies and look at our whole human
selves.
[I suggest reframing WB's black and white, good and evil, light and
dark bipolarization with a postmodern currently updated set of
metaphors based on our half-century later understanding of what the
human condition is based on neuroscience and related sciences,
contemporary philosophy and humanities.]
APPENDICES:
Negation,
Finitude, and the Nature of Man 283
283 "Nothing is more real than nothing." Samuel Beckett
[and for good measure: "That the impossible should be asked of me,
good, what else could be
asked of me? But the absurd! Of me whom they have reduced to reason."
–The Unnamable - compare Heidegger's description of language and
Being ≈ Taoist unnameable
Tao ("He who knows does not say. He who says
does not know. The tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao") ≈
Beckett's book The Unnamable
283-285 Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" How well
Hemingway communicates the somethingness and presence of Nothingness,
more than a feeling or mood, more like a human condition. [see also
Ellison's Invisible Man whose undergound room enjoys the blaze from
1369 lights.]
285 WB likens this experience to the Taoist Great Void., the Tao. WB
then returns to Hemingway as "a credible witness."
286 WB still once more points out the great divide between Platonic
Idealism and Aristotelian Realism and their manifestations in differing
cultural patterns: aristocratic authoritarian vs democratic
participatory government.
286
1.
[Traditional Being]
286-287 WB presents the classical scholastic definitions of 'real
being' and conceptual being (still beings, not Heidegger's Being)
WB further elucidates how all negative entities or privations
(finitudes' remainders) are considered as conceptual entities. So, for
example, blindness and evil of all sorts are simply the lack or
privation of good - nothing real.
288 WB shows how even down to the Logical Positivists as represented by
Carnap this conceptual 'reality' and definition of negation simply does
not jibe with human experience.
289 WB then analyzes human blindness from the rationalist vs the
existentialist viewpoint. Which makes more sense? You be the judge.
290 Rationalism and subjectivity take place in a 'flesh and blood'
world - "Human finitude is the presence of the not in the being of man." To
understand the human condition we need to understand that nothingness
and privation exist and are integral to understanding our finitude, the
limits of the human condition.
290
2.
[Human Being]
290-291 WB backs up and reviews how much of the classical scholastic
tradition was joined with theology and theodicy. WB traces this
thinking and its negative consequences for us through Christian
Aristotelianism, Aquinas, Descartes, and Hegelian Idealism. Throughout
the human is treated as an object.
192-193 WB elaborates on this view as expressed in Communism and
science. He raises two objections to its being a satisfactory
philosophy or explanation: 1 the limited scope of scientific inquiry to
observables, yielding reliable evidence 2 the ongoing imcompleteness of
science, in its hypothetical nature and its reductionistic formalism.
294 The abiding image and presence of humans gives living proof against
such -isms and philosophies and sciences - it is both a voiced and
voiceless revolt, a resounding NO to any attempt at belying the human
condition.
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence
and nothingness”
Samuel
Beckett quote
"The rest is silence." Shakespeare
Existence and
Analytic Philosophers 295
295 "That existence is not a genuine predicate has been one of the more
entrenched dogmas of Positivism and Analytic Philosophy..."
WBs point in this appendix is to show how rationalism's attempt to make
existence merely a concept and then to make it a meaningless and
superfluous one at that is not successful when called upon to help
explain our living day to day experienced existence.
296 Kant's $100 illustration - its questionable cogency - however in a
purely conceptual universe of discourse it is perfectly logical
297 the problem: in such a subjective purely conceptual universe of
discourse one is "unable to provide any proof of the reality of the
external world." - It is in this feature that Kantianism has influenced
Positivism and Pragmaticism as well as fueled Kant's related agenda of
demolishing arguments for the existence of God.
298 WB just bemoans throwing out the baby with the bathwater, existence
with its enveloping waters of the divine and metaphysical.
WB then shows how the Kantian position can lead to quite opposite
conclusions: instead of existence being "too empty, thin, and therefore
ultimatedly meaningless; for Kierkegaard, my existence is not a concept
because it is too dense, rich, and concrete to be represented
adequately in any mental picture."
Further: "if existence cannot be a
concept, then quite clearly it cannot be reduced to essence, not can
priority for essence over existence be claimed."
299 WB reminds us that this is just another footnote to the Platonic
tradition of relegating existence to a copy, imitation, fall or bogus
descent of essence.
299-301 1. Bertrand Russell's
variation on this theme of trying to eradicate existence from
philosophical discourse - its inadequacy to account for our real lived
experience of existence
301-303 2. A quibble over
existence as merely a copula [a copulating quibble]
304 WBs final summary of the existence-essence argument: 3 general
arguments to deny existence: 1denial 2 expunging the existential
operator, 'there is' 3 reduce 'to be' to a copula
305 WBs and this book's last two sentences: "So far as he logicizes,
man tends to forget existence. It happens, however, that he must first
exist in order to logicize."
INDEX 307
A bit more about our author,
William C. Barrett:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barrett_(philosopher)
http://www.anova.org//bio/we-barrett.html
HIS BOOKS:
- What Is Existentialism? (1947), Partisan Review, 1964
Random House edition: ISBN 0-394-17388-0
- Irrational
Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Doubleday,
Anchor Books paperback (1962): ISBN 978-0-385-03138-7
- Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1962), four volumes,
William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, editors, Random House
- Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century
(1972), Harper Bros. ISBN 0-06-131754-3
- The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a
Technological Civilization (1979), Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-11202-4
- The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (1982), a
memoir, Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-17328-5
- Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer (1986),
Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-17327-8
08Class
Today’s Class 090521
10:00 = 12;00
Assignment: Read Schools
Out - LIVE!
SOME COURSE MATERIALS AND MATERIALS RELATED TO THE
COURSE
For electronic versions of some class materials and references, go to existdownloads page
Related
Links
Go to: http://www.klinedinst.com/existentialism/oed/
OR click on the individual terms for the definitions, etymology,
quotations and date chart for each term.
for links to OED definitions for: existence,
existential,
exist,
existentialism
http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/index.html
Since 1996, The
Existential Primer has provided a basic introduction to
existentialism and the related Continental philosophies. Since
the 1950s philosophy has been divided into analytic schools, focused on
language and communication, and the metaphysical approaches of
Continental schools.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
Of course the now classicus locus for a reference
item, Wikipedia
There are 26,800 for +existentialism +timeline hits in Google.
One can be found in The Existential
Primer
http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/ex_history.html
Let me know if you want others added - or go figure...
An Existential Lexicon or Glossary
One can be found in The
Existential Primer
http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/ex_lexicon.html
There are 33,500 for +existentialism +glossary hits in Google.
There are 18,200 for +existentialism +lexicon hits in Google.
649,000 for +existentialism +music
760,000 for +existentialism +art
190,000 for +existentialism +architecture
856,000 for +existentialism +literature
134,000 for +existentialism +theatre
403,000 for +existentialism +film
220,000 for +existentialism +dance
135,000 for +existentialism +"beat"
6,370 for +existentialism +"beat generation"
318,000 for +existentialism +"blog"
49,100 for +heidegger +sartre +humanism
7,690 for +"ralph ellison" +existentialism
5,500 for +"contemporary philosophers " +existentialism.
Again, let me know if you want other links added.
A Bipolar B/W Division and Descent Line
Man the Rational Animal Separate and Aloft
|
Humans the Whole Animal Embodied
and Embedded
|
Socrates
|
Plato
|
Augustine
|
Aquinas
|
Descartes
|
Pascal
|
Hegel
|
Kierkegaard
|
Previous classes:
01Class 090402
10:00 Credits and Housekeeping
10:05 Course Overview
10:20 I: "THE PRESENT AGE"
1:
The Advent of Existentialism 3
10:50 Break
11:00 2: The
Encounter with Nothingness 23
1. The Decline of Religion
2. The Rational Ordering of Society
3. Science and Finitude
11:30 3: The Testimony of Modern Art 42
Preview of Class 02 II: THE SOURCES OF
EXISTENTIALISM IN THE WESTERN
TRADITION
Assignment: Read Part II
COMING ATTRACTIONS: THE ROOTS OF EXISTENTIALISM:
JUDAISM, HELLENISM, CHRISTIANITY, RATIONALISM AND REALISM
03Class 090416
10:00 Intro Comments Thanks to Lee Furfine and Hannah
Zane for Refreshments
10:05 Review of Last Class:
II: THE SOURCES OF EXISTENTIALISM IN THE
WESTERN TRADITION
4: Hebraism and
Hellenism 69
1 The Hebraic Man of
Faith 73
2 Greek
Reason 79
5: Christian
Sources
92
1 Faith and
Reason 92
2 Existence vs
Essence 101
3 The Case of
Pascal 110
6: The
Flight from Laputa
120
1 The
Romantics 123
2 The Russians:
Dostoevksi and Tolstoy 133
10:30 III: THE
EXISTENTIALISTS
7: Kierkegaard 149
1 The Man
Himself 151
2 Socrates and Hegel;
Existence and
Reason 156
10:50
Break
11:00 Kierkegaard
3 Aesthetic, Ethical,
Religious 163
4 Subjective and Objective
Truth 170
5 The Attack Upon
Christendom 172
(Assignment:
Read Part III:
Chapter 8: Nietzsche
177)
05Class
090430
10:00 Intro Comments Thanks to Lee Furfine and Hannah
Zane for Refreshments 2 weeks ago and Genie Hatch and Fran Sisson for
last week's treats.
This week we thank Pat Marusic and Ed Fullerton for our nourishment.
10:05
9: Heidegger 206
1 Being 210
2 Phenomenology and Human Existence 213
10:50 Break
11:00 Heidegger
3 Death,
Anxiety, Finitude 225
4 Time and
Temporality; History 227
Assignment: Read Ch 8 Sartre
06Class 090507
10:00 Intro Comments This week we thank Martha Dysart
and Jane Kahn for our nourishment.
10:05
10: Sartre 239
1 Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself 245
2 Literature as a mode of action 250
10:50 Break
11:00 Sartre
3 An Existential Psychology 254
[4 An Existential Politics 261]
Assignment: Read Part IV: INTEGRAL VS. RATIONAL MAN, Ch 11 The Place of
the Furies 267
07Class 090514
10:00 Intro Comments This week we thank Gina
Wischmeyer
and Jo Ann Schnur for our nourishment.
ALL CALL: We need facilitators who will offer some courses in
Philosophy and will serve on the LLI Philosophy Committee!
10:05 Some Review
and a Closer Look at our Author, William Barrett
IV: INTEGRAL VS. RATIONAL MAN
11: The Place of the
Furies 267
11:00
1 The Crystal
Palace Unmanned 268
10:50
Break
2 The Furies
275
Assignment: Read
APPENDICES:
Negation, Finitude, and the Nature of
Man 283
Existence and Analytic
Philosophers 295
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