From Merriam Webster
EXISTENTIALISM
A chiefly 20th century philosophical movement embracing diverse doctrines but centering on analysis of individual existence in an unfathomable universe and the plight of the individual who must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of what is right or wrong or good or bad.
ex·is·ten·tial·ism
n.
A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts.
WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM?
http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/whatis.html
By Bob Corbett
March 1985
Webster University
Existentialism. A difficult term to define and an odd movement. Odd because most thinkers whom the intellectual world categorizes as existentialists are people who deny they are that. And, two of the people whom nearly everyone points to as important to the movement, Soren Kierkegaard and Fredrich Nietzsche, are both too early in time to be in the group, thus are usually called "precursorers," but studied and treated as members of the group.
Major figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus all flatly deny they are in the movement (at least at times they did), yet everyone says they are central.
Secondly, the term is very difficult, if not totally impossible to define. What is existentialism? I've been asked that a thousand times, have read most intro type books on the field, have spent much of my teaching life "doing" Existentialism, yet cannot give a coherent and relatively short definition. It's sort of a spirit or aura of how one responds to human existence, much easier to characterize (rather than define) in negative terms -- what Existentialism is NOT that philosophy generally is -- than in positive terms of a definition.
However, I can define certain characterists that most Existentialists (and precursors to Existentialism) seem to share:
- they are obsessed with how to live one's life and believe that philosophical and psychological inquiry can help.
- they believe there are certain questions that everyone must deal with (if they are to take human life seriously), and that these are special -- existential -- questions. Questions such as death, the meaning of human existence, the place of God in human existence, the meaning of value, interpersonal relationship, the place of self-reflective conscious knowledge of one's self in existing.
Note that the existentialists on this characterization don't pay much attention to "social" questions such as the politics of life and what "social" responsibility the society or state has. They focus almost exclusively on the individual.
- By and large Existentialists believe that life is very difficult and that it doesn't have an "objective" or universally known value, but that the individual must create value by affiriming it and living it, not by talking about it.
- Existential choices and values are primarily demonstrated in ACTs not in words.
- Given that one is focusing on individual existence and the "existential" struggles (that is, in making decisions that are meaningful in everyday life), they often find that literary characterizations rather than more abstract philosophical thinking, are the best ways to elucidate existential struggles.
- They tend to take freedom of the will, the human power to do or not do, as absolutely obvious. Now and again there are arguments for free will in Existentialist literature, but even in these arguments, one gets the distinct sense that the arguments are not for themselves, but for "outsiders." Inside the movement, free will is axiomatic, it is intuitively obvious, it is the backdrop of all else that goes on.
- There are certainly exceptions to each of these things, but this is sort of a placing of the existentialist-like positions.
Another way of doing it is much simpler. There are about a dozen major thinkers who are characterized as "Existentilist" whom most scholars agree are existentialist. Thus, Existentialism is what these thinkers hold and write. I think that in the end, this is probably the best way to understand it.
In response to a question about the above:
I want to address, at least for a first round, the question of decision making for the Existentialists. First of all there is a split among them on their concern for decisions and actions.
One of the most important thinkers in this movement, Martin Heidegger, is very little concerned with deciding and acting, but is concerned with knowing. It's not what you DO that matters to Heidegger, but how you KNOW it and that you KNOW it. Jean-Paul Sartre on the other hand is profoundly concerned with acting.
However, in general the Existentialists recognize that human knowledge is limited and fallible. One can be deeply committed to truth and investigation and simply fail to find adequate truth, or get it wrong. Further, unlike science, which can keep searching for generations for an answer and afford to just say: We don't know yet, in the everyday world, we often simply must do or not do. The moment of decision comes. For the Existentialist one faces these moments of decision with a sense of fallibility and seriousness of purpose, and then RISKS. Sartre is extremely harsh on this point. At one place he says: When I choose I choose for the whole world. Now what can this mean. I think what Sartre is getting at is that first of all when I choose and act, I change the world in some iota. This note gets written or it doesn't. That has ramifications. It commits me to say what I'm saying. It may change someone who may be affected by my remarks. Others can be too if they hear or read them. And so on. The ripples of actions are like ripples on the sea, they go on and on and on.
By my acts I also begin to define and create the self I am, which is, to some extent a public self. Thus an act is like opening Pandora's box, it lets out what's inside the act and there is no getting it back.
That's not a MORAL point to Sartre, it is an ontological fact, that is, a fact about the world. Not a should or an ought, but a description of a reality about the world and human choice.
If:
I am a person serious about my acts.
If they are as uncertain as Sartre describes
They are as potentially momentous as he describes
Then:
It's not surprising that acting, for the Existentialist, is a terrifying responsibility and living and acting is a burden that causes great anxiety for the Existentialists. There is not absolute certainty (for some of the reasons given above and for yet more we can talk about later), thus human acts are the full responsibility of the individual.
Further, in another place in Sartre's major work, BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, he talks about creating oneself in action. What he means by this is that I, the human, am free. I can make up my own mind about my acts. What I will BE in some final sense is what I make of myself. Thus my acts are not trivial, but definitive of my very self-hood. Again, acting in such a world of freedom, uncertainty and ontological responsibility (as opposed to moral responsibility), is so weighty that the Existentialists nearly recoil from living and acting under the terror of the weight of it all.
Put in the shortest form: Living without certainty and with personal responsibility is a nearly unbearable burden.
Bob Corbett
March 1985
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to the work of certain late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.
Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher, though he did not use the term existentialism. He proposed that each individual—not society or religion—is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely ("authentically").Existentialism became popular in the years following World War II, and strongly influenced many disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
First published Mon Aug 23, 2004; substantive revision Mon Oct 11, 2010
Like “rationalism” and “empiricism,” “existentialism” is a term that belongs to intellectual history. Its definition is thus to some extent one of historical convenience. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and his associates—notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus—existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the major philosophers identified as existentialists (many of whom—for instance Camus and Heidegger—repudiated the label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber in Germany, Jean Wahl and Gabriel Marcel in France, the Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, and the Russians Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. The nineteenth century philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement. Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one. Sartre's own ideas were and are better known through his fictional works (such as Nausea and No Exit) than through his more purely philosophical ones (such as Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason), and the postwar years found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked under the term: retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted; in Paris there were Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, and the expatriate Samuel Beckett; the Norwegian Knut Hamsun and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belong to the club; artists such as Alberto Giacometti and even Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of existentialism had become a cliché, parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen.
It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism just is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position; or, alternatively, that the term should be restricted to Sartre's philosophy alone. But while a philosophical definition of existentialism may not entirely ignore the cultural fate of the term, and while Sartre's thought must loom large in any account of existentialism, the concept does pick out a distinctive cluster of philosophical problems and helpfully identifies a relatively distinct current of twentieth- and now twenty-first century philosophical inquiry, one that has had significant impact on fields such as theology (through Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and others) and psychology (from Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss to Otto Rank, R. D. Laing, and Viktor Frankl). What makes this current of inquiry distinct is not its concern with “existence” in general, but rather its claim that thinking about human existence requires new categories not found in the conceptual repertoire of ancient or modern thought; human beings can be understood neither as substances with fixed properties, nor as subjects interacting with a world of objects.
On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science—including the science of psychology—could tell us. The dualist who holds that human beings are composed of independent substances—“mind” and “body”—is no better off in this regard than is the physicalist, who holds that human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental physical constituents of the universe. Existentialism does not deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by supplementing our scientific picture with a moral one. Categories of moral theory such as intention, blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do capture important aspects of the human condition, but neither moral thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth) suffices.
“Existentialism”, therefore, may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence. To approach existentialism in this categorial way may seem to conceal what is often taken to be its “heart” (Kaufmann 1968:12), namely, its character as a gesture of protest against academic philosophy, its anti-system sensibility, its flight from the “iron cage” of reason. But while it is true that the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time, and while the idea that philosophy cannot be practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective science is indeed central to existentialism, it is equally true that all the themes popularly associated with existentialism—dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, nothingness, and so on—find their philosophical significance in the context of the search for a new categorial framework, together with its governing norm.
No comments:
Post a Comment