Existentialism For Dummies

I don’t really get what the big deal about existentialism is. First of all, there’s almost nothing in common amongst the thinkers who are called existentialists. If there is, it’s probably summed up nicely by the line Stuart mentioned, from Sartre I think, “existence preceedes essence”. But really, what does that really mean? All it really seems to mean is that the best way to philosophize is from the ground upwards, AKA “inductively”, rather than deductively from abstract principles. That’s fine, but for godssakes, it doesn’t entitle anyone to a school of philosophy. People had been reasoning inductively since they were swinging from a tree with hairy backs. Are existentialists, as a unit, trying to say anything more than that? I doubt if they are. But man is it a sexy label… I just think of cigarettes and berets and coffee shops and parreeeeee (sp? -paris?)

But that said, I think that individually some of the existentialists contributions to describing experience have been awesome.

 A self effacing intellectual may not necessarily be a dummy, he may see the existent and the essential in progressive, I.e. In incomplete terms.  If he makes a conscious choice to be a dummy, (in good faith) then he is really not a dummy, but acting like one for a reason((kind of like Nietzche's use of the Zarathusta persona))

Existence precedes essence, meaning raw experience precedes definition, however, phenomenon are bundled, and it becomes hard to determine which choices become essentially good faith based or bad faith based.

This leads to the Nausea, Sartre’s, I believe, greatest novel, Stuart. Do you agree?

As far as “dummy” is concerned, in all honesty, a dead person can not be beyond choices in the same sense as a less then able person who makes wrong choices. They are two usages of the same term: one in a sub conscious mode, the other in a non or beyond conscious mode. A dummy person is able to make choices while alive, even sub conscious ones, or in bad faith, but a dead person cannot. The dummies apparently dead, can be described as the ones on display in store windows made out inanimate material.

Von: existentialism is more than arguing up inductively.  It implies to begin with a phenomenology, which has been reduced to the level when this can be done.  Induction, prior to the phenomenological reduction was based on the rejection of all general principles of purely hypothetical assumptions.

Existentialism did finally come to terms with the contingency of all probable truths to possible ones, and the method was not one of using induction from the ground up(the ground of Being having become the phenomenon being reduced) but a reverse induction from the same empirical ground. So it’s kind of a compromise between the Being and the Nothingness.

We can define a self-effacing person anyway we wish, including the perspective you give above, then decide how we are going to characterize that person, such as calling them a dummy or not. Not long ago I would have agreed with you that a self-effacing person is not a dummy assuming the conditions of his perception you mentioned, so how can I not respect your conclusion? But, respect or not, recently I have changed my opinion on the matter and I think self-effacing individuals are dummies. (It should be noted the term dummy is light, I wouldn’t consider them to be dumb necessarily, just lacking a certain insight that I find important.)

I haven’t read it yet, unfortunately.

That is why I mentioned the two perspectives. They are perspectives of speech, just as dragon, was insisting that she shouldn’t be thought of as one who is upset because that is the style in which she was using to express herself, I can be either speaking from the perspective that it is me I’m talking about or someone who’s mind I choose to “speak for”, or I can be speaking from the perspective of pure observation, as behaviorists do, in which case one’s past behavior was exactly as it was, whether they are alive to produce new behavior or not.

von Rivers, I no longer consider myself an existentialist (or a nihilist by the way), but there is a difference between existentialism and being (or declaring yourself as I once did) an existentialist. As Gamer was saying there is a freedom with existentialism that is very important and I agree with him that one doesn’t have to study Sartre or any existentialist author to find the philosophy necessary for that freedom. It’s not as if I tripped and found myself immersed in studying Being and Nothingness for over a year, it is because I was immediately drawn to it over several other books I sampled, for the very reason that I was headed in that direction one way or another, as Gamer was. And while I’m not overly familiar with the common use of the term “induction”, from what I understand obe (in his response to you) is basically giving, in part, an explanation as to how existentialism provides this freedom.

Yes, you can define a dummy as lacking insight true but that's based on  a psychological observation in purely philosophical terms, I restricted the usage of necessarily ambiguous terms.   As far as contingency goes, any phenomenon, observation, whatever has the ground of pre essential.  Therefore they can be bundled as contingencies, but not as foundations (necessary) to conclusions.

The essential thing is, Stuart is to see, the how the contingent plays into the appearance of the necessary. That is the whole idea behind the reduction. That is the inauthentic gesturing which Sartre talks about. He doesn’t hold it against the person acting in such a way, since he has been reduced to acting inauthentically. He has no insight, because he is acting inauthentically, he has been reduced essentially who he is, a man dealing with raw unessential experience. His choices may look like the choices of a dummy. That’s all.

Raw experience is not always pleasant, and here, the person trying to make choices on basis of some kind of evaluation has to be able to take himself out of the equation a little bit, and start discriminating the essential from the pure experience, and not fall into the trap of prematurely identifying with his absolute freedom. You are ahead of me Stuart, in being to be able in some sense to have gone beyond existentialism, I am still there, and trying to find ways to go beyond it, for the simple reason that it is no longer considered as a viable way of being in the world.

It seems in the above paragraph you are speaking about one who has taken the idea of existential freedom too far. He doesn’t understand that just because he can make any choice, it doesn’t mean he will choose to be happy with it. And that person will quickly become disillusioned with existentialism due to his misunderstanding. But, I don’t think he would have been “prematurely identifying with his absolute freedom”, he will simply have failed to understand that he shouldn’t replaced what before he saw as non-choices with arbitrary choices, but that he should choose to discriminate more.

In the earlier paragraphs it seems you are speaking of inauthenticity from one who has no notion of existential ideas. If so, I agree; he too will make bad choices. But, that isn’t necessarily only because he is less discriminating, but because he is unaware that he is always choosing.

You say “it is no longer viable” rather than “I find it to be no longer viable”, why is that? I would guess perhaps because the world around you has changed so that it is no longer enough for one in your position to be authentic, but that they need something more. And the answer for me is to discriminate as much as possible. The problem is that to honestly discriminate in all things, means you might not like what you find… better for some to give up on authenticity and live happy inauthentic lives, if they can. But, I think most on ilp would like what they find if they for once honestly discriminated between themselves and most others.

Power to you, brethren.

Gee, I’m sorry to lose you. But I don’t suppose you would call me a “serious philosopher”. Why? Just lucky I guess. :wink:

Von Rivers

I think the power of existentialism is that, for me, it’s very logical and also normative. I don’t see why turtlenecks and cafés etc is part of the deal. It certainly isn’t for me. I think that was a coincidence of fashion and culture.

Whether it’s kierkegaard or wittgenstein or david wallace, we can see that many bright people have felt the pang of loneliness, and that there was something intrinsic about this loneliness, baked in to the human condition. So lonely is this situation that concepts like “human condition” fall away, and you or only left your own condition, the only one you can be somewhat sure of. To be torn from your world and furthermore shown that it never existed and to be fully alone sucks. That’s why existentialism is so baller. it gives you something to do.

Double post, but will also add that I’m aware there are some other answers to this problem, having to do with language and the intertwining of the “other” and “social structures” and the thing we experience as thought, and that logically we can’t have thought without society, etc.

This never really did it for me, it just seems like a parlor trick. The key is to get busy choosing things.

I thought Sartre was going further than this, more or less denying determinism. (existence, not experience) That consciousness allowed the individual to go in any direction, rather than, say, character determining Destiny - with essence as character. I thought he was positing a kind of nothingness in being - consciousness - and that this allowed for freedom. Not absolute freedom, situations do constrain (and I presume he recognized that certain options, like flying through the sun, were beyond choice) - but that within the range of possible choices we were entirely free. Genes and Environment placing certain limits, but not determining.

This ends up potentially meaning that morals are reached inductively, though not necessarily, but yes, not deductively, unless, I suppose one chose to. But it seems like he was going beyond this.

As far as I can tell the existentialists took Husserl, and focused on the suffering and what they saw as the emptiness of everyday Life and its not presenting ultimate answers.

Where did you imply you were a dummy?

We can judge them, but it would seem like Sartre was saying that this would be an ontological error.

Two options: (…it seems to me, for making sense of Sartre)

  1. When Sartre talks about how you’re “condemned to be free,” and so on, it could be that what he’s really just saying is that you’ll have to reason inductively about what you should do, or how you should live. There’s no blueprint in the form of deductive principles or whatever. (Look to existence, your experience, gather the data, arrange it in an inductive case about doing one thing or another). —What I said initially implies this, and it could be wrong.

  2. But maybe, for Sartre, existence under-determines our lives in an even deeper sense. Do you remember his example of the young man who had to choose between going to fight the war against Hitler, or else to stay home and help/protect his mother? —I think the gist of that example was that neither one of those options has any better justification than the other. IOW, existence has under-determined the choice to such an extent that you can’t even reason inductively about it—or else you arrive at an incommensurability, or a stalemate whenever you do.

If #2 is what you’re getting at, then yea, I can see that what I said initially doesn’t really capture Sartre.

Side point: Most philosphers have denied determinism in one way or another. Immanuel Kant did—and he did it in a way that strikes me as VERY similar to Sartre. Kant thought that your self could be non-determined by the sensory world because its origin/home was in some unknowable realm. That sounds a bit like a “nothingness” in being, if being is the sensory world. (Kant’s a good example of the “essence preceeds existence” camp, I’d guess).

Sure. --Anyone tied to induction will not have much time for foundational principles, or ultimate answers, or whatever.

I’m not sure that Husserl (I mean, just phenomenological introspection), is really an aid to anything Sartre was saying, if what he was saying was something like #2. I think some people might be able to meditate themselves into a place where the don’t care about anything… but usually, if you focus on a decision you have to make… really hard… there’ll be some sort of desire there, maybe cloudy or shifting or conflicted, but there’s not an emptiness or a “nothingness”. And if there’s not a nothingness there, then I don’t think the options in your existence are actually under-determined.

I suppose the condemned to be free is not so much ontological but that there is no expert to answer our ethical questions, or perhaps more broadly than ethical, moral and even to some degree practical questions. How should I spend my time? for example.

Don’t remember it, only the waiter. But your take on the example seems fair.

I took Sartre to be positing a radical freedom, an ontological one that allows us to respond in various ways to what is determined. We, not being determined. Along the lines of what you said about Kant. I Think he actually coupled the for-itself with transcendence, but how I cannot remember. I do remember finding it odd. Kind of dehumanizing. I mean, i do understand the appeal of free will and how this would seem humanizing, but these Little dots of nothingness that can do anything (within physical laws) seems sort of empty, rather Buddhist, I now realize.

I was thinking of the existentialists in general in relation to Husserl. Perhaps not Merleau Ponty - he seems more neutral. But that they investigated in somewhat husserlian ways the predicament, as they saw it, of the self in the World - I suppose I could have added ‘post-Nietschze’ - god is dead etc. Not that Reading Husserl would help one understand, particularly, what the existentialists thought Life was like, but more that he presented a tool, or really a kind of permission to focus in a certain way, and they used it to describe and explore.

If you think Sartre is doing #2, then that’s probably an ontological claim. There’s no expert for a reason—namely, there’s nothing for him to be an expert on.

Well… that kind of thing is the natural attitude for most people, and treated like a self-evident truth by most philosophers. Maybe that’s changing, I don’t know…

If existence preceeds essence, does it mean you can’t have an essence? Maybe the “nothingness” part for Sartre was a nothingless like what’s on a canvas, before you paint it.

Agreed.

That’s true, but it seems to me Sartre tried to describe the mechanism or lack thereof in a focused way. It was not simply assumed. Perhaps a sign that it was losing it self-evidency.

I believe that each choosing makes essence. You have no character, could kick the old lady or pick her up off the street. Whatevery you do makes essence, especially if this is regular. But still, you are free, even after a pattern. Essence is almost like a reputation. It really sounds rather odd when I describe it though I Think I am being fair to him.

A good analogy I Think. Though the nothingness is still, in the next instant, blank again.

i sort of imagined it like a ghost in the machine - though without that phrase in mind. The machine gets built over time as choices are made by the ghost that could have done other things and made Another machine. I can’t get at what he is saying with out a dualism, even if it is nothingness and being, and perhaps he was trying to avoid dualism by positing a mere gap in being - no new substance. The former however being us and thus such an Active non-substance.

I was speaking from the (hypothetical) perspective that I was a dummy, which inherently makes the implication, though I understand how redundant I’m being, but nowhere else outside of the above quote did I imply I was a dummy.

How so?

To understand Sartre you need to understand how it is he wrote that book. He has a way of constantly contradicting himself, then explaining the contradiction with another contradiction and that with another, essentially making a full circle and explaining one of the contradiction with the original contradiction. That explains itself why it is that I think I can explain Sartre in only a few pages, but always fail, because to explain even a small piece of his philosophy in a few pages is to appear as if I’m making a direct non-contradictory claim, which is self-defeating. That is why his book is so long while seemingly only containing a small amount of “philosophical material”. For every point he makes (whether it be about his specific use of the term ‘nothingness’, bad faith, authenticity, being-in-the-world, being-for-others and freedom itself) he has to use that style of contradiction.

It is necessary because his philosophy is about more than all those semi-concrete points is about, what I can for lack of better words, call a new perspective. My understanding of that perspective is always fleeting, because it isn’t what I’m used to. But, perhaps to give an insight into it let me give a response to the discussion going on in this thread about determinism. In the book itself (which is all that matters) Sartre never says what his view on determinism is, what he does do is show why it doesn’t matter. We are equally free whether or not determinism exists and we are equally free whether or not we believe determinism exists. To even discuss determinism one must use a perspective antithetical to the one I have so much difficulty explaining. The term ‘determinism’ is loaded with cultural ideas; such as the idea that there was a world with differentiated objects for billions of years before human life emerged and that all events including the emergence of human life are due to causal principals. Then from their one only needs to ask if those causal principals allow some randomness. The only reason he even needed to mention determinism is to make it clear that he wasn’t even speaking in that sphere of thought and for one other reason:

Some people confuse the idea that everything may be determined with the idea that certain determined things or events can always be known. If one believes that, then they are more susceptible to making choices in bad faith - based on the idea that what others are telling him to believe must be so, because they are already determined and known. But, everything one knows, one chooses to know - if one hears someone tell them something as if it were fact they can always choose to see it as fiction.

Think of it this way, if a powerful being knew the future of Earth for the next one hundred years and was outside of Earth and any influence on Earth then we would never know of him and it would be irrelevant if he wrote or let’s say “carved” a prediction of the next hundred years on a material for which the act of carving can be dated. Then one hundred years later he came to Earth and let scientists date his prediction and verify it. The knowledge of that would take nothing from our freedom. In fact if he had been exerting control in various ways without our knowledge that would have taken nothing away from our freedom, in fact isn’t that example the equivalent of saying that we are governed by forces we don’t understand?

Perhaps one may laugh at that idea today, because we understand the laws of physics, but before the laws of physics were formulated people were in fact governed by forces they didn’t understand. But, I’m speaking in a historical context; a modern person who simply is so under-educated to have never heard of the laws of physics is also governed by forces he doesn’t understand, but that only matters to him if he should do something stupid and later realize that it could have been avoided.

The issue that I still am unfamiliar with is how much this difficult to explain perspective that Sartre is using was influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger in general. I was reading out of order, I read Sartre without knowing the historical contexts he was speaking from - anything about his influences. So just like Gamer discovered he knew about existentialism before he knew that the term applied to his knowledge, I have to wonder how many concepts from Sartre that I attempt to explain using my terminology already have readymade terms. Perhaps this difficult to explain perspective that he speaks from is actually called the phenomenological approach. Which refers to what Moreno was saying:

human existence has no essential meaning as far as the big picture…the only real meaning is that there is none…
very pleasant thought…from the dummy