existentialism

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Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Anja Steinbauer on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.

Sartre’s Existentialism leads to a clear individualism, in which the fact that there are other people presents a constant threat of falling into ‘bad faith’. Others judge us and impose limits on us to the unbearable degree that “hell is other people”.

Okay, but what we choose to do is still no less embedded out in a particular world understood in a particular way. And no less entangled in both actual options and the Benjamin Button Syndrome. That’s why I have always been curious as to how Sartre and de Beauvoir might have responded to my own far more fractured and fragmented moral philosophy. While we all came to reject God and religion, they always struck me as more inclined to believe that their own moral and political prejudices really were closer to being a more reasonable and virtuous – authentic – frame of mind.

Same with some of the No God folks here. They seem convinced that using the tools of philosophy – of science? – we don’t need religion to establish and then to sustain an optimal moral and political agenda. Scrap immortality and salvation perhaps but ideologically and/or deontologically we can still come to embody the “most rational of all worlds”.

By contrast, Beauvoir’s own individualism is more nuanced, in a Kantian way: “Is this kind of ethics individualistic, or not? Yes, if one means by that that it accords to the individual an absolute value and recognises in him alone the power of laying the foundations of his own existence.…The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals…. His freedom can only be achieved through the freedom of others.”

There’s certainly a part of me that would like to believe this. Still, however “nuanced” any particular individual is in confronting this…

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

…given a particular social, political and economic context, it doesn’t make the points I raise in my signature threads go away.

Individuals are still indoctrinated as children to embrace all manner of hopelessly conflicting assessments of “reality”. And they still share the same historical and cultural and experiential parameters as adults.

Then this part…

“The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals…His freedom can only be achieved through the freedom of others.”

…is still no less a “general description philosophical contraption” that, in my view, doesn’t even come close to creating a truly “one-size-fits-all” Kantian rendition of moral obligations.

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Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Anja Steinbauer on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.

And here we finally have it: “No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.” Beauvoir’s ethics views the existence of others as an opportunity. In fact it is the only opportunity we have to give reality and meaning to what we do and therefore to what we are: We must invite others to join our projects.

By it’s very nature, human interaction necessitates ethics. As social, political and economic relationships unfold in any particular community, when has there ever been a community where disagreements did not emerge in regard to “the right thing to do”?

And what is the role of philosophy here if not to take into account all of the vast and varied sets of circumstances that precipitate moral conflicts and make the attempt to propose the least dysfunctional rules of behavior? And here, over and again, going back centuries now, the stark limitations of philosophy have been exposed time and again. After all, if philosophers and ethicists and political scientists were able to accomplish this, how then can one explain the fact that so many conflicts continue to this day?

Beauvoir gives examples of how many of us make poor use, or no use at all, of our freedom.

Indeed, it has always been my own contention that moral objectivism itself is basically a commentary on how most of us seek to circumvent freedom by reducing everything down to the equivalent of an either/or moral philosophy. As William Barrett once suggested, “[t]he terror of confronting oneself in such a situation [confronting rival goods] is so great that most people panic and try to take cover under any universal rules that will apply, if only to save them from the task of choosing themselves.”

In fact, most men and women don’t panic at all. They simply accept what their family, community, culture, nation, etc., have instilled in them as the one true path is the one true path.

Then, historically, the part where “or else” comes into play.

Now, fit yourself in here…

She even explains how freedom for children differs from adult freedom. Children can do what they like to an extent, without being morally judged for it, because they are largely free of responsibilities to others. Not so adults, yet some adults still try and live in the naïve freedom of childhood. Others try to control or manipulate people in an attempt to limit their freedom – a tactic that according to Beauvoir is ironically doomed to end in self-deception and the limiting of one’s own freedom. A mature and constructive use of our freedom, our only chance of fulfilling ourselves as individuals, involves making a ‘plea’ to others, appealing to them for their attention and cooperation.

…somewhere.

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Existentialism
Is Kierkegaard Still Relevant Today?

There is a general tendency in the non-philosophical world to dismiss philosophy as being purely theoretical, with no connection to the types of problems that people are confronted within their everyday lives. But this is not necessarily true. Many philosophers struggled to find ways to improve people’s lives, by drawing attention to, and making people think about, fundamental aspects of life. A good example would be Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).

First, of course, in my own “rooted existentially in dasein” frame of mind, a number of philosophers here seem content to explore God and religion and human morality up in the theoretical clouds. What Will Durant called the “epistemologists”:

“In the end it is dishonesty that breeds the sterile intellectualism of contemporary speculation. A man who is not certain of his mental integrity shuns the vital problems of human existence; at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth. So he builds himself an ivory tower of esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals; he is comfortable only in their company…he wanders farther and farther away from his time and place, and from the problems that absorb his people and his century. The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him…He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist.”

What Kierkegaard attempted to do, in my view, was to connect the dots between the Christian God and the existential parameters of the lives we actually live:

“According to Kierkegaard, faith does not have logic, reason, and rationality. Therefore, the definition of a leap of faith is a person having trust in something despite the lack of logic, reason, and rationality. They leap, figuratively, to interact or explore this thing.” study.com

Compare that to the “philosophical God” those like IC and others here flounder about in attempting to capture in their “theoretical” exchanges here.

Feeling discontent with Hegel’s then-dominant philosophical system (and with every other philosophy popular in his time), Kierkegaard sought to answer life’s questions by turning back to ancient times, and a thinker to whom he felt closer in mind and spirit. Socrates, ‘the gadfly of Athens’, became the role-model for the young Kierkegaard, who wanted to continue his spiritual mentor’s art of ‘philosophical midwifery’, and become himself ‘the gadfly of Copenhagen’.

You tell me:

“The Athenians had certain beliefs concerning deity. Socrates also believes in deity, but his conception is completely different from the typical Athenians. While to the Athenians gods are human-like and confused, Socrates believes god to be perfectly good and perfectly wise. His god is rationally moral.” BYU

Of course, things get complicated: medium.com/@edwardliguori/kierk … 03bb3c1a66

And, from my frame of mind, those like Kierkegaard and Socrates are no less the historical, cultural and experiential embodiment of dasein. They lived particular lives, had particular experiences, formed particular relationships, came into contact with particular information and knowledge…then took their own existential leap to God and religion.

Just as Socrates did, Kierkegaard tried to challenge the common beliefs of his time. He wanted to show that the only truth that is important is subjective truth. For Kierkegaard, only through a deep and honest analysis of oneself, can one truly know what one is or is not, what are one’s values and beliefs, what are one’s truths.

Here, of course, I would be tapping both Socrates and Kierkegaard on the shoulder and asking them to comment on these four factors:

1] a demonstrable proof of the existence of your God or religious/spiritual path
2] addressing the fact that down through the ages hundreds of Gods and religious/spiritual paths to immortality and salvation were/are championed…but only one of which [if any] can be the true path. So why yours?
3] addressing the profoundly problematic role that dasein plays in any particular individual’s belief in Gods and religious/spiritual faiths
4] the questions that revolve around theodicy and your own particular God or religious/spiritual path

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Existentialism
Is Kierkegaard Still Relevant Today?
Lucian Lupescu says the disputatious Dane dares us to live.

Unlike Socrates, whose ideas we know only through other sources, Kierkegaard was a prolific writer. He left behind a collection of writings centered on particular themes and interests. His works may seem contradictory at first glance. However, on a closer reading, one can see that they follow the same ‘negative’ scheme as Socrates. The ancient philosopher believed that no one had a privileged claim to absolute knowledge (hence the title ‘negative’, as opposed to ‘positive’, philosophy), and that each individual can and should think for themselves and so find their own paths in life, and their own values.

And how fascinating it would be if I could travel back in time, agree with this “negative” philosophy, and then ask both to react to the OPs here:

ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296

Given a particular context of course.

This can be done by a close examination of one’s thinking. Socrates called his technique of helping people become aware of their inner knowledge maieutic, or midwifery. Socrates humbled himself, claiming he didn’t know anything, and would ask his interlocutor a series of questions that aimed to reveal that person’s knowledge, or lack of it. These dialogues usually ended in aporia – a state of puzzlement about the subject being discussed, without finding a solution, but the person thus realizing his ignorance.

Ah, the Socratic Method:

Charles W. Kingsfield Jr.: “The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you. We use the Socratic Method here. I call on you, ask you a question and you answer it. Why don’t I just give you a lecture? Because through my questions, you learn to teach yourselves. Through this method of questioning, answering… questioning, answering…we seek to develop in you the ability to analyze that vast complex of facts that constitute the relationships of members within a given society. Questioning and answering. At times you may feel that you have found the correct answer. I assure you that is a total delusion on your part. You will never find the correct, absolute and final answer. In my classroom there is always another question…and question to follow your answer.”

Of course, some answers get you an A and some an F.

On the other hand, if Socrates claimed he didn’t know anything then, after asking others questions to determine what they know, how would he determine if what they claimed to know was really rational in and of itself? How would he know which questions to ask next if he wasn’t able to grasp what others had already told him?

And that sort of knowledge would be especially crucial in regard to legal prescriptions and proscriptions. Instead, Socrates seemed to have God in the background…someone who did have an ultimate knowledge of, well, everything?

Kingsfield may have been an authority on contract law, but he was training the minds of his students to grasp it given the assumption that the capitalist political economy itself was the bottom line.

Same thing with Kierkegaard. Once you have taken a leap of faith to God, He is always there. He is always there to pass the buck to given one or another rendition of Judgment Day.

Again, “Socrates believes God to be perfectly good and perfectly wise. His god is rationally moral.” BYU

Or is this only Plato’s take on him?

As an aside, I never liked the ending of The Paper Chase movie. Susan and others finally make him aware that it was all just basically a paper chase. But…

Susan: Here’s your mail.
[hands Hart an envelope marked “GRADES ENCLOSED”]
Susan: I just got a letter from my father, something very interesting. My divorce is final. A piece of paper, and I’m free.
[pauses]
Susan: Aren’t you going to open your grades?

Nope. He turns the envelope containing them into a paper airplane and sends it flying out into the Atlantic Ocean. But then, he doesn’t have to open it, does he? We already know that Kingsfield gave him an A.

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Existentialism
Is Kierkegaard Still Relevant Today?
Lucian Lupescu says the disputatious Dane dares us to live.

Kierkegaard embraced Socrates’ project, analyzing his own thinking, and in doing so, realized that:

“…the thing is to find a truth which is a truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die…"

Right, and how on Earth is this not basically the embodiment of dasein? Back again to all of these “my way or the highway” truths:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r … traditions

All of these conflicting One True Paths to immortality and salvation.

“What use would it be in this respect if I were to discover a so-called objective truth, or if I worked my way through the philosophers’ systems…? And what use would it be in that respect to be able to work out a theory of the state…which I myself did not inhabit but merely held up for others to see?”

Then there’s the part where others who more or less shared a life similar to his own might grasp this…might embrace it themselves. But what of those who were indoctrinated to live lives very, very different from his own? Is there or is there not one deontological truth that logicians and epistemologists and ethicists can pin down…philosophically?

Indeed, isn’t that what some philosophers [here for example] insist is possible?

"What use would it be to be able to propound the meaning of Christianity, to explain many separate facts, if it had no deeper meaning for myself and my life? One must first learn to know oneself before knowing anything else…Only when the person has inwardly understood himself, and then sees the way forward on his path, does his life acquire repose and meaning.”

Or…

“What use would it be to be able to propound the meaning of Islam, to explain many separate facts, if it had no deeper meaning for myself and my life?”

Then right down the line, each path to immortality and salvation in the link above embracing Kierkegaard’s belief about a deeper meaning…but no less as convinced as he was that this revolves around their own God or their own spiritual path.

I can’t help but be curious as to how Kierkegaard might have responded to the points I raise in regard to dasein.

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Existentialism
Is Kierkegaard Still Relevant Today?
Lucian Lupescu says the disputatious Dane dares us to live.

Kierkegaard used pseudonyms to, in a way, distance himself from the ideas in each book. Each persona is an embodiment of a way of seeing the world, a way of living your life. Across his works he suggests three main paths of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious (for him, Christian).

In other words, three paths whereby the tools of philosophy are least likely to be effective in establishing anything in the vicinity of the objective truth. The paths, in turn, most infused with dasein.

The aesthete sees the world through an interesting/boring dichotomy. For him, life is made to live, to experience, and there are no serious choices. Life is immediacy.

Any aesthetes here? You tell me. Given your own personal experiences.

I’ve always associated them with this:

“Aesthete: 1] a person who has or affects to have a special appreciation of art and beauty.”

On the other hand:

“2] a person who affects great love of art, music, poetry, etc., and indifference to practical matters.”

The hedonist, say? Or the epicurist? Or the libertine? Or the debauchee? Or, as with those like Hannibal Lector, the cultured sociopath?

For the ethicist, on the contrary, there are only serious choices. For him, life is what you make of it. It is not enough to just live it; you must make concrete choices that will give shape to your existence, to your self. Life is responsibility. The ethicist’s dichotomy is, let’s say, good versus evil.

And, of course, for many religionists, all of this eventually comes around to Judgment Day. Thus, your most serious “concrete choices” have stark implications in regard to immortality and salvation itself.

The Christian, on the other hand, acknowledges that you cannot succeed in creating a perfect self. But through faith in God’s forgiveness you can accept your imperfect condition, and live your life as yourself.

And, indeed, if the Christian God was not just someone you had to take a more or less blind leap of faith to…someone who was actually around…this would make sense. Like Catholics with the Pope. The Pope really does exist…someone the flocks can go back and forth with in regard to right and wrong, good and evil behaviors.

However, although these options look a lot like they represent ultimate solutions, Kierkegaard’s life possibilities are just that – possibilities. None of them represents an ‘ultimate truth’. As Kierkegaard sees them, they are merely choices that one can make in one’s life.

Thus, as an existentialist, that proverbial leap of faith. A largely subjective, subjunctive – intuitive? – “deep down inside” gut feeling one hopes is the real thing.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Kierkegaard groans

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Existentialism
Is Kierkegaard Still Relevant Today?
Lucian Lupescu says the disputatious Dane dares us to live.

Kierkegaard’s Socratic approach is still relevant because of its focus on the individual. Each of us feels the need for purpose. What Kierkegaard, and Socrates, teach us, is that this purpose can be gained only by our choices, our actions, the way we live our lives. No one, neither philosopher nor priest, can tell us who or what we are, or what we should do. We must discover and decide that for ourselves, in our inner, most intimate place, where we can make our true self come to light, then shine upon our own, singular path.

Yes, I once bought this myself…hook, line and sinker.

But now I am no less fractured and fragmented in my reaction to it.

Sure, one can emphasize the individual here. But all of us as individuals were in fact thrown fortuitously out into a particular world at birth. We were indoctrinated as children to understand that world as others insisted it was. And then depending on the historical and cultural and demographic parameters of our own particular experiences as adults, we come to embrace one set of religious and political and moral and philosophical assumptions rather than another.

How was this not true of both Socrates and Kierkegaard? Put their equivalents in the same room today and ask them to differentiate authentic from inauthentic “purposes” in regard to any particular conflicting goods.

It’s as though both are intent on providing us with a philosophical scaffold [linked to different renditions of God] but when we take that framework down out of the intellectual clouds…then what?

Then just look at the world we live in. In other words, so much for moral philosophy?

Then this part:

It is important for us to know ourselves, to discover what are really our values, our beliefs – our truths – in order to live a more fulfilling life. It is important to know who we truly are, so that nobody can manipulate us into doing what is contrary to our inner selves.

The part that in my view completely ignores the points I raise here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529

Kierkegaard does not present us with absolute, objective truths, but challenges us to discover subjective truths for ourselves. He proposes to encourage us to become independent: “The phrase ‘know yourself’ means: separate yourself from the others"…In the end, what Kierkegaard does is dare us to live, by choosing how we live, and by taking responsibility for our lives. Can we rise to his expectations?

On the other hand, over and over and over again, we bump into one of these folks…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r … traditions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p … ideologies
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s … philosophy

…who insist that to truly “know yourself” you must become “one of us”.

For example: knowthyself.forumotion.net/f6-agora

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Why Camus Was Not An Existentialist
Greg Stone presents the evidence.

When Johnny Depp raises a wry eyebrow on screen, it’s an ‘existential performance’. When Donald Rumsfeld says there are ‘unknown unknowns’, they call it ‘existential poetry’. Though many politicians and entertainers welcome the label, Albert Camus certainly did not. Even so, many people, even in academic publications, have inaccurately identified him as an existentialist. What in the name of Nietszche is going on?

Indeed, what does that tell us if not this: your guess is as good as mine.

Again, there were aspects of his existence which all reasonable people can agree on. For example, the various demographic components of his life. All of the unequivocal facts embedded in all of his unequivocal experiences. The things he said and did that are entirely documented.

Just like all the rest of us.

But who can pin down for certain whether or not he was an “existentialist”?

Start here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

Historically, he is clearly construed to be a part of the existential movement. But that also includes Christians and Nazis.

Though, sure, if you include Johnny Depp’s raised eyebrow in the mix, well, who is to say where existentialism stops and something else begins?

In an interview in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 15 November, 1945, Camus said point-blank: “I am not an existentialist.” He went on to say, “Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. We have even thought of publishing a short statement in which the undersigned declare that they have nothing in common with each other and refuse to be held responsible for the debts they might respectively incur. It’s a joke actually. Sartre and I published our books without exception before we had ever met. When we did get to know each other, it was to realize how much we differed. Sartre is an existentialist, and the only book of ideas that I have published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers.”

Nope, that doesn’t convince me. He may have had his own “rooted existentially in dasein” assessment of existentialism…but then so do I. And mine includes him.

Mine starts with the assumption that in a No God world “existence is prior to essence”. And did not his? Also, where does existentialism end and absurdism begin?

And, in my view, where Camus and Sartre truly parted ways revolved more around Sartre’s commitment to Communism and Maoism. In fact, there, start here: marxists.org/archive/novack … y/ch12.htm

Camus compared existentialism to “philosophical suicide,” causing followers to “deify what crushes them” – saying, in effect, that they turn negation into a religion.

Now, here, I’m more inclined to agree. Once existentialism becomes a philosophy of life that one embraces in order to differentiate “authentic” from “inauthentic” behavior, it becomes the moral and political equivalent of “essence being prior to existence”. Or, rather, so it seems to me.

Camus in turn had a religion of his own – a quasi-pagan quasi-Greek reverence for nature. Case in point: Sisyphus, his hero of the absurd, who is condemned to push a heavy boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll down each time into the valley below. Sisyphus achieves a serene unity with the physical world: “The cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands”. In Camus’ version of the story, Sisyphus is happy. If Jean-Paul Sartre had written it, Sisyphus would have experienced nausea as he contemplated the alien substantiality – the ‘being-in-itself’ – of the rock.

Come on, let’s get real. If you actually did find yourself in a position of endlessly rolling a heavy boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down into the valley, compelling you to roll it back up again all the way to the grave and beyond…how happy would you be? I can hardly imagine a more “nauseating” predicament myself.

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Why Camus Was Not An Existentialist
Greg Stone presents the evidence.

So what is existentialism, and why does Camus not qualify? In simple terms, Sartre believed that existence precedes essence; Camus however contended that essence precedes existence. That is to say, in Sartre’s bleak cosmos, man becomes conscious primarily of his existence as a free agent, and is then condemned to forge his own identity – his essence – in a world without God.

What then is this essence that Camus believed preceded existence…absurdism?

Is or is not the human condition essentially absurd?

No, seriously, what is essentially true about human interactions in regard to our moral, political and spiritual values?

As for Sartre, what I’d give to have him around today responding to my own arguments here. From my frame of mind, what makes the human condition bleak is that in a No God world we interact based on all of the variables in our lives that we do not either fully grasp or control. And, in fact, in regard to conflicting goods, a fractured and fragmented “self” seems entirely reasonable to me.

“Hell is other people” precisely when they objectify us. When they demand of all others that they embrace the same essence. Then the “or else” part.

Camus, on the other hand, was willing to posit legal rules so absolute that they could be said to point to ‘essences’ – among them a belief that almost all violence is immoral. Therein lies the foul: dogmatic principles for living, no matter how well intentioned, are not ‘existential’.

Did he believe that? And, if he did, how on Earth did he reconcile it with the world that we actually live in? Violence is everywhere. And, in part, because some who do believe that essence is prior to existence are hellbent on including and excluding others in their own “my way or the highway” dogmas. And if one of them is hellbent on coming after you, how can a violent reaction be immoral then?

As for these factors…

Although Camus is invariably linked with Sartre, whose name is synonymous with existentialism, they were an odd couple, who clashed like Voltaire and Rousseau, or Verlaine and Rimbaud. Sartre was tiny, plump, and ugly; Camus tall, elegant, and handsome: Sartre played Quasimodo to Camus’ Humphrey Bogart. Sartre famously described man as a “useless passion”; Camus described himself as a man of passion. Sartre felt most at home in the dark cafés of Paris; Camus in the blazing sunlight of the Algeria of his childhood. Sartre wrote at Mozartian speed; Camus at Beethoven’s tortured pace.

…you tell me.

There are the truly personal components of our lives – looks, demographics, experiences, relationships, etc. – that will always set us apart from others. The facts of life.

And then the components rooted far more in dasein. And then “the gap” and “Rummy’s Rule”.

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Why Camus Was Not An Existentialist
Greg Stone presents the evidence.

Their political differences spilled into public view in 1952, in the pages of Sartre’s newspaper Les Temps Modernes. By this time, Sartre’s views had evolved to include support for communism, which Camus regarded as the extension of a harsh Teutonic tradition stretching from Hegel to Marx, and reaching a perverse conclusion in Stalin’s labor camps. He decried Marx’s theory of history, dialectical materialism, and its use by communists to “authorize any excess” in their quest for a classless society. In his view there are no privileged executioners.

Few things get trickier than this in regard to our value judgments. The part where in any particular community, state, nation, etc., “I” end and “we” begins. Camus might have been less inclined than Satyr to focus in on political economy, but that does not make the arguments from those like Marx and Engels go away. Capitalism as a historical phenomenon had a profound impact on how we came to view the world around us. It’s just that some [like the Objectivists and the Libertarians] attempt to reconfigure it as a historical component of the human condition into a “metaphysical” philosophy of life.

In his fashion, Sartre also opposed Stalin’s methods – while at the same time claiming that mass imprisonment in the Soviet Union was not as bad as one lynching in the United States. He objected, however, to the exploitation of Stalin’s labor camps by the ‘bourgeois press’ to fuel their anti-communist propaganda.

Here, however, it’s always possible to make a distinction between Communism as those like Marx envisioned it and how those like Stalin practiced it. And, in fact, the “bourgeois press” has always been around to turn the Commies into plain old “terrorists”.

But after Camus’ taunt that Sartre was a detached intellectual who merely pointed his armchair at history, Sartre stabbed back: “My dear Camus: our friendship was not easy, but I will miss it… I don’t dare advise you to go back to Being and Nothingness, since reading it would be needlessly difficult for you… You are only half-alive among us.” Privately, Sartre characterized Camus as “a kind of schoolteacher, worthless in philosophy.”

Back again to political economy. From Sartre’s frame of mind there is simply no getting around the “class struggle”. Marx and Engels may have been largely didactic in exploring the means of production as the center of the universe, but to dismiss “dialectical materialism” as that which “detached intellectuals” embrace is, to say the least, awash with irony.

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The Absurd Heroics of Monsieur Meursault
Alex Holzman asks what a hero is, and if Camus’ infamous character qualifies.

Heroics lie near the heart of both literary and historical culture. Something about the ‘greatness’ of heroes lends context to and brings to vivid life the events in which they took part and often come to represent. They are anchors in the sea of history, often cast by desperate people; and like an anchor, they often alter the course of the vessel.

Of course: your heroes or mine? Our course or theirs?

When has that ever not been the case when the discussion shifts from, say, saving lives to taking them?

Who are the heroes now in the Gaza Strip? Or in Ukraine? Or in the abortion wars?

Heroes, fictional or otherwise, are quite diverse. We revere Odysseus for his guile and tenacity, Atticus Finch for his justness and morality, and Christ for his self-sacrifice; others we exalt for their military exploits, ethical guidance, ideological commitment, civic service, or rebelliousness.

Tell that to the Romans or the racists or the Muslims and Jews.

As for “military exploits, ethical guidance, ideological commitment, civic service, or rebelliousness” isn’t it true that over and again there are two or more conflicting renditions of what exactly they entail?

Thus…

Heroes can be controversial – perhaps even necessarily so for non-fictional heroes. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon were without fault, to say the very least, yet they command a place of respect in the annals of history. Why is this the case? What do heroes capture in people’s minds that us historical wallflowers cannot?

Of course, heroes often put their very lives on the line. That’s why they are seen as heroes. We ask ourselves, “would I do that? would I risk my own life?”

And then with fictional heroes the circumstances are concocted by a particular author with his or her own moral and political values to champion and defend.

In fact, that’s the part that many existentialists emphasize. In a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change.

[Dan1 (Dan~)]

I recently made love to one of my astral species in a dream.
I call them cytomorphs. They are basically a bunch of merged
bodies, souls, minds, shells, machines, magics, etc.
All linked together and doing a lot more than what they
could do alone and disconnected.
These beings to me have sufficient meaning to satisfy
my craving for meaning, for a long time to come.

Meaning basically comes from collectivism.

Being alone and disconnected is the anti meaning.

A family is basically a small collective.
That is where humanity gets most of its meaning.

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The Absurd Heroics of Monsieur Meursault
Alex Holzman asks what a hero is, and if Camus’ infamous character qualifies.

The Essence of Heroism

The answer lies perhaps in a deconstruction of the terms ‘heroic’ and ‘heroic deeds’. What does it mean to behave heroically? Self-sacrifice, generosity, piety, humility, and such traits are sometimes considered central to heroics, but that’s certainly not always the case.

Suppose someone had risked their life to save Adolph Hillter from certain death back in Nazi Germany. A hero? Suppose a doctor risked her freedom and performed safe abortions in a jurisdiction where abortion was deemed a capital crime. A hero? Suppose someone believed that Donald Trump was a danger to democracy here in America, and set out to assassinate him. A hero?

Who are the heroes right now in Ukraine and in the Gaza Strip? Who are the heroes in regard to AI technology…those advancing it leaps and bounds or those attempting to rein it in its potential dangers?

Are the capitalists the heroes or the socialists?

Thus…

This is a conflation of moral heroics with heroics of a more general nature. Many historical and fictional heroes were neither unwaveringly moral nor particularly interested in morality.

You can risk your own life in any number of particular contexts. No one would be able to deny that. Heroics revolving around the act of risking one’s life. The “for better or worse” consequences embedded in the context itself.

A more Hegelian conception of ‘hero’ might simply be an influential figure in history – a Napoleon or Caesar, a Stalin or Mao: someone who moves the historical process along. The similarities between these barbarous heroes and the more palatable ones (Christ, Gandhi, etc) are scarce, but essential to understanding the nature of heroics.

Sure, ignore the moral and political consequences of heroic behavior altogether. Make it a purely “technical” account. Or scratch out the part about courage and make it more about “outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.”

Then each side can line up and name their own heroes.

[Dan1 (Dan~)]

What if skunks are heroes ?

[iambiguous]

The Absurd Heroics of Monsieur Meursault
Alex Holzman asks what a hero is, and if Camus’ infamous character qualifies.

An existentialist understanding of heroics may indeed dispense with moral considerations altogether.

Well, how much guts does it take to live your life convinced that in a No God world good and evil are basically social and political constructs rooted existentially out in a particular world understood intersubjectively in a particular way? And even here convinced in turn that you have the capacity to freely choose between them?

In other words…

If for the sake of argument we accept the core existentialist idea that morality is self-imposed, so that no one can be objectively more or less moral than anyone else, would it follow that heroism cannot exist?

And then the part where, in a wholly determined universe, it would “exist”…but not exist. Whereas in a universe where “somehow” our speices did acquire free will, the “self” comes to acquire value judgments existentially. Morality derived from dasein.

There are many, many different ways to assess this. Philosophically or otherwise. And while we might all concur regarding this fact, only a very, very few of us are fractured and fragmented.

Heroism? Given what particular context? Also, are we talking more about means or about ends?

This seems unlikely: existentialists from Kierkegaard to Camus have made reference to heroics despite their preclusion of objective morality.

In fact, existentialists I’ve bumped into over the years have sometimes reveled in the assumption that existentialism itself is the philosophy for heroes. Why? Well, first you have to expunge God from the narrative. Once He’s gone, it takes courage, they insist, to go on accepting that your own existence is essentially meaningless and purposeless, that objective morality is out of reach, that death equals oblivion. God and morality are for the weak, they aver.

Then straight back up into the philosophical clouds…

So morality cannot be the basis of heroism, as heroes no doubt exist but morality may not. Justness and moral conscientiousness may be sufficient for heroism, given certain contexts and standards; but from an existentialist perspective, it cannot be necessary. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s greatest hero, Abraham, was but a few heartbeats away from murdering his own son.

Given certain contexts and standards? Now, we’re talking.

As for Abraham the hero? You tell me.

[iambiguous]

The Absurd Heroics of Monsieur Meursault
Alex Holzman asks what a hero is, and if Camus’ infamous character qualifies.

Sisyphus & The Absurd

Monsieur Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger, is surely an intentionally unconventional hero.

Yes, but only if you imagine Sisyphus happy?

The Stranger was first published in 1942, after WWI, and therefore marked by extreme pessimism, and in the midst of WWII, and therefore belonging to a world thoroughly in upheaval.

No, really, think about that. You are born and raised in a world teeming with unending upheavals. The First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War. How to reconcile that with a philosophy of life marked by…extreme optimism? In fact, how, once you have concluded there is almost certainly No God able to bring it all around to living happily ever after, is pessimism not an entirely reasonable frame of mind?

Correspondingly, the philosophy underscoring The Stranger is one of listlessness, dissatisfaction, cynicism, and exhaustion. In short, the novel is consumed wholly by a preoccupation with the absurd.

In other words, “listlessness, dissatisfaction, cynicism, and exhaustion” given an existence that is essentially meaningless and purposeless. Then in imagining yourself happy nonetheless?

Camus’ conception of heroics inevitably reflects this preoccupation, and subsequently, so does Meursault’s heroism.

You tell me.

What I’ll tell you however is likely to be different. And that’s because given all of the uniquely individual lives that we live, your heroes may well be entirely at odds with mine. Cue dasein?

However, it is in The Myth of Sisyphus that Camus most explicitly describes the heroics of absurdity. There he writes: “You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of life.”

So, how might one then encompass posting here as accomplishing nothing? Well, I rationalize it by assuming that I cannot know with any degree of certainty if posting here is, in fact, actually accomplishing nothing or not. Perhaps one of these folks…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r … traditions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p … ideologies
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s … philosophy

…are right and one can accomplish something considerably less absurd?

[iambiguous]

The Absurd Heroics of Monsieur Meursault
Alex Holzman asks what a hero is, and if Camus’ infamous character qualifies.

Like many legendary heros, Sisyphus struggled (and, if myth is to be believed, continues to struggle) against the will of the gods themselves. Sisyphus sought eternal life by challenging Death and Hades, and so was punished with ceaseless, meaningless toil, by having to push a boulder up a hill only to watch it tumble back down again, for all eternity.

Well, it’s not called the myth of Sisyphus for nothing. And like most such myths, we take out of it what we first put into it…our own rooted existentially in dasein “self”. And given that Camus attempts to reconcile the human condition with the “absurdity of life”, how does Sisyphus not become just another manifestation of that? If your own life is essentially absurd, what’s left but your own hopelessly – at times haplessly – subjective/subjunctive “narrative”. The stories you tell yourself about “what it all means”.

This punishment is an attempt by the gods to suppress Sisyphus’s freedom of choice, to make him into a mere object. However, to call it an ‘attempt’ reveals the possibility for heroics for Sisyphus.

And if there are no Gods? That, from my own frame of mind, is what makes human existence essentially meaningless and absurd. Clearly if there were Gods a font would then be available to encompass Sisyphus ontologically and teleologically. Sans the Gods [or a God, the God] and each of us as individuals will react to him existentially given the objective and subjective parameters of the life we live.

The primordial authority of the Olympian gods bore down on Sisyphus, and to some extent, he had no power but to submit; but even in the hopelessness of this unending torture, there remains the possibility of transcendence:

“Sisyphus, the proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn… if the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.”

Same thing of course. I read this and react as I do, you read it and react as you do. So, Mr. Serious Philosopher, how ought all rational mean and women react to it if they wish to be thought of as rational? The way that you do, perhaps?

Personally, I think that Camus’s assessment is simply preposterous. Unless, of course, the Gods really do exist.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

question you might be able to help me with here:
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=198650

[iambiguous]

The Absurd Heroics of Monsieur Meursault
Alex Holzman asks what a hero is, and if Camus’ infamous character qualifies.

Meursault’s Absurdity

Let’s return to Meursault. In a world without gods, in which human experience reigns as the sole transcendence, heroism is defined not by a scorn for the will of the gods, but instead by a scorn for the machinations of man and for the contingency of the universe. With this established, Meursault is the realization of an absurd hero.

Okay, but that’s not going to stop most “normal” men and women from being utterly alienated when confronting the attitude he displays regarding any number of things…and the behaviors he chooses which are considerably off the beaten path. Instead, they are going to fit him into one or another mainstream narrative and find him to be, well, very, very strange indeed.

The absurd swirls around Meursault as it does us all, lurking beneath our glib rationalizations. For instance, we grind our noses against the absurd in the nauseatingly alien moments of semantic satiation, where the meaningfulness of the arbitrary structures of grammar and language collapse through the repetition of words. We also face the absurd in those uncomfortably inexplicable but thankfully momentary experiences of disembodiment.

Maybe. Different folks, different strokes here in turn. But for me the “absurdity of life” still revolves largely around the consequences of being unable to connect the dots existentially between the behaviors we choose on this side of the grave and the fate of “I” for all the rest of eternity. An essentially meaningless existence that ends abruptly for all time to come in nothingness.

The absurd is similar in operation to Sartre’s nothingness, in that it is first and foremost a function of consciousness. Only consciousness can offer the awareness of the absurd – thereby creating absurdity; and once experienced, it can never be forgotten. The struggle against the absurd is consciousness’s ultimate battle.

Nausea let’s call it.