existentialism

[MagsJ (Surya Loka)]

_
Existentially… where, is, Brian?

[iambiguous]

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

Death is the supreme symbol of the absurd, since death represents both the cessation of consciousness and an unknowable phenomenon.

Unless, of course, God does exist. And you worship and adore the right one. Then you can spend the rest of eternity in paradise.

No God though and death would seem to make the life that mere mortals live essentially absurd. On the other hand, there are any number of Humanisms out there to choose from that will provide us with one or another ideological or deontological meaning and purpose. At least on this side of the grave. And all you have to do is to believe it.

Cue the Cure: youtu.be/SdbLqOXmJ04?si=EXMRm82LmSqsVTqk

It is in the depths of the struggle against absurdist death that we find Meursault at the end of The Stranger. The crime that has led him to the guillotine was pointless, insofar as we can tell: he has murdered an Arab, but not out of passion or spite, nor even bloodlust. The act was contingent upon nothing but the bright sun. It simply happened. It was an absurd act.

On the contrary, run that by those who reacted to what he did and it was anything but an absurd act. They have their own “philosophy of life” allowing them to spin the murder in any number of “objective” ways.

Of course, human law cannot comprehend this. For the legal system, crimes must have intent; there must have been a motive. So as a matter of course, Meursault is (justly) condemned by this institutional reaction to the absurd. But in a certain sense, the legal system has become another component of Meursault’s consciousness of absurdity.

Indeed, the legal system revolves around the “for all practical purposes” reality of human interactions that often come into conflict. Imagine breaking the law and insisting it really doesn’t matter because ultimately life is absurd. I believe “here and now” that my own existence is essentially meaningless. But I have no illusion that this will satisfy others if my behaviors bring harm to them. It’s the existential motive and intent that counts here.

Same with arguing determinism as your defense. After all, when they lock you up for murdering someone and send you to death row, they can argue determinism as well.

[iambiguous]

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

He is sentenced to death, the most severe punishment allowable by law. The absurd has ensnared Meursault, just as it did Sisyphus, snatched from the sea and sand to his toilsome stone. Led to his cell, Meursault is expected to either repent and surrender to the whims of man, or suffer in terror until the drop of the blade.

Or, of course, however you might react yourself in a similar situation? Given that you are convinced your own existence is essentially meaningless and absurd? And, again, it’s not like philosophers can determine the most rational manner in which one ought to react to an execution where the variables involved are as problematic as they are here. In fact, here we are confronted with the moral conflagration that is capital punishment itself. Ought the state to be executing its own citizens? What is the most rationally sound philosophical argument?

This expectation is predicated upon both his consciousness of experiencing imprisonment and an expectation of a consciousness of fear, to be terminated by his death. And for a time it works as intended: Meursault quakes in his bunk each morning, awaiting the heavy footsteps of the guard coming to take him to his end. It is not until after his climactic rage against the prison chaplain that Meursault’s deconstruction of traditional expectations becomes clear.

Clear? To Camus, perhaps. In imagining himself as Monsieur Meursault? But how close would you and I come to “deconstructing traditional expectations” if we were awaiting execution on death row? How would our own deconstruction be any less rooted existentially in dasein than the reality that we and others constructed in the first place?

Again, once God is severed from the “human condition”, so too is the font the faithful among us use to provide them with a resolution for…everything?

Meursault was content with the pleasures and passions of his world. He loved and longed for the sea and the bends of the coast, the alluring touch of a young lover, and the other aesthetic joys of a casual life, just as did (or does) Sisyphus. When asked by the chaplain what he’d desire in death, Meursault replies curtly that he desires nothing more or less than his own life again – what else could a man desire at the end?

In other words, as with those like me, Meursault had accumulated “distractions” that provided him with crucial day to day fulfilments and satisfactions that either put absurdity and oblivion out of mind or into perspective.

Still, once we choose to interact with others, we run the risk of coming into contact with those who don’t share our own “philosophy of life”. Our moral and political values. Our own assessment of immortality and salvation.

[gib]

@iambiguous

From PN:

Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre
Kate Taylor recalls a ‘humanist’ classic by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s short book Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) sets out the main claims of Sartre’s existentialism, and defends these against some of the criticisms laid against it.

Or, perhaps, more to the point, both are Isms. And, of course, so is criticism.

The word “criticism” is an “ism”, sure, but it’s not a philosophy, an ideology, a way of looking at the world from a cognitive/abstract level. It’s an activity, a mode of delivering commentary. Anyway, on with your point…

@iambiguous

Isms tend to attract those who anchor their moral and political convictions to objectivism. Another one.

Wrong again! Any subjectivist can be attracted to any ism (as for instance “subjectivism”). If you’re a subjectivist, you have a point of view, a philosophy, a way of looking at the world. If there is an overwhelming preponderance of objectivists who attach themselves to one or another “ism”, this is merely a matter of disproportionality, not the power of “isms” to attract objectivists over subjectivists.

@iambiguous

But a crucial point regarding existentialism is that it steers clear of essentialism. I’ve always wondered why this was necessary to existentialism. The idea that value judgments can be ascertained ontologically, teleologically and deontologically – God or No God – if [and only if] they are anchored to the correct Ism.

I get why existentialism would discourage essentialism, but it doesn’t rule it out (hence my blue comment above). It just tempers it a bit by depicting the essence of things as arrived at by experience and contemplation (as opposed to being known directly and immediately).

@iambiguous

Pick one:

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

How 'bout no.

@iambiguous

And, sure, it might end up that yours is actually the most rational and enlightened one of all.

How’d you know?!

Sartre makes two basic claims – firstly that God is dead and this has consequences for the way we live; and secondly that all claims about humanity and the world must begin with human experience. Given these two claims, Sartre concludes that ‘existence precedes essence’. What he means by this is that human beings are without any pre-existing purpose or ‘essence’ which is not of their own making.

Like I said above, existentialism doesn’t rule out essentialism, it just challenges it with the question “how do you know?” and leaves you in a bit of doubt. Things may still have “essences”, including us, but we can’t know them directly and immediately, and with 100% certainty. We have to infer them. This includes us as well, along with our “essence” or “purpose”.

@iambiguous

The first claim is of fundamental importance because if there is a God, the God and this God is both omniscient and omnipotent, then case closed. The whole truth just doesn’t get more essential than that. On the other hand, if moral and political claims begin with human experience, how then are we to confront the fact that historically and culturally and in terms of our own personal experiences, there have been, are now and always will be countless differences? And, indeed, given that philosophy has been around for many, many centuries now and we are no where near to a consensus regarding any of the most wrenching moral conflagrations, what does that tell us?

I’ve always questioned the claim that philosophy has done nothing to advance the human condition. I think people pose this question because everything that has advanced the human condition comes out of disciplines other than philosophy. Mathematics for example, or science, art, or politics, etc. But if you trace any one of these back to their origins, you’ll find they stem from philosophy. Mathematics stems from the likes of Pythagoras and Euclid for example, science from Francis Bacon and Newton (who regarded his mechanics as a form of natural philosophy), politics from Montesquieu, Hobbes, and a whole swath of ancient Greek philosophers. The trick here is to recognize that once a philosophy becomes useful (i.e. it proves promising to the amelioration of the human condition), it ceases to be called “philosophy” and branches off to becomes a whole new discipline. What this entails is that the reason we see no progress or efficacy in philosophy towards the amelioration of mankind if that any such efficacious philosophies quickly leave philosophy once they’ve proved their usefulness, which leaves philosophy to be the realm of ideas that are either useless or untested. It’s no wonder, then, that philosophy has such a bad rep for failing to improve the lot of man–every time it has, a new discipline is born and takes all the credit!

@iambiguous

Of course, some then argue that the closest we come to an essential human scaffolding is our embodiment of “biological imperatives”. Genes. So, according to them, in regard to things like race and ethnicity and gender and sexual orientation there are behaviors that are “natural” and behaviors that are “deviant”.

I hate this philosophy. No one wants to acknowledge that it rest on the Naturalistic Fallacy–the unfounded assumption that whatever is natural is good–but pull this rug from under them and they fall to their utter demise. I also contend that this “biological imperative” poses any challenge to existentialism as any such scientific imperative rests on empiricism which brings us back to… drum-roll… existentialism. We know these biological imperatives from experience–scientifically conducted and carefully observed experiences, but experiences nonetheless–which we then follow up with inferences about our essential nature (personally, I think we’re better off looking within our own psyches rather than our biology for essences, but we still run up against experience).

@iambiguous

Then one by one they will tell you what must be done to those who are not “one of us”. All the way up to extermination.

The naturalistic fallacy run amok.

[iambiguous]

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

In the face of religion, Meursault remains unrepentant. And in the face of society, he feels no guilt.

So what?

From the perspective of the faithful, he is going to tumble over into the abyss that is oblivion. Eternal nothingness. While they will ascend to Heaven. Immortality and salvation awaits them. Though, sure, if those like Camus want to pat themselves on the back for having the intellectual integrity, honesty and courage to reject religion and accept an essentially absurd existence and oblivion…?

As for “society”, there will always be any number of others who feel just as adamant regarding their own far more “spiritual” understanding of the human condition. What they believe will comfort and console them all the way to the grave. And even if what they believe about their own God and their own One True Path is not true at all, all it need be is true for them.

He does not suffer the concerns of others, nor does he submit to a fear of the absurd. The absurdity of Meursault’s world – personified and punctuated by his companions, the Arabs, the magistrate, the prosecutor, the judges, and the priest – seeks to collapse him into a choiceless object, whose only remaining transcendence will be his suffering and death.

Hell is other people? That’s how I always interpreted Sartre’s frame of mind here. They can be hell because existentially they make our day to day lives a misery. But more to the point [mine] they are hell because they attempt to objectify us. They react to what we say and do given how close to or far away from their own God or No God dogmas they construe us to be. Which is why the conflict between Hamas and the Zionists is particularly surreal. They both worship the same God!

Then this particularly obtuse “philosophical contraption”:

But Meursault, the Algerian Sisyphus, resists this reduction to a choiceless nothingness, and in doing so, affirms his own transcendence. At the sight of his own great stone tumbling down for the final time, Meursault merely shrugs his shoulders and begins his descent.

Culminating in this:

Absurd Heroics

It is only conscious life that separates us from death, and death can only come at the end of consciousness. Yet we fear it as though it is something to be suffered, like an illness. Rather, death is simply a bracketing of conscious life – no different in function than birth. Fear of death is in actuality an expression of love for life. It is the fear of an unknown that steals our possibilities from us. But it is only while fearful that one can choose instead to be brave; and it is only while brave that one can be a hero. Meursault routinely demonstrates radical bravery in the face of the absurd. He is not a good man; but he attains a level of authenticity that few ever mimic. And he faces death with contentedness, taking responsibility for the man he chose to be. Thus he opens himself to the happiness of Sisyphus. Hades kneels before Chaos, and Meursault awaits the scornful cries, comforted by their familiarity.

We have to imagine that Meursault was…happy?

And, okay, if you are able to think yourself into believing this then good for you. “Whatever works”, I always say.

[sacrosanct]

Authentic being is the attainment of selfhood

However to love somebody you need to appreciate their own being and be who they are

That is seeking wisdom in the self and being with others

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

It took almost a century of thought before existentialism came to fruition as a popular movement – almost a craze – in post-war France in the nineteen-forties and fifties.

This was the time of its greatest influence, not only on philosophy but also on literature, drama and film-making, extending far beyond France.

Let’s speculate as to why that was the case…

1] World War I
2] the Great depression
3] World War II
4] the Cold War culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis

A tumultuous world confronting one historical crisis after another. Existentialists then groping to encompass that in a philosophy of life that increasingly [for many] does not include God and religion.

But here I am dealing with existentialism solely as a school of philosophy – one which arose mainly from the work of five men and one woman: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Me? Well, in regard to these folks, my own main interest revolves not around exploring existentialism as a school of philosophy, but around taking their technical, philosophical assumptions down out of the philosophical clouds – out of school – and examining them instead out in a particular set of circumstances. Contexts let’s call them.

Of these, Sartre was the only one to accept the name ‘existentialist’ and employ all of its key concepts: ‘anguish’, ‘bad faith’, ‘facticity’, ‘commitment’, and ‘authenticity’.

Yes, but that does get all the trickier because Sartre was also committed existentially to an “authenticity” that included Marx and Mao.

And that’s always crucial in regard to human interactions, in my view: where does “I” end and “we” begin?

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

All philosophers in the existentialist camp shared the same mission: to make us recognise that human beings are free to choose, not only what to do when faced with moral choices, but what to value and how to live.

Which, for the most part, is why any number of existentialists that I have encountered over the years were/are so reluctant to consider my own “fractured and fragmented” frame of mind. Most rejected God and objective morality, but many were convinced that, in regard to “I” in the is/ought world, one could still be considerably more authentic than inauthentic. Indeed, for those like Nietzsche, one could even become an Übermensch…and rule the roost?

They want these facts about human freedom to be not merely accepted, but absorbed by each person for himself or herself, so that when they have absorbed them their whole view of life will be different.

Different, yes. But better? Well, many of the No God secular objectivists have certainly convinced themselves that “might makes right” only insofar as it is seamlessly intertwined in “right makes might”. The Übermensch rule…but only because “philosophically”/“naturally” they deserve to.

Existentialism as a cultural movement belongs to the past. But as a philosophy with this utterly practical mission, it can be as liberating to us now as it was to men and women in war-torn Europe.

Liberating, perhaps. But we will still need actual contexts in which to explore this down out of the didactic clouds. If, for example, you feel liberated in shepherding flocks the Last Men to do your own superior and enlightened bidding, fine…but what “for all practical purposes” will that mean in terms of rewards and punishments for actual flesh and blood human beings?

After all, consider the fate of those who, for folks like Satyr and AJ, are deemed inherently/necessarily inferior given the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation or their religion or their political values. The “biological imperative” Nazis who actually do act out their own xenophobic dogmas.

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

When readers of the Parisian newspaper Le Monde began to take notice of existentialism, the newspaper published an article in December 1945 to tell them what it meant. Although it did its best, Le Monde finally felt it had to admit that “Existentialism, like faith, cannot be explained; it can only be lived.”

Though, of course, if we all lived the same life what would be the point of creating existentialism as a philosophy of life? Instead, we often live very, very different lives. And, as a result of this, our own uniquely personal experiences bring about what can be very different understandings regarding things like war and peace, sexuality, gender, race, religion, value judgments.

The human condition to date, for example.

Why is existentialism like faith? Because to base one’s conduct on a belief that one is free to choose is an act of faith, for there’s no way of knowing for sure whether it’s true or false.

Sound familiar? You know, going back to a definitive understanding of how and why the human condition fits into the existence of existence itself. With or without God?

Besides, with all of the other “philosophies of life” to choose from – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s … philosophy – what else is there [in the end] but one or another rooted existentially in dasein “leap of faith” to one or another “one of us” vs. “one of them” set of assumptions.

And what makes existentialism hard to explain? Perhaps it is its claim that no objective moral order exists, independently of humanity. That makes it futile to seek a code for behaviour anywhere outside of ourselves. Each individual has to create his or her own value by living and affirming it, and must do so in a way that satisfies a single governing norm of ‘authenticity’ – in perhaps oversimplistic terms, through always ‘being myself’.

Of course, that’s my point, isn’t it? In any given community, one may or may not be encouraged to “be yourself”. Or one may or may not be encouraged to “be like all the rest of us”. Then the part where historically, culturally and experientially that is ever and always evolving and changing.

But it’s not so much explaining this that matters nearly as much as how discomfited others can be with your own explanation.

Mine here for example.

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

Existentialism is obsessed with how individuals choose to live their lives.

Well, this existentialist is more obsessed with the manner in which dasein and the Benjamine Button Syndrome factor into the choices we make pertaining to value judgments. The part where we can ascertain what “the right thing to do” is in accomplishing goals in the either/or world – you either do or you do not – and the part where we embrace one set of behaviors that others insist are “the wrong thing to do”.

For example, the difference between “what is the right thing to do” in order to become a successful investment banker and a successful investment banker then encountering someone who insists that the right thing to do is dismantle capitalism and embrace socialism.

Our choices are demonstrated by our acts, and always concern matters within our power. To choose, then, involves deliberating about things that are in our control and attainable by our action. Then by whatever actions we choose to take, we define and create the selves that we gradually become.

Up to a point, of course, we can all agree with this. It is behavior that precipitates consequences. But to what extent can philosophers/ethicists establish which behaviors are in fact the most rational and the most virtuous? And, perhaps, nothing is more important here than being within reach of the options needed to act out what we believe is the right thing to do in our heads. Political power is always the bottom line out in the world we live in.

But then back to why we choose things that others roundly reject. Pick one:

1] dasein
2] deontology

For example, we become ‘just’ by performing just acts, and similarly as regards other virtues. This is not meant as a moral point – no ‘should’ or ‘ought’ is implied – but as a fact about the nature of the world and of human choice: that my choices of good or evil will determine my character and make me the kind of human being that I turn out to be.

Well, existentially, we’ve all turned out to be who we think we are here and now. But what of those who turned out to be very different? Given the tools of philosophy, to what extent can we determine what the optimal sets of behaviors are in a particular “situation”? In regard to performing just acts are the ethics situational as well, or was Kant right?

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

Choosing Value

Existentialism makes every individual responsible for deciding for him or herself how to evaluate their choices.

Think about how problematic that is however. Every individual decides for him or herself. But only given the world that they were born and raised in. Sure, if philosophers were able, using the tools at their disposal, to take that into account and propose the most rational choices then that evaluation process would be all that mattered.

So, link us to it.

Sartre further remarked that it is in the nature of values that they make demands on us. I do not just see the homeless person; I encounter him as someone ‘to be helped’. Why ought I help the homeless? The answer can be revealed, Sartre thought, only to a free agent who makes the value exist by the fact of recognizing it as such. You judge a homeless man as someone to be helped only because you have already chosen yourself as a person who helps people. There is an answer to ‘Why ought I help the homeless?’ from within that prior ‘self-making’ choice; but outside of it there is none. Moreover, the principle of helping – say kindliness or compassion – is sanctioned by your action, rather than the action by the principle.

No, the nature of values revolves instead around all of complex reactions each of us as individuals have in regard to the homeless. Not everyone wishes to help them. Some feel contempt for them. They become bums, losers, vagrants. Think Alex DeLarge and his Droogs. Others, however, see them as victims of “society”. Of capitalism and the “deep state”.

So, you are an existentialist. What then is the most “authentic” reaction to them?

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

The Facts of Freedom

Existentialism’s most basic premise is that human beings have no pre-existing or set nature or character. We are not essentially anything, except that we are essentially free. We become self-created beings by virtue of our actions and our relations with other people. Hence the existentialist slogan ‘existence precedes essence’.

Of course, there are any number of biological imperatives that do factor into the behaviors that we choose. Before we can begin to squabble over the morality of any number of conflicting goods given our social, political and economic interactions, we must first be a part of a community able to sustain a means of production that allows us to subsist from day to day.

That each one of us has absolute freedom of choice is an existentialist article of faith – to the existentialist it is a truth so self-evident that it never needs to be proved or even argued for.

Absolute freedom of choice?!! That’s ridiculous. We either have the actual option to do what we want to do or we don’t. And those options are in turn shaped and molded by the historical and cultural parameters of our lived lives or they are not. As are our wants themselves. Some want this, others want that. So, what ought all rational men and women want if they wish to be thought of as either good or evil?

Instead, let’s stay up in the philosophical clouds:

And who needs theoretical proof of something indispensable to the practical business of living? To an existentialist, “My freedom is my essence and my salvation. I cannot lose it without ceasing to be” (Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy). So every honest person must recognize my freedom.

You tell me. If the behaviors you honestly chose in regard to conflicting goods are derived from an essential freedom and others choosing to behave in exactly the opposite manner based on the assumption that their freedom is essentially – objectively – the One True Path…?

[Dan1 (Dan~)]

@iambiguous

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

The Facts of Freedom

Existentialism’s most basic premise is that human beings have no pre-existing or set nature or character. We are not essentially anything, except that we are essentially free. We become self-created beings by virtue of our actions and our relations with other people. Hence the existentialist slogan ‘existence precedes essence’.

Of course, there are any number of biological imperatives that do factor into the behaviors that we choose. Before we can begin to squabble over the morality of any number of conflicting goods given our social, political and economic interactions, we must first be a part of a community able to sustain a means of production that allows us to subsist from day to day.

That each one of us has absolute freedom of choice is an existentialist article of faith – to the existentialist it is a truth so self-evident that it never needs to be proved or even argued for.

Absolute freedom of choice?!! That’s ridiculous. We either have the actual option to do what we want to do or we don’t. And those options are in turn shaped and molded by the historical and cultural parameters of our lived lives or they are not. As are our wants themselves. Some want this, others want that. So, what ought all rational men and women want if they wish to be thought of as either good or evil?

Instead, let’s stay up in the philosophical clouds:

And who needs theoretical proof of something indispensable to the practical business of living? To an existentialist, “My freedom is my essence and my salvation. I cannot lose it without ceasing to be” (Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy). So every honest person must recognize my freedom.

You tell me. If the behaviors you honestly chose in regard to conflicting goods are derived from an essential freedom and others choosing to behave in exactly the opposite manner based on the assumption that their freedom is essentially – objectively – the One True Path…?

What if there are many True Paths ?

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

Obviously no one chooses entirely what he or she becomes, or is. Each of us has a set of given natural and social properties that influence the kind of person we become.

Sound familiar? Indeed, how is this any less applicable to existentialists? Starting with our indoctrination as children and all of the personal expereineces that revolve entirely around when and where we were born, there are any number of varaibles in our lives that are either beyond our fully understanding or controlling.

Or, demographically…

Sartre gave to these features the collective name ‘facticity’. One’s facticity comprises all those properties another person could discover and investigate. They include natural properties, such as sex, weight, height, and skin colour; social facts, such as race, class, and nationality; psychological properties, such as my extant web of beliefs, desires, and character traits; and historical facts, such as my family background, schooling; and so forth.

Sound familiar? I merely make what I deem to be that crucial distinction between actual facts…objective facts that can readily be communicated in the either/or world…and the “facts” some claim to be universally applicable to all of us in regard to value judgments.

And, sure, if you believe that is the case, by all means, try to convince me. After all, there is still a part of me that wants to believe it. And all the better if the dots can then be connected between “here and now” and “there and then”.

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

Our own facticity hardly ever occupies our own minds in this third-person kind of way, even though it does weigh on us and colour our moods and approach to life.

Again, though, how it occupies your mind is not likely to be how it occupies mine. Why? Because my own approach to life involves that critical distinction between the objective components of our lives readily communicated to others and the subjective/subjunctive nature of “I” embedded in the endless communication breakdowns in regard to our value judgments.

However, when I do step back and take a third-person, objective, view of my facticity, then these given facts about me may strike me as precisely what does define who I am.

And then this parrt…

Yes, there are any number of objective facts about our lives. But even these demographic and circumstantial variables were beyond our control at birth. And how others react to them over the course of our lives is going to be rooted in turn out in particular worlds understood in particular ways historically and culturally. So, it’s not like philosophers came along and figured out a way to grasp how we ought to think and feel about the parts that come into conflict.

Unless, of course, you count the “my way or the highway” objectivists…

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

…among these folks who, in my view, make fool out of themselves by insisting that, no, their own One True Path really is the One True Path.

So, many of them – the “serious philosophers”? – take it all back up into the theoretical clouds…

But for an existentialist, to think this would be a radical mistake, not because my factual properties are misleading, but because the person each one of us is cannot be defined in third-person terms. No objective account of my properties could ever describe my subjective experience of what it’s like to be me, the person who has them. So someone observing me can make out my skin colour, class, or ethnicity; but the moment he attempts to identify me in terms of these properties, he encounters a paradox, since the kind of being I am is defined, among other things, by the attitude I adopt towards my own facticity – by how I choose to interpret it – and that is not fixed by the facts. Who I am depends (among other things) on what I make of my facticity, on how I try to go beyond, or transcend it. In other words, whatever my facticity, and no matter how fixed it may be, it does not curtail my freedom. I am still free to decide what values to ascribe to my facticity, and what stance to take towards it. To become the person you choose to be despite the burden of your facticity is the only authentic way to live your life, whereas to live it as though you were at the mercy of your facticity – to pretend that it has robbed you of your freedom – is inauthenticity. It would be to lose both one’s autonomy and one’s integrity, and in this way give in to determinism.

Got that?

Okay, bring your own interpretation of it down out of the didactic clouds and let’s explore it given a particular set of circumstances.

[sacrosanct]

Sarte’s way of putting it

"We mean that man first of all exists encounters himself surges up in the world and defines himself afterwards if man as the existentialist sees him is not definable it is because to begin with he is nothing he will not be anything until later and then he will be what he makes of himself "

…do philosophy

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

With what raw material?

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

The Price of Freedom

It would be hard to feel otherwise about freedom and choice if you had lived in occupied France between 1940 and 1945, when existentialism came of age as the philosophie officielle of the resistance movement.

Again, what does this tell us about freedom? That, depending on the historical and cultural parameters of the life you live, and your own collection of personal experiences, freedom can mean many, many different things. And it’s not only the price that you pay for freedom but, in turn, the cost it can exact when you come upon those who insist that you must embrace their own social, political and economic assessments of it. Or else. Think Nazis and Jews. Think Trump and democracy.

Or that age-old conundrum embedded in the advice from others to “be yourself”; but, at the same time, to “do the right thing”.

In those years, and even during the post-1945 reconstruction, it exerted a powerful appeal that was as much emotional as intellectual. If “man is nothing but that which he makes of himself” (Sartre), then no one is bound by fate, or by forces outside their control.

Does this really make sense? If existentialism was born following such historical calamities as the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cuban Missile crisis, doesn’t it confront us precisely with the reality that there are any number of things that can have a profound impact on the lives we live, but are largely beyond our control? Or even our understanding of?

Right now, in America, the Iowa caucuses commence a presidential election year that could very well culminate in a second Trump term. And if the MAGA forces also succeed in capturing both houses of Congress?

By uniting with like-minded people, the individual can challenge authority – even tyrannical power – and change things. He or she can choose to oppose the Nazis, or to create a more just society than had existed before the war. Only by exercising their personal freedom could people regain their civil liberties.

Of course, this assumes that philosophers can pin down deontologically how all rational men and women ought to exercise their freedom. That, say, democracy and the rule of law really is the best of all possible worlds? Did not any number of Nazis in all sincerity believe that National Socialism – the final solution – was the best of all possible worlds? A just world?

Sure, as long as the discussion stays up in the intellectual clouds…

But there is a price to be paid for the freedom to do whatever you choose at every juncture. No one can decide on your behalf; the choice of action is always yours and yours alone. And no one can ever avoid the personal responsibility for judging what the morally right thing to do is. You thus suffer the potential anguish of having to endure an endless series of choices in the knowledge that only you can decide, that you may evaluate anything as you please, and that you have no character to guide your choice other than the one you’re forming for yourself.

…freedom can be construed to fall anywhere along the ideological spectrum.

Just steer entirely clear of the points I raise in the OPs here:

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

Instead, assume that you really are in sync with the “real me” in sync further with “the right thing to do” and embrace one of these…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p … ideologies

…objectivist renditions of the One True Path to enlightenment and freedom and justice.

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

Not everyone can cope with the burden of an existentialist approach to shaping their lives and characters. Some may try to flee the tyranny of choice by hiding from themselves the truth that we are all, as Sartre said, “condemned to be free” – which means not free to cease being free.

Sure, there are always going to be moral and political objectivists among us who insist you are “condemned to be wrong” if you don’t embrace their own assessment of freedom.

They cease to be free every time they actually dare to insist that in regard to all of many One True Paths to Enlightenment, their own really, really, really is the optimal [if not the only] way to be free.

All our acts inevitably presuppose choice; and so we are still choosing even when we think we are not – even when we have deliberately chosen not to choose.

We’ll need a context of course. After all, if not choosing to act is still a choice, the actual existential/historical ramifications of that can be more or less consequential.

When France was over-run and occupied by the German army in 1940, every French man and woman was forced to think about their values and decide whether to resist and struggle to free their country, or to resign themselves to Nazi domination.

And, suppose, for any number of reasons over the next 10 months or so, MAGA prevails here in America such that Trumpworld encompasses the White House, Capital Hill and the Supreme Court. But by bit some semblance of fascism in the USA begins to emerge.

What is to be done? In other words, whether you act or do not act on that, or however you do act, is there a way [philosophically or otherwise] to grasp how reasonable men and women are [in a Kantian sense] obligated to act?

They had to choose, and it was a time when they faced their freedom in great anguish. Some were unable to bear the thought of their freedom, and in order to escape its pressure adopted the cover of what Sartre called ‘bad faith’, perhaps the most important concept of his philosophy.

[iambiguous]

On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.

A common type of bad faith is the denial of one’s freedom in the form of an excuse, typically beginning with “I couldn’t help it…” We hear this in the excuse made by those Nazi soldiers who insisted “I could not do otherwise” or “I was just doing my duty.”

Tell me, however, that “for all practical purposes” this doesn’t get tricky? Surely, there are any number of situations we might find ourselves in whereby we really do believe we couldn’t help doing what we did. Someone [for whatever reason] is able to force us to do their bidding…or else.

Yes, any number of German soldiers and civilians might have rejected Hitler and the Nazis. They might even have attempted to bring them all down. But how is this not but another manifestation of dasein? And how does this not entail consequences?

On the other hand, any number of German soldiers and civilians back then acted out of what they construed to be a “good faith” commitment to fascism and the Final Solution.

One can always do otherwise: one can quit, or run away, or even choose to be shot. The cost might be enormous – even one’s life – but it is never a case of cannot, always of will not.

Yes, but again, each individual here is embedded in their own set of circumstances. And the costs might not only be in regard to them. The costs can also spill over to families and friends and loved ones.

They chose to continue to obey orders: it was not determined by their nature. Existentialism doesn’t allow excuses.

This reflects what some construe to be the most radical – or ridiculous? – assessment of existentialism. What some will deem to be excuses from their point of view is deemed as anything but from another’s point of view. And there is no “nature” here so much as nurture.

And then those who argue that we don’t really choose anything at all in a wholly determined universe.

Instead, even given free will, this particular assessment hovers up in the clouds…

There is never a legitimate reason for denying one’s freedom. No matter how oppressed we may be by our situation or circumstances, we know we can always imagine alternatives – and act on them too, if we’re brave enough. The only way to stay in good faith is honestly to continually own up and respond to being free to choose, and accountable for whatever you decide to do.

That’s what some will bring it down to: bravery.

As though there is always the “right thing to do” if you have the guts to do it. As though those on the other side of any particular conflict can’t make the same claim about their own behaviors.