existentialism

[iambiguous]

Gary Cox interview

Gary Cox is the author of several books on existentialism and general philosophy. The 10th anniversary edition of his bestselling self-help book How to Be an Existentialist was published recently. Gavin Smith talks with him about existentialism.

If religion is often about wishing, then existentialism is about willing. It is about getting real and acting decisively towards reasonable, worldly goals.

Willing what? Given what set of circumstances? And, given this context, how do philosophers go about the task of differentiating real from unreal reactions? Are they our reasonable worthy goals or theirs?

Instead, the author stays up in the intellectual clouds…

[quote]As I wrote in the book, “You have to build your life on an understanding and acceptance of how things really are, otherwise you will always be fooling and deluding yourself as you hanker after impossibilities like complete happiness and total fulfilment. Ironically, existentialism is saying, if you want to be happy, or at least be happier, stop struggling to achieve complete happiness because that way only leads to disappointment.”

How could this not mean [at times] very different things to very different people? Instead, from my own frame of mind, the distinction here is between moral objectivism and moral nihilism. Between sustaining the comfort and consolation of being on the One True Path and feeling fractured and fragmented. At least in regard to conflicting goods.

Then just more of the same “general description” assessment…

Existentialism is not in the business of replacing religion. Unlike religion, existentialism does not tell people how to live, what to eat, what to wear, who to marry. It instead urges people to recognise that they and others are inalienably free, and to embrace their freedom in a positive, courageous, and moral way rather than act in bad faith and deny their freedom. The most rewarding thing for me about writing How to Be an Existentialist is the wealth of correspondence I have received over the past decade from people who tell me it has helped them to find or recover their self-esteem, to confront reality, and to get their life together.

Okay, I’ll try to contact the author and see how he does react to my points here.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

@iambiguous

all things can be rationalized

That’s actually something that makes things easier…if you’re not doing it according to self=other (because you reject the only being who exists essence—gives self=other ontological, existential, and essential import). It’s kind of like a cop out. Which is ironic. Because that’s basically bad faith.

[iambiguous]

Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

This is an eclectic collection of extracts, as befits the decision of the editor, Robert C. Solomon, not to define ‘existentialism’ tightly.

Tightly defined? What does that mean? For many, I suspect, it presumes their own definition of existentialism encompasses what it does in fact mean.

Objectively?

The dictionary defines existentialism as “a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.”

How tightly does your own definition of existentialism correspond with human interactions that do come into conflict over value judgments?

Existentialism is undoubtedly tricky to define, but Solomon must have had something in mind when he put together this collection other than just following what people habitually call ‘existentialism’.

In fact, down through the decades, lots of different people came to lots of different conclusions regarding what it means to live one’s life as as existentialist. For some, it included leaps of faith to God, while for others leaps of faith to No God. For some the focus is always on the individual, while for others existentialism and Marxism are entirely compatible. Then those like Freud and Jung and Reich who introduced components revolving around the nature of human psychology and the role that sex plays in sustaining repression.

At any rate, it includes those philosophical giants most associated with existentialism – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty – as well as slightly less famous philosophers similarly implicated – de Unamuno, Marcel, de Beauvoir, Hazel Barnes, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Keiji Nishitani, Colin Wilson, Viktor Frankl – and finally those whose existentialist credentials are embedded in more literary genres – Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Rilke, Kafka, Camus, Márquez, Beckett, Borges, Pinter, Heller, Roth, Miller.

What would all of them either agree or disagree about regarding “the for all practical purposes” interactions of men and women, given their own “rooted existentially in dasein” subjective assumptions about existentialism?

[iambiguous]

Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

Going where angels, and even Solomon, fear to tread, I shall take a stab at defining existentialism.

Again: define! define! define!

Whereas I am far more intrigued with how any particular definition given to words of this sort are then shown to be applicable to actual human interactions that come into conflict over value judgments.

The dictionary defines existentialism as, “a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.”

Given this definition, however, doesn’t enable individual existentialists to pin down what “for all practical purposes” it means to be free and responsible in any particular set of circumstances. If those at both ends of the political divide insist that being “authentic” revolves around sharing their own set of assumptions regarding the morality of human interactions, then what?

The core of existentialism is a recognition of inescapable personal responsibility.

In other words, in the absence of a demonstrable moral font [God or No God], agreeing on the definition of existentialism won’t make the conflicts go away. Nor, in my view, does it make the arguments I post here pertaining to dasein any less relevant.

Instead, what is agreed upon among existentialists all up and down the social, political and economic divides is that they are acting freely and responsibly.

That, and keeping one’s assessment of existentialism up in the theoretical clouds…

[quote]It involves the realisation that the human individual is irredeemably free and responsible for choosing his outlook on the world, for his conduct in it, for essentially who or what he is, and that no appeal to external authorities such as God, or to rational philosophical systems, or to a predetermined ‘self’, or to the norms that surround us, or to science, can remove this and do the job for us if we wish to live as fully authentic human beings and not as ‘things’ enslaved by the world.

The force of existential choice comes charging home to us when we feel alienated from the mass of norms by which most people around us govern their lives, but which to the enlightened existentialist are ‘absurd’ and ungrounded. [/quote]

Let’s take this to the abortion wars, or the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. And my own focus is on the part where, in the absence of God, existentialists are able to sustain a moral and political philosophy that is not “fractured and fragmented”.

Solomon is right: this view of existentialism leads not to a body of doctrine, but to a pervasive way of thinking about the human condition, a comportment to the world, fired by integrity.

Integrity. Another word that can be defined. But those all up and down the moral and political spectrum can claim to embody it. Did Hitler embody it? Is liberal integrity more or less authentic than conservative integrity?

[iambiguous]

Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

Most of the above writers are well known, so I’m going to focus on one in the collection who deserves far greater attention than he usually gets. For among the most welcome additions to the second edition of this book is an extract from Colin Wilson’s substantial essay ‘Anti-Sartre’. This is written with all the engaging clarity that one would expect, and facilitated by illuminating analogies.

Start here?

"The book [The Outsider] is structured in order to mirror the Outsider’s experience: a sense of dislocation, or of being at odds with society. These are figures like Dostoyevsky’s ‘Underground-Man’ who seem to be lost to despair and non-transcendence with no way out.

Characters are then brought to the fore (including the title character from Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf). These are presented as examples of those who have insightful moments of lucidity in which they feel as though things are worthwhile/meaningful amidst their shared, usual, experience of nihilism and gloom. Sartre’s Nausea is herein the key text – and the moment when the hero listens to a song in a cafe which momentarily lifts his spirits is the outlook on life to be normalized.

Wilson then engages in some detailed case studies of artists who failed in this task and try to understand their weakness – which is either intellectual, of the body or of the emotions. The final chapter is Wilson’s attempt at a ‘great synthesis’ in which he justifies his belief that western philosophy is afflicted with a needless pessimistic fallacy." wiki

The great synthesis? Or, as with Nietzsche and his Übermensch, did Wilson blink?

Colin Wilson has been unjustly neglected by academia, in the case of philosophy almost totally so. This may be because he has worked outside the university system almost all his life, and therefore attracts an irredeemable suspicion of not really being ‘sound’.

Why wouldn’t that surprise me? Academic philosophy with their Hallowed Halls and their “world of words” dictums.

One does not have to agree with every turn in his writings in general to believe that his specifically philosophical work is in fact of significant value. The core of his philosophical ideas is contained in ‘The Outsider’ series of books, headed up by the first in the set, titled The Outsider. These ideas are condensed in his The New Existentialism and further explored in Below the Iceberg, in the latter of which the full text of ‘Anti-Sartre’ appears.

Here we go again. To revolt or not to revolt? I or we? Political economy or “the market”? In other words, the individual in society and where to draw the line. Sartre accepting that Marxism is clearly relevant to human interactions down through the ages. Where to draw the line there: marxism vs existentialism - Google Search

Where do you draw it? Me? I’m no less fractured and fragmented here as well.

[iambiguous]

Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

Wilson’s criticism of Sartre echoes Nietzsche’s charge that what are presented by philosophers as universally valid conclusions based on cool reasoning may often be “…an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.”

On the other hand, what on Earth does that mean? What does it mean in regard to your own interactions with others?

For me, what an observation like this really revolves around is dasein. Because each of us as individuals might accumulate many, many different experiences, the “very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts” that we attest to often come into conflict. And once the death of God begins to sink in, any number of ethicists have to find another foundation in which to anchor objective morality. Ideology, philosophy, biological imperatives, science etc., provide some with an alternative to God in regard to the “best of all possible worlds”.

Even if we regard this as an exaggeration, it is a reminder of the way in which non-rational factors may be the dominant process leading someone to a belief and others to accepting it, a process made dangerous when what is really doing the work is hidden behind a façade of poor reasoning that we are assured is its true origin.

Same thing. What “on Earth” does this convey to each of us as individuals given the assumptions I make above. That, in my view, in a world teeming with conflicting goods centuries and centuries after the birth of philosophy, why haven’t philosophers been able to pin down human interactions demonstrated to be either the most and the least rational?

According to Wilson, nothing could be truer of Sartre. What seems to be a complex, thought-out position in fact manifests the drive of personal psychology that was going to take him to that result anyway – and, moreover, to a position concerning the human condition that is false.

Is this actually true? How about if an attempt is made at intertwining the positions Sartre conveys in Being and Nothingness with events that unfold from day to day “in the news”.

On the other hand, here we go again: philosophers who claim to rationally differentiate the right from the wrong assessment of the “human condition” itself. These parts:

Capitalism vs. socialism, big government vs. small government, I vs. we, genes vs. memes, religion vs. atheism, idealism vs pragmatism, might makes right vs. right makes might vs. democracy and the rules of law.

[PZR]

Next up: persistentialism.

[iambiguous]

Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

Wilson accuses Sartre of pessimism. Sartre, in particular in his novel Nausea, supposedly presents a world stripped of illusion; a world revealed as it would be if devoid of the ordering categories of metaphysics and values.

That’s not my point so much as suggesting that down through the ages many, many very different human communities have pursued many, many very different “ordering categories of metaphysics and values” pertaining to behaviors across the board…social, political and economic. That’s the main thrust of existentialism…to suggest further that there are no objective [let alone universal] values that all reasonable men and women are obligated to embrace. Unless, of course, you “will” yourself to take a leap of faith to God.

And, of course, if you were either indoctrinated to believe or thought yourself into believing that your own values do reflect an objective or universal Truth, it’s not likely that you will be pessimistic. Especially if you can believe in turn that death itself is just a path to eternal salvation.

What we are left with is nothing or, at most, ineffable overwhelming existence. The giddiness of being cut free from the only thing we know, a life lived entirely by categories that we suddenly realise are utterly arbitrary, induces in us retching nausea; an anxious despair in which we ask, “Why am I here doing this?”, while realising that no answer appears ultimately justified, and that we have no-one but ourselves to help us answer it.

Yes, believing instead that your own existence is essentially meaningless, is fractured and fragmented morally and, day by day, is getting you closer and closer to oblivion, can precipitate a grueling pessimism for some. Again, it depends on how fulfilling your day to day circumstances are. Also, once you abandon the belief that you are ever and always obligated to act out the equivalent of “what would Jesus do?”, you are afforded so many more options in life.

We carry on, of course, but we do so in ‘Bad Faith’, tricking ourselves into giving significance to what we do, while uneasily aware that our life amounts to no more than the result of happenchance.

Okay, but as long as you are able to convince yourself it is not a trick at all, but the real deal, then it matters not at all whether Sartre or Wilson is closer to the…truth?

If we cap this off with an awareness of the immovable horizon of death towards which we are all doomed to progress without redemption, then the seriousness with which we regard our lives seems indefensibly absurd.

Let’s run that by the Immanual Cans here. See if we can finally convince them to be pessimists too.

[felix_dakat]

You’re confusing existentialism with nihilism again. Not that it matters in a meaningless world.

[iambiguous]

felix dakat

You’re confusing existentialism with nihilism again. Not that it matters in a meaningless world.

We’ll need a context, of course. One in which we explore the manner in which we make that distinction ourselves.

How about you pick it?

[felix_dakat]

Both existentialists and nihilists think that life is essentially meaningless and ideas of good and evil are based on human constructions. But, they differ insofar as existentialists aim to create meaning through free will. As Sartre said, “Man makes himself; he is not found ready-made; he makes himself by the choice of his morality, and he cannot but choose a morality, such is the pressure of circumstances upon him.”

[iambiguous]

Actually, there once were, are now, and probably always will be existentialists able to take a leap of faith to God.

Though I’ve yet to come upon a nihilist who believed in God, it wouldn’t surprise me at all in this “human all too human world” if they aren’t out there somewhere.

And then there are those nihilists/atheists who embrace nihilism/No God…religiously?

But, they differ insofar as existentialists aim to create meaning through free will. As Sartre said, “Man makes himself; he is not found ready-made; he makes himself by the choice of his morality, and he cannot but choose a morality, such is the pressure of circumstances upon him.”

On the other hand, children are indoctrinated to believe many very different things about “the meaning of life”. And then, as adults, what people believe about right and wrong often revolves entirely around the particular historical and cultural communities they grew up in. Also, experientially, in terms of our individual experiences, we might live lives that are very much at odds in regard to meaning and morality.

After all, it’s not for nothing that in regard to both meaning and morality, we live in a world that has generated any number of One True Paths:

List of religions and spiritual traditions

List of political ideologies

List of schools of philosophy

Me? “Here and now” my own understanding of value judgments revolves around the arguments I make in the OPs here:

a man amidst mankind: back again to dasein

a man amidst mankind… That is the paradox, right? I am an individual…a man; yet, in turn, I am but one of 6,500,000,000 additional men and women that constitutes what is commonly called “mankind”. So, in what sense can I, as an individual, grasp my identity as separate and distinct from mankind? How do I make intelligent distinctions between my personal, psychological “self” [the me “I” know intimately from day to day], my persona [the me “I” project – often as a chameleon – in conflicting inte…

moral philosophy in the lives that we live

If there is one thing I am clearly preoccupied with at ILP, it is relationship between moral and political value judgments and the existential tajectory of the lives that we live. And, in almost every thread in which I post about this relationship, I eventually get around to this: 1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin. 2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon polit…

back to the beginning: morality

I believe what many would construe to be two seemingly conflicting [even contradictory] things: 1] that aborting a human fetus is the killing of an innocent human being 2] that women should be afforded full legal rights to choose abortion As a result, the first thing many point out is that, regarding this issue, I am insisting women should be permitted legally to kill innocent human beings. And that doing so is in this particular context not immoral. To which I respond: “Yes, but…” But: J…

Though, trust me, if one of the folks on their One True Path above can demonstrate to me that all of the other paths are bogus, and that their own objective morality is the real deal, watch me eagerly embrace it.

As for the pressures we are under to choose particular behaviors in any particular community, sure, if we do choose to interact with others, it is almost inevitable that conflicts over value judgments will occur.

But why yours and not theirs?

And by context, I mean a particular set of circumstances familiar to most of us in which conflicting goods have been sustained now for literally thousands of years.

[felix_dakat]

I made my point. I have no problem with any of what you say above, although, I confess I didn’t open any of the links you provided. I suppose everyone is on their own path. No two are the same.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

Christians who are existentialists believe that we must choose in our thoughts, values, and actions eternal meaning which truly satisfies, but only if you choose it. Yeah. Sartre just secularized it. Well. At first. He acknowledged God is the only candidate for a Being (ontology) who always exists (acts) essence (purpose). In other words — pure authenticity.

[felix_dakat]

For sure, there is a secularization of Kierkegaard’s thinking that goes on across what became known as existentialism. But could we agree that the basic aim of all these existential philosophies is to overcome the crisis of meaning that is called nihilism?

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

…the same way Jesus did when he crossed out made up (nihil) meaning of the religious elite & circled back to the essential (self=other) & put binding & loosing back in the hands of those who treat the other as self. That is the Kingdom of Ends Kant was/is about.

Temple-crashing, table-turning revolutionaries, those.

[felix_dakat]

That may be your particular take on what existentialism is, but surely you can see that not all those who identify with the term would agree that the answer to the human dilemma is Christian let alone with your characterization of that as the essence of Christianity.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

No actually I had never thought of that before in my entire life.

Thanks for the anti-snarcastic delight.

[iambiguous]

Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

This absurdity has been the excuse for much dark humour among those capable of this sort of existentialist outlook. Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, as anyone with any sensitivity knows, is one of the funniest plays you can see in a theatre.

Wouldn’t this depend largely on the frame of mind someone brings to the performance? If you connote godot with the grim reaper in an essentially meaningless and purposeless universe, and you are yourself getting closer and closer to oblivion, you might not be busting a gut while watching it. Or you might assume godot is God. And since God is now dead to many in our modern world, it all comes down to whatever secular “Ism” you can anchor what’s left of your precious Self to.

To return to Sartre, when the good existentialist strips away the contingent accretions that order his world, he should be left with the world raw, true, and as it is in itself. Sartre thinks this is reality, and that it is a depressing place, devoid of meaning or, ultimately, even sense.

Right, the world’s raw, true, intrinsic meaning and purpose. And while the odds are remote your own One True Path to enlightenment embodies this given all the others out there claiming the same, all the others out there are just as likely to be hapless in actually demonstrating it.

[iambiguous]

Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

Sartre thinks this – “the world raw, true, and as it is in itself” – is reality, and that it is a depressing place, devoid of meaning or, ultimately, even sense. However, Wilson argues that Sartre’s ‘reality’ is in fact the projection of his own subjective view, which it so happens is pessimistic.

Right, and Wilson’s own collection of uniquely personal experiences, relationships and access to information and knowledge is, what, considerably less subjective/subjunctive? He actually came closer than Sartre to living his own life “authentically”?

Again, pessimism can revolve around both the philosophy of life that we subscribe to and our actual day to day circumstances. Which is why so many are inclined towards one or another “spiritual” quest. With God and religion you have the ultimate antidote: immortality and salvation.

“I have tried to show how religion, the backbone of civilisation, hardens into a Church that is unacceptable to Outsiders, and the Outsiders — the men who strive to become visionaries — become the Rebels. In our case, the scientific progress that has brought us closer than ever before to conquering the problems of civilisation, has also robbed us of spiritual drive; and the Outsider is doubly a rebel: a rebel against the Established Church , a rebel against the unestablished church of materialism. Yet for all this, he is the real spiritual heir of the prophets, of Jesus and St. Peter, of St. Augustine and Peter Waldo. The purest religion of any age lies in the hands of its spiritual rebels. The twentieth century is no exception.”

Got that? He’s a “visionary”.

Besides, rebelling against the Established Church is one thing, offering up a “spiritual” alternative to it another thing altogether. Let alone connecting the dots between the spiritual and the…political?

This is plausible; when devoid of the constraints of the commonality of publicly ratified categories, we are left not with nothing, but with our subjective outlook.

So, there’s Sartre trying to pin down an authentic human existence in a No God world, and Wilson trying to pin down something in the way of a spiritual alternative?

There is a masochistic tendency in many to suppose that the worse must somehow be truer; that inevitably a grim view of reality is what we get when disabused, free from fairytales that comfort us and satisfy our desires, that quell fears so deep and terrifying that we are hardly able to admit them to ourselves.

Still, isn’t that basically what religious faith comes down to: subsuming an essentially meaningless life in the psychological balm that is the One True Path? That for many it also includes immortality and salvation, seals the deal.

Conversely, maybe it is all right to kid ourselves, as from the disillusioned point of view, if nothing matters, it doesn’t matter how you get through your life either…But why should we assume that a true view would reveal a terrible prospect?

Whatever works? And that does sustain millions around the globe no doubt. And the beauty of the human condition in a free will world is that all one need do is to believe something – anything – is true “in their head”, and that makes it true “in reality”.