Existentialism For Dummies

melonkali: I do have some rough idea of existentialism, an area of philosophy which I personally find interesting, but I’d rather hear from people in this forum who are more learned in the subject, in hopes of instituting a protocol wherein those of us in this forum who (like myself) are a little behind the learning curve in philosophy can learn from and ask questions of the philosophers here. Class is in – any volunteer teachers?"

K: have you read anybody and if so, who? Finding out about your background may speed up the process.

Kropotkin

I studied existentialism in a university course, which included Dostoyevsky (sp?), Kirkegaard (sp?), Nietzsche (sp?), Sarte, Camus. The various writings were interesting; there were similarities, and differences, between the authors. I never understood what specific common denominators connecting these authors earned them the descriptive “existentialist”, and what traits might cause another, apparently similar, author to be considered “not existentialist”. rebecca

I’m very familiar with Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. That book has virtually all Sartre had to say about his early philosophy and is considered one of the major works of existentialism. That said I’m hardly good at teaching, but I will try. James found some good definitions of existentialism. The one I like best is “1. the doctrine that man forms his essence in the course of the life resulting from his personal choices.” They are all written in “plain English” while existentialism must be written in a way that finds new meanings for average words. Therefore, they all can seem accurate and inaccurate at the same time.

Many authors including Sartre came to similar conclusions as those expressed in those definitions. A novelist can express those ideas as well through the story and if the ideas “move you” or agree with you, then why question them? While it’s true many existential philosophers were also novelists they all had a solid bases in philosophy for their views. The question is: How did they come to the conclusions that the definitions give?

Like I said there is no plain English way to explain existentialism without the risk of misinterpretation. I believe that existentialist ideas are something we learn over time through reading, reflection and discussions. Nonetheless, I’ll try to give a quick summary of the root idea of existentialism. Keep in mind it’s bound to sound ambiguous.

I like to think the best way to express the root idea of existentialism is with the phrase; being before essence. The significance of that is that philosophy often used to be thought of as the reverse, essence before being. Now to clarify I must offer some sort of definition for the way I’m using the terms “being” and “essence”. Being is the physical world; essence is what people give to it. Now the temporal difference between the two terms needs to be explained. First I’ll explain essence before being, then the reverse.

There is two ways to look at essence before being. The broad way is this: There was an unexplainable essence, and then the universe was created or formed. That essence defines why things are the way they are. The word good has a natural meaning, and it is good for all to do good.

The other way of looking at essence before being is from a completely different perspective, furthermore I don’t know if many people believe this but I included it because it is another way of viewing essence before being. A person is essence. That person creates being through thought. Whatever that person thinks reality is it is. Some might say that what I just described is existentialism, but as you will see it isn’t.

There is two ways to look at being before essence. The first way I describe sounds somewhat paradoxical, the second is what is really meant by existentialist. I only bring up this way because it may avoid some confusion when I describe the second. The first way is also broad: There was just the universe it was being, but it was undifferentiated being. Humans evolved and gave essence to being.

The second way of looking at being before essence starts from the individual’s perspective. Before the individual there was undifferentiated being. The individual gives it essence, they choose the essence they give it, or in other words they must choose the essence they give to it. The term facticity comes in to play here. Without facticity our world would be just like the second version of essence before being I described. We would be able to do anything. Facticity is our freedom’s limits. One may ask: How does the concept of undifferentiated being and facticity correspond? That question may be the most difficult and fundamental question of existentialism. Sartre explains it very well, perhaps later I’ll attempt to summarize Sartre’s explanation, but it won’t be easy.

I think it has to do with choosing some principles that you want to value and then basing your choices against those principles. These principles should be woven into your fabric and nearly unconscious. Things like courage, honesty, kindness, gratitude, humility, etc. are good choices. But it can be anything. It can be evil, destructive, etc. You get to pick and are able to pick, based on what’s most woven into your fabric already.

The key is that these principles, so long as you have thought, can’t be taken away from you. IOW, if you can still do it as a quadriplegic, it’s a principle. Connection is not a principle, but a value. You employ a principle often to obtain a value, but the principle itself has to also be a value.

I agree, except I have to wonder if the principles you mentioned are all good choices. I mean speaking in existential terms, if you choose them as a good choices and continue to do so, then no on is to say they weren’t. But, I don’t know, I had once chosen them all to some degree, but in bad faith, which means, at the time, I didn’t think of them as choices so much as simply obviously positive traits.

Now that I think about it, they all can be good principals, as long as the are actually chosen in good faith. To choose them in good faith means that you aren’t going to constantly try to let them become idealized or become being-in-itself. That is, you won’t consider them to be obvious as to their definition, but dynamic principals which you and you alone must adjust to circumstances.

In the first paragraph you say principles are value, and the last that connections are  principles but no value. There is a definitional problem here.

The mixup comes from equating principles with value. According to Frege, connections do not have truth value. Therefore holding that connections are principles, is tatamount to saying principles have no value. Then why hold them?

 Stuart: choosing principles in good faith does not qualify them as good.  You may be choosing the worst choice in good faith.

  An example would be: have you seen the movie with robert De niro called "Analyze this"? If you did or didn't makes no difference, the plot is simple.

 A guy (robert De niro) goes to a psychiatrist because of OCD.  He chooses to go to one (Billy crystal) who inadvertently accepts to treat the patient, in good faith, not knowing the guy is part of the mob.  Now the immediate mob boss (but not the top guy) about this, and warns De niro about how they can't let this out, because the important thing is, going to a shrink will not be an admission of crazy, but of weakness, which the mob can not tolerate.

The story is a delightful run around- what if kind of fears surrounding impending revelations, about the identity of the shrink, who becomes a fall guy, the mob putting a hit on him. The shrink gets out of it by a sleight of hand bravura.

The point is, all the principals are values within variable contexts: the mob, the psychiatric community, the shrink’s wife who is sort of out of it, the mob middleman who’s good faith awareness of his available choices has to change to accord to the changing attitudes toward his underling (De nero) toward whom he has more affiliation then toward the head honcho.

The twists and turns are scary, hilarious , thoughtful,
Frame my frame, and this ever changing scenario makes it difficult to connect them. The principles have changing value, and it is this, that the splicing of the frames becomes important. The splicing (the connections) have no inherent value other then their function: to spice together the different scenes-to make them appear seamless. The value is in appreciating the good faith that all of the principal characters. Use in good faith in trying to approximate the reality, the truth value of the situation, to accord them their proper use.

Have you seen this? It’s a riot.

I’ll only meant they could be good, one always must decide how to constitute them with what one knows. As far as advice goes, I would advice using those principals in good faith, which of course means not taking my advice as the final word. I haven’t seen that movie, except perhaps a small part of it.

 And I meant only meant to clarify the fact that bad principles can be begotten on good faith.  That's all.

Obe, almost everything you said about my paragraphs is false.

In the first paragraph I say that principles are something you want (or choose) to value (verb). I didn’t say principles are value (nouns). I could go into the difference if you feel it is necessary, but what I’m getting at is that a principle precedes value, or yields value. Also keep in mind that a principal can include value as an attribute, but that doesn’t mean that all values are hereby principals. For instance, I value oxygen, but it’s not a principle. A principle is something you can employ even in the absence of oxygen, for instance, the courageous choice employed in that two minutes before you experience brain death, to not be fearful of death, but rather grateful of the life you lead.

What I literally said was: connection is not a principle but a value. You are quoting me in the exact opposite of what I said, so I don’t know how to respond. Connection, like oxygen, is a value, not a principle. We can employ principles to obtain connection, such as courage to ask a girl out, but we can also employ principles when we have no connection, such as the courage you’d choose to exhibit in hell, or in the moments before death when being buried alive, God forbid. That last example is quite apropos actually, since the best use for existentialism is to be okay with the kind of isolation we come to feel upon true wisdom, which is I suppose similar to a sepulcher existence.

Would also add that I never carefully read sartre or kierkegaard – I arrived at existentialism completely on my own as a survival mechanism after a bad drug trip. It took me about seven years to approach the epiphany. Only later did I realize that I had in fact stumbled upon existentialism. The best way to learn and understand existentialism is to actually viscerally experience solipsism and then manage your way out of it. Any prosaic knowledge of existentialism is faulty. Bottom line is I have good news for everyone: it’s all going to be okay, you are in fact not alone, and moreover life is brimming with meaning and fun. It’s an exhilarating game, in fact, and who doesn’t like a game? The only thing wrong with a fun game is that it ends. But your game doesn’t end until you die. That’s a long ass game, folks. A game that should be well played. And we are all, if we choose, gamers.

 Well, Gamer then I did misread. However what you describe is the story of my life. My existentialism was borne the same way! A lousy drug trip! And now I am hooked on it (existentialism) and found it a terrific game changer.  But now reading the post modernists, and even the conventional philosophers, realized that existentialism is a relic of the past and we must tag along! However , being that it is built into my ontology, and not merely a game, I do want to keep up with the times, but can't let go of the logical reduction and its compensating mechanism in existentialism.  So there may be a new thing with some kind of synthesis (not dialectical). Habermas-looking into Him, he seems a way out. But having almost 0 experience with post modernism, need to do some work on it.  Hey, great to meet you, and hope to interact.

I don’t think there’s anything mere about a game, but I get your point, and I don’t doubt there are ways to outthink it. I’m just not so eager to do that, for God knows where I’ll land. The freedom from existentialism, once mastered, is extraordinary, not without work and diligence, but I wouldn’t trade it in.

Mine was some very odd pot smoked through a bong. The pot was extra dusty, or had been ground to dust by someone else prior to me trying it, and it had hints of both gold and purple amid the green. Whatever that shit was, it blew my mind and tossed me directly into the deep end of the pool and forced me to swim.

Pls to meet you, too. Cheers

given that…

then since dummies make poor choices
their essence will suffer…but…
since being a dummy is an essential quality, you can only be a dummy when you are dead, when you can no longer make, utterly freely, choice. Up until then you might, suddenly, stop making poor choices, given your utter freedom from essence.

Speaking from the perspective that I am a dummy, then it is because I choose to be a dummy (why else would I have just implied I was one) and I can be a dummy how ever I want, including being a self-enfacing intellectual. Now, speaking from the perspective that others are dummies, they are simply that and if we must even grant that they make choices (solipsism is impossible, but it doesn’t mean everyone must exist to you as an existential being at all times, especially when they are a dummy) and have an essence then no doubt their essence will suffer. It doesn’t matter whether someone is dead or not from the second perspective, we can judge them as we wish. From the first perspective they certainly can be a dummy even though they can always change there mind later.

Gamer, what’s worse; splitting hairs or splitting world views?

Yes, existentialism must be learned from experience to be known. Believe it or not, to actually carefully read Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is enough in itself to give that experience. An uninterested student in philosophy would have less trouble actually memorizing all 800 plus pages than understanding them in the least, I know this from reading one bad academic account after another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven’t read it yet, unfortunately.

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

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

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

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

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