Existentialism For Dummies

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.

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

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

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

Power to you, brethren.

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

Von Rivers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where did you imply you were a dummy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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