At the Existentialist Cafe - Sarah Bakewell Flashcards
Traditional philosophers often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment.
‘Phenomena’ - from the Greek word ‘things that appear’
The leading thinker Edmund Husserl provided a rallying cry “To the things themselves”.
It meant don’t waste time wondering whether things are real. Just look at what is being presented, and describe it as precisely as possible.
Heidegger asked “What is it for a thing to be?”
Sartre and Beauvoir felt dissatisfied with their University syllabus - endless reinterpretations of Immanuel Kant.
Sartre hinted that he was incubating some new ‘destructive philosophy’.
Sartre went to Berlin to study and brought back a new blend: the methods of German phenomenology, with ideas from the earlier Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, set off with the distinctive French seasoning of his own literary sensibility.
Sartre defined existentialism as ‘Existence precedes essence’. It roughly means: having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (ornate, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms (where essence precedes existence).
Sartre said that you are free to decide what you make of any situation in mind and deed. You always have a choice.
Sartre’s existentialism implies that it’s possible to be authentic and free, as long as you keep up the effort.
“There is no traced-out path to lead man to his own salvation; he must constantly invent his own path.”
The Catholic Church put Sartre’s entire works on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1948.
Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ was also added to the list.
The bourgeois model of marriage had no appeal to Sartre/Beauvoir: its strict gender roles, hushed up infidelities, and its dedication to the accumulation of property and children.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were 2 misfits who had a very strong influence on the later existentialists. Both were contrarians by nature, dedicated to making people feel uncomfortable.
Kierkegaard disagreed with Descartes and Hegel:
He thought Descartes had things back to front. Human existence comes first. I am therefore I think (rather than other way round).
He took issue with Hegel, whose philosophy showed the world evolving dialectically through a succession of ‘forms of consciousness’, each stage superseding the one before until they all rise up sublimely into ‘Absolute Spirit’. Kierkegaard countered with typically awkward questions: what if I don’t choose to be part of this ‘Absolute Spirit?’
Dialectic - the Hegelian process of change in which a concept or its realization passes over into and is preserved and fulfilled by its opposite.
Sartre read Kierkegaard, and was fascinated by his contrarian spirit and by his rebellion against the grand philosophical systems of the past. He borrowed Kierkegaard’s specific use of the word ‘existence’, in which we mould ourselves by making ‘either/or’ choices at every step. This brings a pervasive anxiety.
‘Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’, wrote Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard thought the answer to ‘anguish’ was to take a leap of faith into the arms of God, whether or not you could feel sure He was there. This was a plunge into the ‘Absurd’ - into what cannot be rationally proved or justified. Sartre was repelled by this theological existentialism.
Sartre taught me to drop out - an underrated and sometimes useful response to the world.
The notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch.
Good definition of existentialism - page 34
What exactly is phenomenology - DESCRIBE PHENOMENA.
The Husserlian ‘bracketing out’ or epoché allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question ‘But is it real?’.
Epoché is an ancient Greek term which, in its philosophical usage, describes the state where all judgments about non-evident matters are suspended in order to induce a state of ataraxia (freedom from worry and anxiety).
Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects ‘really’ are, and the question of what the mind ‘really’ is.
Sycophantic - behaving or done in an obsequious (ob-see-kwius) way in order to gain advantage; obsequious, servile, subservient, deferential, grovelling, toadying, fawning
According to Heidegger there is an ontological difference between Being (way of being) and being (individual entity).
Heidegger wants to make the familiar obscure. His purpose was less to be understood than to be experienced through a ‘felt strangeness’.
It can help to think of Heidegger as an experimental novelist or poet.
The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something. I don’t tend to contemplate things but just pick up and act on them.
Ontological - relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
In Being and Time, it is Being rather than the far reaches of cosmology or mathematics that is most ‘ontological’, Practical care and concern are more primordial (existing at or from the beginning of time; primeval) than reflection. We are already in the world and involved in it. We are ‘thrown’ here. And ‘thrownness’ must be our starting point (Die Geworfenheit).
It is in questions and discomfort that philosophy begins.
Nazi Germany was steeped in the sensation that Heidegger sometimes called ‘uncanniness’. Sometimes the best educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last.
The journalist Sebastian Haffner used the word ‘uncanny’ stating that ‘Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia’. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’
People had become yoke to their habits and to mass media, forgetting to stop and think, or to disrupt their habits long enough to question what was going on.
Totalitarian movements thrived at least partly because of this fragmentation in modern lives, which made people more vulnerable to being swept away by demagogues.
Heidegger wrote in Being and Time that ‘Dasein’ tends to fall under the sway of ‘the they’ - an impersonal entity that robs us of the freedom to think for ourselves.
To live authentically requires resisting or outwitting this influence.
Everything is contingent (accidental) - a theme of Sartre’s novel ‘Nausea’.
In Nausea, art brings liberation because it captures things as they are and gives them an inner necessity.
Partially Examined Life - Episode 4 Camus
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. “
Camus thought that anyone who was intellectually honest could not refute that life is absurd. He thought that life had no meaning, that nothing exists that could ever be a source of meaning, and hence there is something deeply absurd about the human quest to find meaning (in the face of death).
“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world”
Camus then asked, what should we do in light of this? Commit suicide if we’re all going to die anyway?
Absurdity is a relation between our minds and the world and the fact that they don’t match up in lots of ways. We have a desire to unify everything but nature, at its core, is unknowable. Lots of other philosophers like Kant have tried to demonstrate this. We have perceptions of reality but not direct experience of it. Or we have expectations of a fair world, but these are not borne out in the uncaring Universe.
Given all these things, it’s a relational concept between our mind, our reason versus this vast uncaring world. There is a tension between those things. To Camus, the only admirable response is to keep this tension going.
If you come up with a philosophy that denies the Absurd, like God, then you are copping out. This is philosophical suicide because you are denying the relationship with the irrational world. If you physically commit suicide this is also copping out. Living with this tension in mind, and keeping the human need vs irrational world unreconciled, is the best way to live.
Suicide is a solution to Absurdity. However, it’s the wrong solution because you are accepting it rather than revolting against it.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy”.
The literary projects of Camus:
The Outsider
The Myth of Sisyphus
Caligula
He called these his ‘Three absurds’ because they all dealt with the meaningless or absurdity of human existence.
King Sisyphus, having arrogantly defied the Gods is condemned to roll a boulder endlessly up a hill. Each time it gets near the top, it slips out of his grasp and rolls down, so he has to plod back and begin again. Camus asks: if life is revealed to be as futile as the labour of Sisyphus, how should we respond?
He points out that mostly we don’t see the fundamental problem of life because we don’t stop to think about it.
Neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. Sartre argued that experience already comes to us charged with experience.
Hegel’s stately vision was of human history progressing through inevitable sequences of thesis, antithesis and synthesis towards sublimation in Absolute Spirit.
For Beauvoir and Sartre, the big lesson of the war years was that the art of life lies in getting things done, We do not thrive in satiety and rest.
Satiety = the state of feeling fed to capacity.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir used philosophy to take two huge subjects: the history of humanity - which she reinterpreted as a history of patriarchy - and the history of an individual woman’s life from birth to old age.
She highlighted the ‘myths of femininity’, which ultimately derived from Nietzsche’s ‘genealogical’ way of digging out fallacies about culture and morality.
Women live much of their lives in ‘bad faith’, pretending to be objects.
The Second Sex could have become established in the canon as one of the great cultural re-evaluations of modern times, a book to set alongside the works of Charles Darwin (who re-situated humans in relation to other animals), Karl Marx (who re-situated high culture in relation to economics) and Sigmund Freud (who re-situated the conscious mind in relation to the unconscious).
Beauvoir re-situated men in relation to women. Yet it was never elevated to the pantheon.
Beauvoir argued that the question of the relationship between our physical restraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a problem requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it.
She hastens to add that she does not believe we should therefore give up and fall back on a bland Sisyphus-like affirmation of cosmic flux and fate. The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly trying to take control of things. We have to do two new-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue projects as though we are truly in control.
In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency.
The most dramatic work of existentialist non-fiction was written by Hannah Arendt. Her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem concerned the trial of Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the Holocaust. Having attended the trial and observed his curiously blank responses, Arendt interpreted him as the ultimate Man in the Grey Suit. For her, he was a mindless bureaucrat so in thrall to the Heideggerian ‘they’ that he had lost all human individuality and responsibility, a phenomenon which she characterised as ‘the banality of evil’.
To the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, human beings were essentially vagabonds. We can never own anything, and we never truly settle anywhere, even if we stay in one place all our lives. We are always Homo Viator - Man the Traveller.
