© Roger M Tagg 2012
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'Existentialism', as with a number of schools in philosophy, seems to be a label applied almost fortuitously to the ideas of a number of writers; some of whom accepted it with varying degrees of good grace, and others who either rejected it as undesirable pigeonholing or were already dead. 'Pragmatism' seems to have been a similar case in point.
The author of this book makes a noble effort to go beyond what particular writers said, and to draw up a sort of 'manifesto' of what an idealized 'Existentialist' would say about various issues. In fact he has probably done more than just patch up the rather inconsistent, leaky and misshapen public face of Existentialism. Despite a lot of almost "arguing with himself", he seems to offer a reasonably consistent description of what being an Existentialist requires.
That said, one is left with the feeling that Existentialism is not an easy path, requiring considerable mental re-alignment from the position that most people - of almost any cultural tradition - are brought up in. Most people, one feels, won't be able to 'hack it'; and one wonders how civilization would fare if a majority of people espoused it as a philosophy for life.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Preface | vii | Cooper's aim is to (re-)construct the views of an idealized person he calls "The Existentialist", and not to regard any particular authors as defining any 'orthodoxy' |
| viii | Existentialism is something that has been both 'in' (Paris in the late 1950s) and 'out' (Oxford in the 1960s), but hasn't quite had a line drawn under it. More recent writing about it has come from Taylor, Dreyfus and Rorty (all American). | |
| 1 - Prelim-liminaries | 2 | Regarded as 'core' existentialist ('existentialist') writers are Heidegger and Sartre, together with Jaspers, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty. Earlier influences were Kirkegaard and Nietzsche. Somewhat on the outer are Buber, Marcel and Ortega y Gasset. Camus (see p8) is 'out'. |
| 4 | Heidegger sometimes spelt 'exist' as 'ex-ist', i.e. 'stand out' (from the herd). "... in some sense a person is always 'beyond' or 'ahead' of whatever properties characterize him at a given time." | |
| 5 | M-P: "To ask oneself whether the world is real is to fail to understand what one is asking.". Consciousness "always finds itself at work in the world". | |
| 10-11 | The common trigger for existentialist thinking is 'alienation'. "It is serious, finally, because it is undertaken to 'overcome' threats to human integrity and dignity which all but the self-narcoticized must on occasion experience". [RT: Maybe most people just pass such moments off as part of the 'shit' that happens?] | |
| 11-18 | Existentialism suffers from many public misconceptions, e.g. as anti-tradition vogue in mid-20C Europe. | |
| 14 | "Existential Angst is, rather, a sense of freedom, of a capacity to strike out on one's own in the formation of a scheme of beliefs and values. If Angst has special significance in modern times, this is not because life has become too 'dishevelled' or 'wide and wild', but because it has become too comfortable. Beliefs are too easily and readily received from what Kirkegaard called the 'Public', Nietzsche the 'herd' and Heidegger the 'they'. This Angst is not something to be 'treated'; we need to be called to it..." | |
| 2 - Philo- sophy and Alienation | 22
| "Neither puzzlement nor awe, neither a thirst for knowledge nor a craving for clarity, has been the abiding inspiration for philosophy. Rather, this has been the perpetual threat posed by the sense that men are hopelessly alienated from their world." [RT: Alienated - in what sense? How many of the people we know would we describe as 'hopelessly alienated'? And are they the more philosophical types? Are they worried about the gulf between the 'inner', 'private' mental life and an 'objective' reality "independent of our particular conceptual schemes, 'language games' ..." ? Does anyone in practice doubt the existence of a real world? Is the alienation due to the threat posed, by increasing levels of rational and scientific thinking, on our societies' traditions and stories? Or is it just that we don't feel at ease with our daily grind?] |
| 25 | "...Alienation is a many-sided notion whose sides need to be individually exposed." | |
| 26-33 | Hegel and Marx each had their own notions of what the 'essential alienation' is. | |
| 33 | The existentialist ... thinks that, for the most part, people suppress a sense of alienation from the world by becoming 'absorbed' in or 'tranquilized' by the comforting, ready-made schemes of beliefs and values which prevail in our societies." | |
| It's harder for the existentialist (than for Hegel or Marx) to find structures that will make us feel 'at home' with the world and each other [RT: because there are multiple aspects to alienation]. | ||
| 35 | "... people's misunderstandings about Being - notably their tendency to equate it with the spatio-temporal universe investigated by scientists." | |
| 36 | Existentialism "addresses a number of dualistic illusions to which we are prone". | |
| 3 - Exist-entialist | 39-56 | Existentialism is 'Existential Phenomenology'. This is unlike Husserl's 'pure' variety which has to bracket out all beliefs in the external world, so that we can get to know 'essences' through "immediate seeing", or "a non-perceptual type of intuition". |
| Phenom- | 42 | With Husserl, "we suspend belief in the scientists' world, in order to focus on the Lebenswelt" (i.e., "the world that can be commonly talked about"). |
| enology | 47 | Nietzsche denounced "the illusion of 'worlds-behind-the-scene' ". |
| 'Intentionality' means a) "conscious acts must be directed to objects" and b) "our awareness of objects is mediated by meanings". | ||
| 49 | E Phenomenology rejects the 'spectator' model. | |
| 50 | "... we are 'plunged into the world' as revealed to us through the meanings our activities project." | |
| 51 | To understand "bring me a slab" we have to know what slabs are for [RT: in this case, for building, not beer drinking]. | |
| 52 | "The significance of a slab is not ... a slab-essence, but the place held by slabs within a form of life." | |
| 4 - Being-in-the-World | 57 | An existentialist description of the world must a) "be one pre-supposed by any other accounts" and b) "describe the world as it is 'for us' - as a phenomenon ...". [RT: Cooper also says that the world is 'essentially human'. Where does this leave sentient animals - aren't they part of 'us'?] |
| "Human existence is intelligible only in terms of an engagement with it (the world)." | ||
| "The existentialist is not aiming to produce an account on which everyone will readily agree." | ||
| "We should, in fact, be suspicious of people's responses to questions about how the world is, since these are liable to encapsulate a 'folk' version of the bad metaphysics and 'scientism' which have dominated thinking for too long" - because such answers will be reflective. | ||
| 58 | The 'naive' standard account says the world is just a collection of substances. But even this has to explain things like shadows, colour and smell - and, more generally, events, structures and relationships. It's not 'false', it's just 'parasitic' on the Lebenswelt view. | |
| 59 | Heidegger's distinction between 'ready-to-hand' (r-t-h) and 'present-at-hand' (p-a-h). The first view is 'proximally encountered', and it has the 'priority'. | |
| 60 | Objects in nature are " 'signs' (warnings, promises etc)". | |
| 61 | To get from r-t-h to p-a-h we "stand back". | |
| 62 | We 'stand back' when something doesn't work as we expect. | |
| 63 | Sartre's 'nothingness': we have a primary knowledge of non-existence too, when something is destroyed, has disappeared, is missing or is lacking. | |
| 65 | We can conceive of some objects "having no r-t-h character" (but still having p-a-h properties) - but they can't make up the whole world. | |
| 67 | Heidegger's 'special vocabulary' [RT: all those hyphenated compounds] is a pain, but he was trying to avoid "unwelcome connotations" of using 'human', 'life' and 'consciousness'. It also helps avoid implying that sentient animals don't count. | |
| 68 | That some existentialists say that 'existence' only applies to human existence, leads to a very stilted vocabulary. | |
| 69 | Existentialism fights "the pervasive tendency" to label and pigeonhole people. Ortega: "... the stone is given its existence ... man has to make his own existence at every single moment." | |
| 70 | "Man is always not-yet-being, what-he-is-not or only possibility. His being is that of care, value or lack. It has the form of a narrative or a vital programme." (Also, man's Being is ahead-of-itself.) | |
| 71 | "... our intercourse with the world is not to be construed as causal." [RT: even if the neurophysiologists say otherwise!] | |
| 72 | "My current behaviour is not to be explained, nor even identified, except by reference to this orientation towards the future." [RT: Same comment as above, and Cooper asks, isn't it the same for an acorn?] | |
| 73 | "My situation does not comprise just any old facts about myself, but those which take on significance for me precisely in the light of what I am 'on my way towards'." | |
| It's difficult for existentialism to shake off "the conviction that a given stage in an entity's career can only [RT's italics] be explained as the outcome of previous stages". [RT: there may be a danger if we relegate causality too far, as if it were non-pukka r-t-h Existentialism.] | ||
| 74 | Ortega: we have "more the kind of being possessed by narratives than by substances". | |
| 75 | Heidegger: "our being is one of care" - meaning concern, not nursing or anxiety. Things 'matter', or are 'an issue'. For things regarded as p-a-h, being is a matter of indifference - they just 'are'. | |
| 76 | "We must first exist as 'unsaturated', future-oriented loci of 'care' and 'value'. [RT: All the same, we can't expect to thrive if we try to 'kick against the pricks' of the p-a-h view, which may act as a constraint on us.] | |
| 5 - Dualisms | 79-93 | Four dualisms are considered: Subject v Object, Mind v Body, Reason v Passion and Fact v Value |
| Dissolved | 79 | He is not saying that there are no distinctions here, just that each pair does not consist of two independent realms. existentialism in any case has its own distinctions, e.g. 'r-t-h' v 'p-a-h', but these again are of 'views'. |
| 80 | Subject v Object: the existentialist certainly doesn't like to view 'us as subjects' as spectators of 'things in the world' - which might rebound on 'us as objects'. [RT: I don't think Cooper means Subject and Object in the grammatical sense, i.e. active and passive elements in a transitive verb.] | |
| 83 | Mind v Body: Marcel said "I am my body", while M-P said "We must exercise our 'operative intentionality' " before we sit back and indulge in theoretical judgment and reflective knowledge. Our primary mode of knowledge is 'knowledge in the hands'. | |
| 84 | M-P also contrasted my 'lived body' against my 'objective body'. "I am an embodied 'vehicle' of intentions, understanding and perception." It's not two bodies, it's two views. | |
| 86-7 | Reason v Passion: these feed off each other. They are not "horses pulling us in opposite directions", or separate parts of the soul. | |
| 88 | "... an emotion serves to reveal aspects of a situation for us." | |
| "The 'subjective' label is an unhappy one." [RT: Presumably it leads us to over-state the contrasts with 'objective'.] | ||
| 90 | Fact v Value: "... Our 'proximal' experience is a world of 'r-t-h', replete with significance, utility and worth." | |
| Heidegger: "In interpreting, we do not throw 'signification' over some naked thing which is 'p-a-h', we do not stick a value on it". | ||
| 91 | "...It is only through the goals and values that inform our activities that anything can get 'disclosed' or 'lit up' in the first place." | |
| "We are constantly in the business of making good the 'lacks', by reference to which the world, encountered as a 'world of tasks', is articulated. Value is what belongs to that which makes good our 'lacks'. | ||
| 91-2 | Facts aren't really so different. We 'choose the world' as well as our values. [RT: presumably, we choose the data that's relevant to our activities.] | |
| 92 | What is not so good as a view of values is: the values that we 'impose' on each other. | |
| 6 - Self | 95 | Heidegger: Our everyday existence "drifts along towards an alienation", due to our being estranged from our "ownmost potentiality-for-Being". |
| and Others
| 96 | But existentialism doesn't like Polonius's idea "to thine own self be true", as it might imply there is some 'false' self or selves in competition. It's the same with the Californian hippy "get into yourself". [RT: I'm not sure I see a big difference between 'false self' and alienation, other than from not wanting to slip into mind-body dualism.] |
| Nietzsche: it's something one should strive to become. However the so-called " 'sincere' person believes he has a true, fixed essence". | ||
| 97 | "For Sartre too, self-reflection is conducted not by switching on an inner searchlight, but by observing how one is reflected in that 'world of tasks' which is the 'image of myself'." | |
| 98-9 | How do ideas of 'self' fit the Jekyll/Hyde scenario? It's 'numerically identical' versus 'qualitatively identical'. | |
| 100 | We may feel (as M-P says) that "it is essential to me not only to have a body, but to have this body". | |
| 101-2 | "The 'problem of other minds' is a pseudo one." | |
| 102 | M-P: "If my consciousness has a body, who should not other bodies not have consciousness?" | |
| 103 | Sartre sees other people quite differently from the way he sees objects - they are a "centre of purposes and perspectives which rival my own". | |
| I see a suit, which has 'an essential ... reference to possible wearers'; or a boat, which 'indicates' those who might voyage in it." | ||
| 104 | Following Heidegger, "in 'concern', I encounter things in the light of my purposes ... in 'solicitude', I encounter entities as ones with purposes of their own". | |
| 105 | Shame, modesty, pride, shyness, loss of face and dignity require a person's sense of himself in distinction from others. Sartre talks about the 'Look', e.g. when one is caught looking through a keyhole. "In the first instance, the 'Other' is nothing but the 'Look'. | |
| 7 - Modes of | 109 | The tension within human life: "On the one hand, that a person is a free, meaning-giving 'existing individual'; and, on the other, that a person is necessarily a participant in a public, social world, where he is the object of the 'Look', judgments and categorizations of others." |
| Self-estr-angement | 'Self-estranged' or 'inauthentic' life describes "someone who resolves his 'ambiguity' by identifying too much, and too easily, with the 'communal character' of his existence". | |
| 110 | (An anti-existentialist view (Erving Goffman) says that "A person is nothing but the intersection of a number of 'social roles'".) | |
| 110-11 | An inauthentic individual's life is "immersed in the anonymous 'public', 'crowd', 'herd' or 'mass'", or "under the dictatorship of the 'they'". | |
| 111 | The main targets of existentialist critics are "the mass media, the levelling ideologies of socialism and consumerism"; but this means they may get portrayed as 'elitists'. However many non-existentialist critics take a similar line and could also be labelled as elitists. | |
| In ancient Greece, "the value of the outstanding individual was espoused" (e.g. Homeric heroes and gods). | ||
| 113 | "Life must, for the most part, be (lived) in the 'they'." ... "There is a premium, therefore, on 'averageness' in which the 'they' keeps watch over everything exceptional, and on 'levelling down of individual possibilities'. | |
| 114 | "The 'they' often encourages a busy 'versatility', 'curiosity' and 'exaggerated self-dissection'." | |
| 115 | Ways in which 'they' can put down our beliefs, values and interpretations include treating them as mental illness (like in the old USSR), or saying "he would say that, wouldn't he?" | |
| 116 | Beliefs and values shouldn't be thought of as 'self-expression'. | |
| 117 | Sartre points out the danger for someone who "conceives his own consciousness on the model of the 'Other'". | |
| 'Bad faith' can include the above, but also 1) "paying no heed at all to how one is for others"; 2) "identifying with one's 'objective' body as something to which things simply happen"; 3) identifying too closely with how one has been, with one's past ...". | ||
| 119 | "Human existence, in short, is 'ambiguous', many-sided. Bad faith operates when a person, instead of f acing up to his inevitable 'ambiguity', resolves it by ignoring or denying some of the poles between which his existence stands." | |
| 120 | "... people in any society whatsoever are eager to classify and pigeonhole one another." | |
| 122 | Is 'authenticity' "something to be won in struggling out from a natural condition of 'inauthenticity'"? Or is it "the original condition, later lost through bad faith"? | |
| 123 | "Like Kirkegaard's 'despair', existentialist self-estrangement is all the more entrenched to the degree that is unaware of itself as such." | |
| 8 - Angst, | 128 | Trying to be authentic can lead to Angst, so we may not try very hard. |
| Death and Absurdity | Angst can be 1) "the 'disturbing' and 'uncanny' mood which summons a person to reflect on his individual existence and its 'possibilities'; 2) "resolute, sober and joyful Angst - or 3) "committing shocking actes gratuits". | |
| 129-30 | Angst isn't about particular objects, just of "groundlessness, the absence of anything holding one in place and anchoring one's actions". | |
| 131 | The 'they' 'sinks away' in Angst. Angst 'individualizes'. | |
| 132 | Iris Murdoch countered this view of Angst, saying that it comes when we realize that we don't have control of ourselves, whereas existentialism says we ought to have. | |
| 133 | "It is in relation to one's death that Angst is peculiarly liable to arise." | |
| 134 | The existentialist isn't so concerned with the event of physical death, but with his "life in relation to the prospect of that event". | |
| 135-6 | When we are dead, we can't do anything more about our life - other people's judgment can take over. | |
| 136 | We are individualized through the prospect of our death. | |
| 138 | "The notion of an individualized person - a self, if you wish - depends on the integrity and wholeness which only a person's self-concern can confer." | |
| 139 | The existentialist feels that life is absurd "vividly and continuously" (Nagel). | |
| 142 | After examining several unsatisfactory views of absurdity, Cooper plumps for the realization that the choice of our "stance towards things, others and ourselves (i.e. our chosen 'world') is made without basis of support and dictating its own causes to itself". In other words, we have no 'justificatory' ground for any such fundamental choice. | |
| 144 | Kirkegaard also said there is no non-circular justification, e.g. for choosing the 'ethical' rather than the 'aesthetic' way of life. | |
| 9 - Exist- ential | 147 | Sartre: "It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we are". [RT: presumably he means as free, existentialist beings. But even then, disability or other external circumstances must make some difference, possibly an overwhelming one.] |
| Freedom | 149 | "The sense of being a fully responsible agent may be threatened from two directions: By the thought, first, of being in the grip of inexorable causal processes. And by the thought, second, that one's decisions - to marry, join the Resistance or whatever - are all subject to rational decision procedures with deterministic outcomes." |
| 150 | "...The existentialist's near silence (on whether freedom is compatible with Neurophysiology) owes to the belief that Neurophysiology, whether it delivers the goods or not, is tangential to issues of freedom and responsibility." | |
| 151 | "We are only at the early stages of a seemingly interminable dialectic" (of free will versus determinism). | |
| 152-3 | Sartre thought in terms of an 'initial choice' but with the ability to 'reverse steam' and 'abruptly invert' choices. | |
| 154 | Merleau-Ponty criticized this; we can't choose without acquiring understanding. We are 'thrown'; "'thrownness' is immersion at the outset in a world already interpreted by one's fellows, a world a person must first be 'in' before he can make an 'issue' of it and himself". | |
| 155 | M-P: "We must not say that I continually choose myself, on the excuse that I might continually refuse what I am. 'Not to refuse' is not the same as to choose." | |
| M-P: "While 'I can no longer pretend ... to choose myself continually from ... nothing at all, I do possess the power of 'general refusal' and the power to 'begin something else'. | ||
| 156 | Maybe there wasn't any difference between choosing and not refusing (or resisting) in the Nazi occupation of France in the early 1940s. | |
| 157 | "My situation is not an environment with which I interact. It is, in Ortega's metaphor, something I carry like the vagabond his bundle." | |
| 158 | "In Neurath's famous analogy, the ship's planks may well get replaced, but not all at once, for the carpenter must have some to stand upon while he removes others." So, instead of 'reverse steam', it should be 'slow ahead'. | |
| "To be free is to have that kind (i.e. constantly in the business of resolving issues through the projects in which one engages) of life, viewed from the perspective of the responsibility which such a life has for itself." | ||
| 160 | Two opposing views are that of the 'collective' (e.g. Goffman, Marx) and 'tribalism' (e.g. Whorf). Also Debray, who said "Man is not a personal possession, but a patrimonial construct". It's arguable whether it's possible to survive in life "unencumbered by social traditions". | |
| 162 | "The existentialist rejects the image of language as a straitjacket on the thinking that goes on inside it." | |
| "... while there is no retreat from language, a person can retreat with and through it." | ||
| 164 | "...The existentialist will of course concede that there are societies, including those described by anthropologists as 'tribal', where the conditions for exercising the powers to 'refuse' and 'begin something else' are hardly favourable." After all, even our own 'open' societies have evolved from 'tribal' ones. This approach is preferable to emphasizing 'roots' and 'cultural identity'. | |
| 10 - Exist- entialism | 168 | Mary Warnock: In existentialism, "our picture of ourselves has become too grand ... We have lost the vision of a reality separate from ourselves ... 'Unselfing' is a precondition of a genuinely moral outlook". Cooper thinks this is unfair, as existentialism is not as egocentric as Warnock is implying. |
| and Ethics | 169 | Sartre's example of choice, for a young wartime Frenchman, between joining the Resistance and looking after his mother: this has two different kinds of morality, with no fixed right answer. We have to 'invent' a resolution. |
| 170 | "Because they are often both in conflict and inconsistent, moral rules are, for Sartre, of limited use for guidance." | |
| Sartre and de Beauvoir "warn against 'principles that are too abstract, and against the mechanical application of principles to situations that are only superficially similar". | ||
| 171 | 'To live authentically' is an existentialist 'super-directive'. | |
| 172 | Sartre's 'Commitment' is to live an authentic life. 'Availability' (Marcel's alternative key quality) is an authentic stance of openness and a refusal to be tied down to specific actions. | |
| 173 | Sartre's 'commitment' might be to a great 'project'. | |
| 174 | Even if committed, we should not remain aloof. | |
| "The 'invisible' person draws concentric circles round himself, allowing only those experiences which fall within the nearest zones to influence his concepts and values." | ||
| 175 | "The 'available' person will break up 'the lines of this ... egocentric topography', and will be ready to accept, for example, that 'from a stranger, casually met, may come a call too strong to be resisted' ..." | |
| But ... "Whatever we are holding ourselves available for, it cannot be the dawning of a secure certainty". | ||
| 176 | But Marcel thought that there should still be an absolute commitment - to persons and to God. | |
| 177 | Sartre also said that "a person's freedom depends entirely on the freedom of others" - the concept of 'reciprocal freedom'. | |
| "The less we recognize the freedom of the other, the less we experience our own." (Sartre) | ||
| 179 | Neither the existentialist nor Aristotle regard ethics as a matter of "what's in it for me", or one depending on some meaning of the word 'ought'. For Aristotle, it's part of 'flourishing as a human being'. For the existentialist, it's part of being 'authentic'. | |
| Sartre: "My illness does not restrict my freedom, since I am 'without excuses' for what I make, or fail to make, of it". | ||
| 181 | "If others are 'objects' for me, I am an 'object' for them" - unless we go for 'inter-subjective solidarity'. | |
| 182 | The concept of 'reciprocal freedom', however, seems 'depressingly abstract'. | |
| 182-3 | Critics say "Sartrean authenticity is rendered 'nugatory' by the impossibility, in our kind of society at least, of transparent communication. All communication, we hear, is 'systematically distorted', or replete with hidden rhetorical devices which work on hearers even despite the speaker's intention. Or a code intervenes, so that the speaker is never able to get across his message 'neat' ". [RT: I agree totally, but what can we do about it?] | |
| 183 | Heidegger proposed two types of 'solicitude'; 1) 'leaping in' but maybe making the other 'dependent' on you; and 2) 'leaping forth', not disburdening the other but calling him to face up to his concerns. These correspond to whether we treat the 'other' as 'ready-to-hand' or 'present-at-hand'. | |
| 184 | We need an absence of vanity, a complete indifference to 'what people say', and also eliminate "apathy and a desire to be liked" (Iris Murdoch). This is a 'movement of escape'. | |
| 185 | We need others as good sounding boards - which they won't be if we 'cajole' or 'browbeat' them. | |
| 186 | There is a tension between concern for 'those close to me' and 'other people wherever and whenever'. We ought to get the local version right first. Rorty's 'ironist' is not so different to this. | |
| 187 | Rorty: "In the ideal liberal society, the intellectuals would still be ironists, although the non-intellectuals would not". | |
| We can't "exercise powers of 're-description', withdrawal and 'refusal' ... or pursue authenticity ... except against a background of relative stability in the thought and vocabulary of our society". | ||
| 188 | The existentialist, like Aristotle, "is not shy to proclaim that human beings realize that authentic existence in a transcendence of the commonplace, is 'philosophizing'. It is no objection to either of them that, according to the egalitarian sentiment of our age, this is snobbery". |
I suspect I might qualify as a 'pinko' existentialist, although I am not 100% sure a) that I know what it takes to be a 'full member', nor b) that I really know about myself and my various inauthenticities and 'bad faith'. I might be nearer Rorty than Sartre, and might still slide into pragmatism. I've also a lot of time for Karl Popper - if we have to balance the 'objective world' of science, reason and positivism with the 'lived world' of existentialism, then perhaps we can regard science as something that can tell us which of our 'stories' are inconsistent with what can be observed, or are just nonsense.
I did enjoy the book; despite it's fairly heavy style it does seem to tackle a good range of issues and potential objections.
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 5th January 2012
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .