nietzsche

The first obvious question: where do you stand on this philosophical 'movement'/concept?

Does it just degenerate into nihilism or absurdism?

Are there anyways to assign ethics and ideals to an existentialist way of life?

Just looking for other's ideas.

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Man is condemned to be free

Zdragva

errrrr... i have a lot to say on the matters of mind soul science and philosphy, but... what the hell IS existentialism?

asaris

Existentialism is, very briefly, the doctrine that existence preceeds essence. In point of fact, there's only one philosopher, to the best of my knowledge, that described themselves as an existentialist -- J.P. Sartre. He was heavily influenced by Heidegger and Hegel and believed, in a nutshell, that we are what our choices make us. Usually Jaspers and Camus are also described as existentialists, and Derrida certainly has many of the same influences. Kierkegaard is often described as the 'godfather' of existentialism, because of his heavy emphasis on human choice and his analyses of despair and anxiety.

Personally, I find myself in agreement with quite a few of the existentialists' points; this, however, is probably due more to the fact that the people I agree with the most -- Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard -- were all important influences on the movement. As far as N's questions go, you're going to have to be a bit more specific. Maybe you could start by answer the question "Why do you think it's difficult for an existentialist to have ethics/ideals?"

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

roachboy

for sartre in particular, existentialism **was** an ethics.
how are "ideals" related to an ethics, if you take anything about existentialism seriously? you need to untangle some things before we can talk about much.....

the best solution to the problem of whether sartre's style of ethics is practical is in camus's novel "the fall" which i take to be a parody.

as for the lineage in asaris's post.... this comes from walter kaufman and is not a framework that really lets you say much of anything of interest about kierkegaard, nietzsche or heidegger for that matter. it leads you to reductive readings of the type that seems to have been kaufman's specialty.

as for the question: existentialism, how about it? (which started the thread).... i dont really know how to respond.
i am also unclear about the level you are wanting to play at--so could you be more clear please about what you really want to talk about?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

asaris

Far be it from me to say anything nice of Walter Kaufman. His translations aren't much good either. But as far as most people who haven't really studied the topic are concerned, the genealogy I gave is what they'll know. Really, it goes something like this: And Hegel begat Kierkegaard and Husserl. And Husserl and Kierkegaard begat Heidegger, and Hegel and Heidegger begat Sartre. And behold! it was good. Of course, that's oversimplified (not to mention a bit tongue in cheek.) But it's clear that Sartre owed as much to Hegel as he does to Heidegger, and he owes a lot to Heidegger.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

roachboy

asairs:
agreed, yes....
i still wish i knew what this thread was actually about, though, what is actually being asked....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Outpour

How about we redefine existentialism?


Existentialism is characterized by an emphasis on individualism, individual freedom, and subjectivity.
The existentialist believes that "existence precedes essence." What does this mean? That there is no pre-defined essence to humanity except that which we make for ourselves. Since Sartrean existentialism does not admit the existence of a god or of any other determining principle, human beings are free to do as they choose.

Since there is no predefined human nature or ultimate valuation beyond that which humans project onto the world, people may only be judged or defined by their actions and choices, and human choices are the ultimate valuation.

Simply put there is no inherent purpose to existence. You ask if it is possible to assign ethics or meaning to this way of life? The answer is yes. Of course, if it was not possible the _true_ existentialist would not last very long in light of the hopelessness nature of the philosophy.

A practical interpretation and method for living the existentialist life is to realize there is no meaning to be found in life. Meaning is what we perceive as the value an object holds. But where did this meaning originate? Somewhere, someone had to apply this value to said object. Hence someone had to create it, therefore meaning is tangible and subject to interpretation, if this is true, meaning does not exist.

Meaning is something to create, not something to be found. This is described as "Being in itself." And this is the beginnings of nihilism.

Hope I helped.

roachboy

thanks outpour....at least now i can get a toehold here.

i do not see why there need be any connection between the idea--which is quite marxian--that meaning is created through praxis and nihilism. i really dont. the outcomes can be linked only if you adopt a metaphysics-based viewpoint, which would require some kind of transcendent principle up front in order to make an ethics possible--which seems to me goofy.

it seems simple: such values as are imputed to objects in the world are social in nature and origin--the mechanisms that reify these are multiple--for marx it is the combo platter of money and commodities that do it in the end, and other institutions simply double/elaborate/apply to local situations this basic feature of capitalist ideology.

if you are reading sartre, it helps to position his existentialist stuff against marxism, which is a constant partner in dialogue--the relation between the two elements flip publically in 1952, with his essay "the communists and peace"--which is a kind of absurd essay in many ways, but would take things far off topic.

on this, as on most things, it is more interesting and productive to read and think about merleau-ponty than it is to dwell on sartre. particularly when it comes to navigating both the relation of philosophy to marxism (given the way each was instituted in france during the late 1940s-1950s)....there is a good book that gives a history of this general relation: francois dosse's two volume historiy of structuralism, particularly the first volume.

the american version of existentialism strips out this context and thereby reduces it to an individualist position--this is the legacy of good ole walter kaufman in particular--and this move leads to basic misunderstandings of the game.

for example, it does not follow that meaning does not exist for sartre: of course it exists, but it is made--the model is from marx's 1844 manuscripts, but in sartre you have this model stripped of the situation that marx used to elbaorate it. in this sartre ran into the problem of trying to retain the core of marx's understanding while generalizing it--one that later, more interesting thinkers who tried to work their way out from under marx to a more contemporary type of revolutionary theory also encountered--but they resolved it differently. (castoriadis in particular)...

the problem with sartre's formulations of the late 1940s (which is what we are talking about here) is that he gives you no way to situate that making/practice socially--too much hiedegger i susupect. social being is reduced to a variant of "throwness" from being and time...the social world therefore is an abstraction, and all codes for generating meaning have to collapse back onto the individual. which is absurd (this not in the sense sartre gives the term, but in a pejorative sense)

similarly it is only in principle that human beings have absolute freedom of choice--in fact, their freedom is delimited by Others around them--and it is in the idea of responsibility toward others that a practical ethics can be elaborated--it is also a problem for sartre (whence the famous "hell is other people" line) because the previous move of collapsing back onto the individual of the production of meanings renders the limits imposed by responsibility to others necessarily arbitrary.

so this responsibility is abstract, without any particular content. this is why some folk read existentialism--and the popularity of it in the postwar climate--as a kind of bourgeois response to the fact of the vichy period in that it enabled an assumption of guilt through purely formal linkages of practical actions undertaken by individuals to the Other in general, which enabled content to be given to these linkages in any number of registers, including a kind of ex-post manner.

i seem to be rattling on again.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

asaris

(Caveat: I've only read Being and Nothingness by Sartre, so if my view of his views is incomplete, that's why)

The problem with Sartre and the social world is not simply a matter of his appropriation of Heideggerian thrownness. Heidegger's divide between the ontic and the ontological allows him to comment on the ontological nature of thrownness and being-in-the-world without abstractizing the social world in its ontic being. Then, when Sartre takes up Heideggerian thrownness, the waters get deeply muddled, since Sartre explicitly rejects the distinction between the ontic and the ontological (in his essay Transcendence and the Ego, which I should read one of these days).

It's not clear at all that freedom of choice, for Sartre, is something merely in principle. Certainly that's one way to read him (and the best way, IMHO, of making sense of him), but certainly at least some of his formulations imply that we always have absolute freedom of choice.

I find it interesting the way in which different philosophers of the time period characterize our first encounter with the Other. For Heidegger, it's primarily through things; we experience our neighbor first as the owner of that ready-to-hand object. For Sartre, it's through shame. But both of these are primarily negative ways of relating to the Other. To encounter the Other through his possessions is to reduce him to just another entity ready-to-hand in the world (at best, though his analysis tends to make me think we actually encounter people primordially as present-at-hand); and in encountering her primoridally as an obstacle to our own being-for-ourselves, we deny her her own status as a being-for-itself. Levinas' analysis (you knew this was coming) seems much happier -- we encounter others primordially through enjoyment. But I seem to have digressed. I'll post more later, I think.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

ZenMasterJG

I really like existentialism, but it does have a nasty tendency to rapidly spiral into nihilism. Especially in people who think they understand it, but really don't. Ethics and existentialism is easy, but maybe a little too much so, as whats "right" from an existentialist point of view seems to be what we BELIEVE to be right. People tend not to like an ethical system thats so subjective, as it makes making objective value-judgements really hard (example: Hitler wasn't doing anything wrong, by his code of ethics.) if not impossible.
Seems to be me existentialism doesn't turn into nihilism if the existentialist is a well-natured, thoughtful person. Its the self-righteous bastard that makes existentialism into an ugly, negative thing.

In my expirance, at least.

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I love the watermelon monster!

Zdragva

so basiclly we exist and that is it? if we do good its because we call it good and if we do bad its because we call it bad? We are born and have the free will to do as we please and the good natured or thoughtful guy is only such because he conforms to humanity's pre convieved ideas of goodness? Well the way i see it is that even if what iv said is the fact there are still things we know of that are base 'good' or 'bad' even if we're conditioned into believing it. What i mean is although we give it meaning and we decide as a whole good and bad, thngs like stealing would be bad (imo) even if society as a whole called it good. I can understand totally that without us there would be no good or bad, but i cant bleieve that to be true. even if there is no god we as people 'feel' revulsion when we see acts that we have never encountered before that are bad. how can u explain that? if i was brought up in a convant and the first day i left i saw someone getting brutaly beating would i not think that evil even if all i knew was eating sleeping and praying? or maybe thats not a good analogy, what i mean is that to me at least there are some things which seem to go deeper than simply being told or deciding its good or bad, we 'feel' within oursleves that its bad even if we do not understand or know that it is. i might chave completly misunderstood existentialism, and i dont believe in predestiny or anything like that, but i do believe that we can tell base evil and good, not just be conditioned to think it so.

adysav

I don't stand anywhere on it, but thanks for asking ;P

Outpour

That is a contradiction. It is one or the other. And I am going to assume you believe ethics/morals exist without humans there to create them. Your a moral/ethical objectivist.

I don't have to explain it because logically it would not happen. If you were raised in such an environment where killing and torture was socially acceptable then you would not think it was evil.

The Aztecs are notorious for their live sacrifices and torture of humans. That is only one example of the many cultures throughout human history where human death was an integral part of life. Our view today on any human death being evil is very recent in respect to the length of our existence.

But you have never felt these feelings, no one has... ever. There is no base for such an assumption. We are products of our environment.

What you talked about in your post was one of the consequences of existentialism. And your right you don't fully understand it, though no one epects you to, hence why you are here learning.

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Nihilism is the organic, reasoned response to artificial chaos, the intentional chaos manufactured by government, religion and mass-media.