Ernest Sparks

ieyeasu,

To the extent that existentialism (existenzphilosophie) is a real type of philosophy, and not just an ongoing popular rave, it needs to seek a foundation, a source. As such, it falls under the general category of 'phenomenology', the general notion that experience is real and basic, the starting point for all ideas. The most famous cliche from the existentialist pioneers is "existence precedes essence". Another way to say this: being-there must come ahead of being-something or being-someone. Yes, some existentialists kicked over goals established by other authorities (e.g. the churches, society), but that was in order to focus on what really mattered, the beingness implicit in being conscious.

A christian existentialist, for example, might say that God comes to you and confronts you as a consciousness, rather than waiting for you to just figure out that God might exist too.

The atheist existentialist sees no such thing. The discovery of the world beyond self is a lifelong, ongoing process.

The 'absurdity' thing is basically a gimmick to attract attention to the thoroughly internal nature of learning and knowing and the accompanying pain: one reacts to other things and (horror!) people, and thus one learns something, thus one gets to know something.

Consider Jean-Paul Sartre's story "Nausea". Antoine Roquentin discovers the importance of his own existence in an alarming form of mental breakdown. The climax of this occurs in a park and the gnarled, senseless roots of an old tree.

Quote:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of existence….. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was , clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder-naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.

also,

Quote:

You must love people. Men are admirable. I want to vomit-and suddenly, there it is: the Nausea. A fine climax: it shakes me from top to bottom. I saw it coming more than an hour ago, only I didn't want to admit it….. So this is the Nausea: this blinding evidence? I have scratched my head over it I've written about it. Now I know: I exist-the world exists-and I know that the world exists. That's all. It makes no difference to me. It's strange that everything makes so little difference to me: it frightens me.

Well, it does matter. This is just the start for JPS: his earliest existentialist work, I reckon.

Ernie

ieyeasu

Thanks Ernie!

So, then, I guess my "Sarte the Wimp" was erroneous. I'll look into readinga bit.

Ernest Sparks

ieyeasu,

Let me make my bottom-line points. Because I choose to propose a few interesting parallels between two sets of conceptions (those of AR and of JPS), that doesn't mean I am establishing an equation. They are really quite different in character, one from another. But the parallels get so interesting: both are literary writers prior to formulating their separate philosophies, and their literary works illustrate their concepts in formation. Isn't that interesting? As for existentialists collectively, they were only slightly and temporarily connected to one another. Martin Heidegger is a case different from JPS, coming strictly from the academic philosophy world. So did they all start almost immediately to go their separate ways after the first blush of world fame.

ernie

Eikonoklast

I'd say it is not in any way connected to any socialist movement. What about Zen Buddhism? I'd say that it's certainly existentialist.

Tyler A DiPietro

Sort of. Zen Buddhist however differ from existentialists in that they believe that there an objective goal in life. That is attaining "spiritual enlightenment" or nirvana. I may be mistaken, but doesn't existentialism claim that life is essentially pointless?

phaedrus

Some remarks from britannica which sort of encapsulate the modern movement

Human existence is, for all the forms of Existentialism, the projection of the future on the basis of the possibilities that constitute it. For some Existentialists (the Germans Heidegger and Jaspers, for example), the existential possibilities, inasmuch as they are rooted in the past, merely lead every project for the future back to the past, so that only what has already been chosen can be chosen (Nietzsche's amor fati). For others (such as Sartre), the possibilities that are offered to existential choice are infinite and equivalent, such that the choice between them is indifferent; and for still others (Abbagnano and Merleau-Ponty), the existential possibilities are limited by the situation, but they neither determine the choice nor render it indifferent. The issue is one of individuating, in every concrete situation and by means of a specific inquiry, the real possibilities offered to man. For all the Existentialists, however, the choice among possibilities—i.e., the projection of existence—implies risks, renunciation, and limitation. Among the risks, the most serious is man's descent into inauthenticity or into alienation, his degradation from a person into a thing. Against this risk, for the theological forms of Existentialism (as in Gabriel Marcel, a Socratic dramatist; Karl Barth , a Swiss Neo-orthodoxist; Rudolf Bultmann, a biblical interpreter), there is the guarantee of the transcendent help from God, which in its turn is guaranteed by faith .

Existentialism, consequently, by insisting on the individuality and nonrepeatability of existence (following Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), is sometimes led to regard one's coexistence with other people (held to be, however, an ineluctable fact of the human situation) as a condemnation or alienation of man. Marcel has said that all that exists in society beyond the individual is “expressible by a minus sign,” and Sartre has affirmed in his major work L'Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956) that “the Other is the hidden death of my possibilities.” For the other forms of Existentialism, however, a coexistence that is not anonymous (as that of a mob) but is grounded on personal communication conditions man's authentic existence.

Existentialism has had ramifications in various areas of contemporary culture. In literature, Franz Kafka , author of haunting novels, walking in Kierkegaard's footsteps, described human existence as the quest for a stable, secure, and radiant reality that continually eludes it (Das Schloss [1926; The Castle, 1930]); or he described it as threatened by a guilty verdict about which it knows neither the reason nor the circumstances but against which it can do nothing—a verdict that ends with death (Der Prozess [1925; The Trial, 1937]).

The theses of contemporary Existentialism were then diffused and popularized by the novels and plays of Sartre, by the writings of the French novelists and dramatists Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus . In L'Homme révolté (1951; The Rebel, 1953), Camus described the “metaphysical rebellion” as “the movement by which a man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation.” In art, the analogues of Existentialism may be considered to be Surrealism, Expressionism , and in general those schools that view the work of art not as the reflection of a reality external to man but as the free immediate expression of human reality.

Existentialism made its entrance into psychopathology through Karl Jaspers' Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913; General Psychopathology, 1965), which was inspired by the need to understand the world in which the mental patient lives, by means of a sympathetic participation in his experience. Later, Ludwig Binswanger , a Swiss psychiatrist of the Daseinsanalyse school, in one of his celebrated works, Über Ideenflucht (1933; “On the Flight of Ideas”), inspired by Heidegger's thought, viewed the origin of mental illness as a failure in the existential possibilities that constitute human existence (Dasein). From Jaspers and Binswanger, the Existentialist current became diffused and variously stated in contemporary psychiatry.

In theology, Barth's Römerbrief (1919; The Epistle to the Romans, 1933) started the “Kierkegaard revival,” the emblem of which was expressed by Barth himself; it is “the relation of this God with this man; the relation of this man with this God—this is the only theme of the Bible and of philosophy.” Within the bounds of this current, on the one hand, there was an insistence upon the absolute transcendence of God with respect to man, who could place himself in relationship with God only by denying himself and by abandoning himself to a gratuitously granted faith. On the other hand, there was the requirement to demythologize the religious content of faith, particularly of the Christian faith, in order to allow the message of the eschatological event (of salvation) to emerge from among the existential possibilities of man.

Ernest Sparks

I think the philosophical taxonomy goes (in descending order of specialization):

subjectivism -> phenomenology -> existentialism