These notes indicate the topics covered in the first couple of weeks, and are intended to provide food for thought for the rest of the course.

Philosophy and literature shouldn’t mix?

Is existentialism a philosophy?

A way of thinking about the world and life, or attitude to the world/god/life, better called a philosophical tendency or trend?:

General features (existentialists without knowing it) /terminology

The course novels all have central existential themes: also note thriller/suspense aspects - whodunnits and whydunnits and whynotdoits

1. Existence is primary - that is, our knowledge or awareness of our own individual existence is the starting point. Everything flows from it: what we say about the world, about each other, relationships, emotions

A term often used with it is therefore ‘Being’; the nature of existence of our self

Cf with animals: difference is? - self-consciousness? language? will? ability to contemplate one's own death? moral choice? 'theory of mind'?

2. Existence is primary, essence is secondary. By essence is meant what we think of as the precise nature of things, of reality. Some philosophies/most? aim to describe the true nature of the world as some kind of objective entity / regardless of individual perception/ Dang an Sich. Some existentialists might say this is possible, others not. What they would probably agree on is the idea that such factual knowledge of the world is only part of the story. What is important is knowledge of ourselves.

3. Again, this is not knowledge in the sense of factual objectivity. It cannot be objective in this manner because the knowledge sought is really the knowledge that comes about through experience. Proper knowledge is experiencing life, is partaking of existence. Therefore just thinking about things, trying to reason them out, is not sufficient. Perhaps why E is not a philosophy in the traditional sense, because the emphasis is on self experience.

4. Before everything else, therefore, is your own existence, your own self, and this is very much what e is concerned with, this self. The starting point is that you find yourself in the world. You have certain fears and hopes, you have beliefs, you have a certain will. You can only understand these things by experiencing them. For instance love is something that can only be known through self experience, or the feeling of failure. These are the kinds of areas often left out by other philosophies.

5. Although I’ve stressed the individual nature of e and how the focus is on the self, there are certain ideas about the world that permeate existentialism. The most crucial is the question of the existence of God. Some e.s have believed in a god, others not. For those who do believe in God, this is understood to be a leap of faith, since god’s existence can not be proved, nor can god’s existence be reasoned. Much of existentialism has been concerned with how to live in a world where god no longer exists. In Crime and Punishment, someone says that ‘if God is dead, then everything is permitted’. If there is no god, then there appears to be nothing in the world, or nothing but our individual selves, so what values are we to live by? If there is no god, is life meaningless? Is life absurd? Is it a cruel joke? Does it mean we have complete freedom to do whatever we like? However, even the existential atheists seem to have a deeply religious sensibility.

6. Another crucial feature of the e.t worldview is the fact that we are all mortal, our lives have a limited span. The notion of death is a clear indicator of how existentialism works: we all know that we will die, it’s a fact of life which might seem an objective fact, yet it really means very little without the personal response to it.

Historical overview: There are 3 main figures/thinkers: Soren Kierkegaard; Martin Heidegger; Jean-Paul Sartre. Kierkegaard and Heidegger are discussed below. To read about Sartre (along with some discussion of Husserl and phenomenology), click here.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), Danish philosopher, ‘father of e’. Little regarded in his own time, writing in Danish (only 1.3 million audience possible!) was a barrier. Mainly taken up in the twentieth-century. Much of his work was a commentary on or critique of Christianity. Of his most important ideas for e.m are ‘a non-substantialist view of the self (or "spirit") as a "relation which relates itself to itself", the centrality of choice and commitment in the establishment of selfhood, and the communicative role of indirect communication’ (The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, hereafter WPP). Most important for us here is the idea of choice and commitment. What should we choose to do with our lives? And how can we commit ourselves to actions, since any choice must surely be a leap in the dark. Or to choose one course of action over another is to close off other possibilities. Kierkegaard also introduced the idea of authenticity, of an authentic self, for which we alone are responsible. There is an idea that we will always at some time have to face our true self, or that we will be unmasked.

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself; I have seen men who played hide and seek so long that at last madness through them obtruded disgustingly upon others their secret thoughts which hitherto they had proudly concealed. Or can you think of anything more frightful than that it might end with your nature being resolved into a multiplicity, that you really might become many, become, like those unhappy demoniacs, a legion, and you thus would have lost the inmost and holiest thing of all in a man, the unifying power of personality? Truly, you should not jest with that which is not only serious but dreadful. (Kierkegaard, Either/Or)

The other two main thinkers, Heidegger and Sartre, have been massively influenced by Kierkegaard, to the extent that one commentator claims they ‘have cunningly drained off much of Kierkegaard’s theory, for the greater part without acknowledgment’ (Roger Poole, Introduction to A Kierkegaard Reader, p.14).

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

There’s a reluctance to discuss Heidegger because of his associations with German Nazism and his refusal after WW2 to publicly denounce Nazism. But his influence throughout the C20 has been very great. Truth for H was not about propositional statements, it was to do with ‘disclosure, unconcealement’. H’s main book is Being and Time (1927), he elaborates upon the idea of being, as a kind of fundamental category, and upon what can be called ‘the possibility of human being’ - Dasein. Translates as ‘being-there’. Best way to think of self is as a kind of ‘being-there’, we are never simply being, separate from the world.

There is a sense in which we should always be astonished by being (mystical? religious?) 'the sky is blue'.

And then, what is it that is being, what is it that constitutes existence? / ‘Why is there? Why is there not nothing?’ (Steiner, Heidegger), p.41. Part of this, or allied to it, is the notion that existence precedes essence (Steiner, 80) - ‘Man achieves his essence, his humanity, in the process of ‘existence’, and he does so by questioning Being, by making his own particular ‘extantness’ questionable.’ Man unique because a being that questions Being [?]. But also precisely this livedness, this everydayness we live through, that other philosophies have ignored.

One of H’s key ideas is the need to be true to the self (authentic) by resisting all the pressures to be someone or something else - as if the public world, the world to which we have to present a face, always tends to make us something we are not, it absorbs us. This authenticity can only be achieved by confronting one’s own death. This raises the issue of time: to view future possible selves is always to be projecting our current selves forward.

Another key idea, taking us back to the issue of Dasein is that there is always a sense in which we are ‘thrown’, we are always in the midst of existence, which is why ‘being-there’ is an apt phrase, although the phrase ‘being-in-the-world’ is perhaps a more common idea. It is that to exist means to be thrown into the world.

It is not the case that man ‘is’ and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the ‘world’ - a world with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is never ‘proximally’ an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a ‘relationship’ towards the world. Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some other entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can ‘meet up with’ Dasein only insofar as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

But nor is this idea of thrownness, of being-in-the-world, the end of it. If H had stopped here it would have led to an idea where an individual thinks that the world is a projection of their own mind, a philosophy known as solipsism. For H ‘being’ is always ‘being-in-the-world-with-others’. Now whilst this solves the problem of solipsism, and might appear to provide the basis for a social, communal philosophy, in H’s hands it is a rather negative feature, and leads to a whole host of ideas that have become dominant in C20 Western society, although some of these ideas were being worked out in different areas in C19 (for example, Marx’s notion of alienation). This notion that being is always ‘being-in-the-world-with-others’ means that ‘we come not to be ourselves’ (Steiner, 89).

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The "they", which supplies the answer to the question of the "who" of everyday Dasein, is the "nobody" to whom every Dasein has already surrendered himself in being-among-one-another.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

In doing this, in being part of the mass, we become alienated from our authentic self, we become average, we do not stand out as unique individuals, there is nothing of our self but only a public self which is not authentic. It also tends to take away responsibility for the self, since actions and judgements all emerge from the general they of the public. Some have seen this as prophetic of totalitarianism, since all actions are validated by a ‘they’ that means an individual conscience has no place.

But there is not a choice: being-in-the-world-with-others must mean living inauthentically; being inauthentic is part of existence. Conversely, existence also means striving for authentic being. So there is a problem at the heart of Dasein, in that being is always inauthentic as it strives for authenticity. H gets out of this by the notion of ‘care’. Care for the idea of Being, for the mystery of existence. It is care for the desire to be free - for to be free is to be authentic.

Another dimension to all this, which I am not following through, is the role of death. Only by understanding the idea of ‘not being there’ can there be authentic existence. So death creates meaning and significance. Therefore being, which as I’ve already pointed out is always being-in-the-world with others, is also always a being-towards-death. And of course each person’s own death is uniquely and exclusively theirs. [Handout]

But death is also a state of affairs which has not yet happened, it is potential within existence which means that Dasein is always not complete, is unfulfilled. The confrontation with your own finitude, with a sense of your non-being, amounts to a freedom. [why?] The phrase from H is ‘freedom towards death’. [Morbid?] This sense of being as incomplete is one of the crucial ideas.

Current state of 'extistentialism': A social movement that’s had its day; dispersed into other kinds of discussion, for example, there is still a thriving industry in ‘the self’, as well as the notion of ‘the other’, which share many of the same roots as the existentialism I’ve been speaking about here. But there are still practitioners of existential psychology, and Buber has been put forward as a possible starting-point for social work.

Criticisms:

subjective / individualistic / egotistical - ‘it often rests on a highly specialised personal experience and, as such, is incommunicable’ (Pears)

vague / mystical

not systematic (hence not a philosophy)