|
|
This page includes excerpts from various writers. They are not all necessarily usually thought of as 'existential' writers, but the passages all have existential features. Click on the author's name/book title.
Nikolai Berdyaev [On freedom and consciousness]
Martin Buber, Ich und Du [I and Thou]
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Soren Kierkegaard: The Midnight Hour
Mary Warnock [On freedom and consciousness]
Jack London, John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs. London: Mills and Boon, 1914.
Jack London is most famous for his 'animal' novels, such as Call of the Wild, which give a harsh, social-Darwinist view of life.
In John Barleycorn, an autobiographical piece, London rails against the evils of drink ('John Barleycorn') by detailing his own heavy-drinking life. But he has a curious argument: because drinking leads us to strip away all falsehood, in effect, leads us to unpalatable truths, we should give up drinking in order to be able to live in a world where such harsh light is banished.
London is not normally associated with existentialism, but the
book is clearly informed by Nietzsche, even if he doesn't name him directly
('a pessimistic German philosopher'), especially in the idea of 'transvaluation
of all values' (Thus Spake Zarathustra).
'There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.
The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. He may bubble with wit, or expand with good fellowship. Or he may see intellectual spectres and phantoms that are cosmic and logical and that take the forms of syllogisms. It is when in this condition that he strips away the husks of life's healthiest illusions and gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about the neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn's subtlest power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds for himself but one freedom - namely, the anticipating of the day of his death. With this man this is the hour of the white logic (of which more anon), when he knows that he may know only the laws of things - the meaning of things never. This is his danger hour. His feet are taking hold of the pathway that leads down into the grave.
All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches after immortality are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of death, and cursed with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination. They have not the instinct for death; they lack the will to die when the time to die is at hand. They trick themselves into believing they will outwit the game and win to a future, leaving the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the annihilating heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his white logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not even that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls-immortality. But he know, he know, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He is compounded of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-dust, a frail mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered at by doctors of divinity and doctors of physic, and to be flung into the serap-heap at the end.
Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the penalty the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John Barleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler, easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends- in the clear, whit light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that the sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their Mayfly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of chance. So is he. He realises that. But there is one difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: he may anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good for a man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide, quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes making the just, due payment.' (pp. 8-11)
Nikolai Berdyaev [on Freedom and Consciousness]
An ontological system recognizing the absolute primacy of being is a system of determinism. Every objectivized intellectual system is one of determinism. It derives freedom from being; it appears that freedom is determined by being, which in the last analysis means that freedom is the child of necessity. Being is thus ideal necessity, with no possibility of outburst; it is complete and absolute unity. But freedom cannot be derived from being. it is rooted in nothingness, in non-being, if we are to use ontological terminology. Freedom is baseless, neither determined by nor born of being.
Mary Warnock [on Freedom and Consciousness]
The conscious being is referred to by Sartre, borrowing from Hegel, as the being-for-itself. Unconscious beings are beings-in-themelves. They are thought of as thoroughly existing in a solid concrete way. The whole of their possibilities are, as it were, absorbed in being a chair or a tree. Whatever thoughts or attitudes we may have concerning them, beings-in-themselves go on existing undisturbed, and completely determined by their own perception of them. Consciousness is regarded as the very opposite of this. Beings-for-themselves bring nothingness into the world, both in the sense of emptiness - a failure to be anything, and in the sense of negation - a being-for-itself knows that it does not have this pure concrete solid existence which trees and chairs have, and it strives above all things to have such existence, unsuccessfully. Consciousness, therefore, consisting as it does of this emptiness waiting to be filled up, and of this knowledge that it is not any of the solid and permanent beings-in-themselves, must, if it exists at all, exist in relation to external objects, whose existence in the world does not need further proof. From this starting-point Sartre sets out to explore more, completely the relations which do in fact hold between conscious beings and the rest of the world.
In Mary Warnock, Ethics since 1900 (3rd Edition)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
The lemon is extended through all its qualities, and each of its qualities is extended through each of the others. It is the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellowness of the lemon which is our. We cat the colour of the cake, and the taste of the cake is the instrument through which its shape and its colour are revealed to what we might term the alimentary intuition. Conversely, if 1 poke my finger into the jar of jam, the sticky coldness of the jam is a revelation to my fingers of its sugary taste. The fluidity, the tepidity, the bluish colour, the undulating restlessness of the water in a pool are given at one stroke, each quality through the others; and it is this total interpenetration which we call the this.
To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude.
The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.
The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.
The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.
Hence the I of man is also twofold.
For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.
Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.
Primary words do not describe something that might exist independetly of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.
Primary words are spoken from the being.
If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it.
The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being. The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.
There is no I taken in itself, but only the I of the primary word I-Thou and the I of the primary word I-It.
When a man says I he refers to one or other of these. The I to which he refers is present when he says I. Further, when he says Thou or It, the I of one of the two primary words is present. The existence of I and the speaking of I are one and the same thing. When a primary word is spoken the speaker enters the word and takes his stand in it.
Sĝren Kierkegaard: The Midnight Hour
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.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
You should have heard him say, "My ivory." Oh yes, I heard him. "My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my -" everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of heating the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him - but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible - it was not good for one either trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land - I mean literally. You can't understand. How could you? - with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums - how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude - utter solitude without a policeman - by the way of silence - utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong - too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil: the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil - I don't know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place - and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say. But most of us are one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, smells, too, by Jove! - breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you see? your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in - your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business.
Saul Bellow, Dangling Man
He did not waste time maturing, he did not make any of the obvious mistakes. His hold was too good. That winter he was Lenin, Mozart, and Locke all rolled into one. But there was unfortunately not enough time to he all three. And so, in the spring, he passed through a crisis. It was necessary to make a choice. But, whatever it was be chose, that would be the most important. How could it be otherwise? He gave up attending meetings and practising the piano, he banished the party reports as trash, and decided to become a political philosopher. There was a general purge. Everything else went. Anti-Dühring and 'The Critique of the Gotha Prograintne sank to the rear of the bottom shelf of his bookcase and were supplanted at the top by Bentham and Locke. Now he had decided, and in dead earnestness he followed greatness. Inevitably, he fell short of his models. He would never admit that he wanted to become another Locke, but there he was, wearing himself thin with the effort of emulation, increasingly angry at himself, and unable to admit that the scale of his ambition was defeating him.
He is stubborn. Just as, in the old days, it disgraced him to confess that he was not familiar with a book or a statement that came under his jurisdiction, he now cannot acknowledge that his plan has miscarried. But then, it bothers him to be found guilty even of small errors. He does not like to forget a date or a name or the proper form of a foreign verb. He cannot be wrong, that is his difficulty. If you warn him that there is a fissure at his feet, he answers, 'no, you must be mistaken'. But when it can no longer be ignored he says, 'Do you see it?' as though he had discovered it.
Of course, we suffer from bottomless avidity. Our lives are so precious to us, we are so watchful of waste. Or perhaps a better name for it would be the Sense of personal Destiny. Yes, I think that is better than avidity. Shall my life by one-thousandth of an inch fall short of its ultimate possibility? It is a different thing to value oneself, and to prize oneself crazily. And then there are our plans, idealizations. These are dangerous, too. They can consume us like parasites, eat us, drink us, and leave us lifelessly prostrate. And yet we are always inviting the parasite, as if we were eager to he drained and eaten.
It is because we have been taught there is no limit to what we can do. Six hundred years ago, a man was what he was born to be. Satan and the Church, representing God, did battle over him. He, by reason of his choice, partially decided the outcome. But whether, after life, he went to hell or to heaven, his place among other men was given. It could not he contested. But, since, the stage has been reset and human beings only walk on it, and, under this revision, we have, instead, history to answer to. We were important enough then for our souls to be fought over. Now, each of us is responsible for his own salvation, which is in his greatness. And that, that greatness, is the rock our hearts are abraded on. Great minds, great beauties, great lovers and criminals surround us. From the great sadness and desperation of Werthers and Don Juans we went to the great ruling images of Napoleons; from these to murderers who had that right over victims because they were greater than the victims; to men who felt privileged to approach others with a whip; to schoolboys and clerks who roared like revolutionary lions, to those pimps and subway creatures, debaters in midnight cafeterias who believed they could he great in treachery and catch the throats of those they felt were sound and well in the lassos of their morbidity; to dreams of greatly beautiful shadows embracing on a flawless screen. Because of these things we hate immoderately and punish ourselves and one another immoderately. The fear of lagging pursues and maddens us. The fear lies in us like a cloud. It makes an inner climate of darkness. And occasionally there is a storm and hate and wounding rain out of us.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
That she had grown older? Would he say that, or would she see him thinking when he came back, that she had grown older? It was true. Since her illness she had turned almost white. Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there - the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself. How many million times she had seen her face, and always with the same imperceptible contraction! She pursed her lips when she looked in the glass. It was to give her face point. That was her self - pointed; dart-like; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self, drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond, one woman who sat in her drawing-room and made a meeting- point, a radiancy no doubt in some dull lives, a refuge for the lonely to come to, perhaps; she had helped young people, who were grateful to her; had tried to be the same always, never showing a sign of all the other sides of her - faults, jealousies, vanities, suspicions...