PHILOSOPHY SEMINAR ON EXISTENTIALISM presented by Dr' Jaseela'P

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PHILOSOPHY SEMINARONEXISTENTIALISMpresented
byDr. Jaseela.P
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• It deals with the problem of existence.
• It is an irrational trend in bourgeois
  philosophy.
• It tries to differentiate between being and
  existing.
• The subject matter of philosophy is
  Being(Essence).
• Science deals with existence i.e. everything that
  belongs to the empirical world, the world of
  experience.
• The philosophy of existentialism developed from
  the disillusionment and waste-land feeling
  created during the World War II.
• It was a revolt against the existing European
  philosophy.

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• It emerged as a movement in twentieth-century
  literature and philosophy, though it had
  forerunners in earlier centuries.
• Existentialism generally postulates that the
  absence of a transcendent force (such as God)
  means that the individual is entirely free, and,
  therefore, ultimately responsible.
• It is up to humans to create an Ethos of personal
  responsibility outside any branded belief system.
• In existentialist views, personal articulation of
  being is the only way to rise above humanity's
  absurd condition of much suffering and inevitable
  death

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• Existentialists emphasized the freedom of man
• Man is not a thing that is being shaped under the
  influence of natural and social necessity, but he
  should mould himself by his act.
• He must continuously decide what is true and what
  is false, what is right and what is wrong, which
  to accept and which to reject.
• The human choice is therefore subjective. Because
  the individual must make his own choice without
  any help from external standards as laws, ethical
  rules and tradition(Freedom of Choice)

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• Since he has freedom of choice, he is completely
  responsible for his choice, and for what results
  from his actions. So he is not to justify himself
  by circumstances. So freedom is necessarily
  followed by responsibility.
• Since individuals are forced to make choices for
  themselves, they are condemned to be free.
• Responsibility is the dark side of freedom. This
  need for responsibility leads to anxiety. They
  try to escape from his anxiety by ignoring or
  denying their freedom or responsibility, and
  thereby they deceive themselves(Self-deception).
   

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• Soren Kierkgaad (1813 1855)
• Existentialism developed with Soren Kierkgaad a
  Danish religious philosopher.
• He himself used the terms existential and
  existentialism in relation to his philosophising,
  his heartfelt view was that life, existence, in
  all its aspects was subjective and ambiguous.
• In his view individuals must be prepared to defy
  the accepted practices of society, if this was
  necessary to their leading, what seemed to that
  person, to be a personally valid and meaningful
  life.
• He suggests that people might effectively choose
  to live within either of two "existence spheres.
• He called these spheres the aesthetic and the
  ethical

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• Aesthetical lives lived in search of such things
  as pleasure, novelty and romantic individualism.
• Kierkegaard thought that such "pleasure", such
  "novelty", and such "romantic individualism"
  would eventually tend to decay or become
  meaningless and this would inevitably lead to
  much boredom and dire frustration.
• Ethical lives meanwhile, as being lived very
  much in line with a sense of duty to observe
  social and confessional obligations.
• Such a life would be easy, in some ways, to live,
  yet would also involve much compromise of several
  genuinely human faculties and potentials.
• Such compromise would inevitably mean that Human
  integrity would tend to be eroded although lives
  seemed to be progressing in a bourgeois-satisfacto
  ry way.
•  

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• In his later works he suggested that there was a
  third, religious, "sphere" where people accepted
  that they could "live in the truth" that they
  were "individual before the Eternal" to which
  they belonged.
• By living in this truth people could achieve a
  full unity of purpose with all other people who
  were also, individually, living in the same
  truth.
• This is the choice that he made for himself in
  his own efforts to live a life which he
  considered to be valid.

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• Religious doctrine of paradox
• Divine world and human world, faith and logical
  thinking cannot be compromised. This idea led him
  to a conflict with the church officials.
• In his later years, he revolted against religious
  philosophy and considered religion as irrational,
  on the ground that religious beliefs are
  subjective. It involves passion of the believer.
• His ideas served as a source for existentialism.
• He became involved in controversies with the
  Lutheran Church in Denmark - he had formed the
  view that the church was at that time open to
  being seen as worldly and corrupt and he had made
  some blatant public criticisms known to all.

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• Karl Jaspers (1883 1969) 
• He was a German existentialist psychiatrist.
• For Jaspers, transcendence , as a unique and
  absolute Being and is always beyond and just
  outside the existent being.
• The transcendence of Being is intangible to human
  experience. 
• The philosophical search of Jaspers may be
  divided into three stages
• 1. The discovery of the world.
• 2. The clarification of existence.
• 3. The attempt to transcend world of objects.
• The first stage considers "the being in the
  world" understood as a mere fact I exist and
  things exist around me. In this first stage, man
  believes that he can reach being in its totality.
  This attempt is illusory and hence it is destined
  to fail. Indeed, all knowledge of the "being in
  the world" is a "limitation

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•  
• The study of "transcendence" belongs to
  metaphysics, and hence we are in the third stage
  of philosophising.
• Our existence is a search for transcendence but
  transcendence cannot be reached, because if
  transcendence were attainable, it would not be
  transcendence.
• Thus the transcendence of being is always
  something else, something more and any attempt
  to attain it is destined to fail.
• However, the transcendent Being can be perceived
  in the form of "ciphers" or symbolic characters
  expressed by the things of the world.
• Philosophy, in its search for being, reads these
  ciphers as possible traces of God, as signs and
  signals pointing toward the ultimate depth and
  plenitude of Being

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• His main concepts are
• 1. Conscious manifestations of man (Science, Art
  Religion) are based on the unconscious activity
  of existence.
• 2. Real meaning of existence becomes clearer to
  man only during the periods of shock. (Illness,
  death etc) or when he is free from everyday cares
  and interests. He then faces a profoundly
  intimate existence and his true experience of
  God.

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• Gabriel Marcel (1889 1973) Catholic
  existentialism
• Most noted within existentialism for his disputes
  with Jean- Paul Satre, Gabriel Marcel was a
  gifted essayist and playwright, specializing in
  matters of faith and morality.
• Marcel is generally considered a Christian
  existentialist due to his Catholicism and the
  influence of Soren Keirkegard, on his philosophy.
  
• He held that the philosopher must be engaged, or
  personally involved, because existence and the
  human person are more significant than any
  abstraction.
• Involvement must be with other persons. To
  counter the impersonality of the mechanistic
  modern world and to recall man to an awareness of
  the mystery of being, Marcel spoke of the
  development of the individual in person-to-person
  dialogue.
• Human existence finds its earthly satisfaction in
  a God-centred communion of persons that is
  characterized by mutual fidelity and hope.

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• Science studies the world of objects, but does
  not touch the existential experience of the inner
  spiritual life of the individual.
• He denies the need for a rational proof for the
  existence of God.
• One can comprehend God through his existential
  experience.
• He accepted the catholic doctrine of
  pre-destination and freedom of will.
•  

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• Atheist existentialism 
• Martin Heidegger (1889- 1976)
• German existentialist
• The central theme is the problem of Being.
• He analyses man in his relation to himself and to
  his environment and to other men.
• In his attempt to inquire into the nature of
  existence, Heidegger distinguishes two ways of
  living
• 1. Inferior, called the unauthentic.
• 2. Superior called the authentic.
• Unauthentic existence is an uncritical
  participation in the world as it is authentic
  existence consists in an analysis of self.
  Although distinct, the unauthentic and the
  authentic life have some common characteristics

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• Actual participation in the world This means
  that the existent being has a relationship to
  surrounding objects, which he uses as instruments
  of his existence.
• Existence in a determined situation
• This means that every situation is essentially
  individuated, limited and presents only one of
  the infinite number of possible ways of realizing
  existence.
• The unauthentic life is characterized by its
  banality.
• The subject of such a life is not the individual,
  but an anonymous and featureless public ego ("das
  Mann"), the one-like-many, shirking personal
  responsibility and taking cues from the
  conventions of the masses.
• The result is a self-estrangement of human
  existence, which leads eventually to the blotting
  out of its possibilities and to its
  disintegration in the irrelevancy of everyday
  life.

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• Authentic existence is something decidedly
  different from everyday life.
• To live authentically means "to exist" this in
  turn means to stand out ,from the Latin
  "ex-stare," i.e., to be outside the anonymous
  mass, to emerge from the world in which we
  ourselves, and to accept our own situation with
  all its limitations.
• To exist means both to stand apart (to withdraw)
  and to stand out (to be offered as a target for
  the fullness of being).
• Authentic existence, a conscious returning to
  oneself, is a means of discovering and disclosing
  that the surrounding banality of the world is
  vanity and disappears into "nothingness."
• This universal sense of nothingness produces
  anguish.

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• Anguish must not be confused with fear.
• Fear has as its object some determined thing, a
  determined danger anguish, on the contrary is a
  dread of that indefinite thing which, because it
  is indefinite, is a dread of nothing in
  particular.
• The struggle with anguish and the outcome of this
  struggle opens new horizons as regards the
  interpretation of being.
• I am aware that I am a finite being, and I can
  reach the fullness of my being only to the degree
  that my circumstances permit.
• The scope of my potentialities depends on time.
• Time is what I am not yet it is my present
  situation in so far as it is moving toward my
  possibilities. Time is the horizon open to me.
  But time tells me that every being has its own
  end.

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• Being is for death. Thus I am an "existent being
  destined for death." And since I accepted
  existence with all its ramifications, I accept my
  death without fear.
• The whole human experience is permeated by the
  tragic anxiety induced by the sense of
  inevitability of death.
• Man is facing his own death, confronted by
  absolute nothingness.
• Mans existence is a being for death.
• Heidegger's Existentialism is a valuable
  contribution to the understanding of individual
  life but being guided by no spiritual principle,
  Heidegger ends with destruction and death.

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• Jean Paul Sartre (1905- 1890)
• French existentialist 
• Theological and Moral Nihilism
• He combined existentialism with phenomenology.
• The existent is identified with the series of
  phenomena, which tells us of its existence.
• In other words, to be an existent means to be a
  series of appearances.
• Ordinarily, appearance tells us of a dualism,
  i.e., the appearance and what is hidden in that
  appearance. Such a dualism is denied by Sartre
  and he maintains instead that appearance is the
  entire and only reality.
• As a result God, who cannot be phenomenal, does
  not exist and the existent is only one unit in
  the complete series of phenomena, and is "without
  support and help.

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• Since, according to Sartre, God does not exist
  and man is without "support and help," the
  existent must construct his existence freely
  "Man is damned to be free."
• In regard to the free execution of the project of
  existence, Sartre repeats the maxim of Ivan
  Karamazov of Dostoevski's famed novel.
• "If God does not exist, all is permitted" hence
  freedom results in arbitrary acts in the carrying
  out of the project of existence.
• He reversed the theist doctrine of priority of
  Essence over existence, or rejected essence
  entirely in favour of existence.
• Freedom is the essence of mans behaviour.
• Man is born with nothingness. Existence precedes
  Essence.
• The atheism and amoralism of Sartre may be
  considered as the ultimate corruption of
  Existentialism, and of philosophy in general.

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• Albert Camus (1913 1960)
• French writer Philosopher
• After World War II broke out, Camus used his
  literary talents to support the French
  Resistance, taking on the editorship of Combat,
  an important underground paper.
• After the war, however, he gave up politics and
  journalism and devoted himself to writing.
• He soon established an international reputation
  with such works as The Stranger (1946), The
  Plague (1948), The Rebel (1954) and The Myth of
  Sisyphus (1955).
• Central Theme
• 1. Mans existence is absurd and senseless
• 2. He is a hopelessly lonely man in the absurd
  world
• 3. Man is personified by the mythological image
  of Sisyphus, doomed for ever to roll uphill a
  heavy stone, which always rolls down again
• 4. Unable to bear this senselessness, man revolts
  and hence recurrent riots and revolutions.

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• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 1900)
• Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who
  reasoned that Christianity's emphasis on the
  afterlife makes its believers less able to cope
  with earthly life.
• Nietzsche argued that the ideal human being, the
  Ubermensch, would be able to channel passions
  creatively instead of suppressing them.
• Nietzsche's written works include Beyond Good
  and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra.
• Nietzsche is a major player in the Realm of
  Existentialism.

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• Nietzsche challenged the foundations of
  Christianity and traditional morality.
• He believed in life, creativity, health, and the
  realities of the world we live in, rather than
  those situated in a world beyond.
• Central to his philosophy is the idea of
  life-affirmation, which involves an honest
  questioning of all doctrines that drain life's
  energies, however socially prevalent those views
  might be.
• Often referred to as one of the first
  existentialist philosophers, Nietzsche's
  revitalizing philosophy has inspired leading
  figures in all walks of cultural life, including
  dancers, poets, novelists, painters,
  psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and
  social revolutionaries
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• Reliance on abstract concepts in a quest for
  absolute truth, he supposed, is merely a symptom
  of the degenerate personalities of philosophers
  like Socrates.
• From this Nietzsche concluded that traditional
  philosophy and religion are both erroneous and
  harmful for human life they enervate and degrade
  our native capacity for achievement

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• Progress beyond the stultifying influence of
  philosophy, then, requires a thorough
  "revaluation of values.
• In Zur Geneologie der Moral (On the Genealogy of
  Morals) (1887) Nietzsche bitterly decried the
  slave morality enforced by social sanctions and
  religious guilt.( A change from Slave morality to
  Master morality with an adea of Superman).
• Other works
• Death of God, Eternal values against immortality
  of Soul 

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• Major concepts
• 1. A focus on existence
• Existentialism tends to focus on the question of
  human existence the feeling that there is no
  purpose, indeed nothing, at the core of
  existence.
• Finding a way to counter this nothingness, by
  embracing existence, is the fundamental theme of
  existentialism, and the root of the philosophy's
  name.
• Given that someone who believes in reality might
  be called a "realist", and someone who believes
  in a deity might be called a "theist", therefore
  someone who believes fundamentally only in
  existence, and seeks to find meaning in his or
  her life solely by embracing existence, is an
  existentialist

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• 2. Existence precedes consciousness
• Existentialism differentiates itself from the
  modern Western rationalist tradition of
  philosophers such as Descartes in rejecting the
  idea that the most certain and primary reality is
  consciousness.
• Descartes argues in his Meditations on First
  Philosophy that humans can be certain of their
  consciousness (which is therefore the only truth
  ("Cogito ergo sum"), even though humans can doubt
  almost all aspects of reality as illusions.
• In opposition, existentialism asserts that a
  human finds oneself already in a world and prior
  context that the human cannot think away.
• In other words, the ultimate and unquestionable
  reality is not consciousness but existence
  ("being in the world", in the words of
  Heidegger).

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• 3. Existence precedes essence
• A central proposition of existentialism is that
  humans define their own meaning in life.
• Philosophers might phrase such view technically,
  as existence precedes essence i.e. a human's
  existence precedes and is more fundamental than
  the essence or meaning that may be ascribed to
  the life.
• An older view was that essence precedes
  existence, so that "being human" might bind a
  person to such phrase's a priori definitions and
  connotations, and determining such meanings was
  seen as a central project of philosophy.
• This older view was widely accepted from ancient
  Greek philosophy to Hegel's philosophy, which
  would focus on questions like "what is a human
  being?" or "what is the human essence?", and use
  the answer to seek to derive how human beings
  should behave

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• 4. Reason as a problematic defense against
  anxiety
• Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as
  fundamental, existentialists oppose themselves to
  rationalism and positivism. That is, they argue
  against definitions of human beings as primarily
  rational.
• Rather, existentialists look at where people find
  meaning. Existentialism asserts that people
  actually make decisions based on what has meaning
  to them rather than what is rational.
• The rejection of reason as the source of meaning
  is a common theme of existentialist thought, as
  is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread
  that we feel in the face of our own radical
  freedom and our awareness of death.
• Kierkegaard saw rationality as a mechanism humans
  use to counter their existential anxiety, their
  fear of being in the world.
• "If I can believe that I am rational and everyone
  else is rational then I have nothing to fear and
  no reason to feel anxious about being free."

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• 5. The absurd 
• It then follows that existentialism tends to view
  human beings as subjects in an indifferent,
  objective, often ambiguous, and "absurd"
  universe, in which meaning is not provided by the
  natural order, but rather can be created, however
  provisionally and unstably, by human beings'
  actions and interpretations.
• During the literary modernist movement in the
  1900s, authors began describing dystopian
  societies and surreal and absurd situations in a
  parallel universe, a trend that paralleled the
  existentialist movement.
• In Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis, a man
  awakes to the realization that he has turned into
  a creature known only as a "vermin". This story,
  which is certainly "absurd" and surreal, is one
  of many modernist literary works that influenced
  and were influenced by existentialist philosophy.

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• 6. Perspectives on God
• Some existentialists accept Nietzsche's
  proclamation that "God is dead" they believe
  that the concept of God is obsolete.
• Some existentialists, like Kierkegaard, conceive
  the fundamental existentialist question as man's
  relationship to God.
• Theological existentialism, as advocated by
  philosophers and theologians (including Paul
  Tillich, Gabriel Marcel, and Martin Buber),
  shares tenets and themes that are central to
  atheistic existentialism.
• Just as atheistic existentialists can freely
  choose not to believe in God, theistic
  existentialists can freely choose to believe in
  God and, despite doubt, have faith that God
  exists.
• Belief in God is a personal choice made based on
  a passion, faith, an observation, or experience.

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• Positive contributions of Existentialism to the
  Perennial Philosophy
• It is really too early to tell what contributions
  Existentialism will make to the Perennial
  Philosophy.
• Heidegger, Jaspers, and Marcel have certainly
  raised some concrete issues, which must be
  addressed by commonsense philosophical realism.
• But Sartre makes no positive contributions
  whatsoever.
• There are some traditional philosophical realists
  who are making an attempt to bring about a
  synthesis of some of the main points raised by
  the theistic Existentialists, but whether or not
  they are successful will be seen in the future.

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