Anti-conversion....
Just about every human child born in and after the 1960s
knows about existentialism and has probably thrown around the term, or an
associative culprit (e.g., Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard & Assoc.),
a time or two at some cocktail party or other. All in all, it is a fine and
weighty word with which to impress those who are impressionable and to offend
those who seek to take offense; it is a word that has enjoyed all the status of
a philosophically charged nuclear device being detonated in a conversation in
which one seeks evasion from intellectual obligation, from moral
responsibility, or in which one just wants to do a little intellectual sparing with
a Christian-ly minded westerner.
However, although certainly of philosophical import, “Existentialism”
is neither a philosophy per se, in the sense that it is not an assemblage of
ideas and concepts articulated by a single and deliberate author or faction
(i.e., it has no omniscient narrator!), nor is it a system of thinking. Rather,
it is the situation or experience of the mind-world (the kosmos) in which the generally homogenous
organization of our ambient social, religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas
(the knowledge paradigm), has become progressively disrupted and porous, and thus
disharmonious or heterogeneous; at which point all hell begins to break loose
intellectually speaking. With the loss of a universalizing or commonly accepted
notion (a paradigm) of how One might best
interpret or best prioritize data or
information, which is replaced by a nearly infinite variety of possible perspectives
and thoughts and opinions that could be entertained in and by the ambient Zeitgeist,
the intellectual “lay of the land” takes the shape of a paradigmatic wasteland, barren
of any specific dominant belief or narrative. To borrow just a little from
Schopenhauer’s idea that systematic thinking is an architectural structure –
when the foundation begins to crumble, the edifice built upon it also becomes
unreliable—so the London Bridge of interpretive intelligibility comes falling
down… and pop goes the weasel in an intellectual no-man’s land!
So, for instance, an Immanuel Kant might anchor his idea of
perception, which is a function of the human mind, in the (for him) necessary
deduction that some unknowable Ding-an-sich
(thing-in-itself) type of worldly reality is present behind the perceptions of
my body, which caused or provoked my
perceptions in the first place; but this other and original “world” behind the
“perceived-world,” which has gotten all tangled up in my seeing and hearing and
tasting and feeling and smelling, is itself unknown and unknowable precisely
because it is outside of the confines of my perceptions. So as far as Kant is
concerned, there is a world out-there, beyond my perceptions, which anchors my
perceptions—there are two elements in this Kantian equation: 1) the world
out-there, and 2) the concept of the world that I construct in my mind, which
consists of the out-there world + whatever other changes my body needed to
contribute to that original thing in order for me to be able to see it, hear
it, taste it, feel it, and smell it. To be sure, this is a lovely philosophical
paradigm in its architectural design.
Schopenhauer,
of course, kindly (or not so, if his curmudgeonly reputation is accurate and
deserved) takes exception to Kant’s architectural flair, and thus dismisses the
Kantian philosophical foundation (the out-there world), but decides to keep the
Kantian mental edifice. So Schopenhauer chooses to hoist philosophical anchor
in a distinctly non-Kantianesque movement – by arguing that the “world” is in
fact no-“thing” other than the mere composition of my perception/imagination (Vorstellung)
and my will (Wille).
Now, we all know, more or less, what a conversion is in the
religious and philosophical meaning. The individual Turns Away From one path,
and Turns Toward (con + vertere) a new path – there is a changing of the mind,
which has application to my actions. So in all its various contexts, conversion
is an ordering of the mind around a philosophical anchor, a very deliberate
turning toward a different fundamental and organizing idea or principle. What
happens, though, when the paradigm surrounding the anchor, which is composed of
associative ideas and ancillary beliefs, breaks down? How do we reason philosophically,
or even meaningfully, in an intellectual wasteland? What are the rules for
thinking during History’s more existential and therefore chaotic moments?
That this question
is still meaningful actually shows why existentialism is not a philosophy in
any ordinary sense of that word—for we are not converted to the existential
philosophy. Rather, we become persuaded that the organizing worldview, the
paradigm, in which we grew up, is porous and dissolving, and that it no longer
holds sway over our minds. We become anti-converts.
However,
there certainly were, are, and can be a variety of plausibly meaningful intellectual
responses to the existential moment, and these responses certainly can be articulated
philosophically. An example of this may be found in Camus’ volume of
philosophically oriented essays entitled The
Rebel.
As a condition marking the human intellectual condition, existentialism
is not a state of the physis-world,
but rather of the kosmos-world. It is a state of mind provoked by the disintegration
of the religious world-view. To date, there have been two existential periods
in the history of the western thought tradition, both of which have been
triggered by a breakdown of a mytho-religious intellectual paradigm. The first
dissolution, which began in ancient Greece prior to the 7th century
B.C., resulted in the birth of philosophy with the Greek natural philosophers,
such as Thales, Heraclitus,
et al. And the Really Big Idea that was brought forth from this first and
primary intellectual response to the breakdown of a mytho-religious paradigm
was the articulation of the Just Life.
In Greece
the idea of Justice, as a Big Idea, derived from an understanding of the
physis-world as system where process occurred correctly or rightly (i.e.,
justly). This idea is not dissimilar to the Asian understanding of the Tao. Human
understanding was anchored in the right understanding of the “way” of the
natural world – phases of the moon, wind blowing, water flowing, etc.
Naturally, then, if there was a rightness inherent in the way the natural
(physis)-world operated, the next logical step would be to search out the
rightness, or justice, that must also be inherent in men’s relationship to their
world in general, and to one another in the polis in particular. On the
question of Justice, of course, the great Socrates comes to mind among others.
The second existential period in the western thought tradition
was provoked by the onset of the “Fall” or dissolution of the Christian
worldview. What was to become an anchoring idea for this existential period,
was the articulation of the idea of Man as thinking subject – the Cartesian cogito, an idea that has continued on to
the fantastic, albeit muddling success we see around us still today.
It is
interesting to note that, yet again, a dominant response (Really Big Idea) to
this second breakdown of the mytho-religious paradigm remains the question of
justice. Hence, there is Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which the author invites us to observe that God’s
justice has no effect on, in, or for this world of men, and that men’s justice
is, frankly, no better – for it only manages to muddle its way to concluding
that an innocent Dmitri Karamazov is guilty of and should be punished for
patricide. Thus, Nietzsche’s pale criminal
(in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, book I)
rebuts the judge for his hypocrisy – there can be no justice (but also no true
crime) where all men (including judges) are born native predators, and where
all men must, of necessity, work out their native predatory destinies in the
world of predatory men. Thus, also, Joseph K’s fruitless search to discover the
crime he must have committed, because he has been sentenced to capital
punishment for that crime, in Kafka’s The
Trial. All that K manages to discover is that he is guilty and that the “system”
has the power to exact punishment on him. Thus, finally, Meursault’s trial in
Camus’ The Stranger, in which he is
put on trial for the murder of a man, but condemned, really, because he
apparently, in his remembering her death, did not show the proper love and
appreciation for his mother.
