Friday, March 1, 2019

Lost, But Not-found



~by David Aiken~

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—Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, & Co.—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. ‘Existentialism’ 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 opponent.


The term “existentialism,” however, which unquestionably describes a situation of philosophical import, is yet not a philosophy in its own right; or, at least, it is not an identifiable assemblage of ideas and concepts articulated by a unified and deliberate author or faction (i.e., it has no omniscient narrator!), which would allow one to point a finger at someone and say, “Ah ha, there goes an existentialist!” So, existentialism is not 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 social, religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas (for those in the know: the paradigm), has become progressively disrupted and porous, and thus disharmonious or heterogeneous—at which point all hell begins to break loose in terms of how we interpret what has meaning and value in our world.
With the loss of a universalizing or commonly accepted notion of how one might best interpret or best prioritize data or information, which happens when the commonly held truth system or paradigm goes on walkabout for an individual, it will be replaced by any of a nearly infinite variety of possible perspectives and thoughts and opinions that could be entertained in and by the ambient Zeitgeist. In this situation, our intellectual take on the “lay of the land” begins to look like a paradigmatic wasteland, barren of any specific dominant belief or narrative.
We no longer know what to think or believe, or why we should act in some particular way as opposed to almost every other way. 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!

In this type of situation, a rationalist philosopher like 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 or thing-in-itself type of worldly reality is present behind the perceptions of my body, that there is an out-there reality which caused or provoked my perceptions in the first place. Yet, this other and original “world” behind the “perceived-world,” which has gotten itself 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 how my body collects data and thus ‘grasps’ the world around it. So as far as Kant is concerned, there is a world out-there beyond my perceptions, but which anchors my perceptions. So, 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 needs to contribute to that original out-there 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 construct in its architectural design.
            Schopenhauer, of course, kindly (or not so, if his curmudgeonly reputation is accurate and well-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 then is supposed to have some application to my actions. As an intellectual event, conversion is an ordering of the mind around a philosophical anchor, a very deliberate turning toward a new organizing idea or principle, which then allows us to put our thinking house in order. 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 Human History’s more existential and therefore intellectually 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 that shaped our perceptions about the world surrounding our thinking as we grew up, has become porous and is dissolving, and that it no longer holds sway as truth over our minds. In the moment of that realization we have become anti-converts.
           
However, there certainly were, are, and can be a variety of plausibly meaningful intellectual responses to the existential situation, 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. In the history of the Western philosophical tradition, such a state of mind has always been accompanied by the disintegration of a dominant religious world-view. To date, for example, there have been two clear 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 around the 6th century B.C.E., resulted in the birth of philosophy with the Greek natural philosophers, such as Thales, Heraclitus, et al. And a Really Big Idea that sprung up from this first and primary breakdown of a mytho-religious paradigm in the West, and which oversaw the birth of Greek philosophy, was the articulation of the Just Life.
            In the Greece of that time, the idea of Justice derived from an understanding of the physis-world as a system where the processes of the world occurred correctly or rightly—which is to say, justly. Philosophically speaking, 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, stuff coming into being and leaving being, etc. Naturally then, if there was a rightness inherent in the way the natural or 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 “Fall” of Christianity, by the progressive dissolution of the Christian worldview. Historically, what was to become an anchoring idea for this second existential period, was the articulation of the idea of Man as thinking subject – the Cartesian cogito, an idea that has continued on to the philosophically fantastic, albeit muddling practical success we see around us still today in the form of democracy.
            It is interesting to note that the dominant speculative response to this second breakdown of the mytho-religious paradigm remains, as in the first existential period of Greek antiquity, surrounds 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 by and large it only manages to muddle its way to concluding that an innocent Dmitri Karamazov is guilty of and should be punished for patricide. Thus, also, Nietzsche’s pale criminal (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, book I) rebuts for his hypocrisy the judge who is standing in judgement over him– 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 also, 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.

(Reprise from a Phrontisterion essay entitled ‘An Existential Moment’, posted in February 2013)

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