Douglas Adam’s computer, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy, famously spits out the following answer –42, when asked the
question, what is the meaning of life? So not daring to tread where even
fictional computers only go sluggishly and with trepidation, let me distinguish
between the hitchhiker’s question concerning the meaning of life, and a much
more focused reflection on the so-called “problem” of existence.
… “to make the journey to the truth upon the waters of
make-believe” (Salmon Rushdie, Joseph Anton). It is a rather
wonderful irony that most of existentialist philosophy is actually
existentialist and Nobel Prize winning literature. This makes reading
transpositions of existentialist themes and perceptions, from authors such as
Luigi Pirandello (1934), Hermann Hesse (1946), André Gide (1947), Albert Camus
(1957), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), and Samuel Beckett (1969), much more
interesting, aesthetically satisfying, and emotionally inspiring.
This is a noteworthy advantage when reading existentialist fiction, because for
a rather long time the only other alternative was the point of view represented
by the Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann. Kaufmann edited the first, and
for a long while only, existentialist primer intended for English-language
students of philosophy, so for texts from philosophers of the existentialist
persuasion he had the market cornered; and of course on
that corner only Kaufmann’s dictum reigned supreme: that the criterion for
belonging to the club of existentialists is to be depressed! This,
notwithstanding that Kaufmann’s life work was the rehabilitation of the most joyful
of all existentialists, Nietzsche, who, if we consider philosophy only
historically, was really only a proto-existentialist.
An exception that confirms our above-stated rule that existentialism is most
cogently expressed in the language of prize-winning literati, is the Russian
existentialist writer, Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), who, although certainly worthy
to be a NP recipient, had the misfortune to flourish well before the onset of
Nobel Prizes in Literature, which did not begin until 1901. There is also the
Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an exquisite and exquisitely
existentialist writer if ever there was; and if in their infinite wisdom the
Nobel Committee did not deem Borges fit to receive the Nobel Prize in
Literature, which they did not, then it must be that the esteemed NP Committee
Members had already begun to follow the type of selection peculiarities that
would later characterize the train(-wreck) of thought that would lead them to
award the Nobel Peace Prize to American President Barack Obama (ostensibly not
for the following non-peaceful types of things: wars in Iraq and Afghanistan;
supporting military intervention in Somalia, Libya, and Syria; escalating the
drone war in Pakistan; Guantanamo; extending the Patriot Act; etc.).
To put clearly the obvious point to the argument: the writing of existentialist
littérateurs is significantly and just all-around better than the writing of
existentialist philosophers. By way of demonstrating the unfortunate
philosophical standard—if you are looking to pass a thoroughly soporific moment,
crack one of the covers of existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers who,
although obviously superbly educated, reads like a dehydrated mud puddle.
Common to all of these contributors to the existentialist
project, of course, is that they follow their own inimitable visions and
imaginary fancies concerning the World of Men; and each narrates into existence
heuristic forays into that World outside of the normal high-ways and by-ways of
the classical thought tradition, thus exposing to our view and for our consideration
the almost infinite variety of themes associated with the existentialist
realization of Man’s Coming-of-Age, of our radical solitude and vulnerability.
In language borrowed from Rushdie (who has only won the Booker Prize for
literature), story telling of this philosophical sort is in fact an invitation
for us to enter into the existential frame of interiority, to recognize that
the World within is without borders. Formulaically, the Open Self equals the
Open Universe. So Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton:
Literature tried to open the
universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was
possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. […]
There were plenty of people who didn’t want the universe opened, who would, in
fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the
frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back.
This is a literature that puts us in the awkward position of
having to reflect on our lives from womb to tomb; and in that reflection we
will be called upon to give an accounting for what we will Stand For in
the space & time between the extremes. This is a literature that asks from
us that we enter into the world of Symbol; that we allow our life to become
transmogrified into a “Standing For”; and that the days of our lives should
become representative or reflective of some notion of Otherness, some
Idea(l)—that we should strive to embody the Symbolic Life.
Heads & Hands. A common device used by both
littérateurs and philosophers, and which is certainly worth our meditating
upon, is the rather typical existentialist opposition between Homo Faber,
man as maker or doer, and Homo Sapiens, man as thinker or knower. A
superb illustration of this device frames Hermann Hesse’s 1930 novel, Narcissus
and Goldmund, where Narcissus will represent the life of the mind and
Goldmund the “handy” life of the creator or artist; and Hesse’s story-telling
talent is such that all the peripeties of his two protagonists will carefully
shadow the singular antagonism in our own Western lives between the life of the
mind and the life of the body. When one takes this particular device, opposing
the doer to the thinker, and applies it to the Western philosophical
Life-world, which is becoming ever-more defined by all the various types of
materialisms, then the existential dilemma achieves a certain philosophical
poignancy and urgency, which is exactly what the NP Committee Members have not
failed to recognize in the great existentialist literature of the last 100+
years.
However, if we had only the philosophers and their generally impermeable
writing styles to inform us on this, the very intimate confrontation between
our bodies and our minds, then it would look something like the analysis
composed by the Stanford professor of German and philosophy, Kurt Reinhardt, in
his 1952 book, The Existentialist Revolt. Reinhardt introduces his topic
by considering the merits of a diagnosis about Western culture, doomed to
materialism and despair, which is advanced by a German philosopher of history,
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) in his 1917 masterwork, The End of the West.
There is no doubt that if his
premises of an all-inclusive materialism and naturalism were correct, the conclusions
presented in The End of the West are logically conclusive and thus
equally correct. If the distinguishing mark of man is indeed “his hand” rather
than his head, then such a being might actually achieve its greatest triumphs
in the creation of “millions and billions of horsepower. But if man’s
distinguishing marks are his intellect and free will, then the entire picture
changes, and the essentially different premises call for essentially different
conclusions and solutions. If in fact the crisis of human existence issues from
the confused mind, the sick heart, and the perverted will of modern Western
man, then he and his civilization are not irretrievably doomed or lost, because
then even at this critical juncture human nature will be able to rouse itself
and to rise again, to challenge the “spirit of the age” and to recover the
wholeness and balance of a truly human life and civilization.
Reinhardt’s book allows us to cherry-pick yet another
splendid illustration of the device of opposing the doer to the thinker, and
then applying that to the Western philosophical Life-world. According to
Reinhardt, French personalist
philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950) frames his thinking in a parallel between
“creative nihilism” and “destructive nihilism.” Creative nihilism, which
characterizes the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger, is of the head (Homo
Sapiens). It is an intellectual nihilism that sees the death of philosophy
and the life of the mind through valuation of faith and the anti-intellectual
life. This nihilism is “creative” because it is “preliminary” in nature, which
simply means that Reason precedes Action. Destructive nihilism (Homo Faber),
on the other hand, is where the hand is occupied with actual physical nihilism,
the destruction of man and his planet. This type of nihilism is, to state the
obvious, rather definitive in nature.
There is also Reinhardt on a Nietzschean oppositionalism, citing an 1873
reference concerning barbarism—that “Western hearts had been emptied of the
strong and noble sentiments of a heroic past”: ‘…barbarism in human minds,
which had lost their sense of direction and orientation, and of the barbarism
in human works and deeds which had become the stillborn children of
intellectual and moral chaos.’”
Finally, Reinhardt reminds us, in the words of French Catholic and
existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), that Man is Homo
Viator (a “traveling man,” a voyager, or explorer), constantly unterwegs
between the world-at-hand, as Heidegger might have said, the world he creates
with his hands, and the world pulsating in his head, the world of meaning and
purpose and intent, the philosophical world. The journey, when conceived of in
this Heracleitan
kind of way, is between the greater sophon, divine wisdom, which is
immanent in the cosmic dialectic, and human phronesis, “introspective
listening” to the way, or the being, of the world around us.
Now although the ideas with which Reinhardt is engaged are
certainly and obviously interesting and important in and of themselves, and
even engrossing, their stylized philosophical articulations have nothing of the
littérateur’s je-ne-sais-quoi related to the turning of a phrase in the
art of telling the Story. This is perhaps history of philosophy at its best;
but it is just not the stuff of a Nobel in Literature.
The Horns of the Human Dilemma. Another component
common to collaborators in the existentialist
project, is that central to their narrative plots is the “problem” of
existence.
I should perhaps concede at this point that, before reading existentialist
literature, it had never occurred to me that “being here” in the world was
especially problematic (beyond muddling through the usual predicaments of
growing up, finding a job, thinking about relationships, and difficulties of
that sort)… nonetheless, with respect to existence, the philosophical dilemma
upon whose horns we are ostensibly poised, is that we are here instead
of not here (to speak like Parmenides by way of Heidegger); and so also,
by extension, being here, what should we do to pass the time? (When stated like
this, though, the problem actually begins to sound a lot more like a religious
rather than a philosophical inquiry – a sort of Pirandelloesque, six-characters-in-search-of-an-author
(i.e., a god) problem of origins.)
In another
post that also deals with this “problem” of existence, I suggested that we
humans, each and every one, are not any particular “thing,” but rather like so
many layers of an onion without an actual being or core at the center. I have
since come to realize, however, that while I really like my onion metaphor, as
I really like being able to “blame” Heraclitus for the philosophical direction
of that earlier reflection, I did not really like discovering, as well, that I
was following a point of view also shared by the French existentialist
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. So I have decided to give equal time for the question
to another French existentialist intellectual, Albert Camus. Perhaps it is just
that I find Camus more personally likeable than the rancunier Sartre.
Color me vindictive.
On this one question, though, inspired by an intuition from Heraclitus, which
Sartre translated into philosophical constructs and I blogified into an
onion-like metaphor, Sartre and I have both found it plausible that the human
individual is not some essential “thing,” some substantive self, some type of noun-idea.
Rather, Man is a Verbal idea – a Deciding and an Acting. The existentialist
conclusion from this premise is then rather straight-forward and unavoidable:
that because our decisions and actions are 1) absolutely arbitrary—in the
infinite diversity of decisions and actions the ones we choose are simply from
among an infinite many, and 2) profoundly irrelevant to some bigger, and
specifically pertinent picture—life has no obvious or intrinsic single goal, it
would therefore seem that, along with our decisions and actions, which have no
specifically ultimate arguable point, neither does Mankind as such have
one precise and decisive point to it.
On this particular question of being, however, unlike Heraclitus, Sartre, and
this humble teacher of philosophy, Camus follows Friedrich Nietzsche, holding
that the individual is in fact some essential “thing,” and that there is
in fact a fundamental nature to the animal that is Man.
Whatever we think Man is ultimately, though, He is still very much alone in an
unanchored kosmos (read: surrounded entirely by immanence with no hope of
transcendence); and cocooned by despair and absurdity, He is become defined by
a condition of Worldlessness, which is the precondition for the existential
possibility of self-creation. Camus will find this idea so persuasive, in fact,
that in the 1938 autobiographical collection called Noces, he will even
transform the existential life-journey, the adventure of coming-home-to-self,
into a type of Odyssean journey Home, a Nostos : « ce n’est pas si facile de devenir ce qu’on
est. » It is on this point, precisely, that Camus, the
intellectual and journalist, will oppose Sartre, famous philosopher and
arrogant jerk.
Philosophical one-upmanship notwithstanding, it is an interesting irony of
history that while Sartre may have possibly won the greater academic battle for
existentialism on the question of being, it will still be Camus who will most
influence general international readers of existential literature, with books
such as L’Etranger. After all, who has ever read Sartre’s massive 1943
opus, Etre et le néant (which tips the scales at 722 pages in the French
edition), and can still claim to have some kind of a life?
Zarathustra summons from outre-tombe.
Another piece of the existentialist project, which goes well beyond how the
various story-tellers, both littérateur and philosopher, frame their stories
and which devices they use, is that each seeks deliberately to make of
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, arguably the West’s first full-bodied albeit fictional
existentialist, a paraphrase into real-world categories of human existence.
These translations will be multifaceted, certainly, and not necessarily
recognizable for any one quality that might bind them together as a particular
type. Yet it may still be argued that each translation, each fictional
incarnation, no matter how they differ from one another, is a plausible
imagined-reflection of some aspect of the Zarathustrian type, as that type
could appear in the World of Men. Ultimately, it will be up to the Reader
to determine what the various characters in the various narratives symbolize,
and whether the journey of those characters on their way to Übermensch-Symbol
is actually successful, either as embodying a faithful son of Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra, or simply as representing a credible Life of Man.
Zarathustra can look out at us through the eyes of Camus’ Merseult (L’Etranger),
for example, as he can be translated through the binary philoso-phrenia
of Harry Haller (Steppenwolf). Normally in his writings, Hesse tended to
split the mind/body problem classically, such as he does through the characters
of Narcissus (mind-intellectual) and Goldmund (body-artist) in the eponymously
titled work. His depiction of Haller, though, not unlike that of his
Siddhartha, unifies the dichotomy in one person, one body.
A quality that would seem to knit together many of Sartre’s existential
protagonists, is an overwhelming feeling of nausea (Les mains sales; La
nausée); but the sine que non characteristic of his Zarathustras,
which Sartre makes unmistakably clear in his 1946 lecture Existentialism
is a Humanism, is that in the person of the existentialist, Zarathustra
is a man (or woman) of action.
In a work such as Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot, on the other
hand, the Zarathustrian type might not necessarily be reflected through one of
the characters, nor even be implicitly housed in the Omniscient Narrator.
Rather, the Reader may be called upon to recognize that the situational
outworking of the plot may itself be the subject of the piece, and that Beckett
might perhaps be suggesting that the most relevant way to speak of a god who is
expected to arrive, to be there (present), is to speak of the God(ot) who is
not there (absent).
Zarathustra is also present in other existentialist literature, but perhaps
only as a fragmented composite, where no one character has all the
traits that we might associate with an Über-Man, with one who has achieved the
freedom of having divested himself, intellectually, of the emotional and
irrational accouterments of Culture. Diverse Zarathustrian traits might be
shared among various characters, thus giving the impression that each of the
players in the novel’s cast of characters is wandering around somewhere on
the road toward the liberation of his own Thought-Life. This seems to me to
be true of André Gide’s 1902 L’immoraliste.
There are many ways to become waylaid in our thinking about this novel—that it
is about homosexuality, or pedophilia, or evil; but this is to wander along the
Holzwege of Gide’s thought-world, instead of daring to tread the high
road of his fictional vision. For it is indisputable that Gide is attempting to
characterize Zarathustrian qualities in L’immoraliste, which have little
to do with specific forms of sexuality or with evil; he is taking us along on
the journey back to the natural world (Penguin: 2000, 120), away from the masks
(cities, labor, morality) created by men in their histories…. (Ibid, 110).
Indeed, it is perhaps only in this way that the principal protagonist, Michel,
reflects any recognizable quality of the Zarathustrian hero.
Gide’s Ménalque, on the other hand, although he plays only a small part in the
overall narrative of L’immoraliste, is a Zarathustrian hero of Wildean
proportions; and it is through this character that we come to see just how
impoverished Michel is, how pathetically dim his illumination, and how very
much bound he is to the chains of his shallow thought-life. Ménalque incarnates
Man-as-Choosing-Agent who is very much at home in himself in his world. He
offers drink to others for their pleasure, but does not himself drink, because,
he says, “I find sobriety a more powerful form of intoxication, one where I
retain my lucidity. […] I seek to heighten life, not diminish it through
intoxication.” Continuing the conversation with Michel, Ménalque lays out the
existential underpinnings that explain his life:
. . . I hate resting. Possessions
encourage this; when one feels secure one falls asleep. I love life enough to
prefer to live it awake. So within all this wealth I preserve a sense of
precariousness with which I aggravate, or at least intensify, my life. I can’t
claim that I love danger, but I do like life to be risky. I like it to make demands
on my courage, my happiness, my health at every moment . . .
Against the life-affirming light of this Zarathustrian
existentialism, Michel is able to measure his own intellectual puniness and
pastiness: “But how pale are mere words compared to actions! Wasn’t Ménalque’s
life, his smallest action, a thousand times more eloquent than my lectures? Now
I understood that the moral lessons of the great philosophers of Antiquity were
given as much by example as by words, if not more so.”
It seems fitting to close our meandering reflections on the
Existentialist “Project” with a sentiment from Gide’s Ménalque, which, because
it is so obviously and so fully inspired by Nietzsche’s proto-existentialism,
could be said to lie at the heart of the very best of existentialist thought:
The Greeks created their ideals
directly from life. The life of the artist was itself an act of poetic
creation, the life of the philosopher the enactment of his philosophy. Both are
bound up with life: instead of ignoring each other, philosophy fed poetry, and
poetry expressed philosophy, with admirably persuasive results. Nowadays beauty
no longer appears in action, action no longer aspires to be beautiful, and
wisdom exists in a separate sphere.
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