~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.
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.
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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