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 6^th 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)

Boredom

~by David Aiken~  

Boredom is not a phenomenon from the world. It is an echo from an inert mind.

In his novel Le Rouge et le Noir, which was published in 1830, Stendhal writes of his protagonist, Julien Sorel, that he frightens his youthful peers because of his excessive ‘energy’.  

Just to introduce the character briefly, Julien Sorel is a bourgeois clerk librarian who is employed by a wealthy peer of the French aristocracy. Sorel is poor, a country bumpkin from ‘lesser’ France (i.e., the provinces), and has the (mis-)fortune to be transplanted from the hinterlands of France into the brilliant and complex aristocratic ecosystem which is at the core of 19^th century Parisian society (i.e., the enriched, the endowed, the entitled, and the ennobled). Although he is not yet a member of the clergy, Julien Sorel is educated in the tradition of poor humanist priests; regrettably, however, he is also socially ambitious in a world where the social classes can never successfully mix. The plot in The Red and the Black hinges precisely on this “caste” tension, where the irresistible force of a socially humble man’s individual merit and ambition is pitted against the immovable rock of society’s lethargically enshrined rules of inherited rank.

            Because of Julien Sorel’s education and personal intellectual merit and efforts, as well as a little pushing from his priestly teachers, once our budding Tartuffe becomes established in his clerical employ in Paris, he discovers that his learning and his reflective habits of mind intimidate the indolent but aristocratic young people in his entourage—those who have inherited their merits and their high-society positions from their wealthy families and connections. From this strain between Julien and his social milieu shall unfold more complexity in the plot intrigue, of course; and so, writes Stendhal about this bourgeois arriviste Julien, “Dans ce siècle, où toute énergie est morte, son énergie leur fair peur.”

So, the first characteristic in this story for our consideration is énergie, which it seems should be understood as being something like intellectual daring, emotional drive, or just simply commitment to an idea that inspires and moves our hero to action. In the context of this description Stendhal creates an additional tension between ridicule, which serves to oppress and enthrall Parisian society in general, and an intriguing notion of personal vitality, which renders certain individuals social mis-fits who seem always to be crusading for some greater fairness in or amelioration of the social context.

To be exact, Stendhal’s narrative reasoning suggests that the fear of ridicule had long since died in his 19^th century, leaving behind a particular hardened ‘moral’ shell for the coming generations of society; and this moral shell of codified and inflexible opinion both dominates individuals and transforms them into a homogeneous flock. This staid mass, in turn, demands from its younger constituent elements that each should conform to inherited ideas and usages, and it uses ridicule and mockery to subdue and beat the wayward down into submission. The idea, by way of metaphor, is that as we grow up we are enculturated through a cookie-cutter mold, which in turn comforts the previous generations of our society because the elders can then rest assured that one young pressed cookie will look just like another and that all cookies will look just alike for the foreseeable future. The promise of success in such a world lies in conformity—like peas in a pod, everyone is and acts like everyone else. [By way of a comparable albeit more explicitly philosophical excursus: in his 1689 “A Letter about Toleration” §4 The limits on toleration, John Locke writes about precisely the same type of cookie-making zealotry that accompanies the imposed and imposing conformity in the Christian religious communities of his day.]

The second characteristic to which Stendhal draws our attention in his novel is to the adhesive that unites the herd, this society, into one homogeneous group. The binding glue for this particular 19^th century Parisian society, which is so tightly girdled and entrapped inside the mold of its received ideas, opinions, manners, etc., is ridicule. The vital piece of information here is that the younger generations are not even bothered by the fear of ridicule, because they have simply slipped into the dead, but actively constraining cookie mold as inheritors of a previous generation’s battle of words and ideas. The young themselves have no intellectual or emotional investment in the mold that is imposed on them, and which they unwittingly adopt. They are taught the “proper” way of doing things, and their world asks of them not that they should have their own ideas and battles, but only that they should conform to what they have received from those who have gone before. The intellectual battles for ideological terrain are long past; theirs is now simply to continue to change the dressings on the metaphorical and never-healing wounds. 

            In his chronicling of 19^th century France, Stendhal minutely observes and dissects the phenomenon of cultural transmission. There is an inherently dialectical and dialogical tension among and between generations. One generation fights for its manners, usages, and beliefs, and then passes that acquired ‘body’ of beliefs and actions onto the children and the children’s children, who receive and believe because they respect or fear their parents and their elders. In the best of cases, from the point of view of a Nietzschean philosopher anyway, as the child becomes the adult of the new generation he will challenge the teachings he has received, fighting his own battles and winning through to his own understanding of the world. In most cases, though, this struggle will not occur (so also says Nietzsche!); and the succeeding generation, aimless, will meekly ramble around until individuals of a same class come together into a free-ranging herd, conforming to and obeying the cookie-press precepts and “truths” they received through the mother-milk.

This brings us to the third characteristic that interests Stendhal in Le Rouge et le Noir – ennui, or boredom. Cookies, per our metaphorical usage, are uniformly jaded. They are not encouraged to challenge their shape, nor the color of their sprinkles, nor their position on the serving plate; they are simply pressed out and expected to sit patiently, in all the glory of their cookie-ness, waiting until whatever in the world is going to happen inevitably happens. And so, goes proverbial wisdom, it should be with every generation’s children. In such a metaphor, coming-into-adulthood, except on the rare occasion, is not marked by the cookie-individual personally doing battle with the dragons that live in the hidden places of our minds, dragons that have snuck in through the education we have received and that have tucked themselves away in the corners of our imagination, dragons that have carefully secreted themselves in our most shadowy places and there patiently await the Dawning-of-Their-Day. (—The image of dragons is from the first discourse in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; Immanuel Kant would have very properly called such ‘mind-critters’, Verstandeswesen).

            In the social construct that Stendhal is opening up to us, the typical coming-into-adulthood tends to be marked by acceptance of and conformity to the teachings and traditions received from the hands of the Elders. This means that the excitement of discovery for self, the heuristic call of the wild and of engaging in one’s own personal and private ‘heroic’ tussles against the demons that attend us and stalk us, is not only not an outcome desired by the Elders of our societies (including our educational institutions), but it is aggressively discouraged, indeed excluded from those individual right-of-passage experiences that are considered, at least by Nietzschean philosophers, to be healthy and good. So it would seem that we may tentatively conclude that it is therefore ‘the way of things’ in human society that we should be profoundly bored.

           Like Nietzsche after him with his ideas about the world’s Great Men and of social evolution through their Will to Power, Stendhal seemed to understand that each generation is automatically the hero of its own stories. However, while this may be true of generations, most individuals probably will not ever become authentically heroic, precisely because they are being pressed and molded into the societal cookie patterns (teachings and traditions) that require no individual thought or action, but only obedience to the principles of conformity and a passive mind. This irrepressible ennui at the heart of Stendhal’s vision of 19^th century France, whose controlling mechanism is ridicule, is directly translatable today by our alpha-state inducing relationship to education, to work, and to technology, which first lures our eyes to the screen, then dulls our brains and senses.

Ennui – the emotional flat-line of the Nietzschean masses. This is the defining characteristic of the Merseaults (…remember Camus’ L’Etranger) of our world, of the “outsider” who does not remember whether his mother died today, yesterday, or whether she is still sitting at home right now having her afternoon tea and crumpets.

However, we must not become complacent, believing that all is completely undone for the thinking imagination. The world become existential and therefore ultimately unpredictable, still invites the individual to dare. To dare to rebel; to dare to listen to the sound of the different drummer; and to dare to follow the path toward the sound of that new drumbeat by taking the high road of our own thoughts and dreams and visions, that most solitary and desert way which so titillated and so seduced Stendhal’s Julien Sorel and Mlle de la Mole, and which so profoundly enthused Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. To be sure, the terminus of this journey is seldom, if ever, specific happiness. But then how could it be? Are we not, after all, daring to break the pressed cookie mold, and thereby necessarily drawing down upon ourselves the disapprobation, indeed the wrath, of the Elder generations of cookie-makers? But while this journey’s end may not be happiness in the most traditional sense of social contentment, Nietzsche has argued that we will finally find at the end of that road freedom in the truest philosophical sense.

            And what will these new cookies-sans-molds look like? Some will make great contributions to the world of men; some will wreak great havoc. Some will become admired; some reviled. All will be Rebels in courage. Thinkers of thoughts independent. Ayn-Randian-type Architects of their own realities. New-world Iconoclasts. The Ridiculed. The Isolated and Insular. The Street Fighters of the world.  The Alive. And finally –the Dead.

(Modified from an original essay published August 29, 2012)

Further reading: Roland Barthe’s essay, “Toys”.

The Space of a Man

Borders & Edges.

            Every-thing is just so frustratingly approximative — so imprecise and squishy. This is true of all things, of those things of a physis sort (re: nature & the natural) as with things of a kosmos sort (re: intellect & the interpretative).  For a refresher course on this distinction, have a look at the Phrontisterion essay on Anti-conversion in “An Existential Moment” (February 2013).

            Trying to determine the exact boundaries or edges of physical things, for example, which seem so very clear and so very observably present to our senses, is notoriously difficult in an imprecise and squishy kind of world. The classical illustration of this idea for students of philosophy is the good old-fashioned table (or chair): my body tells me that the table is one sort of a thing—it is solid, ponderously weighty, and does not seem to be going anywhere at any given speed; it seems to just want to hang out in the space that it presently occupies. In contrast, however, my mind tells me that the table is also a constituted kind of a thing—it is made up of an unimaginable number of invisible, itsy-bity teeny-weeny other-things that are all zinging around at warp-speed, and which are not at all concrete and stationary like the table-thing of which they are the composing elements. Now which of these two tables, the one that is speaking to my body or the one that is comprehended by my mind, is the most nearly-true definition of this particular table at which I sit and write? It seems obvious that both ‘truths’ are somehow implicated in the thing that is this table, but only one of the truths is actually experienced by me. From one point of view—the body’s—the edges of the table seem quite distinct from the edges of me the writer, but from a second point of view both the table and I seem inseparably implicated in the dance of sub-physical, invisible other-realities that frame the symphonic composition of things that are the visible world.

            Language, in contrast to our table, is obviously a very cosmetic sort of thing. And although it is the primary means by which humans speak out their recognition of the world, it is also perhaps one of the most disturbingly approximative forms of identifying and articulating objects. One has only to look at the idea of denotations and connotations, which sets the boundaries for words. The denotative world of a word is actually quite straightjacketed and narrow, and has therefore at least some degree of precision because it is more exclusive, while a word’s connotative world is infinitely richer and inclusive, brimming with associative images and suggestions, and overflowing with emotional and figurative relationships. The word ‘invitation’, for example, is denotatively a “written or verbal request inviting someone to go somewhere or to do something,” as in a wedding or birthday party invitation. Connotatively, however, an ‘invitation’ lives in an entirely different space –it is an incitement to venture out into strange new corridors of the world, a bidding to try new things, a giving of permission to go through doors that stand open but which may, at first blush, seem to us forbidding and ominous.

Toward Enlightenment.

            In the historical intervals that have followed upon the heels of enlightenment in the West, we are offered rare glimpses into an interpretative world, a kosmos, that is almost entirely illuminated and articulated by purely human categories of thinking. Enlightenment creates The Individual. This was obviously the case in the first period of Western enlightenment in ancient Greece, which gave rise to philosophy as the very first human scientia of things natural, and also in the second period of enlightenment in 18^th century Europe, which superintended the fairly radical dethronement of the Religious Mind and the gradual enthronement of the rational and thoroughly human Mind as the measure and interpreter of man in his world.

            In the first period of Western enlightenment, the “Space” where The Individual “happens” (—for many philosophers make the case that Socrates was in fact the West’s first individual and that he taught a philosophy where the individual mattered as individuum—) can be measured on a gradation that separates two influential Greek thinkers from the classical period: on the extreme rationalist end of our Scale of Individuality there is the Greek architect-philosopher, Hippodamus (498-408 BC), who originally hailed from Miletus in Asia Minor, and on the spiritualizing end of that scale there is the famous Athenian philosopher, Plato (ca. 428-347 BC).

            According to the Wiki-world on Hippodamus, we discover how, through this first urban planner, Man presumed to impose upon the real topography of the real physical world of hills & valleys and streams & rivers, the rationalizing and abstracted geographical grid-frames of strictly human and cosmetic thought. This was the birthright of rationalism, at its worst.

“Hippodamus… was an ancient Greek architect, urban planner, physician, mathematician, meteorologist and philosopher and is considered to be the “father” of urban planning, the namesake of Hippodamian plan of city layouts (grid plan). […] According to Aristotle, Hippodamus was the first author who wrote upon the theory of government, without any knowledge of practical affairs. His plans of Greek cities were characterised by order and regularity in contrast to the intricacy and confusion common to cities of that period, even Athens. He is seen as the originator of the idea that a town plan might formally embody and clarify a rational social order.”

On the other hand, although his dialogue The Republic has been almost entirely co-opted by political philosophers and re-constructed as some kind of feeble humbuggery disguised as a rational ‘theory of state’, Plato in fact allegorizes for us in The Republic, through the analogy of the State, the interior structures—the types of Souls—that can be found among Individual Men. In an aside, however, neither this idea nor this metaphor originates with Plato, because we find already a first incarnation of both in the nature poem of the Pre-Socratic philosopher-poet, Parmenides.

            If we follow out the broad strokes of the narrative in Plato’s Republic, Plato’s initiatory intent throughout his mythic “republican” allegory becomes obvious, an idea that can be said to be confirmed through later usage not only by the Christian apostle, Paul, who appropriated and employed the structure of that allegory to good effect in his New Testament letter to the Church in Corinth (I Corinthians 15:45ff), but also through usage by Neo-Platonic philosophers, such as the late 5^th century Boethius, who, in Book IV of the Consolation of Philosophy, divides man’s life journey into either a descent toward the embodiment of the life of the beasts (evil) or an ascent toward becoming gods (good).

            At a very basic level, in the Republic Plato means to portray for us in the Gyges myth (Book II) the ‘earthy’ man (Paul’s psychikon or soulish man, i.e., a man like the First Adam/Man; v 46-47) who burrows into the earth and discovers, but does not grasp the importance of, the limitations of earthly dreams and aspirations. Allegorically speaking, as an alternative to the life of burrowing and tunneling into the bowels of the earth, Plato tells us in Book VII a second story/allegory, the well-known allegory of the Cave, where we learn about the man who seeks enlightenment (Paul’s pneumatikon or heavenly/spiritual man, a man like the Second Adam/Man; v 46-47), who struggles to free himself from the earthly Cave, and who discovers, during his ascent out of the earth-womb, the higher, and indeed the highest truths in, about, and behind the World. In Plato’s final myth in the Republic (Book X), we discover a character whose name is Er. In this last myth Plato hopes for the Reader to understand that the choice is given to each of us as to how to live, either as the earthy man or the sky-bound man—the only choice that necessity imposes upon us is that we necessarily must choose the direction of our journey: either our lives will be as diggers and burrowers in the darkness, or as climbers toward the sunlight and the stars. Choose—we must; which direction–there is the rub!

            The one constant in the enlightened Greece of antiquity is the shift of philosophers and poets away from the gods. And in that shifting away from the Religious Mind, it is possible for us to cherry-pick illustrations of those thinkers who leaned toward the rationalizing interpretative framework of Hippodamus just as easily as one can those who tended to spiritualize Man after the way of Plato and his followers.

In the second period of Western enlightenment, the “Space” of The Individual is measurable by the progression of the democratic ideal from its small Western cradle to its pervasively global nesting grounds; and the cornerstone for this enlightenment vision is the idea of The Individual. As an idea, The Individual replaced the idea of the Divine Right of Kings (Phrontisterion essay, February 2015).

“The model for the democratic vision, of course, is European enlightenment, and flows organically from the beheading of the idea of the divine right of kings. When the one king is dead, then ‘We the People’ is assigned the burden of kingship – each one his own little bit. Upon reflection, though, in the democratic model how does one so tie the power of state to the individual, both philosophically and functionally, that the state is ensured a long, even if complex life? Historically speaking, the model of democracy in the west, inspired by the ideas of enlightenment, began life moored to several fundamental principles: participation in the vote; freedom of expression; separation of religious interference from the function and power of the state; and a press that badgers those holding office in order to inhibit the easy spread of corruption.”

At some point in our reflection there must arise an ambiguity, or perhaps it is only a tension, between The Individual conceived as physis or as kosmos. Until now, we have been considering The Individual primarily as a cosmetic entity, as an historical idea whose boundaries have been greatly expanded around the periods of enlightenment in the West. This conclusion is generally confirmed among historians of ideas working in just about every field. In his book Escape From Freedom, for example, the social psychologist Erik Fromm (Ch. II) agrees that as an idea, The Individual emerges as a post-enlightenment phenomenon (although he only refers to one period of Western enlightenment), maintaining that what he calls the ‘process of individuation’ or the ‘emergence of the individual’ “seems to have reached its peak in modern history in the centuries between the Reformation and the present.”

            However, there is also a more denotative aspect to the idea of The Individual, and that becomes clear when one begins to wonder what it means to be, essentially, “an” individual, beyond the more connotative elements that accrue to individuals as a result of their particular historical circumstances. Is there some essential quantity, or quality, that all men share as humans? Is there such a thing as an essential and therefore irreducible human nature? There have been two general philosophical theories on this question, which Phrontisterion has examined in “The Existentialist ‘Project’ & the Ostensible ‘Problem’ of Existence” (November 2013), which might be characterized as the Camusian position and the Sartrian position. Camus, following Nietzsche and others, thinks there is an essentialness to men, which, when considered as a collective, makes it meaningful to speak of men as Man. Sartre, in contrast, thinks that a man is, essentially, an empty set = {  }, that he is a bundle of possible choices linked to a specific space in time for a while, then not. In this respect, Fromm (op cit, 13) is Sartrian in his thinking about The Individual, for he writes:

“It is not as if we had on the one hand an individual equipped by nature with certain drives and on the other, society as something apart from him, either satisfying or frustrating these innate propensities. […] The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. […] Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.”

So, we have gained up to this point the idea that the history of Western enlightenments has been consistently marked by a shift in the boundaries of men’s view of both themselves as specific objects, as individuum, and of themselves as role-players in their world. Both historical shifts toward enlightenment have been characterized by an otherworldly vision of reality yielding the right-of-way to a this-worldly interpretation and expression of Man’s world, a progression from the Religious Mind to the Rational Mind.

           

Away from Enlightenment.

            However, History pauses for neither man nor idea, but turns itself over and over forever in response to “another shake of the kaleidoscope,” to borrow on Maurice Gee’s felicitous expression [Plumb, p. 142]—which only goes to show, once again, the prescience of old Heraclitus the Obscure, that rJei√n ta» o¢la potamouv di÷khn: “It is the way of things […] that, like the currents of the river, the whole [thing] just streams along” (D/K 12, vol. 1, p. 141; cf B12, 91). And as if in response to a free-wheeling period of Free-Thinking that followed hard on the heels of the first period of enlightenment, and which has come to be celebrated as the birth of Greek philosophy, came the onslaught of the Christian Church. And enlightenment gave way before it. Consequently, the Religious Mind would hold intellectual sway in Western History until the rise of the second period of enlightenment in Europe. And in the period following the second period of enlightenment, which is the swinging door to our contemporary world, it would seem that, once again, the Religious Mind is seeking to subjugate or vanquish entirely the free-thinking enlightenment ways of Western Nations and Men. The children of the first enlightenment yielded the floor to the Religious Mind and its belief. The children of the second enlightenment are not obliged to make the same choices as their intellectual forefathers.

            The Western notion of freedom, which is rooted in the rationalistic notions of The Enlightenment Individual, is not an absolute or eternal value, identical for all men at all times. Not all cultures articulate or value freedoms in the same way; and while the desire to be free may be arguably innate, as Fromm [op cit] thinks, he also suggests that “the human aspect of freedom” coexists within a coterie of deadly rivals, which include the longing for submission, and the lust for power. So when all is said and done it would seem that far from being static and fixed, the idea of freedom for the individual remains a negotiable quantity—philosophically & politically.

Our natural world (physis) spins out on a long thread of heat-releasing entropy… an ongoing give-and-take between order and disorder—and we must make our peace with that. But this principle must also then hold for the kosmos created by the human mind: the Age of Religion yields to the Age of Reason, which then yields again to the Religious Mind, which then yields again to whatever paradigmatic frame arises that can impose itself in the mix and jostle. And the whole of human history, like the currents of the river with all of its nooks & crannies and ebbs & flows, just keeps streaming along, sometimes quickly sometimes slowly; for human history also plays in the streams of entropy where order (The Age of Religion) submits to disorder (The Age of Reason), and then disorder to order, in a constant dance of ideas.  What is disorder, after all, but the intrinsic nature that frames the essential idea of “freedom”?

So what does it mean to live in the West, inside the Western mindset, governed by Reason and the principles of the Rights of Men? And what happens when there is no longer even a general consensus about the value of the enlightenment mindset (kosmos-disorder), but where the children of enlightenment begin to imagine alternative mindsets other than living in an environment of reasonable enlightenment? Where it becomes possible to imagine cohabitation between the Religious Mind and the Rational Mind?

            The Sophists of Plato’s day believed they could improve other men through their wise teaching, but Socrates whole-heartedly disagreed with them (Apology 20B). But if we are to believe Socrates, who is after all Plato’s great ethical hero, and if we really cannot improve one another through wise teaching, then at the end of the day we are left, truly, with only The Individual, who must discover and practice his own virtue—which, for Socrates, was following Justice. If, then, we side with Socrates on this idea that the individual is alone to unveil himself through his practice of virtue (i.e., rightness or justice), then it becomes important for the rest of us, as both spectators and players on the theatrical stages of life, and to whatever degree we wish to exemplify virtue, to take our cues from other fine actors. One man can make the difference. But the cost of making the difference can be exacting, as the pacifist journalist, Jean Jarres, discovered, who was practically the only man in the whole of France to publically stand against France and her imperious desire—at all costs, to enter the first war with Germany. The cost to Jarres was his life, assassinated in a restaurant.

Have the democratic nations of the West really reached the effective and unsuccessful end of Enlightenment Reason as the framework for self-governance? Is a society governed principally by Reason really just a dystopia patiently awaiting the inevitable return of halcyon days of innocence and goodness dripping like manna from the hand of one god or another? This seems to be Western history’s prophetic narrative.

            In an article entitled “kant’s depression, the author suggests that Immanuel Kant anticipated precisely this very unsatisfactory end-point of human reason:

“… What Kant doesn’t consider is that reason might actually be connected to depression, rather than stand as its opposite. What if depression – reason’s failure to achieve self-mastery – is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works “too well,” and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human beings? What we would have is a “cold rationalism,” shoring up the anthropocentric conceits of the philosophical endeavor, showing us an anonymous, faceless world impervious to our hopes and desires. And, in spite of Kant’s life-long dedication to philosophy and the Enlightenment project, in several of his writings he allows himself to give voice to this cold rationalism. In his essay on Leibniz’s optimism he questions the rationale of an all-knowing God that is at once beneficent towards humanity but also allows human beings to destroy each other. And in his essay “The End of All Things” Kant not only questions humanity’s dominion over the world, but he also questions our presumption to know that – and if – the world will end at all: “But why do human beings expect an end to the world at all? And if this is conceded to them, why must it be a terrible end?”

                  The implication in these and other comments by Kant is that reason and the “rational estimation of life’s value” may not have our own best interests in mind, and the self-mastery of reason may not coincide with the self-mastery of us as human beings (or, indeed, of the species as a whole). Philosophical reason taken to these lengths would not only make philosophy improbable (for how could one have philosophy without philosophers?), but also impractical (and what would be the use of such a “depressive reason”?). What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse.”

November's Blog_The Existentialist “Project” & the Ostensible “Problem” of Existence.

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.