IMAGINING OTHER
Political Philosophy Part 2
Existentialism
Links:
Imagining Other Index Page.
Political Philosophy Contents Page.
Notes on Feminism (especially Simone
de Beauvoir).
Summary: these – rather
unusual notes – are in two parts:
(a) Notes on the philosophy
of existentialism, with particular reference to Sartre
(b) Additional notes:
(i) obituary of Harold Blackham 1903 – 2009 (author of an excellent book on
existentialism) (Guardian 090209)
(ii) Notes on Rilke
– this is where it gets more unusual…
(iii) further personal notes – and
more unusual still…
(iv) the poetry of Don Paterson.
(a) Definition and Introduction to Sartre (1905 –
1980)
Educated in
From 1933 he studied in
Founded
‘Les Temps modernes’ with Simone de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty.
Was politically active in
support of far-left groups (Maoists), even selling their papers on the streets
of
1. Existentialism starts by rejecting any ‘metaphysical’ beliefs
concerning the creation of man etc. It holds that: (i)
there is no God, and religion is false (though see the note below on #Kiekegaard), and (ii) there
is no pre-determined ‘human nature’ (which is contrary to a religious –
specifically Christian – view.) Sartre, for example, in his book ‘Being and
Nothingness’ 1943, starts with the ‘absolute absence of God’ (Richard Eyre
Guardian Arts Theatre 030500) – “First of all man exists… turns up, appears on
the scene, and only afterwards, defines himself.”
Sometimes the philosophy is
summarised as ‘existence precedes
essence’. Existentialism then explores the nature of our ‘existence.’
In focusing on ‘existence’,
Sartre was influenced by Husserl and Heidegger. The ideas of these ‘phenomenologists’ clearly preceded
existentialism in their attempt to focus on ‘phenomena’ and how we are aware of
the world around us. Whilst Descartes’ ideas had led to a tendency to
see mind and body as separate, Husserl, in an attempt
to understand the immediacy of experience, suggested that consciousness is
always ‘of’ something (something other than consciousness) – that is, it
exhibits an ‘intention’. Sartre took this up, and also Heidegger’s notion of ‘Dasein’ (being-in-the-world), to argue that our
existence is based on our active involvement in the world – not on our ‘thinking’. As Simon
Blackburn puts it (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy): ‘the self… constituted by
acts of intentionality and consciousness… is historically situated, but as an
agent whose own mode of locating itself in the world makes for responsibility
and emotion.’
2. Existentialism is most
unusual as a philosophy, (except where it builds on phenomenology – e.g. Edmund Husserl) in
that it examines basic questions like ‘what
does it feel like to exist’? In
this, existentialism has close connections with literature, as in fiction,
poetry etc, a writer is able to explore such feelings. One of Sartre’s most
famous novels, and his first (published 1938) in which he sets out the basic
ideas of his philosophy, is called ‘Nausea’ – because that is what the central
character feels when he is face-to-face with his own existence and that of the
world around him. Other existentialists such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) described this feeling as ‘Angst’. Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) (who never
accepted the label ‘existentialist’ but is generally seen as one!) wrote of: ‘the absurd’. Nietzsche stressed ‘joy’
and ‘the will’, religious existentialists a feeling of awe or mystery. See
also: Jaspers, Berdyaev, Unamuno.
The term existentialists use
to describe the fact of our simply existing with no apparent reason or purpose
is that we exist ‘contingently’.
If there is no God, and we
have no ‘nature’ that we are born with and cannot escape from, then we are free to define ourselves (what we want to
be). In this, the philosophy is also a reaction against the ‘determinism’
of late 19th century thought e.g. Freud,
Note also that Sartre did use
some similar concepts to Hegel (the dialectic, totalisation, alienation, objectification).
3. Each of us is a ‘being-for-itself’, unlike a physical
object, which simply is what it is - ‘being-in-itself’
- and which has no ability to change itself. The ‘in-itself’ is solid,
self-identical, passive and inert (from Stanford encyclopedia, see reference
below); the ‘for-itself’ is fluid, non self-identical, and dynamic. We humans
are both kinds of being – we have a ‘facticity’: the ‘givens’ of our existence
(I would suggest this means the body primarily, and its attributes i.e.
feelings, appetites? The Stanford article suggests it refers to our ‘language,
environment, previous choices, and our very selves’ – this doesn’t seem clear
to me, as we can change much of this). Simon Blackburn again: ‘Sartre locates
the essential nature of human existence in the capacity for choice, although
choice, being equally incompatible with determinism and with the existence of a Kantian moral law, implies a synthesis
of consciousness (being-for-itself) and the objective (being-in-itself) that is
forever unstable’. What we do – as
beings-for-ourselves – is try to ‘transcend’ our ‘facticity’. (Simone de
Beauvoir will use this idea in her work on the position of women, who she says
live in a world where men have monopoly of the means of ‘transcendence’, and
women are condemned to be unable to escape their ‘facticity’).
Of course, we have – as
existents – no choice over the fact that we have come into existence, nor over
the fact that we are ‘for-ourselves’: we are, Sartre said, ‘condemned to be free’. We are, in a sense, pure potential – but we can only realise
ourselves by accepting that everything else (what I am not, and what I could
become) is ‘nothingness’. As Heidegger put it: ‘Human existence cannot have a relationship
with being unless it remains in the midst of nothingness (nichts).’ (This formulation from The Cry… www.thecry.com/existentialism).
Nothingness can also be understood as: ‘the object of objectless anxiety,
death, and the indeterminacy of human nature’ (Fontana Dictionary of Modern
Thought, ed. Alan Bullock et al 1988).
(It is worth pointing out here
that the philosophy is associated closely with the creative work of writers and
artists – and several great writers have existentialist themes: e.g. Dostoievsky, Kafka, Beckett. Among
more recent writers who acknowledge existentialism is Norman Mailer (and see
below). Other ‘predecessors’ include William Blake, Marquis de Sade…)
However, we find all this –
the notion of our freedom to define ourselves, ‘nothingness’, together with the
absence of God and therefore of absolute, fixed, pre-determined standards of
morality etc – terrifying. (Hence: ‘angst’).
So, to avoid the
responsibility for making fundamental choices about our lives, we are tempted
to adopt roles, which ‘tell’ us how
to behave. (I am: a man… an intellectual (perhaps!)… middle
class… a teacher… a socialist/pacifist etc…). In a sense, we attempt to become
‘things’, as this feels more comfortable!
Note that this outline
implies that different existentialists may take up different attitudes to life,
different politics etc. Thus Heidegger supported the Nazis (to the
embarrassment of other philosophers!), Sartre supported the communists and
Maoists (but he got into trouble with other leftists for denying the atrocities
of Stalin), Kierkegaard was a Christian – though he
argued that God and man are ‘utterly distinct’ from each other, and faith involves
a ‘leap’ which transcends reasoning (Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, ed.
Alan Bullock et al , 1988) - so it is not as simple as saying that
existentialism = atheism!, and Berdyaev was close to
the Russian Orthodox church.
4. When we do this (adopt a
role), especially if we try to convince ourselves that we had no choice, Sartre
calls it ‘bad faith’ – what we
should aim at is ‘authenticity’. To
me this means being true to our freedom, responsible for the choices we make,
not adopting alibis or excuses or blaming others or our environment….
5. It follows that we need to
accept our ‘responsibility’ for our
choices. However, this cannot – in my view – be equated with an amoral
individualism, since (see especially ‘Existentialism is a
Humanism’ 1946) we have to recognise that others have their freedom and responsibility to themselves also.
They too are ‘beings for themselves’ – even though we may be tempted to treat
them as ‘beings in themselves’ (or as part of the ‘nothingness’ around us?) –
see point 6 below. Sartre even goes so far as to say that we feel responsible
for everything – ‘freedom entails total
responsibility’. It seems to me that Sartre is at this point not far from
Kant – however, Sartre himself seems later to have become uncomfortable about
what he wrote in Existentialism and Humanism (it was a transcript of a speech,
and it shows his response to critics who said that existentialism had no
ethics), and in his later writing e.g. ‘Critique de la Raison Dialectique’,
1960, (and in his political activism) Sartre drew on Marxism, saying it was ‘the philosophy of our times’. His attempt
to fuse existentialism (which tends to emphasise our individual feelings about
existence) with Marxism (which posits ‘man’ as a social being) is generally
regarded as a failure. Existentialism has a problem if it wants to argue we
should work together.
6. This difficulty is shown
even more clearly by another controversial and troubling aspect of Sartre’s
existentialism – and something he tried to deal with in his ‘Marxist’ writing –
his treatment of ‘the other’ (other people, as we encounter their existence).
We actually have no way of knowing or deducing that others are ‘for-themselves’
(the old philosophical problem: how do I know other minds exist?) – but when we ‘encounter’ them we are aware they (like
ourselves) have characteristics of both a ‘for-itself’ (a subject) and an
‘in-itself’ (an object). We are also aware that the ‘other’ sees us this way –
and just as it is easier for a ‘subject’ to try to evade its own
‘transcendence’ presumably it is also easier to treat others as
‘in-themselves’, as objects. So we are aware that others may try to reduce us
to ‘objects’ also.
This idea is dramatically
illustrated in Huis Clos,
in which three people are condemned to live together for eternity with no
access to the outside world (i.e. they are ‘in Hell’). Each has something in
their past of which they are ashamed or embarrassed – and they try to hide it
from the others. But each also tries to get to the truth about the others, and
the three are trapped in a situation of intense discomfort – so that ‘Hell is
other people’ seems to be the message. Sartre’s later Marxism is an attempt, it seems to me, to move on from this pessimistic
position.
7. I found one of the ideas
from Sartre’s ‘Marxist’ period particularly convincing: he suggests that when
people act or work together they can form one of two kinds of group: the first
he calls a ‘series’ – here each individual remains as an individual and the
group has no strong collective identity. The other kind of group involves each
member committing him/herself to the group, which then gives the group an
identity of its own. ‘Commitment’ is a key idea in Sartre: one way we can
become authentic is by choosing a course of action and committing ourselves to
it - presumably provided we always retain the ability to change and no longer
be committed? Otherwise we would be in a similar position to a thing-in-itself,
surely?
Sartre’s life-companion,
Simone de Beauvoir, used several of the above concepts (‘transcendence’, and
‘the other’ particularly) to radically reappraise the role of women in society
(in The Second Sex). See the link at the top of these notes.
Notes from: http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/sart.htm, and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
Works:
(i)
fiction:
Nausea – a novel which dramatizes
the sense of existence (the existence of the natural physical world) as
‘nauseating’. We humans are ‘excessive’ (‘de trop’)…
Roads to Freedom – a novel in
three parts, dealing with the experience of France before and during the Second
World War, and exploring existentialist themes in the writing. For example, the
second part – “The Reprieve” – describes a group of characters in 1938, hoping
despite the build-up to war that there will be a ‘reprieve’, and they will not
have to make difficult choices,
Huis Clos 1944 – Sartre was
asked for a play (Eyre loc cit) that had three characters and gave them equal
treatment, equal number of lines, all three always on stage… Sartre liked
theatre because it relies on metaphor, and enabled him to ‘test’ his theories
with ‘real’ characters and situations. It also forced him to condense his
ideas.
Les Mains Sales – first
performed 1948, and widely seen as an attack on communism: but when this
interpretation was given too much weight, and it was being used ‘to castigate
the left’ Sartre banned performances (1952). A young man is set the task of
assassinating another political figure, because the man is supposed to be
betraying the ‘true’ line by wanting to work in a coalition. The young man
falls in love with the target’s wife, and then kills him: but was he motivated
by politics or jealousy? This is the question of ‘authenticity’. In its
politics there are parallels (for Eyre) with Northern Ireland… The play
explores means and ends, class, sex, growing up etc. Eyre put the play on at
the Almeida, in May 2000, under the title The Novice, as it is as much about
innocence as about belief and expediency.
(ii) philosophical:
Being and
Nothingness. (1943)
Existentialism and (is)
Humanism. (1946)
Critique of
Dialectical Reason. (1960)
(b) More on Existentialism, Humanism, and perhaps
going beyond existentialism…
Note: these notes become quite personal in places, but
that’s the nature of existentialism – if it doesn’t make us re-examine our
existence, our being, then it has failed!
(i) Harold Blackham 1903 – 2009
- obituary (G 090209)
Author of
Six Existentialist Thinkers 1952 – standard university textbook, (and one which
shaped my thinking on existentialism).
Pioneer of modern humanism (Andrew
Cropson writes). Founded British
Humanist Assoc. 1963. In 1933 went to London and assisted social
reformer Stanton Coit, became secretary to Ethical
Union. Assisted in transporting Jewish refugees from Austria and helped
organise 1938 conference of World Union of Freethinkers ‘before the double
onslaught of fascism and communism’.
Founded the
journal “Plain View’ in 1944, which attracted e.g. Julian Huxley and Gilbert
Murray.
In 1952 founded International
Humanist Ethical Union with Jaap van Praag. Now is worldwide union with over 100 organisations
in 40 nations. Also worked with Barbara Wootton, AJ
Ayer, Jacob Bronowski.
Contributed to pioneering practical work in sheltered housing, adoption and
non-directive counseling – co-founded British Assn for Counselling in 1977.
Lectured, e.g. at Goldsmiths.
1953: The Human Tradition,
1966: Religion in a modern Society, 1968: Humanism. 1996: The Future of our
Past from Ancient Greece to Global Village. 2001: wrote epilogue to JB Bury’s A History of Freedom of Thought.
Made BHA a vehicle for moral
education (with Cyril Bibby, Lionel Elvin, Sir
Gilbert Fleming, Edward Blishen).
Co-founded Journal of Moral Education (extant).
Sought to work with
non-humanists e.g. in Social Morality Council – now Norham
Foundation.
(ii) Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Long, long ago I copied a
page from a website (*) concerning existentialism. Now I look at it again, and at the extracts
from Rilke copied below, I am amazed: the depth of
the analysis of our fear of the future; the strange and yet familiar idea that
in moments of silence and sadness we can open ourselves to something else – the
future, our destiny... and that we need to go through this, and much more, to
be part of the whole. Yes, in moments of sadness it is too easy to be stuck in
the present or the past, even the immediate past – ‘move on, I must keep moving
on…’ Perhaps Beckett is making the same point in his plays. Perhaps most the
striking – and difficult – part of this extract is the idea that once we have
taken in our ‘destiny’ it then “steps forth out of us to others”… As I feel this text is saying something to
me, I want to try to put its ideas into my own words: When we are paralysed with fear, tension, anxiety about life – the
thing to do is not to be angry, noisy, violent, but to seek stillness, silence,
and open ourselves out so that a ‘way forward’ can come to us. Stillness,
silence and openness (as in Quaker meetings) will help us find the way forward
– not shouting, violence, ‘closed’ behaviour. And when one person succeeds in
this, then others receive something from them – the ‘silence’, the gentleness,
is infectious – just as violence creates only violence, so gentleness creates
gentleness…
[(*) The website is www.thecry.com/existentialism -
see this link for further links! Authors listed Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855), Dostoievsky, Allen, Sartre, Jaspers, Camus,
Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, Rilke.
Notes on the website are very brief, tantalizing, but give the ‘feel’ of existentialism
I think.]
Quotes
from Rilke:
“I believe that almost all our sadnesses are
moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our
surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the
alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and
accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a
transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness
too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart,
has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, is already in
our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe
that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into
which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never
know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in
order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is
so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently
uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much
closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it
happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we
are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does
the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more
will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it "happens" (that
is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin
and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary and toward this our
development will move gradually that nothing strange should befall us, but only
that which has long belonged to us. We have already had to think so many of our
concepts of motion we will also gradually learn to realize that that which we
call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them. Only
because so many have not absorbed their destinies and transmuted them within
themselves while they were living in them, have they not recognized what has
gone forth out of them; it was so strange to them that, in their bewildered
fright, they thought it must only just then have entered into them, for they
swear never before to have found anything like it in themselves. As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they
are even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come. The
future stands firm . . . but we move in infinite space.
How should it not
be difficult for us?
…to childhood illnesses that
began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days
in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to
seas, to it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have
memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others,
memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who
have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room
with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to
have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must
have the immense patience to wait until they return.
Not into a beyond
whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole, into the whole”.
(iii) Further personal notes:
I recall the strange
experience in my yoga class the Monday after singing at the Stratford and East
London Festival this year (Feb/March 2009). My performance had not impressed
the adjudicator, and I was sad… as we lay in our final relaxation (‘yoga nidra’ literally yoga sleep, but meaning that the mind is
stilled, rather like in the stillness that Rilke
describes above?), and Jill had run through the parts of the body for us to
focus quickly on each, she came to the words ‘the whole body, the whole body’
and I felt extraordinary (just as Rilke describes
it): how wonderful it is that the whole of this complex living thing works, all
its parts working together, without thought… and suddenly the sadness lifted –
perhaps as Rilke says, ‘something new entered into
me’… From that moment it all fell into perspective,
and my sadness didn’t matter any more.
Soon after, the phrase ‘a
still small voice’ came to me. Of course I know this is a Biblical quotation,
but it occurred to me that perhaps what some people call ‘God’ is just this
small still voice that comes to us at moments of calm, and brings a message –
as Rilke would say – of the future.
Strangely, too, I am learning
an aria from Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and borrowed a copy of the whole work from
Jenny Gould. There in the Biblical extracts on which
the piece is based, is the passage (1 Kings 19:11 -12) about ‘a mighty wind
[that] rent the mountains around, brake in pieces the rocks… but yet the Lord
was not in the tempest… God the Lord passed by! And the sea was upheaved and the earth was shaken: but yet the Lord was not
in the earthquake… And after the earthquake there came a fire: but yet the Lord
was not in the fire. And after the fire there came a still small voice; and in
that still voice, onward came the Lord.’
A still, small voice… the
gentle way… these are thoughts I need to hold to, to get through life – let
alone to bring anything to others…
But (Sep. 2009): it is easy
to lose this feeling – ‘things fall apart’… and there is the danger that when
one even small part of the whole is not working as I would wish, (since
everything is connected and has its impact on the whole) then the ‘whole’ feels
bad… Then also, perhaps, I simply lose
my sense of being part of a bigger whole (see the quote from Rilke above) – though this is not Sartre’s existentialism.
Re-reading the extract, I am still a little unsure about it: the theme seems to
be one’s ‘destiny’ – a very different notion from existentialism!
(iv) 190909: Review of poetry by Don Paterson: Rain
(Faber) – by Adam Newey:
the poems play with our sense of reality and perspective:
“The Swing”, with its
‘nothing made a sound’ (the sound of nothingness?) – throughout is evidence of ‘awareness
of the viewing, thinking self’ - a kind
of Platonic enquiry into the self and its relation to the physical world –
‘When you lift your hand or tongue, what is it moves to make you move?’ – we may be trapped inside our own consciousness, yet there is
something that ‘hurries on its course/ outside every human head.’
“The Day” deals with
existential loneliness – but the one thing that can bridge the gap between us
is love… sometimes…
Elsewhere (“Phantom”): ‘We
come form nothing and return to it’ – ‘We are ourselves the void in
contemplation./ We are its only nerve and hand and
eye.’
PS on Paterson: what kind of
synchronicity is it that he has written a translation of Rilke’s collection of
poems “Orpheus”? http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/29/poetry.features2
And it may be significant also that he appeals to me since he describes how God died for him, when he was an adolescent, though the search for God did not end, and that now he finds Buddhism offers a path to finding the way to say these things - though a ‘difficult one to honour’ - from an article in the Independent:
This is a good page, on
Paterson and Rilke, too: http://www.preoccupations.org/2006/11/don_paterson_ri.html