This paper is a book review and a synopsis of, “Existentialism for Dummies,” written by Christopher Panza and Gregory Gale. It is also a partial essay on Existentialism. The author strongly recommends the aforementioned book.
The book is available at Amazon here.
Freddy Martini
The book is available at Amazon here.
See Existentialism Part 1 here.
Part Two
Our unique way of existing in the
world
What
is the meaning of human existence? What
makes human existence unique? What is
the meaning of existence? There are
things that we may call beings, such as common objects: pencil, stove, sink,
car, road, rock, book, etc. These are
objects or beings existing in the world around us. When we move to the question of existence,
the mode of language shifts slightly from “a being” to “being” or
“existence.” It is one thing to be. It is another thing to question everything –
i.e., everything in the universe and in our minds – and ask as Heidegger asked,
“Why does all this exist rather than there just being nothing?” Not only are we asking why do we exist as
humans, but why does anything exist
at all. It seems that Heidegger was the
first to investigate this aspect of philosophy with seriousness.
How
do we investigate existence? Science is
not the answer, since science only looks at things as objects – from the
outside. A human being is not an object
that can be observed from the outside after which one can write a coherent
theory on this sample or multiple samples of humans. Again, man has interiority, or,
intentionality, that is unavailable for access by any scientific instrumentation. Technologists may invent amazing machines to
perform brain scans, but they will never be able to understand how you
experience a red apple. This experience
is not available to anyone or anything exterior from a person.
Engagement
The
human method of existence according to some existentialists, such as Martin
Heidegger, involves being engaged with the world. Humans must exist within a social context and
must live life through engagement with
projects and goals. Animals may have goals of survival, but it is
not likely they have projects. The
social world and the physical world provide humans with tools and equipment to
engage in the world. Our lives are
oriented socially and toward activity through projects, goals, tools, and
equipment.
Space
Another
aspect of existence is Space. As
expected, this concept is not the scientific sense of the term involving
meters, centimeters and square kilometers.
It is the space of engaging with the world within your existential
situation. Where or how are we
situated? How are we acting with
reference to our social situation, our goals, or our equipment? Some concerns are closer to you. Other concerns are foreign to you. How far are you away from West Indian cooking
recipes? How close are you to the politics
of your local library’s elections for Director of Procurement? How close are you to your work and your
goals? How close are you to the concerns
of your family and friends? So, the
space of our existential situation is a way of describing the connection and
intensity with regard to the particulars existing within our situation.
Meaning
Existentialists
claim that humans can live without many things; however, humans cannot live
without meaning. Men will give their
lives in charging a military position, if they know that their mission or cause
has meaning to them. However, our lives,
as we are given, have no inherent meaning; we must create our own. Creating meaning in our lives is not an easy
task since the old systems are no longer able to give us confidence in their
efficacy; we must start almost from scratch.
Perhaps we can use pieces of
the old systems, but we must create meaning ourselves for ourselves.
Since
we are engaged in goals and projects, we need tools. The essence of the pursuit of something
implies that we will use things available to us as tools or instruments to
pursue our values. Sometimes tools are
readily available to us. At other times,
we must search for them.
Heidegger
explains that, in living in this world, it is necessary to come into contact
with other beings like ourselves. We are
using tools to pursue our projects. Some
of these tools we create, and other tools are created by others. In the first years of our lives we are
completely dependent upon others for our survival. As we become more competent, we develop the
ability to create our own tools, make more choices, and interact with others in
trading one value for another.
However,
in our interaction with others, we risk becoming inauthentic if we simply accept
the social values and social trends around us.
To go along to get along puts us at risk to pursuing the values of
others, possibly to the detriment of our own.
To be authentic, we pursue our values, and we must be honest with
ourselves in what we are doing, and not passively accept the values of the
social situation we find ourselves in.
Sometimes this is not easy; but, being authentic is always a
struggle. It is especially a struggle if
our values are much different from those within our social situation.
Passion in our lives
Existentialists
suggest that we need passion in our lives.
In the pursuit of our values, we must increase our risk, accept the
struggles and fights accompanying such pursuits, and engage in life with a
large dose of zeal. We are to be engaged
with the people and the things around us.
Our tools to pursue our projects, the people with which we interact in
life and our work are all potential objects of our passions. It is not exactly what you do that concerns existentialists; it is how you do it. Life is to be worked with, fought with,
wrestled with, and engaged. It is to
take your life seriously and to seriously live your life. This passion is focused and intense. It is focused upon being a Subject that
chooses how it interacts, instead of a passive object to be acted upon.
Finding Something Worth Dying For
We
should find a cause in our lives that expresses our values, and expresses our
lives. We should find a cause such that
it is worth dying for; one must find a reason to live such that one stakes one’s
life upon it. Living otherwise is
undignified. Choosing this cause will
undoubtedly include some measure of mystery and risk, since we are not
guaranteed success or failure. We cannot
predict how things will turn out after we make certain decisions. Since life has a large element of absurdity,
some of the consequences may be strange and senseless, thus mysterious.
Engagement to Live in Truth
Existentialists
make the bold claim that when a person engages with life in a passionate way as
we have heretofore described, this person exists in the Truth. Typically, when
we loosely speak of truth, we mean objective truth. However, existentialists are more interested
in subjective truth. Instead of something externally discovered,
it is something that we appropriate and make our own. This does not mean that we ignore objective
truth. It just means that when
determining how to live our lives, we must know it subjectively. Subjective truth implies how we are involved
and engaged with the world. When we
speak of objective truth, we know about the properties of an external
object. When we speak of subjective
truth, we speak of how we subjectively know something, how we are connected to
something with meaning – what does this mean to me? The objective truth says that this table is
made of wood. The subjective truth may
claim that this table is a symbol of the strength of my family when I can
remember them gathered around the table each night for dinner. One can be put to a scientific test with instrumentation;
the other is inaccessible to the scientific method from a physical perspective.
One
paradox that Kierkegaard notices is that the more one pursues the objective
truth of the object of our passions, the less passionate we become about
it. Thus, the passionate pursuit of our
truth value involves some uncertainty about its objectivity. This is another aspect of Existentialism that
illustrates that risk and uncertainty are important aspects of the pursuit of
our goals with passion.
In
shifting to a subjective view of the Truth, one can find a Truth that is yours
and yours alone. An objective Truth
belongs to all, a subjective Truth may or may not.
In
uncovering Truth that is yours and yours alone, it is important to understand
that crowds of people do not find this type of Truth. Since subjective Truth is yours and yours
alone, you must look for it apart from the crowds. You must find this Truth within yourself. This can be
scary for those accustomed to seeking consensus from others, but living
according to one’s values requires us to make the effort.
Modern Temptation Toward the Easy Life
Modern
life is dull. It drains us of passion.
We are encouraged to pursue the easy life.
We look for ways to distract ourselves from facing existential questions
and engaging existence around us. This
is the age of mediocrity where we are encouraged to pursue the average, or
pursue a bourgeois life of well-being with a minimization of risk. Simulation of engagement is another aspect of
this: how many people play video games to simulate passionate and dangerous
situations? We want the feeling of
danger without the real danger. People
want to attend protests, but they do not want to risk arrest, jail or death; feeling like one makes a difference
instead of actually making a difference.
Often people get together and write up revolutionary documents, publish
them, and then go home feeling as
though they made a difference. Often,
playing it safe in our modern age seems like the smart move.
Media as an Instrument of Untruth
Kierkegaard
attacked the media. He saw the crowd as
a threat to subjective Truth. However,
with printing, one gets wide distribution of the voice of the crowd or the
“public.” Media tempts us to get
involved on issues and subjects about which we know very little, and about
which we would care little otherwise.
Often media issues are very far removed from issues that are concrete to
us and “close to home” to the point where we neglect many things “at hand” in
our lives for things far away and often irrelevant to us. The media also gives the crowd an appearance
of strength, and even Truth, which makes it extremely dangerous. It is easy to deal with others’ issues since
it does not involve any risk; it illustrates another case of moderns not
confronting the issues in front of their own lives. The press invites us to spend time and effort
on fake issues, and in the meantime, the minutes of our lives slip away on
unimportant things at the expense of our values. Also we are spread so thin among a variety of
issues to the point where we cannot focus a sufficient amount of time on a
single issue so that we know the issue competently; this produces superficiality
about subjects about which we know little, and upon which we are tempted to
pontificate.
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