(August 8, 2024 at 12:01 pm)Riddar90 Wrote: Søren Kierkegaard is said to be the father of it. But he is kinda forgotten about, probably because he argued heavily for Christianity in his texts.
But i was watching "The Seventh Seal" an old Swedish movie which has held up well. And the confession scene to death in that movie is probably what "keyword, existential crisis" tends to be to me when i think about it. I am just wondering how you feel about it? Anxiety of living etc.
The motto of Existentialism is "existence precedes essence."
In the bad old days, people believed that human beings have an essence -- or in more modern terms, "human nature." We are the way we are because we are the kind of animal we are, and we don't have a choice. So the kinds of needs and wants that are built into you as a human animal determine what kind of life you ought to live, and predetermine what choices will be good ones and which will be bad ones.
This idea of an essence started to get eroded by the modern philosophers. Locke's idea that we are a tabula rasa at birth, for example, opened up the possibility that a lot of what we take to be in-born ways of thinking are in fact learned, and could be different. As such ideas progressed, they reached more or less the opposite view from the pre-modern view. So Marx, for example, famously argued that there is no such thing as human nature. That all of our values and desires get programmed into us by culture. And therefore these can be programmed differently, if culture changes.
Obviously there are points to human nature which can't change -- we need oxygen, we need food, etc. But the debate about which parts are inevitable for humans and which aren't went on a long time, and continues to go on. So for example in the bad old days a lot of people thought that a man and a woman getting married and making babies is "just human nature," and though some people won't do it (for various reasons) it is still the type of life that is born into us as what we're "meant for."
Another way to describe this is nomos vs. physis. Nomos being law, custom, tradition, social habits. And physis being the material nature of things that humans don't decide. Going to senior prom at your high school is not inevitable, it is nomos. Needing to eat is physis.
Many of the cultural issues that have been debated over the years boil down to this distinction. Is marriage simply custom, or is it built into our human nature?
Capitalists say that greed is built into our human nature, and therefore a system which harnesses that greed is best. (Their system, of course.) More recently scholars like David Graeber have looked at history and concluded that cultures don't have to put greed front and center, that many times and places in history have been more generous and egalitarian. So the capitalists perhaps have to give up their physis-based arguments as to why we should all be capitalists.
Having a human nature is not necessarily a religious thing. Whether you think your essence is given to you by God or something that evolved for survival, the fact of human nature is still there. Or not.
The Existentialists staked out the extreme nomos-only position. They say that we are born without an essence, and that we form one for ourselves through the choices that we make. Many of these choices, especially when we're young, are made more or less unconsciously, or are made for us, but they are still choices.
Once you grow up and you realize how much of life is choice, then you become radically responsible for everything in your life. If you say "Oh man, I don't want to go to work tomorrow but I have to," your friendly neighborhood Existentialist will say, "No, you don't HAVE to. You CHOOSE to." In fact you are radically free. You could go right now to the ATM, draw out all your money, and buy a plane ticket to New York. Nothing is stopping you. If you point to things that are stopping you (family responsibilities, desire for comfort, risk-avoidance, etc.) then these are the choices you have made -- the things you have chosen in place of your freedom. You can continue to choose these things, but there is no force besides yourself which makes you stick to them.
You can see how this appealed to a post-War generation which was ready to question all the old social norms. If the traditional ways of life led to mass slaughter, then maybe we really should go back to zero and choose all different things. So we go Existentialists --> Beatniks --> Hippies, with each group questioning and rejecting customs.
Of course radical views like this seldom last. Today we are going back to an essence, or physis, but it's a different kind. So for example with trans people: Existentialists would say that everyone is free to make the choice of continuing with their current gender identity or choosing a new one. This is totally free. But today's argument is "born this way." That is, I DO have an essence which I haven't chosen, and gender-affirming surgery is done to bring the rest of me more in line with this nature that I was born with. Anyone who says "I'm REALLY this way, and I didn't choose it, whether you recognize it or not," is not an Existentialist.
