RE: Existentialism
March 20, 2022 at 5:42 am
(This post was last modified: March 20, 2022 at 5:43 am by Belacqua.)
(March 19, 2022 at 3:26 pm)Istvan Wrote: existentialism poses a radical critique to Western metaphysics by knocking ontology off its pedestal and asserting that the human experience is the starting point of all talk about how reality is. As Sartre says, "The essence is not in the object, it is in the meaning of the object."
Existentialism, as you say, certainly does this -- centers human experience not as illusion but as the basis of reality.
I think if I were being careful I would want to say that Existentialism is part of a larger project which does this, and the project as a whole has many branches and many related approaches.
I'm going to write something long, and there are several people who find my long posts annoying, so this is a trigger warning.
I think it's fair to say that the big metaphysical change occurred with Galileo/Descartes/Newton. This was the time when scientists began to say that although we perceive colors, smells, tastes, etc., that these are all creations of the mind, and the REAL world "out there" is waves and particles.
Thus if the senses create pretty but false pictures, then a fortiori our judgements concerning beauty, justice, and other values are similarly human concoctions. This of course was a shock, since it was normally thought that colors and smells were "out there," and that beauty, justice, and the rest, were woven into the fabric of the universe.
(Here I'm going by The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, by Burtt. Not new but still clear and valuable.)
We can think of Existentialism as a reaction to this. While Sartre et.al. would agree that human values are not something physicists can detect in molecules, they also deny that such values are "just made up" and therefore not somehow "real." As if only scientific subjects can be taken seriously.
But I think the Existentialists are not alone in this. The reaction to the metaphysical shift was quick and varied. Most famously, I think, it was codified in Kant's "Copernican Revolution" which made our knowledge of the world not something that was "out there" and mirrored in the reflective mind, but created by us -- "Far from being a description of an external reality, knowledge is, to Kant, the product of the knowing subject. When the data are those of sense experience, the transcendental (mental) apparatus constitutes human experience or science, or makes it to be such." [Britannica]
So the idea that impressions and values are created by us, but also not simply illusion, is a sort of post-Kantian bedrock on which the Existentialists, as well as the Phenomenologists, the Nietzscheans, and others are standing.
Moreover there was strong push-back even before Kant. Most well known are William Blake and S.T. Coleridge in England, and some others in Germany about whom I know less. Both Blake and Coleridge, in their different ways, argued that the creations of the mind are real, and the scientific effort (as they saw it) to belittle human thought, feeling, and values was a serious danger. They foresaw the harm that mechanization and quantification, coupled with the undermining of values, would do to culture.
And both responded in particularly Christian ways. Coleridge argued that the creative faculty in people -- the one that makes the mental phenomena -- is the same power by which God made the universe (at a smaller scale). There is really no more important idea for Blake than this radically Christian anti-Newtonian epistemology, in which he declares that "The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself." That all we really are is our imagination. (And again here, "imagination" doesn't mean daydreaming; it means the faculty by which images [phenomena] appear in the mind.) He would say that the ideas and images we create are more real than the particles we postulate and quantify. And he would say that each of us creates the world that his current condition allows him to create, which is his only reality, and with which he must then endure. Where he differs from Sartre is his faith that Jesus has created a lower limit below which we cannot fall, and a hope that through sensory awakening we can achieve enlightenment in the here and now (which was, for him, Heaven).
Both were inspired, in their different ways, by the least famous but most influential thinker in German philosophy: Jacob Boehme. And there are a number of other anti-Enlightenment Germans (like Hamann) about whom I know little but were an important part of this project.
If you read early Nietzsche, before he got famous, his essays are just pretty much boilerplate German Romanticism. He is solidly in this tradition. When he begins to express original thoughts, though, they are very much along the lines of what I've been describing. The "real world" for him is chaos and far too horrifying to look at directly. Everything that appears to us in our minds is a dream-like image created by the Apollonian faculty of the mind -- which would look very familiar to Blake or Coleridge.
Nietzsche would have no trouble with the Existentialist idea that we are born with no essence, that we are thrown into a pre-made web that's not of our own making, and that it's our own duty to make of it what we can. In fact he looked down on people who just accept the world they are thrown into, without remaking it. Without our heroic creation, the world is absurd.
So all these guys, as far as I can see, are basically working on the same project as the Existentialists, avant la lettre.
Now you see why my long posts are unpopular.
Anyway, I have a question: as I understand it, Sartre spent his time as a POW translating Heidegger. What you referred to earlier as "facticity" sounded to me a lot like Heidegger's "thrownness." Do you think that Sartre makes a serious advance over Heidegger? Or is it that Sartre introduced these ideas into a France that was not ready to start reading a philosopher who had been a Nazi?
Also in the long run I think we have a serious challenge in what @Neo-Scholastic brings up. It hasn't been knock-down absolutely proven yet that certain truths aren't transcendentally true independent of human beings. And if these things are true, we are not right to say that the world is entirely absurd until we choose for it a meaning.
My worry, too, is that Existentialism, as sold, plugs too nicely into consumerism. But I will hold that for another overly long and verbose post.
I apologize.
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