Existentialism

[Angrboda]

There's room for both, it could be both reassuring and true.  Describing it as comforting doesn't make it untrue.  Personally, I suspect the opposite, that most are afraid of giving up the notion of responsibility that they think determinism entails.

Fair enough. I'm no physicist, so I just assume it boils down to what vision of the universe one prefers: a world of contingency and uncertainty on the one hand, or one of machine-like order and algorithmic inevitability on the other.

Those are fables. Meant to impress little children.

[Belacqua]

I've been all over the atheist blogosphere and it seems like a whole lot of folks don't realize that they've been fed a warmed-over positivism by folks like Dawkins and Harris. The party line seems to be that science tells us how reality is in a completely objective way, our perception-consciousness-free will-yadda yadda are all illusions, all our joys and passions are mere squirts of neurochemicals, and anyone who thinks there's anything but atoms and the void must be a religious nut. I don't consider it unreasonable to question this nostalgic reductionism.

Yes, this has been very frustrating. There are people posting here who take it for granted that religion is just some sort of remnant -- a worthless crust obscuring people's view of a clear and obvious truth, revealed by Science. Which means of course that once the evil crust has been burned away, we will have peace and a steady happy progress toward unquestionable Truth and luxury living. "Reductionism" is a kind word for this. 

People who think they have no ideology generally have the strongest ideology.

(I like your Giacometti, by the way. A wonderful pure artist, and nicely in keeping with the Existentialist vibe.)

[Neo-Scholastic]

Yeah, Giacometti was on one cover of Irrational Man, a popular survey of Existentialist philosophers.

[Belacqua]

Existentialism is basically the concept that our actions and encounters throughout life are what define us.

This makes me wonder about the well-known phrase "existence precedes essence." 

It seems like a really helpful phrase -- Existentialism in a nutshell -- if you sort of squint. But if I think about it carefully it's pretty difficult, simply because "essence" is not a word we use much any more. 

I suspect that to Sartre and de Beauvoir, who had deep training in philosophy (École normale supérieure!) it had a very precise meaning. Just because a lot of those Aristotelian/Thomist words (like "cause") which used to be exact have now become fuzzy. 

So what does it mean that I create my essence, after I come into existence? Is it just my personality? My likes and dislikes? My successes and failures? 

Do I have to decide on some meaning for my life to have an essence ("I am here on this earth to save stray cats"), or can I just sort of fumble along?

[Istvan]

Existentialism is basically the concept that our actions and encounters throughout life are what define us.

This makes me wonder about the well-known phrase "existence precedes essence." 

It seems like a really helpful phrase -- Existentialism in a nutshell -- if you sort of squint. But if I think about it carefully it's pretty difficult, simply because "essence" is not a word we use much any more. 

I suspect that to Sartre and de Beauvoir, who had deep training in philosophy (École normale supérieure!) it had a very precise meaning. Just because a lot of those Aristotelian/Thomist words (like "cause") which used to be exact have now become fuzzy. 

So what does it mean that I create my essence, after I come into existence? Is it just my personality? My likes and dislikes? My successes and failures? 

Do I have to decide on some meaning for my life to have an essence ("I am here on this earth to save stray cats"), or can I just sort of fumble along?

I think it's a handy slogan because it describes the thrust of existentialism. Much harm has been done in the name of human nature, essentialism, bad faith and cultural identity. So it's a necessary corrective to the way of thinking that defines us in terms of a pre-existing function or nature; we need to recognize that humans have constructed these functions and natures for their own ends.

Simone De Beauvoir also gets a lot of mileage out of a phrase she attributes to Sartre: Man is a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being. In other words, the human being needs to realize that we are nothing except what we make of ourselves, so we need to define ourselves in terms of the lack of what we wish to become and thereby disclose Being. And all this deciding and intending is nothing without action.

---

Yeah, Giacometti was on one cover of Irrational Man, a popular survey of Existentialist philosophers.

I've walked next to Walking Man at the Art Institute of Chicago. And I just recently reread Irrational Man, which I consider an excellent summary of the ideas and historical context of existentialism.

[Belacqua]

the human being needs to realize that we are nothing except what we make of ourselves, so we need to define ourselves in terms of the lack of what we wish to become and thereby disclose Being. And all this deciding and intending is nothing without action.

[emphasis added]

I suspect that in Existentialist books there is a great deal said about facticity, or thrownness, and exactly where we can draw the lines of what is a situation we are thrown into, and what is chosen by us. And then we have to ask to what degree our essence -- or let's say "that which we truly are" -- is a part of this thrownness or something we freely choose. 

So obviously we are born with certain kinds of bodies. We need oxygen, that's not a choice. We see only a limited range of the color spectrum. 
We might say that these givens are inevitable, but "what we really are" is what we make of ourselves within these limits. 

This would be a pretty unpopular thing to say to gay or trans people these days. "Born this way" has been a slogan for gay people for a while now. It's verboten to say that being gay is a choice. Yet I think that a person's sexuality is unquestionably a part of what they truly are. 

From Lou Andreas Salome, friend of Nietzsche, lover of Rilke, student and debate partner of Freud:

The psyche is an archive, culture denotes inhibition, memory is weaker than forgetfulness, perception works to prevent seeing too much and intellection to prevent understanding too much, a manifest virtue is the obverse of a latent vice, and one’s sexuality informs the highest reaches of one’s mind.

[emphasis added]

So it seems to me that one's sexuality is a significant part of one's essence, yet is not chosen.

Obviously we can choose what we do with our sexuality. How we express or repress it. These are defining choices that we make, yet a fully repressed sexuality doesn't change the fact that one is essentially a person of that sexuality. The Fates have decreed that I am neither gay nor trans, but (without going into the sordid details) there's no choice that in my life my sexuality has been an essential element of what I truly am. I also suspect that a life of Existentialist Good Faith, authenticity in regard to oneself, would demand honesty about one's [unchosen] sexuality. Repressing it might be a valid and moral choice, but pretending it's otherwise would not. 

So I suspect that like all slogans, "existence precedes essence" has some fairly important exceptions. 

---

Personally, I am more taken with the wisdom of Dante's Christianized Platonism. This deals with our unchosen passions, and the demand that authenticity and a moral life requires being guided by these givens. 

As everyone knows, Dante sees Beatrice when he's quite young and is taken with her goodness. He makes it clear that she is not an official saint, like Catherine of Siena, or a local celebrity, like Simonetta Vespucci. There is no evidence that anyone other than Dante was smitten by her. 

This is a coupe de foudre, an unchosen life-defining attachment. She functions for him just as the cute-boy eromenos functions for the men in Plato’s Symposium. She is the first overwhelming hook toward what will truly give meaning to a life. 

Dante sees more possibilities than Plato, in that the Symposium just assumes that everyone’s first introduction to the passion of Eros will be a boy. For Dante, the hook can be anything containing goodness, and will be different for different people. One person might be taken by music, another by art. Or justice or charity. For people who are truly passionate about these things — whose lives are defined by them — the love is never a choice. Think of the people who study and practice music and continue to make it an essential element of their being. They didn't fall in love with it after years of study, after careful consideration. They fell in love first, it gave them meaning before they understood it, and it was never something they consciously chose as their passion or meaning-giving Beatrice.

Again, they can choose whether they pursue this or not, and literature is full of characters who suffer from choosing not to pursue their calling. When Dante meets Beatrice again in Heaven, she scolds him for losing his focus on her after she died, and allowing himself to go astray. 

I know in my own life, by passions were decided early and not in any consciously chosen way, though the choices I have made in how I pursued them have been defining in other ways. But I feel strongly that much of my essence was unchosen.

Sometimes I meet people who have never experienced such a hook, and who seem fairly directionless in life. I feel they have been unfortunate. 

You probably know that the Greeks saw such passions as being gifts from spirits — daemons or geniuses — who inspire us but are not chosen by us. Though we may no longer believe in the literal existence of such spirits, I still feel that they are emotionally true to how our passions are decided. And it’s still true that one’s guiding daemon may be good bad or indifferent, and one’s life may be a good or bad one depending on this, but the essence of what they make us is not something we choose -- it's fate. 

---

Thank you for bringing this up. It's been fascinating to think about.

[Mister Agenda]

Which means of course that once the evil crust has been burned away, we will have peace and a steady happy progress toward unquestionable Truth and luxury living.

I've never met anyone whose views could be fairly described this way. Sounds pretty foolish.

[Istvan]

Which means of course that once the evil crust has been burned away, we will have peace and a steady happy progress toward unquestionable Truth and luxury living.

I've never met anyone whose views could be fairly described this way. Sounds pretty foolish.

Come now. You've never met anyone in the digital sandbox who thought that eradicating religion will pave the way for scientific progress unrestricted by superstition and lead to a utopia of peace, prosperity, health, freethinking and rationality? It sounds like the norm among village atheists rather than the exception.

[The Grand Nudger]

Interestingly enough, the majority of the atheists here never give a single thought to eradicating religion. That's just a few of us. I think about it from time to time - though I'm actually a big fan of religion, and while an unimpeded or less impeded scientific march might be a pleasant side effect - I wouldn't consider it the main objective to or benefit of eradicating religion. A religion of nature explicitly based on scientific inquiry is a possibility...so, you know, more than one way to skin a cat.

Existentialism is a handy ally in that objective, though. Rejecting the (purportedly) objective claims made by religion on principle would be the eradication of religion, of any kind, in and of itself.

Broadly speaking, from long personal experience - anecdote at the bottom...and conceeding that this may be a rarified bunch of heathens not in any way representative of atheism at large - this bunch agrees with a ton of existential premises, rejects objectivism in a great many contexts, and understands provisional certifications of knowledge. Trying to save you time and frustration.

[Istvan]

Interestingly enough, the majority of the atheists here never give a single thought to eradicating religion.  That's just a few of us.  I think about it from time to time - though I'm actually a big fan of religion, and while an unimpeded or less impeded scientific march might be a pleasant side effect - I wouldn't consider it the main objective to or benefit of eradicating religion.  A religion of nature explicitly based on scientific inquiry is a possibility...so, you know, more than one way to skin a cat.

Existentialism is a handy ally in that objective, though.  Rejecting the (purportedly) objective claims made by religion on principle would be the eradication of religion, of any kind, in and of itself.

Broadly speaking, from long personal experience - anecdote at the bottom...and conceeding that this may be a rarified bunch of heathens not in any way representative of atheism at large - this bunch agrees with a ton of existential premises, rejects objectivism in a great many contexts, and understands provisional certifications of knowledge.

In fact, the folks here do seem to have a much more mature and realistic perspective on religion than the folks in some Facebook debate group. That's why I implied that if he had never come across a village atheist who spouted rhetoric about religion being a monstrous delusion that needs to be eradicated for the good of civilization and the environment, he must not have traveled far & wide in the old atheist blogosphere.

And you're right that existentialism is a fellow traveler on the heathen highway. Even religious existentialists don't cotton to fundamentalist BS, so there's usually a good amount of self-awareness and resistance to dogmatism anywhere in our ranks.