Notes Existentialism

 Phenomenology a method that can be applied to anything

 Way of knowing

 Epistemology: what is knowledge and what it means to know, what is the pathway to the

truths.

 Ontology: Constituting with phenomenology

 As soon as one asks what is being, being will expose itself phenomenologically in many

ways, need to do phenomenology to do metaphysics.

 Negate: relevant and usually true core issues

What is Existentialism?

 Cannot be reduced to a unified doctrine or school of though

 Its major representatives differ widely in their views

 The common thread: concern for the human situations as it is lived

 This is a situation that cannot be reasoned about or captured in an abstract system; it can only

be felt and made meaningful by the concrete choices and actions of the existing individuals

(Aho, p. xi).

- Like a map: an abstract simplified version of reality

- Reductionism: saying map is real and realty is false

- Question is it the right map? When is quantitative or objective work valuable and when is

subjective work valuable?

- Natural attitude: influence how one looks at maps influences how one looks at

countryside, can experience countryside now without the perspective the map provided

which is more primordial

 - Sartre sayings we can only do certain things,

- Systems totalize people: judicial systems or certain diagnoses

Origins of the term “existentialism”:

 Coined by Gabriel Marcel in 1943

 Adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

 Label rejected by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus

 Fredrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard pre-dated the term

Secular and Theistic Existentialists:

 Secular existentialists: Sartre, Nietzsche, Camus (death of God)

 Theistic existentialists: Marcel, Tillich, Buber, Levinas, Kierkegaard, Levinas

- Amor fate (love of fate)

Subjectivism vs Intersubjectivism:

 Subjectivism: Kierkegaard, Beauvoir, Sartre

 Intersubjectivism or Being-in-the-world: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty

Quality of relations with others:

 Invariably tainted with alienation, self-deception, and conflict?

 Or is there a potential for mutual dependency, selfless love, and genuine communion with

others?

Some Major Themes of Existentialism:

1. Existence precedes essence: life is not predetermined we become who we are, essence shapes

us throughout life

2. The self as a tension: tension between opposites, body and mind, both, facticity and

transcendence.
3. The anguish of freedom

4. The insider’s perspective: meanings that come from everywhere

- Know things but taking them to heart

5. Moods as disclosive: disclosing what we feel in reality

6. The possibility of authenticity

7. Ethics and Responsibility

Roots of the Western Self:

 Tension between faith and reason

 Plato (Greek): Transcendence via rational detachment, which allows the philosopher to rise

above the temporal particularities of existence in order to gain knowledge the universal –

timeless and abstract forms or essences

 Moses (Hebraic): Transcendence via an intense faith and trust in an incomprehensible God

(euro-rational, beyond reason).

Christianity as Synthesis of Hebraism and Hellenism:

 Augustine: “Faith seeking understanding”, divine grace as a condition of possibility for

reason.

 Aquinas: Argued that faith and reason are fundamentally compatible

 Cardinal Virtues (wisdom, courage, self-control, justice) are defensible with reason alone

 Reason was grounded in the development of the intellectual virtues

 Grace necessary for the Theological virtues (hope, faith, love).

Soren Kierkegaard:

 Faith and reason cannot be reconciled

 The case of Abraham

 Faith is subjective, fundamentally uncertain and inaccessible to logic or reason

 Subjective truths cannot be thought; they can only be felt inward intensity in the course of

living one’s life.

Medieval Worldview:

 Founded on the belief that human beings belong to and are dependent upon a divine, value-

filled cosmos that provided an enduring moral order – a “great chain of being” that

determined the proper function and place of things and how humans ought to act.

 Provided answers to ultimate questions i.e.:

- Who am I?

- How should I live?

- What is the meaning of my life?

The Modern Worldview:

 Advent of modern science & disenchantment of the world (Max Weber); mechanistic,

deterministic and reductionistic

 Protestant Reformation & the privileging of the private individual’s relationship to the Divine

unmediated by the collective.

 New picture of society as artificial aggregate of disconnected individuals held together by

instrumental social contracts and monetary exchanges

 Industrial Revolution

Friedrich Neitzsche:

 Acknowledge the fighting sense of abandonment and forlornness experienced in the modern

age
 Moral absolutes no longer serve as a source of security and meaning in our lives (The

Madman: “God is dead, and we have killed him”)

 The traditional idols of Greek reason and Judeo-Christian faith have been destroyed by the

Enlightenment’s science, exposing them as “metaphysical comforts”

 But the new science is just another idol that we construct and cling to for security

 The question of what it means to be a human cannot be provided by any scientific proof.

Existentialism as a Cultural Mood:

 The horrors of the Great War and World War II, the Nazi death camos, and the atomic

bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

 Threat of global destruction during the Cold War, regional explosions of racial and colonial

violence, and increasing environmental devastation

 Mood: a sense that life is fundamentally absurd, that we are estranged from one another not

at home in the world.

 Because there are not moral absolutes, we are left alone, rudderless, and adrift in a “terrifying

infinity” (Neitzsche), with nothing and no one to tell us how to live our lives

 The problem of Nihilism (Frankl, “nothing-but-ness)

The Problem of Detachment & Objectivity:

 Critique of “high-attitude thinking” (Merleau-Ponty); “God’s eye view”; “view from

nowhere”: Dispassionate standpoint that gives an “objective” and “eternal” perspective on

reality, transcending our own temporal and historically situated views

 Plato: The detachment intellect; Allegory of the Cave

 Emphasis on mathematics/quantitative

 Reason as a means to immorality (escape from death and time)

 Adoption of Platonic ideas in Enlightenment philosophy and science

Rene Descartes:

- “I think therefore I am”

 Attempt to found rationality on “clear and distinct ideas” that are eternal and unchanging

 Nature taken from Galileo as mechanical and composed of quantitative properties of

extension and movement (primary qualities).

 Physical bodies reduced to deaminated matter that is extended, flexible and mutable, whose

qualities can be measured, and whose movement can be explained and predicted

mathematically, according to law-governed casual processes.

The Existentialist Response:

 When it comes to concrete concerns of the human situation, rational explanation is

inadequate.

 Our existence as self-conscious beings is always penetrated by feelings of uncertainty and

doubt.

 We experience anguish in the face of our own death, in the radical contingency of our

choices, and in the sheer arbitrariness that anything, including ourselves, exists at all.

 The assumption that our actions are grounded in rationality is a comforting illusion that there

is a mechanism of stability, order, and control to the universe and to human existence.

Grasping the Human Situation:

 The human situation cannot be grasped through detached reflection

 It is grasped primarily through penetrating emotions or moods that bring us the face to face

with our existence and with the concrete choices and actions that define us
 There is still a concern with issues of truth and knowledge, but knowledge of what it means

to be human

 Knowledge of human existence begins from inside one’s own situation and the affective

commitments and values that matter to the individual

 It is a truth that cannot be thought it can only be felt with intensity and passion

G.W.F. Hegel:

 Kierkegaard’s critique of G.W.F. Hegel

 Hegel: Aim was to construct a vast metaphysical system that would provide absolute

knowledge of reality

 Evolution of consciousness from a non-conceptual and concrete to universal and abstract

 Consciousness as a diabolical process shaped by opposing principles:

- Subject-object

- Freedom-determinism

- Temporal-eternal

- Particular-universal

Phenomenology

 Edmund Husserl: Description of things as they reveal themselves to us in ordinary

experience

 There is no reality or thing in itself to be found behind the appearance

 Sartre: “The appearance does not hide the essence, it reveals it; it is the essence.”

The Existential Self: Dasein

 Martin Heidegger: Dasein - our unique way of being and does not refer to the usual view of

the self as an entity or substance with what-like properties

 “When we designate this entity with the term ‘Dasein,” we are expressing not its ‘what’ (as if

it were a table, house or tree) but its being.”

 We already embody a pre-reflective understanding of how to exist in the world, and this

understanding can never be made completely theoretically explicit

 Being “thrown” into a web of social meanings that tacitly shape how we make sense of

things

 “One is what one does”: We understand ourselves only in terms of our worldly concerns and

involvements.

Fundamental Ontology:

 Heidegger’s concern was with the question of the meaning of Being (vs. entities).

 Concerned with how things reveal themselves in the meaningful and intelligible way that

they do.

 Dasein (human beings) already has an understanding of Being by virtue of its existence as

the kind of being who asks the question of Being.

 Dasein as an openness or “clearing” through which things emerge into presence as the kinds

of things they are situated in time and history.

Re-Thinking the Body:

 “Lived Body”: the source of pre-reflective understanding or knowledge that endows things

with meaning and value

 The body is not regarded as a material object, extended in space and set against the

dispassionate gaze a cognizing subject.

 The body is how I am, a relational way of being-in-the-world that dissolves the subject-

object opposition altogether.

 I do not have a body; I am my body.

Summary:

 Philosophy does not begin from a standpoint of detachment and objectivity, because it can

never address the concrete concerns of the existing individual

 Hence, my account must begin with my own, first-person experiences and the situated

understanding of have of myself and my world.

 Rejection of the view of the human being as a self-contained subject, separate and distinct

from objects

 As an embedded way of being I am limited and constrained by the world I find myself in

 The standpoint of detachment and objectivity cuts us of the affective meaning and worth of

things

Being-in-the-World:

 Being-in: Does not designate a spatial inclusion, as if a thing insider a container; refers

rather to how we are always already concretely involved in the world of our concerns

 World: Not to be understood in the usual sense, as a spatial container or as the sum total of

objects that exist; rather, it is the meaningful public setting of our lives

 We are always woven into the meanings and values of our socio-historical context, and this

shapes the way we make sense of things, including ourselves.

Work World:

 Heidegger: A hammer has meaning only against the pragmatic context of a field of

equipment within which hammering has a purpose or end, and in relation to other tools (e.g.

nails) and the context if the project (e.g. building a woodshed).

 Ready-to-hand: Hammer in the act of hammering; the most original meaning of the hammer
 Unready-to-hand: Broken hammer as an obstacle to completing a project

 Present-at-hand: Hammer as an object pf detached contemplation or analysis (e.g. examining

its chemical composition).

The Phenomenal Field:

 Merleau-Ponty: The world is not a geometric space or the sum total of objects: it is, rather,

the concrete background or setting in which we exist

 This world precedes scientific knowledge, and science is beholden and dependent upon it if

science is to remain meaningful

 The primacy of perception: What we first experience and what underlies all theoretical

reflection is the world as it is perceived – a structured and unified whole.

Bodily Schema:

 The pre-reflective sensorimotor grip that we have on the world

 Phenomenology returns us to the pre-conceptual experience that underlie objective thought

and brings to light the complex web of relations that endows things with the meanings they

have.

 The world is not something separate from me, but an ambiguous, pre-objective field that I am

already woven into in my everyday perceptual acts.

Naturalism:

 Epistemological assumption of Naturalism: That detached theoretical reflection and the

procedures of empirical science constitute the best way to gain knowledge of intra-worldly

things, including ourselves.

 Metaphysical assumptions of Naturalism: Contends that the world – including our own

thoughts, beliefs, and intentions – is constituted of physical objects in causal interactions.

Critique of Naturalism:

 In the world of our practical involvements, we do not encounter objects in a natural or

impartial way.

 Indeed, we do not encounter “objects” at all, because the term itself entails a view of entities

as being separate and distinct from us as “subjects”.

 As Being-in-the-World, we are already involved with things that make sense, which are

already rich with meaning, and this meaning is disclosed not through theoretical or

conceptual analysis bit is how we pre-reflectively handle, use, and manipulate things in our

everyday practices.

Naturalism as Unworlded:

 The primary relationship we have with things is not one of detachment and objectively but

one of situated and skillful involvement in a referential context if meanings.

 It is a contextual involvement that can never be fully theoretically explicit

 Naturalism us unworlded because it abstracts the situated and purposive meanings of Being-

in-the-world.

 This does not mean we cannot do science, but that we should not uncritically privilege

methodological detachment and objectivity

 Scientific thinking “must return to the ‘there is’ which underlies it; to the site, the soil of the

sensible and opened world such as it is in our life and for our body.. that actual body I call

mine” (Merleau-Ponty).

Aspects of Alterity:

 The existentialist account of Being-in-the-world makes it possible to engage perspectives that

have been historically marginalized in the Western tradition

 If we can make sense of things only from within a situated and embodied orientation, then

this must also be shaped by aspects of alterity or otherness, such as madness, racial and

sexual difference, and physical disability.

Frantz Fanon: Black Existentialism:

 Fanon: Drew on his own experience of racism to expand on and critique Merleau-Ponty’s

conception of Being-in-the-world.

 Argued that the “bodily schema” we normally take for granted, is not present in the same

way for colonized people.

 The historical-racial schema: Captures the black experience of confusion and alienation – a

result of being forcibly “woven out” of the shared meanings and practices that constitute the

white European world.

 Because he does not belong to the European world, the colonized black man does not share

the same pre-objective understand the European has.

Racial Epidermal Schema:

 The black person’s connection to the world can be disrupted when that person is transformed

into a brute object or thing by the judgmental gaze of the white European.

 In these situations, the black person feels immobilized and incapacitated, finding it difficult

to stretch into the world, to handle equipment, and to participate in public activities

 He or she becomes imprisoned in a sphere of immanence, where one’s physical motility and

sense of self are constrained by skin color.

 Fanon refers to the sense of nausea that comes with feeling trapped in the racial-epidermal

schema that emerges from internalizing the objectifying and dehumanizing judgements of the

European.
 - When in another type of body, cannot forget about body’s schema.

- Body transcends when we forget but hard to when marginalized.

- Constant reflexivity

“Throwing Like a Girl”:

 Iris Marion Young examines the phenomenology of women’s motility and sense of spatial

orientation.

 “There is a particular style of bodily comportment that is typical of feminine existence” but

often overlooked.

 Not merely the result of essential differences between men and women in terms of biology

and anatomy.

 Rather they emerge from the oppression of loving in a patriarchal world, where the feminine

is “defined as Other, as the inessential correlate to man, as mere object and immanence.”

 Whereas men inhabit space with ease, confidently stretching into the world and reaching out

to confront obstacles, women “often approach a physical engagement with things with

timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy.”

Mestizos and Mestizas:

 Latina feminist phenomenologists Gloria Anzaldua, Mariana Ortega, and Ofelia Schutte:

Problematize the standard account of Being-in-the-world.

 Engage the lived experience of immigrants, exiles, and marginalized people who dwell in

ambiguous borderlands and embody multiple or transitional selves, because they are caught

between cultures and, as a result, are not a home in the world.

 Ortega: They are “constantly experiencing ruptures of everydayness or disruptions in the

fabric of their daily lives and do not inhibit the world in pre-reflective way; these selves are

continually not being-at-ease.”

Other Forms of Alterity:

 Illness and disability (neurodiverse)

 Queerness (LGBTQ+)

 Forms of “madness’, e.g. schizophrenia, depression, anorexia nervosa, etc.

Summary: Being-in-the-World:

 Makes reference to our concrete and situated existence, which is always prior to detached

theorizing.

 The meaning of things is not generated through cognitive associations but through the

relations of things to others, in the structured and unified whole we are already engaged in.

 Any reflective awareness of our perceptions and actions always presupposes a non-reflective

or pre-reflective way of being-in-the-world.