by D. G. Myers
Originally published in Academic Questions 2 (Winter 1988-89): 27-36.
The eighties witnessed the emergence of a new movement in Anglo-American literary scholarship which, in methodological sophistication, theoretical all-inclusiveness, and classroom appeal, bid fair to rival anything from Germany and France. The moment was ripe for such a homegrown movement to appear. For several years, many scholars in English and American universities—ranging from Frederick Crews, George Watson, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr., on one end of the scale to Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Frank Lentricchia on the other—had been raising a clamor for a return to historical scholarship in the academic study of literature. The historical nature of literary works, it was said, had been badly neglected over the past half century of Anglo-American criticism. The time had come to move beyond the narrowly "formalistic" or "text-centered" approach to literature. A new historical approach was needed and, in the course of events, a new movement arose to meet the demand.
The "New Historicism," as by general agreement the movement has come to be called, is unified by its disdain for literary formalism. Specifically, leaders of the movement describe themselves as unhappy with the exclusion of social and political circumstances (commonly known as the "context") from the interpretation of literary works; they are impatient with the settled view that a poem is a self-contained object, a verbal icon, a logical core surrounded by a texture of irrelevance. In this they are setting their jaws against the New Criticism, albeit rather late in the day. But their hostility can never (to use one of their own favored terms) be unmediated. The French nouvelle critique and German philosophical hermeneutics have intervened, at least in the history of fashions within the university; and the new movement has arisen at least as much in response to these later developments as to a critical establishment which has made a formalistic view of literary works its official doctrine. Thus the New Historicism in literary study has emerged in this decade not so much in the spirit of a counter-insurgency as after the manner of a corporate reorganization. It has been a response not to literature but to literary studies. It has been called forth not by the subject matter under study—not by actual poems, novels, plays—but by the institutional situation in which young scholars now find themselves.
The situation in English as the century entered its final two decades was one that placed a greater premium on method than ideas. In addition, there was a rising sense that literary study had reached something of an impasse. On one side were the students of the New Critics, still doing readings of long-accepted texts; on the other, the deconstructionists, showing how texts undo themselves. Both seemed remote from the true interests of the new professoriat, which had cut its teeth on the political slogans of the sixties. As Jean E. Howard frankly says in a defense of the new movement, by the early eighties professors had grown weary of teaching literary texts as "ethereal entities" floating above the strife of history.1 For a spell, perhaps, feminism seemed close to solving the dilemma; it appeared to hold out the hope of transforming literary criticism into an agent for social change. But gradually many within the discipline began to awaken to the fact that feminism had no distinctive method of its own; the feminist critic knew what she wanted to say about a text, but she had to adopt other interpretive "strategies," as the saying went, to make her themes appear. This began more and more to be the case. Younger critics were having to resort to a tandem operation, using deconstruction or some other variant of poststructuralist method to clear the ground on which an assortment of radical political notions were carted in to raise a new interpretation. But such a procedure left critics anxious lest their interpretations fail to go beyond the already familiar readings of the text. It was in this situation that the New Historicism emerged. It appeared to offer a distinctive approach, a rigorous method, along "with the opportunity to salvage one’s political commitments. Indeed, at times the New Historicism seemed almost designed to methodize the political interpretation of literature.
The movement has gained rapid acceptance in English departments. It already has its classical texts (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning,2 Louis Adrian Montrose’s uncollected essays on Shakespeare, especially the one entitled "Shaping Fantasies"3); it has its own journal (Representations, published by the University of California Press). Its special methods of interpretation are practiced by a large number of critics in England and America Jonathan Dollimore, Jane Tompkins, Don E. Wayne, Walter Benn Michaels, Catherine Gallagher, Arthur F. Marotti, Jean E. Howard, Stephen Orgel, Annabel Patterson, and Peter Stallybrass, to name only a few). It has set off an enthusiasm of historical research. Younger critics have begun to comb through parliamentary reports, religious tracts, labor statistics, and dusty stacks of ephemera published by contemporaries of the great English and American writers. Slightly older critics have begun, as it were, to retool themselves—to "rehistoricize" their scholarship for the new market conditions. Last year the English Institute devoted a large share of its program to the new approach. Graduate students have begun to catch on, and they had better. The year before, Wesleyan University’s English department became the first in the country to advertise a job opening for a New Historicist.
There have been other "new historicisms" before this. Fredric Jameson’s style of neo-Marxist historicism as practiced in The Political Unconscious (Cornell University Press, 1981) has been described as "new," but Jameson locates the grounds of his argument not in historical research but in recent theory; he is "historicist" only in respecting the past as past while seeking to make it serve the present. Similarly, Wesley Morris’s Toward a New Historicism (Princeton University Press, 1972) is unrelated to the movement which has usurped that name. A student of Roy Harvey Pearce, Morris sought an approach that would somehow balance the recognition that a literary work belongs to its own time with the confidence that literary works can nevertheless transcend their time. Perhaps needless to say, Morris’ effort was not followed up by younger critics. The winds of doctrine in university English departments in the last quarter of this century have not been favorable to anyone who suggested the possibility of transcendence.
But the movement that now goes by the name of New Historicism differs from both of these. Perhaps the central statement of its themes is the introduction to Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning.4 Even the title suggests the main focus of the movement. Within the ranks of the New Historicism, literature is considered to be one of the social forces that contributes to the making of individuals; it acts as a form of social control. Although most New Historicists are scrupulous to distinguish themselves from Marxist critics, the fact remains that the central task of the New Historicism is the same as that of Marxist criticism: first to call into question the traditional view of literature as an autonomous realm of discourse with its own problems, forms, principles, activities, and then to dissolve the literary text into the social and political context from which it issued. In fact, the New Historicism tries explicitly to solve the theoretical difficulty in Marxist criticism of relating the cultural superstructure to the material base. Its claim to newness might be put in terms of its claim to having solved that problem.
What are the principles—or what Greenblatt calls the "enabling presumptions"—behind the New Historicist method? The movement establishes itself upon four main contentions. (l) Literature is historical, which means (in this exhibition) that a literary work is not primarily the record of one mind’s attempt to solve certain formal problems and the need to find something to say; it is a social and cultural construct shaped by more than one consciousness. The proper way to understand it, therefore, is through the culture and society that produced it. (2) Literature, then, is not a distinct category of human activity. It must be assimilated to history, which means a particular vision of history. (3) Like works of literature, man himself is a social construct, the sloppy composition of social and political forces—there is no such thing as a human nature that transcends history. Renaissance man belongs inescapably and irretrievably to the Renaissance. There is no continuity between him and us; history is a series of "ruptures" between ages and men. (4) As a consequence, the historian/ critic is trapped in his own "historicity." No one can rise above his own social formations, his own ideological upbringing, in order to understand the past on its terms. A modern reader can never experience a text as its contemporaries experienced it. Given this fact, the best a modern historicist approach to literature can hope to accomplish, according to Catherine Belsey, is "to use the text as a basis for the reconstruction of an ideology."5
Such an approach stands traditional historical scholarship on its head. The first principle of traditional scholarship—its generally agreed-upon point of departure—was that the recovery of the original meaning of a literary text is the whole aim of critical interpretation. But the New Historicism premises that recovery of meaning is impossible, to attempt it naive. What practitioners of the new method are concerned with, by contrast, is the recovery of the original ideology which gave birth to the text, and which the text in turn helped to disseminate throughout a culture. This dimension of critical interpretation has been neglected by traditional scholars not merely because the required concept, the "enabling presumption" of ideology, was unavailable to them until recently; in the New Historicist view, it had never been widely attempted because literary texts themselves suppress the means by which they construct ideology. A traditional formalistic approach, treating the text as self-contained, can never locate these ideological operations, also known as "representations." Only a historicist approach, treating the text as one element in the ideology of an age, can hope to lay them bare.
Although the movement represents itself, then, as being more faithful to the true, hitherto-neglected nature of literature, in reality its key assumptions are derived from the institutional milieu in which it arose. Its concepts and categories are simply those which, over the last few years, have conditioned a large part of the literary thought within the university. Thus, the New Historicism is critical of the ‘‘enabling presumptions" of its more distant, but not of its more immediate, predecessors. For instance, the movement follows poststructuralism in its assurance that literary works mean any number of things to any number of readers (the doctrine of the plurality of meaning), freeing New Historicists to find the warrant for their interpretations not in the author’s intentions for his work but in the ideology of his age. Similarly, the New Historicist effort to assimilate the literary text to history is guaranteed by the poststructuralist doctrine of textuality, which states that the text is not aloof from the surrounding context, that there is a contiguity, an ebb and flow, between text and whatever might once have been seen as "outside" it. Yet these ideas are obtained secondhand. They are not established by original inquiry or argument. They are simply the precipitate of an academic climate in which a plurality of meanings is recognized as offering the greatest good for the greatest number of literary scholars, and in which the reassimilation of text to context is the goal of practically everybody.
The other sources of the movement will be equally familiar to observers of the academic scene. The doctrine of historicity is a Heideggerian motif that came to the movement via the writings of German hermeneutical philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. The New Historicist conception of ideology is not that of Marx, but rather that of the French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser— though, in plain fact, the New Historicists seem more directly influenced by expositors of Marxist doctrine like Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton than by Althusser. Finally, in its general orientation toward scholarship and historical research the New Historicism dances attendance on the figure of the late Michel Foucault. Again, though, the influence of Foucault is a generalized and secondhand one: it permeates the New Historicist conception of history as a succession of épistémes or structures of thought that shape everyone and everything within a culture. But this is no more than to say that Foucault has provided New Historicists with their own épistéme. Their work cannot really be said to extend or elaborate upon Foucault’s. Nor is it critical of Foucault’s concept of the épistéme. It merely embraces the concept as a given.
What do these assumptions lead New Historicists to argue? The initial effort is to relocate the literary text among the other, traditionally nonliterary "discursive practices" of an age. The representation of character in the nineteenth-century novel, for instance, is said to be bound up with contemporary debates over parliamentary representation; or, Iago’s plot against Othello is described as typical of Elizabethan attempts to deny the otherness of subject peoples.6 But the larger purpose of New Historicist inquiry is the reconstruction of the actual (as opposed to the "represented") relations in which people lived during a particular time. For example, in one of the most widely read essays by a New Historicist, Louis Adrian Montrose interprets A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an ideological attempt to comprehend the power of Queen Elizabeth—to make sense of it and place it safely within bounds—while simultaneously upholding the authority of males within Elizabethan culture.7 By citing a variety of contemporary writing (in order to reinstate the "discursive practices" of the age), Montrose demonstrates the Elizabethans’ ambivalence toward their queen: abiding respect mixed with a dark desire to master her sexually. In this context, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. is reread as a fable of the restoration of male governance. Mothers are significantly excluded from the dramatis personae of the play, just as the danger of matriarchy (with which the Elizabethans flirted in their fascination with the myth of the Amazons) was quietly suppressed by the celebration of Elizabeth’s virginity. The very real possibility that power might actually be passed from mother to daughter was concealed from women of the age by such cultural productions as Shakespeare’s play, in which Elizabeth was a willing collaborator as much by her decision to remain unwed and barren as by her "cultural presence" within the play.
It is in this sense that works of literature such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream are "representations" of the culture from which they emerge. They are the emanations, the active agents, of the culture’s circumambient ideology. Literary works are both what a culture produces as well as what reproduces the ideology. The term "representations" is misleading insofar as it suggests a mimetic theory of literature. Nothing could be further from New Historicist truths. In fact, the New Historicism presumes that artistic fiction does not imitate human action; it mediates it. That is, fiction is defined as the lens through which a certain portrait of the human experience is brought into focus. And as mediation rather than as imitation of social practices, it can be thus be said to shape rather than to reflect an age’s understanding of human experience and potentiality.
In New Historicist interpretation, as a consequence, history is not viewed as the cause or the source of a work. Instead, the relationship between history and the work is seen as a dialectic: the literary text is interpreted as both product and producer, end and source, of history. One undeniable side benefit of such a view is that history is no longer conceived, as in some vulgar historical scholarship, as a thing wholly prior, a process which completes itself at the appearance of the work. At the same time, though, it must not be thought that the New Historicism dispenses with the cognitive category of priority. For the New Historicist it is ideology, not history, which is prior. The literary text is said to be a constituent part of a culture’s ideology by virtue of passing it on; but the ideology nevertheless exists’ intact’ intelligible, in a form separate from (and therefore prior to) the work. If it didn’t, the critic could not discern a relationship between work and ideology; and if the ideology were not prior to the work, it wouldn’t be a historical relationship.
But the apriorism of ideology in New Historicist thought raises large questions. The principal one is this: How does the critic know that the ideology located in the work of literature under discussion genuinely belongs to the past? How can he be sure that the ideology is not simply his own political sympathy which has been injected into the work and then ‘‘located" there by means of an ingenious selection of the evidence? These questions occur spontaneously to anyone who reads very widely in New Historicist writing, so much of which expresses a politically au courant sympathy for exploited peoples, powerless women, workers, slaves, peasants. A critic like Stephen Greenblatt is too intelligent not to acknowledge that his own sympathy for such peoples is a priori. In the essay that launched the New Historicist journal Representations, Greenblatt interprets a Dürer sketch in The Painter’s Manual (1525) for a monument commemorating a victory over rebellious peasants—a somewhat ludicrous design topped off by a peasant stabbed in the back—as ironic and subversive.8 Greenblatt goes on to admit, though, that ‘‘[t]he bitter irony we initially perceived [in Dürer’s sketch] was constituted less by concrete evidence of Dürer’s subversiveness than by our own sympathy for the peasants, sympathy conditioned by our century’s ideology, by recent historical scholarship, and no doubt above all, by our safe distance from the fear and loathing of 1525." He does not stop there, however. This admission, he continues, "though necessary, seems inadequate, for our solidarity with early sixteenth-century German peasants is of interest only insofar as it seems to have been called forth by Dürer’s monument and not simply read into it" (emphasis added). Yet how can the critic be certain that the work studied has not simply provided him with an occasion for a renewed outbreak of familiar feeling, like a pop song from our adolescence that reminds us of a girl we once ached for? Greenblatt passes silently over such a question. The real question for him "is how Dürer could have created a brilliant, detailed, and coherent design that could lend itself to a strong interpretation so much at odds with his own probable intentions"? But this isn’t a scholarly question so much as it is a dilemma for a certain kind of scholar. For such a scholar (i.e., one for whom the intentions of the artist are not normative), almost any work, no matter how brilliant, detailed, and coherent, can be made to lend itself to almost any interpretation at all. For Greenblatt, the aim of scholarship is to square the artist’s intentions with the scholar’s own sympathy. He simply assumes that Dürer’s design is "at odds" with the sympathy any sensitive modern would feel. The sympathy is treated as a fact of equal importance (and comparable ontological status) with the design. No effort is made to ascertain whether the design really is at odds with anything; it is simply treated as a donnée of interpretation that it must be. The critic knows because of the way he feels.
The error of the New Historicism lies not in its political allegiances, however, but in the logic of its method. That method might be described as a way of salvaging initially favored hypotheses (or "strong interpretations") in the face of a lack of concrete evidence. Two main objections to such a procedure come to mind. First, we may simply disagree with the conviction that has inspired the argument in the first place. We may not happen to agree that it is a prima facie likelihood that all of the men within any given culture have sought to oppress the women or that those who express contempt for peasants are expressing the ambivalence of a wish-fulfillment fantasy. And if we disagree, no amount of evidence about the "discursive practices" of the age will persuade us otherwise. The very choice of what to quote in corroboration of this view (and what to withhold) will be made on the basis of the conviction that it is true—a conviction that is held long in advance of a search for evidence. But secondly, even if for the sake of argument we grant this assumption, we are not bound to any conclusion reached by its means. We can yield the point that Elizabethan culture u as patriarchal, or that those who serve ruling minorities desire secretly to see them toppled, and still go on to deny that A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Dürer’s sketch contain these meanings. If it is not self-contradictory for us to do this—if we can simultaneously grant an assumption and reject its interpretive significance—it follows that any interpretation grounded upon an unproven assumption about a work’s historical context is trifling, if not untenable. Only if a reader of a New Historicist argument is prepared to accept its a priori assumptions can its conclusions be accepted as true to history. The essential categories of New Historicist thought make the necessary facts appear.
"The whole point" of the New Historicist enterprise, Jean E. Howard says, "is to grasp the terms of the discourse which made it possible [for contemporaries] to see the ‘facts’ [of their own time] in a particular way—indeed, made it possible to see certain phenomena as facts at all."9 At first glance, this objective appears to be little different from that of traditional historical interpretation: the discourse of the past is grasped in its own terms. But what has been subtly introduced is a comparison. The New Historicist sees facts that the people of the time did not, and this special insight is what enables him to grasp the "discursive practices" that "produced" the facts that the people did see. But there remains a question: How can the New Historicist be certain that this second set of "facts"—those so painfully clear to a modern reader—are not merely produced by the discursive practices of his own time? Surely the terms in which he explains the past—"representations," "subversiveness," "cultural presence," etc.—belong to no age so much as his own. They are to be numbered among the discursive practices of the recent academic past. How then does the New Historicist know that the facts which show up so clearly in his interpretive framework can also be found in the distant past? There is no provision for them in his own theory of historical knowledge. If he can never escape his own historicity, how can the New Historicist know for certain that those "facts" exist at all?
Despite its theoretical sheen, the New Historicism is strikingly unphilosophical about these and other problems of knowledge raised by its methods of interpretation. Movement writers never explain how it is that, though we are unable to recover the original meaning of a literary text, we are nevertheless able to reconstruct its original ideology. Nor do they account for why, though we cannot experience a text from an earlier age as its original readers would have experienced it, this problem disappears when we are faced by a text from the more recent past—say, a critical essay by a New Historicist. Indeed, it is clear that the New Historicism’s categories of history are the standard academic ones. Although the movement is publicly contemptuous of the "periodization" of academic history, the uses to which New Historicists put the Foucauldian notion of the épistéme amount to very little more than the same practice under a new, improved label. A historical age is conceived of as a structure of thought held together by the same discursive practices. But the extent and duration of an épistéme is never fixed, and how one can be distinguished from another is never explained, except by the use of such labels as "Renaissance" or "Victorian England." Problems like these are not confronted, because academic categories in which New Historicist thinking occurs act something like ear-stoppers against unwelcome sounds.
None of these doubts is likely to dampen the enthusiasm within English departments for the new movement. The vindication is simply too persuasive. "If we don’t do it this way we can’t justify interpreting literary works any longer," movement regulars seem to be saying, "or what’s worse, we’ll have to go back to our old ways." Hence the distinctive terminology: "discursive practices," "representations," "mediations," "contradictions," "ruptures," "subversion." What the New Historicism offers to students of literature is the joy of new explanations, new paradigms. It does not designate an unexplored area of scholarly investigation. It does not raise new problems, new questions. If its attempts to "historicize" literary study were merely an inducement to look into new kinds of documents, to ask about the relation of literature to social history in a new way, the movement would perform a service for scholarship. But it does not. The New Historicism cannot be considered a new subspecialty within the discipline of English in the same sense as the older subspecialties of textual criticism or Renaissance studies. It is instead an academic specialty in the same sense that feminism is—a school of interpretation predisposed to find the same themes in every work it reads and to explain them always in the same terms. The specialization, in other words, is not a disciplinary but a bureaucratic one. It seeks to establish a new jurisdiction in a reorganized university. At such a juncture, the question of method becomes a matter of group loyalty. New Historicists like to picture themselves as challenging "the institution of criticism"— breaking loose from what Jane Tompkins describes as "the extremely narrow confines of literary study as it is now practiced within the academy."10 In reality, however, the movement is another step toward the reconfinement of literary study. As jobs are created for New Historicists and space in the critical journals is set aside for their essays—as academic decisions are increasingly made on the basis not of scholarly competence but of methodological affiliation— the pressure on younger scholars and graduate students to enlist in the movement becomes enormous: that way employment, advancement, and prestige lie. It seems to worry no one that this might take away from individual scholars the determination of what sort of research to pursue and put it in the hands of hiring committees and editorial boards. Yet such a state of affairs can only end by narrowing the possibilities for fruitful scholarship and abridging the academic freedom of those who would go their own way.
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott has pointed out that a student of the past cannot learn the history of something without first discovering what kind of thing it is. In this respect, the New Historicism is not a genuine historical inquiry; it does not inquire into the true nature of literary works, because it is confident it already knows what they are. They are agents of ideology. Contrary to appearances, the movement is not an effort to discover what it means for a literary work to be historical; it is really little more than an attempt to get literary works to conform to a particular vision of history. For the university as a whole the movement represents a further stage in literary scholarship’s progressive abandonment of literature.
Notes
1. Jean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), p. 15.
2. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From .More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
3. Louis Adrian Montrose, "Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," Representations 2 (1983): 61-94. Other important essays by Montrose include: "Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 8 (1977): 3-35: "'Eliza, Queen of shepheardes,' and the Pastoral of Power," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 153-82; "Gifts and Reasons: The Contexts of Peele's Araygnment of Paris," English Literary Renaissance 47 (1980): 433-61; "'The Place of a Brother' in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form," Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 28-54; "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form," English Literary Renaissance 50 (1983): 415-59; "The Elizabethan Subjects and the Spenserian Text," in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 303-40; and "Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History," English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 5-12.
4. See also Greenblatt's Introduction to the special issue of Genre 15 (1982) entitled The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, pp. 3-6.
5. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 144.
6. See Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 219-67; and Greenblatt, Renaissance, pp. 222-54.
7. Montrose, "Shaping Fantasies."
8. Stephen Greenblatt, "Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion," Representations 1 (1983): 1-29; the quoted passages are from p. 9.
9. Howard, p. 27.
10. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural W0rk of American Fiction, 179o-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. xiv.
Rabu, 22 Desember 2010
Structuralism and Semiotics
Structuralism
Structuralism is a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perceptions and description of structures. At its simplest, structuralism claims that the nature of every element in any given situation has no significance by itself, and in fact is determined by all the other elements involved in that situation. The full significance of any entity cannot be perceived unless and until it is integrated into the structure of which it forms a part (Hawkes, p. 11). Structuralists believe that all human activity is constructed, not natural or "essential." Consequently, it is the systems of organization that are important (what we do is always a matter of selection within a given construct). By this formulation, "any activity, from the actions of a narrative to not eating one's peas with a knife, takes place within a system of differences and has meaning only in its relation to other possible activities within that system, not to some meaning that emanates from nature or the divine" (Childers & Hentzi, p. 286.). Major figures include Claude Lévi-Strauss (LAY-vee-strows), A. J. Greimas (GREE-mahs), Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (bart), Ferdinand de Saussure (soh-SURR or soh-ZHOR), Roman Jakobson (YAH-keb-sen), Vladimir Propp, and Terence Hawkes.
Semiology
Semiotics, simply put, is the science of signs. Semiology proposes that a great diversity of our human action and productions--our bodily postures and gestures, the the social rituals we perform, the clothes we wear, the meals we serve, the buildings we inhabit--all convey "shared" meanings to members of a particular culture, and so can be analyzed as signs which function in diverse kinds of signifying systems. Linguistics (the study of verbal signs and structures) is only one branch of semiotics but supplies the basic methods and terms which are used in the study of all other social sign systems (Abrams, p. 170). Major figures include Charles Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault (fou-KOH), Umberto Eco, Gérard Genette, and Roland Barthes (bart).
DEFINITION OF STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including literature, are thought to be parts of a system of signs. Critic Robert Scholes has described structuralism as a reaction to "’modernist’ alienation and despair."
European structuralists such as Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes (before his shift toward poststructuralism) attempted to develop a semiology, or semiotics (science of signs). Barthes, among others, sought to recover literature and even language from the isolation in which they had been studied and to show that the laws that govern them govern all signs, from road signs to articles of clothing.
Structuralism was heavily influenced by linguistics, especially by the pioneering work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Particularly useful to structuralists was Saussure’s concept of the phoneme (the smallest basic speech sound or unit of pronunciation) and his idea that phonemes exist in two kinds of relationships: diachronic and synchronic. A phoneme has a diachronic, or "horizontal," relationship with those other phonemes that precede and follow it (as the words appear, left to right, on this page) in a particular usage, utterance, or narrative—what Saussure, a linguist, called parole (French for "word"). A phoneme has a synchronic, or "vertical," relationship with the entire system of language within which individual usages, utterances, or narratives have meaning—what Saussure called langue (French for "tongue," as in "native tongue," meaning language). An means what it means in English because those of us who speak the language are plugged into the same system (think of it as a computer network where different individuals can access the same information in the same way at a given time).
Following Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, studied hundreds of myths, breaking them into their smallest meaningful units, which he called "mythemes." Removing each from its diachronic relations with other mythemes in a single myth (such as the myth of Oedipus and his mother), he vertically aligned those mythemes that he found to be homologous (structurally correspondent). He then studied the relationships within as well as between vertically aligned columns, in an attempt to understand scientifically, through ratios and proportions, those thoughts and processes that humankind has shared, both at one particular time and across time. Whether Lévi-Strauss was studying the structure of myths or the structure of villages, he looked for recurring, common elements that transcended the differences within and among cultures.
Structuralists followed Saussure in preferring to think about the overriding langue, or language of myth, in which each mytheme and mytheme-constituted myth fits meaningfully, rather than about isolated individual paroles, or narratives. Structuralists also followed Saussure's lead in believing that sign systems must be understood in terms of binary oppositions (a proposition later disputed by poststructuralist Jacques Derrida). In analyzing myths and texts to find basic structures, structuralists found that opposite terms modulate until they are finally resolved or reconciled by some intermediary third term. Thus a structuralist reading of Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) might show that the war between God and the rebellious angels becomes a rift between God and sinful, fallen man, a rift that is healed by the Son of God, the mediating third term.
Although structuralism was largely a European phenomenon in its origin and development, it was influenced by American thinkers as well. Noam Chomsky, for instance, who powerfully influenced structuralism through works such as Reflections on Language (1975), identified and distinguished between "surface structures" and "deep structures" in language and linguistic literatures, including texts.
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of cultural sign processes (semiosis), analogy, metaphor, signification and communication, signs and symbols. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which in its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is usually divided into three branches, which include:
* Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
* Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
* Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them
Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural sciences – such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoosemiosis.
Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols.[1] More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences."[2] Charles Morris adds that semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects which they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.
Formulations
Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted (see modality). This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear. To coin a word to refer to a thing (see lexical words), the community must agree on a simple meaning (a denotative meaning) within their language. But that word can transmit that meaning only within the language's grammatical structures and codes (see syntax and semantics). Codes also represent the values of the culture, and are able to add new shades of connotation to every aspect of life.
To explain the relationship between semiotics and communication studies, communication is defined as the process of transferring data from a source to a receiver. Hence, communication theorists construct models based on codes, media, and contexts to explain the biology, psychology, and mechanics involved. Both disciplines also recognize that the technical process cannot be separated from the fact that the receiver must decode the data, i.e., be able to distinguish the data as salient and make meaning out of it. This implies that there is a necessary overlap between semiotics and communication. Indeed, many of the concepts are shared, although in each field the emphasis is different. In Messages and Meanings: An Introduction to Semiotics, Marcel Danesi (1994) suggested that semioticians' priorities were to study signification first and communication second. A more extreme view is offered by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1987; trans. 1990: 16), who, as a musicologist, considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of semiotics.
Semiotics differs from linguistics in that it generalizes the definition of a sign to encompass signs in any medium or sensory modality. Thus it broadens the range of sign systems and sign relations, and extends the definition of language in what amounts to its widest analogical or metaphorical sense. Peirce's definition of the term "semiotic" as the study of necessary features of signs also has the effect of distinguishing the discipline from linguistics as the study of contingent features that the world's languages happen to have acquired in the course of human evolution.
Perhaps more difficult is the distinction between semiotics and the philosophy of language. In a sense, the difference is a difference of traditions more than a difference of subjects. Different authors have called themselves "philosopher of language" or "semiotician". This difference does not match the separation between analytic and continental philosophy. On a closer look, there may be found some differences regarding subjects. Philosophy of language pays more attention to natural languages or to languages in general, while semiotics is deeply concerned about non-linguistic signification. Philosophy of language also bears a stronger connection to linguistics, while semiotics is closer to some of the humanities (including literary theory) and to cultural anthropology.
Semiosis or semeiosis is the process that forms meaning from any organism's apprehension of the world through signs.
[edit] History
The importance of signs and signification has been recognized throughout much of the history of philosophy, and in psychology as well. Plato and Aristotle both explored the relationship between signs and the world, and Augustine considered the nature of the sign within a conventional system. These theories have had a lasting effect in Western philosophy, especially through Scholastic philosophy. More recently, Umberto Eco, in his Semiotics and philosophy of language, has argued that semiotic theories are implicit in the work of most, perhaps all, major thinkers.
Early theorists in this area include Charles W. Morris.[9] Max Black attributes the work of Bertrand Russell as being seminal.[10]
[edit] Some important semioticians
* Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), a notable logician who founded philosophical pragmatism, defined semiosis as an irreducibly triadic process wherein something, as an object, logically determines or influences something as a sign to determine or influence something as an interpretation or interpretant, itself a sign, thus leading to further interpretants.[11] Semiosis is logically structured to perpetuate itself. The object can be quality, fact, rule, or even fictional (Hamlet), and can be (1) immediate to the sign, the object as represented in the sign, or (2) dynamic, the object as it really is, on which the immediate object is founded. The interpretant can be (1) immediate to the sign, all that the sign immediately expresses, such as a word's usual meaning; or (2) dynamic, such as a state of agitation; or (3) final or normal, the ultimate ramifications of the sign about its object, to which inquiry taken far enough would be destined and with which any actual interpretant can at most coincide.[12] His semiotic[13] covered not only artificial, linguistic, and symbolic signs, but also semblances such as kindred sensible qualities, and indices such as reactions. He came circa 1903[14] to classify any sign by three interdependent trichotomies, intersecting to form ten (rather than 27) classes of sign.[15] Signs also enter into various kinds of meaningful combinations; Peirce covered both semantic and syntactical issues in his speculative grammar. He regarded formal semiotic as logic per se and part of philosophy; as also encompassing study of arguments (hypothetical, deductive, and inductive) and inquiry's methods including pragmatism; and as allied to but distinct from logic's pure mathematics. For a summary of Peirce's contributions to semiotics, see Liszka (1996) or Atkin (2006).
* Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the "father" of modern linguistics, proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase uttered, to the signified as the mental concept. It is important to note that, according to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary, i.e. there was no necessary connection between the sign and its meaning. This sets him apart from previous philosophers such as Plato or the Scholastics, who thought that there must be some connection between a signifier and the object it signifies. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure himself credits the American linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) with insisting on the arbitrary nature of the sign. Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign has also influenced later philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. Ferdinand de Saussure coined the term semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906–11. Saussure posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a "signifier," i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the "signified," or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued "sign." Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.
* Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) studied the sign processes in animals. He introduced the concept of Umwelt (subjective world or environment, lit. "world around") and functional circle (Funktionskreis) as a general model of sign processes. In his Theory of Meaning (Bedeutungslehre, 1940), he described the semiotic approach to biology, thus establishing the field that is now called biosemiotics.
* Valentin Voloshinov (Russian: Валенти́н Никола́евич Воло́шинов) (1895 – June 13, 1936) was a Soviet/Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology. Written in the late 1920s in the USSR, Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (tr.: Marksizm i Filosofiya Yazyka) developed a counter-Saussurean linguistics, which situated language use in social process rather than in an entirely decontexualized Saussurean langue.
* Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) developed a formalist approach to Saussure's structuralist theories. His best known work is Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, which was expanded in Résumé of the Theory of Language, a formal development of glossematics, his scientific calculus of language.
* Charles W. Morris (1901–1979). In his 1938 Foundations of the Theory of Signs, he defined semiotics as grouping the triad syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Syntax studies the interrelation of the signs, without regard to meaning. Semantics studies the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply. Pragmatics studies the relation between the sign system and its human (or animal) user. Unlike his mentor George Herbert Mead, Morris was a behaviorist and sympathetic to the Vienna Circle positivism of his colleague Rudolf Carnap. Morris was accused by John Dewey[16] of misreading Peirce.
* Thure von Uexküll (1908–2004), the "father" of modern psychosomatic medicine, developed a diagnostic method based on semiotic and biosemiotic analyses.
* Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a French literary theorist and semiotician. He would often interrogate pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society used them to assert its values upon others. For instance, portrayal of wine in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a bourgeois ideal perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics useful in these interrogations. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were second-order signs, or connotations. A picture of a full, dark bottle is a sign, a signifier relating to a signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage – wine. However, the bourgeois take this signified and apply their own emphasis to it, making ‘wine’ a new signifier, this time relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing wine. Motivations for such manipulations vary from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes very much in line with similar Marxist theory.
* Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) developed a structural version of semiotics named generative semiotics, trying to shift the focus of discipline from signs to systems of signification. His theories develop the ideas of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
* Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001), a student of Charles W. Morris, was a prolific and wide-ranging American semiotician. Though he insisted that animals are not capable of language, he expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, thus raising some of the issues addressed by philosophy of mind and coining the term zoosemiotics. Sebeok insisted that all communication was made possible by the relationship between an organism and the environment it lives in. He also posed the equation between semiosis (the activity of interpreting signs) and life – the view that has further developed by Copenhagen-Tartu biosemiotic school.
* Juri Lotman (1922–1993) was the founding member of the Tartu (or Tartu-Moscow) Semiotic School. He developed a semiotic approach to the study of culture and established a communication model for the study of text semiotics. He also introduced the concept of the semiosphere. Among his Moscow colleagues were Vladimir Toporov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, and Boris Uspensky.
* Umberto Eco (1932–present) made a wider audience aware of semiotics by various publications, most notably A Theory of Semiotics and his novel, The Name of the Rose, which includes applied semiotic operations. His most important contributions to the field bear on interpretation, encyclopedia, and model reader. He has also criticized in several works (A theory of semiotics, La struttura assente, Le signe, La production de signes) the "iconism" or "iconic signs" (taken from Peirce's most famous triadic relation, based on indexes, icons, and symbols), to which he purposes four modes of sign production: recognition, ostension, replica, and invention.
* Eliseo Verón (1935–present) developed his "Social Discourse Theory" inspired in the Peircian conception of "Semiosis".
* Alberto J. Muniagurria (1944–present) expert clinitian Full Professor of Medicine and Clinical Semiology in Rosario Medical School. Member of the Argentina National Academy of Medicine, and author of the collection "Clinical Semiology".
* The Mu Group (Groupe µ) (founded 1967) developed a structural version of rhetorics, and the visual semiotics.
[edit] Current applications
Color-coding hot- and cold-water faucets is common in many cultures but, as this example shows, the coding may be rendered meaningless because of context. The two faucets were probably sold as a coded set, but the code is unusable (and ignored) as there is a single water supply.
Applications of semiotics include:
* It represents a methodology for the analysis of texts regardless of modality. For these purposes, "text" is any message preserved in a form whose existence is independent of both sender and receiver;
* It can improve ergonomic design in situations where it is important to ensure that human beings can interact more effectively with their environments, whether it be on a large scale, as in architecture, or on a small scale, such as the configuration of instrumentation for human use.
Semiotics is only slowly establishing itself as a discipline to be respected. In some countries, its role is limited to literary criticism and an appreciation of audio and visual media, but this narrow focus can inhibit a more general study of the social and political forces shaping how different media are used and their dynamic status within modern culture. Issues of technological determinism in the choice of media and the design of communication strategies assume new importance in this age of mass media. The use of semiotic methods to reveal different levels of meaning and, sometimes, hidden motivations has led some[who?] to demonise elements of the subject as Marxist, nihilist, etc. (e.g. critical discourse analysis in Postmodernism and deconstruction in Post-structuralism).
Publication of research is both in dedicated journals such as Sign Systems Studies, established by Juri Lotman and published by Tartu University Press; Semiotica, founded by Thomas A. Sebeok and published by Mouton de Gruyter; Zeitschrift für Semiotik; European Journal of Semiotics; Versus (founded and directed by Umberto Eco), et al.; The American Journal of Semiotics; and as articles accepted in periodicals of other disciplines, especially journals oriented toward philosophy and cultural criticism. The major semiotic book series "Semiotics, Communication, Cognition", published by De Gruyter Mouton (series editors Paul Cobley and Kalevi Kull) replaces the former "Approaches to Semiotics" (over 120 volumes) and "Approaches to Applied Semiotics" (series editor Thomas A. Sebeok).
[edit] Branches
Semiotics has sprouted a number of subfields, including but not limited to the following:
* Biosemiotics is the study of semiotic processes at all levels of biology, or a semiotic study of living systems.
* Cognitive Semiotics is the study of meaning through neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, art, and philosophy at the University of Aarhus, Denmark that has brought many international semioticians: Per Aage Brandt, Svend Oestergaard, Per Bungaard, Frederik Stjernfelt and a connection to Aarhus Hospital, particularly the Center of Functionally Integrated Neuroscience (CFIN).
* Computational semiotics attempts to engineer the process of semiosis, say in the study of and design for Human-Computer Interaction or to mimic aspects of human cognition through artificial intelligence and knowledge representation.
* Cultural and literary semiotics examines the literary world, the visual media, the mass media, and advertising in the work of writers such as Roland Barthes, Marcel Danesi, and Juri Lotman.
* Design Semiotics or Product Semiotics is the study of the use of signs in the design of physical products. Introduced by Rune Monö while teaching Industrial Design at the Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden.
* Law and Semiotics. One of the more accomplished publications in this field is the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law.
* Music semiology "There are strong arguments that music inhabits a semiological realm which, on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, has developmental priority over verbal language." (Middleton 1990, p. 172) See Nattiez (1976, 1987, 1989), Stefani (1973, 1986), Baroni (1983), and Semiotica (66: 1–3 (1987)).
* Organisational Semiotics is the study of semiotic processes in organizations. It has strong ties to Computational semiotics and Human-Computer Interaction.
* Social semiotics expands the interpretable semiotic landscape to include all cultural codes, such as in slang, fashion, and advertising. See the work of Roland Barthes, Michael Halliday, Bob Hodge, and Christian Metz.
* Structuralism and post-structuralism in the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, etc.
* Theatre Semiotics extends or adapts semiotics onstage. Key theoricians include Keir Elam.
* Urban semiotics.
* Visual semiotics – a subdomain of semiotics that analyses visual signs. See also visual rhetoric [2].
[edit] Pictorial semiotics
Pictorial Semiotics is intimately connected to art history and theory. It has gone beyond them both in at least one fundamental way, however. While art history has limited its visual analysis to a small number of pictures which qualify as "works of art," pictorial semiotics has focused on the properties of pictures more generally. This break from traditional art history and theory—as well as from other major streams of semiotic analysis—leaves open a wide variety of possibilities for pictorial semiotics. Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, and structuralist and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology/sociology.
[edit] Semiotics of food
Food has been one traditional topic of choice in relating semiotic theory because it is extremely accessible and easily relatable to the average individual’s life.[17]
Semiotics is the study of sign processes when conducted individually or in groups and how these sign processes give insight as to how meaning is enabled and also understood. [17]
Food is said to be semiotic because it transforms meaning with preparation. Food that is eaten by a wild animal raw off of a carcass is obviously different in meaning when compared to a food that is prepared by humans in a kitchen to represent a cultural dish.[17]
Food can also be said to be symbolic of certain social codes. “If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries” [18].
Food is a semiotic regardless of how it is prepared. Whether food is prepared with precision in a fine dining restaurant, picked from a dumpster, plucked, devoured, or even consumed by a wild animal, meaning can always be extracted from the way a certain food has been prepared and the context in which it is served.
[edit] Semiotics and globalization
Present research found that, as branches grow and become more international, their logos become more symbolic and less iconic. The iconicity and symbolism of a sign depends on the cultural convention and are on that ground in relation with each other. If the cultural convention has greater influence on the sign, the signs get more symbolic value.[19]
[edit] Main institutions
World organisation of semioticians – the International Association for Semiotic Studies, with its journal Semiotica – was established in 1969. The larger research centers together with extensive teaching program include the Semiotics Departments of Tartu University, Aarhus University, and Bologna University.
Structuralism is a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perceptions and description of structures. At its simplest, structuralism claims that the nature of every element in any given situation has no significance by itself, and in fact is determined by all the other elements involved in that situation. The full significance of any entity cannot be perceived unless and until it is integrated into the structure of which it forms a part (Hawkes, p. 11). Structuralists believe that all human activity is constructed, not natural or "essential." Consequently, it is the systems of organization that are important (what we do is always a matter of selection within a given construct). By this formulation, "any activity, from the actions of a narrative to not eating one's peas with a knife, takes place within a system of differences and has meaning only in its relation to other possible activities within that system, not to some meaning that emanates from nature or the divine" (Childers & Hentzi, p. 286.). Major figures include Claude Lévi-Strauss (LAY-vee-strows), A. J. Greimas (GREE-mahs), Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (bart), Ferdinand de Saussure (soh-SURR or soh-ZHOR), Roman Jakobson (YAH-keb-sen), Vladimir Propp, and Terence Hawkes.
Semiology
Semiotics, simply put, is the science of signs. Semiology proposes that a great diversity of our human action and productions--our bodily postures and gestures, the the social rituals we perform, the clothes we wear, the meals we serve, the buildings we inhabit--all convey "shared" meanings to members of a particular culture, and so can be analyzed as signs which function in diverse kinds of signifying systems. Linguistics (the study of verbal signs and structures) is only one branch of semiotics but supplies the basic methods and terms which are used in the study of all other social sign systems (Abrams, p. 170). Major figures include Charles Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault (fou-KOH), Umberto Eco, Gérard Genette, and Roland Barthes (bart).
DEFINITION OF STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including literature, are thought to be parts of a system of signs. Critic Robert Scholes has described structuralism as a reaction to "’modernist’ alienation and despair."
European structuralists such as Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes (before his shift toward poststructuralism) attempted to develop a semiology, or semiotics (science of signs). Barthes, among others, sought to recover literature and even language from the isolation in which they had been studied and to show that the laws that govern them govern all signs, from road signs to articles of clothing.
Structuralism was heavily influenced by linguistics, especially by the pioneering work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Particularly useful to structuralists was Saussure’s concept of the phoneme (the smallest basic speech sound or unit of pronunciation) and his idea that phonemes exist in two kinds of relationships: diachronic and synchronic. A phoneme has a diachronic, or "horizontal," relationship with those other phonemes that precede and follow it (as the words appear, left to right, on this page) in a particular usage, utterance, or narrative—what Saussure, a linguist, called parole (French for "word"). A phoneme has a synchronic, or "vertical," relationship with the entire system of language within which individual usages, utterances, or narratives have meaning—what Saussure called langue (French for "tongue," as in "native tongue," meaning language). An means what it means in English because those of us who speak the language are plugged into the same system (think of it as a computer network where different individuals can access the same information in the same way at a given time).
Following Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, studied hundreds of myths, breaking them into their smallest meaningful units, which he called "mythemes." Removing each from its diachronic relations with other mythemes in a single myth (such as the myth of Oedipus and his mother), he vertically aligned those mythemes that he found to be homologous (structurally correspondent). He then studied the relationships within as well as between vertically aligned columns, in an attempt to understand scientifically, through ratios and proportions, those thoughts and processes that humankind has shared, both at one particular time and across time. Whether Lévi-Strauss was studying the structure of myths or the structure of villages, he looked for recurring, common elements that transcended the differences within and among cultures.
Structuralists followed Saussure in preferring to think about the overriding langue, or language of myth, in which each mytheme and mytheme-constituted myth fits meaningfully, rather than about isolated individual paroles, or narratives. Structuralists also followed Saussure's lead in believing that sign systems must be understood in terms of binary oppositions (a proposition later disputed by poststructuralist Jacques Derrida). In analyzing myths and texts to find basic structures, structuralists found that opposite terms modulate until they are finally resolved or reconciled by some intermediary third term. Thus a structuralist reading of Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) might show that the war between God and the rebellious angels becomes a rift between God and sinful, fallen man, a rift that is healed by the Son of God, the mediating third term.
Although structuralism was largely a European phenomenon in its origin and development, it was influenced by American thinkers as well. Noam Chomsky, for instance, who powerfully influenced structuralism through works such as Reflections on Language (1975), identified and distinguished between "surface structures" and "deep structures" in language and linguistic literatures, including texts.
Adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books.
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of cultural sign processes (semiosis), analogy, metaphor, signification and communication, signs and symbols. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which in its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is usually divided into three branches, which include:
* Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
* Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
* Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them
Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example, Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural sciences – such as how organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoosemiosis.
Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols.[1] More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are combined to form phrases and sentences."[2] Charles Morris adds that semantics deals with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects which they may or do denote; and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.
Formulations
Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted (see modality). This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear. To coin a word to refer to a thing (see lexical words), the community must agree on a simple meaning (a denotative meaning) within their language. But that word can transmit that meaning only within the language's grammatical structures and codes (see syntax and semantics). Codes also represent the values of the culture, and are able to add new shades of connotation to every aspect of life.
To explain the relationship between semiotics and communication studies, communication is defined as the process of transferring data from a source to a receiver. Hence, communication theorists construct models based on codes, media, and contexts to explain the biology, psychology, and mechanics involved. Both disciplines also recognize that the technical process cannot be separated from the fact that the receiver must decode the data, i.e., be able to distinguish the data as salient and make meaning out of it. This implies that there is a necessary overlap between semiotics and communication. Indeed, many of the concepts are shared, although in each field the emphasis is different. In Messages and Meanings: An Introduction to Semiotics, Marcel Danesi (1994) suggested that semioticians' priorities were to study signification first and communication second. A more extreme view is offered by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1987; trans. 1990: 16), who, as a musicologist, considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of semiotics.
Semiotics differs from linguistics in that it generalizes the definition of a sign to encompass signs in any medium or sensory modality. Thus it broadens the range of sign systems and sign relations, and extends the definition of language in what amounts to its widest analogical or metaphorical sense. Peirce's definition of the term "semiotic" as the study of necessary features of signs also has the effect of distinguishing the discipline from linguistics as the study of contingent features that the world's languages happen to have acquired in the course of human evolution.
Perhaps more difficult is the distinction between semiotics and the philosophy of language. In a sense, the difference is a difference of traditions more than a difference of subjects. Different authors have called themselves "philosopher of language" or "semiotician". This difference does not match the separation between analytic and continental philosophy. On a closer look, there may be found some differences regarding subjects. Philosophy of language pays more attention to natural languages or to languages in general, while semiotics is deeply concerned about non-linguistic signification. Philosophy of language also bears a stronger connection to linguistics, while semiotics is closer to some of the humanities (including literary theory) and to cultural anthropology.
Semiosis or semeiosis is the process that forms meaning from any organism's apprehension of the world through signs.
[edit] History
The importance of signs and signification has been recognized throughout much of the history of philosophy, and in psychology as well. Plato and Aristotle both explored the relationship between signs and the world, and Augustine considered the nature of the sign within a conventional system. These theories have had a lasting effect in Western philosophy, especially through Scholastic philosophy. More recently, Umberto Eco, in his Semiotics and philosophy of language, has argued that semiotic theories are implicit in the work of most, perhaps all, major thinkers.
Early theorists in this area include Charles W. Morris.[9] Max Black attributes the work of Bertrand Russell as being seminal.[10]
[edit] Some important semioticians
* Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), a notable logician who founded philosophical pragmatism, defined semiosis as an irreducibly triadic process wherein something, as an object, logically determines or influences something as a sign to determine or influence something as an interpretation or interpretant, itself a sign, thus leading to further interpretants.[11] Semiosis is logically structured to perpetuate itself. The object can be quality, fact, rule, or even fictional (Hamlet), and can be (1) immediate to the sign, the object as represented in the sign, or (2) dynamic, the object as it really is, on which the immediate object is founded. The interpretant can be (1) immediate to the sign, all that the sign immediately expresses, such as a word's usual meaning; or (2) dynamic, such as a state of agitation; or (3) final or normal, the ultimate ramifications of the sign about its object, to which inquiry taken far enough would be destined and with which any actual interpretant can at most coincide.[12] His semiotic[13] covered not only artificial, linguistic, and symbolic signs, but also semblances such as kindred sensible qualities, and indices such as reactions. He came circa 1903[14] to classify any sign by three interdependent trichotomies, intersecting to form ten (rather than 27) classes of sign.[15] Signs also enter into various kinds of meaningful combinations; Peirce covered both semantic and syntactical issues in his speculative grammar. He regarded formal semiotic as logic per se and part of philosophy; as also encompassing study of arguments (hypothetical, deductive, and inductive) and inquiry's methods including pragmatism; and as allied to but distinct from logic's pure mathematics. For a summary of Peirce's contributions to semiotics, see Liszka (1996) or Atkin (2006).
* Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the "father" of modern linguistics, proposed a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase uttered, to the signified as the mental concept. It is important to note that, according to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary, i.e. there was no necessary connection between the sign and its meaning. This sets him apart from previous philosophers such as Plato or the Scholastics, who thought that there must be some connection between a signifier and the object it signifies. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure himself credits the American linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) with insisting on the arbitrary nature of the sign. Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign has also influenced later philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. Ferdinand de Saussure coined the term semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the University of Geneva from 1906–11. Saussure posited that no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a "signifier," i.e. the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the "signified," or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued "sign." Saussure believed that dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.
* Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) studied the sign processes in animals. He introduced the concept of Umwelt (subjective world or environment, lit. "world around") and functional circle (Funktionskreis) as a general model of sign processes. In his Theory of Meaning (Bedeutungslehre, 1940), he described the semiotic approach to biology, thus establishing the field that is now called biosemiotics.
* Valentin Voloshinov (Russian: Валенти́н Никола́евич Воло́шинов) (1895 – June 13, 1936) was a Soviet/Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology. Written in the late 1920s in the USSR, Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (tr.: Marksizm i Filosofiya Yazyka) developed a counter-Saussurean linguistics, which situated language use in social process rather than in an entirely decontexualized Saussurean langue.
* Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) developed a formalist approach to Saussure's structuralist theories. His best known work is Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, which was expanded in Résumé of the Theory of Language, a formal development of glossematics, his scientific calculus of language.
* Charles W. Morris (1901–1979). In his 1938 Foundations of the Theory of Signs, he defined semiotics as grouping the triad syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Syntax studies the interrelation of the signs, without regard to meaning. Semantics studies the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply. Pragmatics studies the relation between the sign system and its human (or animal) user. Unlike his mentor George Herbert Mead, Morris was a behaviorist and sympathetic to the Vienna Circle positivism of his colleague Rudolf Carnap. Morris was accused by John Dewey[16] of misreading Peirce.
* Thure von Uexküll (1908–2004), the "father" of modern psychosomatic medicine, developed a diagnostic method based on semiotic and biosemiotic analyses.
* Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a French literary theorist and semiotician. He would often interrogate pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society used them to assert its values upon others. For instance, portrayal of wine in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a bourgeois ideal perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics useful in these interrogations. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were second-order signs, or connotations. A picture of a full, dark bottle is a sign, a signifier relating to a signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage – wine. However, the bourgeois take this signified and apply their own emphasis to it, making ‘wine’ a new signifier, this time relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing wine. Motivations for such manipulations vary from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes very much in line with similar Marxist theory.
* Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) developed a structural version of semiotics named generative semiotics, trying to shift the focus of discipline from signs to systems of signification. His theories develop the ideas of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
* Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001), a student of Charles W. Morris, was a prolific and wide-ranging American semiotician. Though he insisted that animals are not capable of language, he expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, thus raising some of the issues addressed by philosophy of mind and coining the term zoosemiotics. Sebeok insisted that all communication was made possible by the relationship between an organism and the environment it lives in. He also posed the equation between semiosis (the activity of interpreting signs) and life – the view that has further developed by Copenhagen-Tartu biosemiotic school.
* Juri Lotman (1922–1993) was the founding member of the Tartu (or Tartu-Moscow) Semiotic School. He developed a semiotic approach to the study of culture and established a communication model for the study of text semiotics. He also introduced the concept of the semiosphere. Among his Moscow colleagues were Vladimir Toporov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, and Boris Uspensky.
* Umberto Eco (1932–present) made a wider audience aware of semiotics by various publications, most notably A Theory of Semiotics and his novel, The Name of the Rose, which includes applied semiotic operations. His most important contributions to the field bear on interpretation, encyclopedia, and model reader. He has also criticized in several works (A theory of semiotics, La struttura assente, Le signe, La production de signes) the "iconism" or "iconic signs" (taken from Peirce's most famous triadic relation, based on indexes, icons, and symbols), to which he purposes four modes of sign production: recognition, ostension, replica, and invention.
* Eliseo Verón (1935–present) developed his "Social Discourse Theory" inspired in the Peircian conception of "Semiosis".
* Alberto J. Muniagurria (1944–present) expert clinitian Full Professor of Medicine and Clinical Semiology in Rosario Medical School. Member of the Argentina National Academy of Medicine, and author of the collection "Clinical Semiology".
* The Mu Group (Groupe µ) (founded 1967) developed a structural version of rhetorics, and the visual semiotics.
[edit] Current applications
Color-coding hot- and cold-water faucets is common in many cultures but, as this example shows, the coding may be rendered meaningless because of context. The two faucets were probably sold as a coded set, but the code is unusable (and ignored) as there is a single water supply.
Applications of semiotics include:
* It represents a methodology for the analysis of texts regardless of modality. For these purposes, "text" is any message preserved in a form whose existence is independent of both sender and receiver;
* It can improve ergonomic design in situations where it is important to ensure that human beings can interact more effectively with their environments, whether it be on a large scale, as in architecture, or on a small scale, such as the configuration of instrumentation for human use.
Semiotics is only slowly establishing itself as a discipline to be respected. In some countries, its role is limited to literary criticism and an appreciation of audio and visual media, but this narrow focus can inhibit a more general study of the social and political forces shaping how different media are used and their dynamic status within modern culture. Issues of technological determinism in the choice of media and the design of communication strategies assume new importance in this age of mass media. The use of semiotic methods to reveal different levels of meaning and, sometimes, hidden motivations has led some[who?] to demonise elements of the subject as Marxist, nihilist, etc. (e.g. critical discourse analysis in Postmodernism and deconstruction in Post-structuralism).
Publication of research is both in dedicated journals such as Sign Systems Studies, established by Juri Lotman and published by Tartu University Press; Semiotica, founded by Thomas A. Sebeok and published by Mouton de Gruyter; Zeitschrift für Semiotik; European Journal of Semiotics; Versus (founded and directed by Umberto Eco), et al.; The American Journal of Semiotics; and as articles accepted in periodicals of other disciplines, especially journals oriented toward philosophy and cultural criticism. The major semiotic book series "Semiotics, Communication, Cognition", published by De Gruyter Mouton (series editors Paul Cobley and Kalevi Kull) replaces the former "Approaches to Semiotics" (over 120 volumes) and "Approaches to Applied Semiotics" (series editor Thomas A. Sebeok).
[edit] Branches
Semiotics has sprouted a number of subfields, including but not limited to the following:
* Biosemiotics is the study of semiotic processes at all levels of biology, or a semiotic study of living systems.
* Cognitive Semiotics is the study of meaning through neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, art, and philosophy at the University of Aarhus, Denmark that has brought many international semioticians: Per Aage Brandt, Svend Oestergaard, Per Bungaard, Frederik Stjernfelt and a connection to Aarhus Hospital, particularly the Center of Functionally Integrated Neuroscience (CFIN).
* Computational semiotics attempts to engineer the process of semiosis, say in the study of and design for Human-Computer Interaction or to mimic aspects of human cognition through artificial intelligence and knowledge representation.
* Cultural and literary semiotics examines the literary world, the visual media, the mass media, and advertising in the work of writers such as Roland Barthes, Marcel Danesi, and Juri Lotman.
* Design Semiotics or Product Semiotics is the study of the use of signs in the design of physical products. Introduced by Rune Monö while teaching Industrial Design at the Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden.
* Law and Semiotics. One of the more accomplished publications in this field is the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law.
* Music semiology "There are strong arguments that music inhabits a semiological realm which, on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, has developmental priority over verbal language." (Middleton 1990, p. 172) See Nattiez (1976, 1987, 1989), Stefani (1973, 1986), Baroni (1983), and Semiotica (66: 1–3 (1987)).
* Organisational Semiotics is the study of semiotic processes in organizations. It has strong ties to Computational semiotics and Human-Computer Interaction.
* Social semiotics expands the interpretable semiotic landscape to include all cultural codes, such as in slang, fashion, and advertising. See the work of Roland Barthes, Michael Halliday, Bob Hodge, and Christian Metz.
* Structuralism and post-structuralism in the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, etc.
* Theatre Semiotics extends or adapts semiotics onstage. Key theoricians include Keir Elam.
* Urban semiotics.
* Visual semiotics – a subdomain of semiotics that analyses visual signs. See also visual rhetoric [2].
[edit] Pictorial semiotics
Pictorial Semiotics is intimately connected to art history and theory. It has gone beyond them both in at least one fundamental way, however. While art history has limited its visual analysis to a small number of pictures which qualify as "works of art," pictorial semiotics has focused on the properties of pictures more generally. This break from traditional art history and theory—as well as from other major streams of semiotic analysis—leaves open a wide variety of possibilities for pictorial semiotics. Some influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, and structuralist and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology/sociology.
[edit] Semiotics of food
Food has been one traditional topic of choice in relating semiotic theory because it is extremely accessible and easily relatable to the average individual’s life.[17]
Semiotics is the study of sign processes when conducted individually or in groups and how these sign processes give insight as to how meaning is enabled and also understood. [17]
Food is said to be semiotic because it transforms meaning with preparation. Food that is eaten by a wild animal raw off of a carcass is obviously different in meaning when compared to a food that is prepared by humans in a kitchen to represent a cultural dish.[17]
Food can also be said to be symbolic of certain social codes. “If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries” [18].
Food is a semiotic regardless of how it is prepared. Whether food is prepared with precision in a fine dining restaurant, picked from a dumpster, plucked, devoured, or even consumed by a wild animal, meaning can always be extracted from the way a certain food has been prepared and the context in which it is served.
[edit] Semiotics and globalization
Present research found that, as branches grow and become more international, their logos become more symbolic and less iconic. The iconicity and symbolism of a sign depends on the cultural convention and are on that ground in relation with each other. If the cultural convention has greater influence on the sign, the signs get more symbolic value.[19]
[edit] Main institutions
World organisation of semioticians – the International Association for Semiotic Studies, with its journal Semiotica – was established in 1969. The larger research centers together with extensive teaching program include the Semiotics Departments of Tartu University, Aarhus University, and Bologna University.
The Ethics of Absolute Freedom
David Banach
I. Individuality, Freedom, and Ethics.
The modern conception of man is characterized, more than anything else, by individualism. Existentialism can be seen as a rigorous attempt to work out the implications of this individualism. The purpose of this lecture is to makes sense of the Existentialist conception of individuality and the answers it gives to these three questions: (1) What is human freedom? What can the absolute freedom of absolute individuals mean? (2) What is human flourishing or human happiness? What general ethic or way of life emerges when we take our individuality seriously? (3) What ought we to do? What ethics or code of action can emerge from a position that takes our individuality seriously. Although I am sure you will want to take a critical look at the assumptions from which Existentialism arises in your seminars, I will be attempting, sympathetically, to see what follows if one takes these assumptions seriously.
Let's begin by seeing what it could mean to say we are absolute individuals. When you think of it, each of us is alone in the world. Only we feel our pains, our pleasures, our hopes, and our fears immediately, subjectively, from the inside. Other people only see us from the outside, objectively, and, hard as we may try, we can only see them from the outside. No one else can feel what we feel, and we cannot feel what is going on in any one else's mind.
Actually, when you think of it, the only thing we ever perceive immediately and directly is ourselves and the images and experiences in our mind. When we look at another person or object, we don't see it directly as it is; we see it only as it is represented in our own experience. When you feel the seat under your rear-end, do you really feel the seat itself or do you merely feel the sensations transmitted to you by nerve endings in your posterior?. When you look at the person next to you (contemplating how their rear-end feels), do you really see them as they are on the inside or feel what they feel? You see only the image of them that is presented to your mind through your senses. This is easily demonstrated by considering how our senses deceive us in optical illusions, but one simple example will have to suffice here. [split image demonstration] It seems, then, that we are minds trapped in bodies, only perceiving the images transmitted to us through our bodies and their senses.
Each of us is trapped within our own mind, unable to feel anything but our own feelings and experiences. It is as if each of us is trapped in a dark room with no windows. Our only access to the outside world being a television screen on one wall on which we (with our mind's eye) perceive the images of other people, places, and things. Thus, to be an absolute individual is to be trapped within ourselves, unable to perceive or contact anything but the images on our mental tv screen, and to be imperceptible ourselves to anyone outside of us. In a world where science has opened up and laid bare the nature of subatomic particles, far-away planets, and the workings of our very own bodies and brains, it is to remain, ourselves, hidden from the objective view. It is to be an island of subjectivity in an otherwise objective world.
II. The Existentialist View of Human Freedom.
What view of human nature can emerge from this view of the individual? One such view is the view of human nature identified with the name Existentialism. Sartre says that what all existentialists, both atheistic and christian, share in common "... is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point." (EHE, p. 13) Sartre explains what this means by contrasting it with the opposite slogan: ESSENCE PRECEDES EXISTENCE. He uses the example of a paper-cutter to explain how the old view treated human beings as artifacts, whose nature is tied to a preconceived essence and to a project outside of them, rather than as absolute individuals. He says in Existentialism and Human Emotions:
Let us consider some object that is manufactured, for example, a book or a paper-cutter: here is an object which has been made by an artisan whose inspiration came from a concept. He referred to the concept of what a paper-cutter is ... . Thus, the paper-cutter is at once an object produced in a certain way and, on the other hand, one having a specific use ... . Therefore, let us say that, for the paper-cutter, essence ... precedes existence. (EHE, pp. 13-14)
Essence Precedes Existence
Of course, the artisan in our case is God. Sartre continues:
When we conceive of God as the Creator, He is generally thought of as a superior sort of artisan. ... Thus the concept of man in the mind of God is comparable to the concept of the paper-cutter in the mind of the manufacturer... . Thus, the individual man is the realization of a certain concept in the divine intelligence. (EHE, p. 14)
On this view, the one Sartre is attacking, we get our nature from outside of us, from a being who created us with a preconceived idea of what we were to be and what we were to be good for. Our happiness and our fulfillment consist in our living up to the external standards that God had in mind in creating us. Both our nature and our value come from outside of us.
According to the existentialist, however, EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE. Sartre explains:
What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. ... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. (EHE, p. 15)
Thus, there is no human nature which provides us with an external source of determination and value. Sartre says:
If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.
Nothing outside of us can determine what we are and what we are good for; we must do it ourselves, from the inside. What we will be and what will be good for us is a radically individual matter. If we are radical individuals, there is no place else for our nature and value to come from, except from within us. It is this view of human nature, or the lack thereof, from which the existentialist conceptions of freedom and value flow.
We are now in a position to begin to answer the first of our three main questions: What is human freedom? What, exactly can the freedom of an absolute individual consist of? At first, it may seem clear that if we are islands of subjectivity, isolated from the forces of the outside world, we not only are capable of acting freely of outside determination, but we cannot help doing so since the only possible sources of action are internal. The situation, however, is somewhat more complex than this. To understand what freedom is for the Existentialist we must first see how, even though our inescapable nature is to be free, we all inevitably tend to try to escape our freedom. We all tend to act in what Sartre calls 'bad faith'. We attempt to deceive ourselves and act as if we weren't free, as if we were really determined by our nature, our body, or the expectations of other people.
The picture we drew earlier of the human individual trapped in a dark room perceiving the world only through our mental TV screens was too simple, for humans have a dual nature. Among the things we find on the mental tv screen, besides objects, other people, emotions, and desires, is ourselves. I see my body, and this thing I see is me. The human condition, for the Existentialist is a tension, a vertiginous imbalance, between the self that watches these images, standing apart from them, and the self that appears as an image. Just as I feel an imbalance upon walking into a department store and finding that one of the people on the video monitor is ME (caught by some unseen camera); or just as we feel a tension looking in the mirror wondering how the person in the glass can be ME if I am standing out here looking at it; so the self feels a tension between identifying itself with mind's eye behind the screen (standing apart from the give and take, the flux and flow, of our experience) and the images of us that appear as part of our experience (engaged in the world).
Thus, we all have the tendency to act in bad faith, to identify ourselves with one of the pictures we find on our mental TV screen, and to see ourselves as determined by one of the outside influences we find pictured there: our nature, our body, the physical world, or the expectations and pictures other people have of us. We are all familiar with the ways in which we try to excuse our actions by pretending that we are simply our bodies and are controlled by the forces that determine them. We have all said things like:
I can't talk to people, I just don't have that kind of personality.
I can't pass this course, I'm just don't have the brain for calculus.
I can't help the fact that I was born a man (or a woman); Certain things come naturally for certain types of people. (Says the man who can't take care of his children, or the woman who can't fix her car.)
I'm no good at this; I guess I just wasn't made to go to college.
Gee, I'm sorry about last night. I guess my hormones just got out of control.
I'm sorry I bit your head off yesterday. I must be premenstrual.
I don't know what happened. I guess the beer made me crazy.
In these cases, I am identifying myself with one of the pictures of me I find on my mental TV screen: I am my body, or my brain, or my personality, or my hormones. In each of these cases, I am deceiving myself. I am more than just these, and no matter how I try to avoid it, I am free.
We are also familiar with the way we all play roles, identifying ourselves, or seeing ourselves, in terms of how other people see us, letting other people determine what we are instead of deciding, ourselves, what we will be. We all to some extent tend to make ourselves into the image other people have of us. We are a different person with our friends than with our parents. We are a different person with a lover than with our acquaintances, and we are different still when we are in the classroom or at a job interview. It is often easier to let someone else determine what we will be than to do it ourselves, especially when we see our value in terms of the acceptance we get from other people. We all see little pictures of ourselves projected by other people and we often tend to try to make ourselves into these little pictures by playing roles. We play at being college students out for a good time, at being macho men or nurturing women, at being sons or daughters, at being businesswomen, policemen, scientists. We play at being students taking notes, and professors giving lectures. We play the roles; we make ourselves into characters in the plays; we make ourselves into little pictures on our mental tv screen determined by the script written by the expectations of other people.
But all of this is self-deception. We are more than any of the pictures we find on our mental tv screen. We stand behind it, watching it, making of it what we will. It is impossible to abdicate our freedom. In choosing to identify ourselves with some externally determined object we are choosing none the less. We cannot escape our freedom.
One might well ask at this point, "What does this freedom consist of. Am I free to become George Bush right now? Am I free to become a woman (without some fairly extensive and unpleasant surgery)? Am I free to fly up to the ceiling and hover above your heads? Am I free to close my eyes right now and find myself in the Bahamas when I reopen them? Unfortunately,it appears not. How, then, can I be free when most of my external circumstances are determined by forces beyond my control, when I cannot help where I was born, what type of body I have, and what type of abilities my brain has predisposed me towards?"
The answer to these questions lies in the nature of our radical individuality. I am not identical with any of the externally determined images on my mental TV screen. I am forever beyond the reach of their determinations within the island of my subjectivity.[1] Even if I were a puppet, my body and its actions completely controlled by some malevolent master, what I am, my mind's eye would still be free and untouched. I could still be free to rebel against my master or make whatever I wished of the situation. They can do what they want to my body, manipulate the objects or pictures of me on my mental TV screen, but they can never touch or control the real me. The self within its island of subjectivity is radically free in virtue of its radical individuality.
Furthermore, I have control over the content of my TV screen as well. External circumstances may determine the objects that appear, how they appear, and when they appear, but I control how these various components will be put together into a coherent picture. Sartre compares the type of freedom we have to that of an artist (EHE, pp. 42-43). An artist cannot control the nature of the canvas, nor of the paints that she has to work with. Nor can she control the nature of the subjects she will paint. But she can control how she will view them, how she will put these various elements together into a unique whole. Likewise, we may not be able to control the various elements within our experience that come from outside us, but we can view them and combine them in any way we like. Our experience is not any one of these; it is the way in which we combine these into a unified whole. We have the power to edit the frames which constitute our experience into the film that is to be our life. We all know the power of good editing, of the creative juxtaposition of determinate elements. It can transform experience; make the ugly beautiful and the ordinary, sublime.
Our freedom is, thus, a freedom of synthesis. It is the freedom to pull ourselves together into the type of coherent whole that we will ourselves to be. Even if the raw materials from which we construct ourselves are determined (just as the materials of the artist are determined), what we make of ourselves out of these materials is up to us alone (just as what the artist makes of her subject is up to her alone). We can not make the external world determine this even if we try. The sentence of freedom is the necessity of pulling ourselves together at each moment out of the myriad different influences imposing themselves upon us from the environment, our community,and from our own bodies. We are required to make ourselves, to pull ourselves together, and we can make of ourselves what we will.
The answer to our first question is, then, that we can be free because (1) Our absolute individuality isolates our real self from the determining influences of the outside world; we can always rebel against its influence; and (2) Even though the raw material that makes up our experience is determined by outside influences we are free to put these elements together into a unified whole; we must make ourselves anew at each moment, and what we shall make of ourselves is up to us. We now need to see what view of human happiness and of morality arise from this conception of human freedom. Both of these can be summed up by the single slogan BE AUTHENTIC. The secret of human flourishing and of moral action lies in avoiding bad faith and honoring the responsibility we have to create our own nature and values. The Existentialist enjoins us to be ourselves and make the source of our nature and values our own internal decisions rather than the pictures of ourselves that appear in our minds from external sources. Let us now see what view of human happiness this implies.
III. The Existentialist View of Human Happiness.
Existentialism is often associated with such themes as the absurdity of human existence and the worthlessness of our lives given our inevitable death. One might well wonder what view of happiness could arise from such a view. Sartre characterizes the human condition by (1) our forlorness at the loss of external values and determinants of our nature; (2) anguish at the resultant responsibility to create human nature ourselves; and (3) despair of finding value outside of ourselves and reliance upon what is under our own control. Forlorness, anguish, and despair: Mr. Sartre, it would seem, was not a happy camper. For another 20th century French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, however, the loss of any external source of value did not present quite such a dismal prospect.[2]
Camus compares our situation to that of the mythical figure Sisyphus. In his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" he explains that:
The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. (MS, p. 88)
It is easy to see the similarity between this situation and ours according to the Existentialist. Just as Sisyphus can find no end to his activities, no final resting place where he has finally reached his goal or lived up to some set of pre-existing standards, so we find that all of our activities lead to nowhere. There are no external values that we can live up to, no external viewpoint from which our life can be viewed to be valuable. Our life is a series of meaningless actions culminating in death, with no possibility of external justification. Yet, Camus will say that we must imagine Sisyphus (and ourselves) happy? "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." (MS, p. 91) Why? Why would this fool be happy eternally rolling a ball up a hill, and why should we be happy rolling our ball up the hill to nowhere?
At first, when one was still expecting to get ones value from outside of oneself, all this might seem depressing. Camus says:
When images of the earth cling to tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes to insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man's heart:this is the rock's victory this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is to heavy to bear. These are our nights in Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.
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Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
(MS, p. 90)
As we saw before, no matter what his external circumstances, Sisyphus is always free to make of them what he will, to rebel against them within his island of subjectivity. No matter what the Gods make him do, he is always free to give the Gods one of these [defiant gesture].
I remember when I first read this (as a senior in high school) thinking that this was sort of a stupid response to the absurdity of the human condition. What sense does it make to give one of these [defiant gesture] to a non-existent God whose absence is the source of the absurdity of our lives. What are we rebelling against? There must be more to the existentialist conception of happiness than this, I thought.
And there was. The despair and rebellion we feel at the loss of our external sources of value are the necessary price of a greater value and happiness that comes from within. One must lose all hope of external value before seeking value within. The theme that true happiness must come from within is one that is familiar to all of us, and it is the key to understanding the existentialist conception of happiness.
Two contemporary folk tails embody this existentialist theme well: The Wizard of Oz and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. This common theme probably does not show that these are existentialist works, but only that the American emphasis on self-reliance and internalism flows from the same individualist emphasis as Existentialism. In the Wizard of Oz there is an external realm, somewhere over the rainbow, where everything is as it should be and all problems are solved. There is a wizard who will give us brains, a heart, courage, and happiness. When Dorothy got there and discovered that Oz was full of the same type of evil as Kansas, when they discovered that the Wizard was a hoax, that there was nothing outside of them that was going to make them what they wanted to be, they were understandably depressed. But this disappointment was the necessary price of an important lesson: that the only place they could get a brain, or a heart, or courage was from within. Dorothy learns that if she ever loses anything that cannot be found within her own back yard, it wasn't really lost at all. There is no place like Home. (Especially if you are an island of subjectivity, for then there is no place but home.) The value one gets from within is infinitely better than the value one vainly attempts to get from outside.
The story of the Grinch shows why this is so. At first when the Who's in Whoville woke up to find that the Grinch had stolen their Bamboozlers and Dingdangers, they were at first very disappointed. They thought that the value of Christmas was in these external things. What they discovered, and what the grinch discovered looking out over Whoville listening for sounds of grief and hearing, instead, the sounds of joy, was that their real value came from within and was greater than any value that could come from external things since it couldn't be taken away.
A common theme in existentialist literature is the transformation that can occur in one's outlook on life when one is forced to face death. One of the founders of Existentialism, the 19th century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, actually had such a brush with death transform his life. He was involved in some activities that ran afoul of the Czar and was among the people rounded up in one of the Czar's crackdowns. He was told that he would be executed. He was blindfolded and made to wait his turn to face death. At the last minute, as Dostoevsky prepared to meet death, he got a reprieve. It turned out that he was to be sent to a labor camp instead and that this had merely been a cruel joke. One might imagine that if one could face one's death, face the impossibility of getting any value from any external accomplishments, and still find value within oneself, that value would be invulnerable. It could never be taken away. What else could they do to you?
If, after all sources of external value have been taken away, you can find value within yourself, you would have found what philosophers have been looking for throughout the ages: a way of achieving human happiness that is not vulnerable to the uncontrollable contingencies of the natural world. If we find ourselves isolated from external value by our radical individuality, we can make a world of ourselves, a universe of our own experience, in which we can and must find ourselves happy. Camus writes of Sisyphus:
The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. ... he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death.
............................................
But Sisyphus teaches a higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (MS, p.91)
The Existentialist's secret of happiness, then, is to get ones value from within oneself. In doing so, one loses the promise of external value, but they find a more real happiness, one that cannot be taken away by the external forces beyond their control.
IV. The Ethics of Absolute Freedom.
This conception of happiness, however, raises our third question: How ought we act towards other people? If the source of our value and nature is wholly internal, what obligations can I have to other humans? Can I freely and authentically choose to kill my mother, as Orestes does? Can I choose to be a murderer, a thief, or an exploiter of humanity? Is it true, as some Existentialist were fond of pointing out, that if God is dead then all things are allowable? I'm sure that you will want to discuss this issue, as it arises in The Flies, in your seminars, but I would like to briefly present you with what I take to be Sartre's three-fold response to this question in Existentialism and Human Emotions.
(1) First, in choosing our own human nature, according to Sartre, we choose human nature for all humans. Hence, we must choose courses of action that we would wish all humans to take. In choosing for ourselves, we choose for all men. This must be the case because, in order to act freely, I cannot allow myself to be affected by my peculiar circumstances, desires, or goals. This would be to act in bad faith, to try to identify myself with my desires, or my plans, or my circumstances, and these are all merely pictures on my mental TV screen. When I act freely, the only things that can affect my action must be things that I share with all free agents. Thus, I must choose in the same way I would want others to choose. To say that one must act authentically is to say that one must act in a way that ignores the differences between oneself and other people. After all, these differences are merely external and do not affect our identity as free agents, within our islands of subjectivity. To be free, then, I must follow the golden rule and act only as I would have others act.
(2) Sartre also argues that in order to be free, we must desire the freedom of all men. It is self-defeating to attempt to use other humans as objects to satisfy our desires, or to protect our freedom at the cost of enslaving others. If I attempt to enslave others or use them as objects, I make myself a slave and an object. The person who attempts to dominate other people finds himself a slave to his dependence on the attention and approval of the people he tries to enslave. Think of the tough guy leader of a clique of teenagers. He defines himself in terms of the expectations of his peers to keep their approval and admiration. He makes himself into a character controlled by the very slaves of whom he takes himself to be the master. The person who uses other people as objects to satisfy his desires makes himself an object. He can see other people only through his desires, and ultimately sees himself only as his desire. The manipulator, who attempts to buy and sell other people for his own ends, finds that he has sold his own soul as well by seeing himself merely as his desires. To see others as slaves of our desire is to make ourselves a slave of desire. To be free, we must desire the freedom of all men.
(3) Third, the free decisions that we make are not merely arbitrary. As we saw earlier, freedom does not mean just being able to do anything. The artist is free to create; she does not follow any explicit rules. Yet her action is constrained by the requirement that her creation must be coherent. In order to be her creation, she must pull the various disparate elements that go into the painting into one unified whole. Her freedom is a freedom of synthesis constrained by the material she has to work with and the requirement that she make some one unified thing out of it. In the same way, our actions must unify the many different influences on our lives into the one life that is to be ours. In pulling ourselves together, we cannot ignore the relationships and obligations that provide the raw materials of our lives. We must weave them into our lives, although how we will do this is up to us. Our actions, though free, are constrained by our situation in a community. Orestes, as you shall see in The Flies, is not free to ignore his family, his country, and his mother's crime. Why does he not just leave, as Zeus suggests?
The ethics of absolute freedom, it would seem, are not absolutely free. To be free we must take on the responsibility of choosing for all men, we must desire and work for the freedom of all men, and we must create ourselves within the context of the relationships and obligations we have to other people.
Is the ethic of absolute freedom a portrait of human greatness? Human excellence often defines itself in the struggle against the forces that oppose human flourishing. Existentialism attempts to find happiness, value, and meaning in a modern world characterized by isolation, inauthenticity, and absurdity. It attempts to see what human excellence can consist of if we find ourselves to be islands of subjectivity in an otherwise objective world. You will certainly want to ask if this is in fact what we find ourselves to be, but can it be doubted that the Existentialist attempt to find meaning in the face of absurdity exemplifies the basic drive that all portraits of human excellence must embody.
References
(MS) Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (trans. by Justin O'Brien). New York: Vintage, 1955.
(EHE) Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions (Trans. by Bernard Frechtman). New York: Philosophical Library, 1957.
I. Individuality, Freedom, and Ethics.
The modern conception of man is characterized, more than anything else, by individualism. Existentialism can be seen as a rigorous attempt to work out the implications of this individualism. The purpose of this lecture is to makes sense of the Existentialist conception of individuality and the answers it gives to these three questions: (1) What is human freedom? What can the absolute freedom of absolute individuals mean? (2) What is human flourishing or human happiness? What general ethic or way of life emerges when we take our individuality seriously? (3) What ought we to do? What ethics or code of action can emerge from a position that takes our individuality seriously. Although I am sure you will want to take a critical look at the assumptions from which Existentialism arises in your seminars, I will be attempting, sympathetically, to see what follows if one takes these assumptions seriously.
Let's begin by seeing what it could mean to say we are absolute individuals. When you think of it, each of us is alone in the world. Only we feel our pains, our pleasures, our hopes, and our fears immediately, subjectively, from the inside. Other people only see us from the outside, objectively, and, hard as we may try, we can only see them from the outside. No one else can feel what we feel, and we cannot feel what is going on in any one else's mind.
Actually, when you think of it, the only thing we ever perceive immediately and directly is ourselves and the images and experiences in our mind. When we look at another person or object, we don't see it directly as it is; we see it only as it is represented in our own experience. When you feel the seat under your rear-end, do you really feel the seat itself or do you merely feel the sensations transmitted to you by nerve endings in your posterior?. When you look at the person next to you (contemplating how their rear-end feels), do you really see them as they are on the inside or feel what they feel? You see only the image of them that is presented to your mind through your senses. This is easily demonstrated by considering how our senses deceive us in optical illusions, but one simple example will have to suffice here. [split image demonstration] It seems, then, that we are minds trapped in bodies, only perceiving the images transmitted to us through our bodies and their senses.
Each of us is trapped within our own mind, unable to feel anything but our own feelings and experiences. It is as if each of us is trapped in a dark room with no windows. Our only access to the outside world being a television screen on one wall on which we (with our mind's eye) perceive the images of other people, places, and things. Thus, to be an absolute individual is to be trapped within ourselves, unable to perceive or contact anything but the images on our mental tv screen, and to be imperceptible ourselves to anyone outside of us. In a world where science has opened up and laid bare the nature of subatomic particles, far-away planets, and the workings of our very own bodies and brains, it is to remain, ourselves, hidden from the objective view. It is to be an island of subjectivity in an otherwise objective world.
II. The Existentialist View of Human Freedom.
What view of human nature can emerge from this view of the individual? One such view is the view of human nature identified with the name Existentialism. Sartre says that what all existentialists, both atheistic and christian, share in common "... is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point." (EHE, p. 13) Sartre explains what this means by contrasting it with the opposite slogan: ESSENCE PRECEDES EXISTENCE. He uses the example of a paper-cutter to explain how the old view treated human beings as artifacts, whose nature is tied to a preconceived essence and to a project outside of them, rather than as absolute individuals. He says in Existentialism and Human Emotions:
Let us consider some object that is manufactured, for example, a book or a paper-cutter: here is an object which has been made by an artisan whose inspiration came from a concept. He referred to the concept of what a paper-cutter is ... . Thus, the paper-cutter is at once an object produced in a certain way and, on the other hand, one having a specific use ... . Therefore, let us say that, for the paper-cutter, essence ... precedes existence. (EHE, pp. 13-14)
Essence Precedes Existence
Of course, the artisan in our case is God. Sartre continues:
When we conceive of God as the Creator, He is generally thought of as a superior sort of artisan. ... Thus the concept of man in the mind of God is comparable to the concept of the paper-cutter in the mind of the manufacturer... . Thus, the individual man is the realization of a certain concept in the divine intelligence. (EHE, p. 14)
On this view, the one Sartre is attacking, we get our nature from outside of us, from a being who created us with a preconceived idea of what we were to be and what we were to be good for. Our happiness and our fulfillment consist in our living up to the external standards that God had in mind in creating us. Both our nature and our value come from outside of us.
According to the existentialist, however, EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE. Sartre explains:
What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. ... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. (EHE, p. 15)
Thus, there is no human nature which provides us with an external source of determination and value. Sartre says:
If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.
Nothing outside of us can determine what we are and what we are good for; we must do it ourselves, from the inside. What we will be and what will be good for us is a radically individual matter. If we are radical individuals, there is no place else for our nature and value to come from, except from within us. It is this view of human nature, or the lack thereof, from which the existentialist conceptions of freedom and value flow.
We are now in a position to begin to answer the first of our three main questions: What is human freedom? What, exactly can the freedom of an absolute individual consist of? At first, it may seem clear that if we are islands of subjectivity, isolated from the forces of the outside world, we not only are capable of acting freely of outside determination, but we cannot help doing so since the only possible sources of action are internal. The situation, however, is somewhat more complex than this. To understand what freedom is for the Existentialist we must first see how, even though our inescapable nature is to be free, we all inevitably tend to try to escape our freedom. We all tend to act in what Sartre calls 'bad faith'. We attempt to deceive ourselves and act as if we weren't free, as if we were really determined by our nature, our body, or the expectations of other people.
The picture we drew earlier of the human individual trapped in a dark room perceiving the world only through our mental TV screens was too simple, for humans have a dual nature. Among the things we find on the mental tv screen, besides objects, other people, emotions, and desires, is ourselves. I see my body, and this thing I see is me. The human condition, for the Existentialist is a tension, a vertiginous imbalance, between the self that watches these images, standing apart from them, and the self that appears as an image. Just as I feel an imbalance upon walking into a department store and finding that one of the people on the video monitor is ME (caught by some unseen camera); or just as we feel a tension looking in the mirror wondering how the person in the glass can be ME if I am standing out here looking at it; so the self feels a tension between identifying itself with mind's eye behind the screen (standing apart from the give and take, the flux and flow, of our experience) and the images of us that appear as part of our experience (engaged in the world).
Thus, we all have the tendency to act in bad faith, to identify ourselves with one of the pictures we find on our mental TV screen, and to see ourselves as determined by one of the outside influences we find pictured there: our nature, our body, the physical world, or the expectations and pictures other people have of us. We are all familiar with the ways in which we try to excuse our actions by pretending that we are simply our bodies and are controlled by the forces that determine them. We have all said things like:
I can't talk to people, I just don't have that kind of personality.
I can't pass this course, I'm just don't have the brain for calculus.
I can't help the fact that I was born a man (or a woman); Certain things come naturally for certain types of people. (Says the man who can't take care of his children, or the woman who can't fix her car.)
I'm no good at this; I guess I just wasn't made to go to college.
Gee, I'm sorry about last night. I guess my hormones just got out of control.
I'm sorry I bit your head off yesterday. I must be premenstrual.
I don't know what happened. I guess the beer made me crazy.
In these cases, I am identifying myself with one of the pictures of me I find on my mental TV screen: I am my body, or my brain, or my personality, or my hormones. In each of these cases, I am deceiving myself. I am more than just these, and no matter how I try to avoid it, I am free.
We are also familiar with the way we all play roles, identifying ourselves, or seeing ourselves, in terms of how other people see us, letting other people determine what we are instead of deciding, ourselves, what we will be. We all to some extent tend to make ourselves into the image other people have of us. We are a different person with our friends than with our parents. We are a different person with a lover than with our acquaintances, and we are different still when we are in the classroom or at a job interview. It is often easier to let someone else determine what we will be than to do it ourselves, especially when we see our value in terms of the acceptance we get from other people. We all see little pictures of ourselves projected by other people and we often tend to try to make ourselves into these little pictures by playing roles. We play at being college students out for a good time, at being macho men or nurturing women, at being sons or daughters, at being businesswomen, policemen, scientists. We play at being students taking notes, and professors giving lectures. We play the roles; we make ourselves into characters in the plays; we make ourselves into little pictures on our mental tv screen determined by the script written by the expectations of other people.
But all of this is self-deception. We are more than any of the pictures we find on our mental tv screen. We stand behind it, watching it, making of it what we will. It is impossible to abdicate our freedom. In choosing to identify ourselves with some externally determined object we are choosing none the less. We cannot escape our freedom.
One might well ask at this point, "What does this freedom consist of. Am I free to become George Bush right now? Am I free to become a woman (without some fairly extensive and unpleasant surgery)? Am I free to fly up to the ceiling and hover above your heads? Am I free to close my eyes right now and find myself in the Bahamas when I reopen them? Unfortunately,it appears not. How, then, can I be free when most of my external circumstances are determined by forces beyond my control, when I cannot help where I was born, what type of body I have, and what type of abilities my brain has predisposed me towards?"
The answer to these questions lies in the nature of our radical individuality. I am not identical with any of the externally determined images on my mental TV screen. I am forever beyond the reach of their determinations within the island of my subjectivity.[1] Even if I were a puppet, my body and its actions completely controlled by some malevolent master, what I am, my mind's eye would still be free and untouched. I could still be free to rebel against my master or make whatever I wished of the situation. They can do what they want to my body, manipulate the objects or pictures of me on my mental TV screen, but they can never touch or control the real me. The self within its island of subjectivity is radically free in virtue of its radical individuality.
Furthermore, I have control over the content of my TV screen as well. External circumstances may determine the objects that appear, how they appear, and when they appear, but I control how these various components will be put together into a coherent picture. Sartre compares the type of freedom we have to that of an artist (EHE, pp. 42-43). An artist cannot control the nature of the canvas, nor of the paints that she has to work with. Nor can she control the nature of the subjects she will paint. But she can control how she will view them, how she will put these various elements together into a unique whole. Likewise, we may not be able to control the various elements within our experience that come from outside us, but we can view them and combine them in any way we like. Our experience is not any one of these; it is the way in which we combine these into a unified whole. We have the power to edit the frames which constitute our experience into the film that is to be our life. We all know the power of good editing, of the creative juxtaposition of determinate elements. It can transform experience; make the ugly beautiful and the ordinary, sublime.
Our freedom is, thus, a freedom of synthesis. It is the freedom to pull ourselves together into the type of coherent whole that we will ourselves to be. Even if the raw materials from which we construct ourselves are determined (just as the materials of the artist are determined), what we make of ourselves out of these materials is up to us alone (just as what the artist makes of her subject is up to her alone). We can not make the external world determine this even if we try. The sentence of freedom is the necessity of pulling ourselves together at each moment out of the myriad different influences imposing themselves upon us from the environment, our community,and from our own bodies. We are required to make ourselves, to pull ourselves together, and we can make of ourselves what we will.
The answer to our first question is, then, that we can be free because (1) Our absolute individuality isolates our real self from the determining influences of the outside world; we can always rebel against its influence; and (2) Even though the raw material that makes up our experience is determined by outside influences we are free to put these elements together into a unified whole; we must make ourselves anew at each moment, and what we shall make of ourselves is up to us. We now need to see what view of human happiness and of morality arise from this conception of human freedom. Both of these can be summed up by the single slogan BE AUTHENTIC. The secret of human flourishing and of moral action lies in avoiding bad faith and honoring the responsibility we have to create our own nature and values. The Existentialist enjoins us to be ourselves and make the source of our nature and values our own internal decisions rather than the pictures of ourselves that appear in our minds from external sources. Let us now see what view of human happiness this implies.
III. The Existentialist View of Human Happiness.
Existentialism is often associated with such themes as the absurdity of human existence and the worthlessness of our lives given our inevitable death. One might well wonder what view of happiness could arise from such a view. Sartre characterizes the human condition by (1) our forlorness at the loss of external values and determinants of our nature; (2) anguish at the resultant responsibility to create human nature ourselves; and (3) despair of finding value outside of ourselves and reliance upon what is under our own control. Forlorness, anguish, and despair: Mr. Sartre, it would seem, was not a happy camper. For another 20th century French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, however, the loss of any external source of value did not present quite such a dismal prospect.[2]
Camus compares our situation to that of the mythical figure Sisyphus. In his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" he explains that:
The Gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. (MS, p. 88)
It is easy to see the similarity between this situation and ours according to the Existentialist. Just as Sisyphus can find no end to his activities, no final resting place where he has finally reached his goal or lived up to some set of pre-existing standards, so we find that all of our activities lead to nowhere. There are no external values that we can live up to, no external viewpoint from which our life can be viewed to be valuable. Our life is a series of meaningless actions culminating in death, with no possibility of external justification. Yet, Camus will say that we must imagine Sisyphus (and ourselves) happy? "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." (MS, p. 91) Why? Why would this fool be happy eternally rolling a ball up a hill, and why should we be happy rolling our ball up the hill to nowhere?
At first, when one was still expecting to get ones value from outside of oneself, all this might seem depressing. Camus says:
When images of the earth cling to tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes to insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in man's heart:this is the rock's victory this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is to heavy to bear. These are our nights in Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.
..............................................
Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
(MS, p. 90)
As we saw before, no matter what his external circumstances, Sisyphus is always free to make of them what he will, to rebel against them within his island of subjectivity. No matter what the Gods make him do, he is always free to give the Gods one of these [defiant gesture].
I remember when I first read this (as a senior in high school) thinking that this was sort of a stupid response to the absurdity of the human condition. What sense does it make to give one of these [defiant gesture] to a non-existent God whose absence is the source of the absurdity of our lives. What are we rebelling against? There must be more to the existentialist conception of happiness than this, I thought.
And there was. The despair and rebellion we feel at the loss of our external sources of value are the necessary price of a greater value and happiness that comes from within. One must lose all hope of external value before seeking value within. The theme that true happiness must come from within is one that is familiar to all of us, and it is the key to understanding the existentialist conception of happiness.
Two contemporary folk tails embody this existentialist theme well: The Wizard of Oz and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. This common theme probably does not show that these are existentialist works, but only that the American emphasis on self-reliance and internalism flows from the same individualist emphasis as Existentialism. In the Wizard of Oz there is an external realm, somewhere over the rainbow, where everything is as it should be and all problems are solved. There is a wizard who will give us brains, a heart, courage, and happiness. When Dorothy got there and discovered that Oz was full of the same type of evil as Kansas, when they discovered that the Wizard was a hoax, that there was nothing outside of them that was going to make them what they wanted to be, they were understandably depressed. But this disappointment was the necessary price of an important lesson: that the only place they could get a brain, or a heart, or courage was from within. Dorothy learns that if she ever loses anything that cannot be found within her own back yard, it wasn't really lost at all. There is no place like Home. (Especially if you are an island of subjectivity, for then there is no place but home.) The value one gets from within is infinitely better than the value one vainly attempts to get from outside.
The story of the Grinch shows why this is so. At first when the Who's in Whoville woke up to find that the Grinch had stolen their Bamboozlers and Dingdangers, they were at first very disappointed. They thought that the value of Christmas was in these external things. What they discovered, and what the grinch discovered looking out over Whoville listening for sounds of grief and hearing, instead, the sounds of joy, was that their real value came from within and was greater than any value that could come from external things since it couldn't be taken away.
A common theme in existentialist literature is the transformation that can occur in one's outlook on life when one is forced to face death. One of the founders of Existentialism, the 19th century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, actually had such a brush with death transform his life. He was involved in some activities that ran afoul of the Czar and was among the people rounded up in one of the Czar's crackdowns. He was told that he would be executed. He was blindfolded and made to wait his turn to face death. At the last minute, as Dostoevsky prepared to meet death, he got a reprieve. It turned out that he was to be sent to a labor camp instead and that this had merely been a cruel joke. One might imagine that if one could face one's death, face the impossibility of getting any value from any external accomplishments, and still find value within oneself, that value would be invulnerable. It could never be taken away. What else could they do to you?
If, after all sources of external value have been taken away, you can find value within yourself, you would have found what philosophers have been looking for throughout the ages: a way of achieving human happiness that is not vulnerable to the uncontrollable contingencies of the natural world. If we find ourselves isolated from external value by our radical individuality, we can make a world of ourselves, a universe of our own experience, in which we can and must find ourselves happy. Camus writes of Sisyphus:
The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. ... he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death.
............................................
But Sisyphus teaches a higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (MS, p.91)
The Existentialist's secret of happiness, then, is to get ones value from within oneself. In doing so, one loses the promise of external value, but they find a more real happiness, one that cannot be taken away by the external forces beyond their control.
IV. The Ethics of Absolute Freedom.
This conception of happiness, however, raises our third question: How ought we act towards other people? If the source of our value and nature is wholly internal, what obligations can I have to other humans? Can I freely and authentically choose to kill my mother, as Orestes does? Can I choose to be a murderer, a thief, or an exploiter of humanity? Is it true, as some Existentialist were fond of pointing out, that if God is dead then all things are allowable? I'm sure that you will want to discuss this issue, as it arises in The Flies, in your seminars, but I would like to briefly present you with what I take to be Sartre's three-fold response to this question in Existentialism and Human Emotions.
(1) First, in choosing our own human nature, according to Sartre, we choose human nature for all humans. Hence, we must choose courses of action that we would wish all humans to take. In choosing for ourselves, we choose for all men. This must be the case because, in order to act freely, I cannot allow myself to be affected by my peculiar circumstances, desires, or goals. This would be to act in bad faith, to try to identify myself with my desires, or my plans, or my circumstances, and these are all merely pictures on my mental TV screen. When I act freely, the only things that can affect my action must be things that I share with all free agents. Thus, I must choose in the same way I would want others to choose. To say that one must act authentically is to say that one must act in a way that ignores the differences between oneself and other people. After all, these differences are merely external and do not affect our identity as free agents, within our islands of subjectivity. To be free, then, I must follow the golden rule and act only as I would have others act.
(2) Sartre also argues that in order to be free, we must desire the freedom of all men. It is self-defeating to attempt to use other humans as objects to satisfy our desires, or to protect our freedom at the cost of enslaving others. If I attempt to enslave others or use them as objects, I make myself a slave and an object. The person who attempts to dominate other people finds himself a slave to his dependence on the attention and approval of the people he tries to enslave. Think of the tough guy leader of a clique of teenagers. He defines himself in terms of the expectations of his peers to keep their approval and admiration. He makes himself into a character controlled by the very slaves of whom he takes himself to be the master. The person who uses other people as objects to satisfy his desires makes himself an object. He can see other people only through his desires, and ultimately sees himself only as his desire. The manipulator, who attempts to buy and sell other people for his own ends, finds that he has sold his own soul as well by seeing himself merely as his desires. To see others as slaves of our desire is to make ourselves a slave of desire. To be free, we must desire the freedom of all men.
(3) Third, the free decisions that we make are not merely arbitrary. As we saw earlier, freedom does not mean just being able to do anything. The artist is free to create; she does not follow any explicit rules. Yet her action is constrained by the requirement that her creation must be coherent. In order to be her creation, she must pull the various disparate elements that go into the painting into one unified whole. Her freedom is a freedom of synthesis constrained by the material she has to work with and the requirement that she make some one unified thing out of it. In the same way, our actions must unify the many different influences on our lives into the one life that is to be ours. In pulling ourselves together, we cannot ignore the relationships and obligations that provide the raw materials of our lives. We must weave them into our lives, although how we will do this is up to us. Our actions, though free, are constrained by our situation in a community. Orestes, as you shall see in The Flies, is not free to ignore his family, his country, and his mother's crime. Why does he not just leave, as Zeus suggests?
The ethics of absolute freedom, it would seem, are not absolutely free. To be free we must take on the responsibility of choosing for all men, we must desire and work for the freedom of all men, and we must create ourselves within the context of the relationships and obligations we have to other people.
Is the ethic of absolute freedom a portrait of human greatness? Human excellence often defines itself in the struggle against the forces that oppose human flourishing. Existentialism attempts to find happiness, value, and meaning in a modern world characterized by isolation, inauthenticity, and absurdity. It attempts to see what human excellence can consist of if we find ourselves to be islands of subjectivity in an otherwise objective world. You will certainly want to ask if this is in fact what we find ourselves to be, but can it be doubted that the Existentialist attempt to find meaning in the face of absurdity exemplifies the basic drive that all portraits of human excellence must embody.
References
(MS) Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (trans. by Justin O'Brien). New York: Vintage, 1955.
(EHE) Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions (Trans. by Bernard Frechtman). New York: Philosophical Library, 1957.
Existentialism
Existentialism is a philosophy (promoted especially by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus) that views each person as an isolated being who is cast into an alien universe, and conceives the world as possessing no inherent human truth, value, or meaning. A person's life, then, as it moves from the nothingness from which it came toward the nothingness where it must end, defines an existence which is both anguished and absurd (Guerin). In a world without sense, all choices are possible, a situation which Sartre viewed as human beings central dilemma: "Man [woman] is condemned to be free." In contrast to atheist existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard theorized that belief in God (given that we are provided with no proof or assurance) required a conscious choice or "leap of faith." The major figures include Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre (sart or SAR-treh), Albert Camus (kah-MUE or ka-MOO) , Simone de Beauvoir (bohv-WAHR) , Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers (YASS-pers), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(mer-LOH pawn-TEE).
History
Existentialism is foreshadowed most notably by 19th century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. In the 20th century, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (starting from Husserl's phenomenology) influenced other existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and (absurdist) Albert Camus. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka also described existentialist themes in their literary works. Although there are some common tendencies amongst "existentialist" thinkers, there are major differences and disagreements among them (most notably the divide between atheist existentialists like Sartre and theistic existentialists like Paul Tillich); not all of them accept the validity of the term as applied to their own work.[17]
[edit] Origins
The term "existentialism" seems to have been coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s[18][19][20] and adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre who, on October 29, 1945, discussed his own existentialist position in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris. The lecture was published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme, a short book which did much to popularize existentialist thought.[21]
The label has been applied retrospectively to other philosophers for whom existence and, in particular, human existence were key philosophical topics. Martin Heidegger had made human existence (Dasein) the focus of his work since the 1920s, and Karl Jaspers had called his philosophy "Existenzphilosophie" in the 1930s.[19][22] Both Heidegger and Jaspers had been influenced by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard the crisis of human existence had been a major theme.[6][23][24] He came to be regarded as the first existentialist,[20] and has been called the "father of existentialism".[6] In fact he was the first to explicitly make existential questions a primary focus in his philosophy.[25] In retrospect, other writers have also implicitly discussed existentialist themes throughout the history of philosophy and literature. Due to the exposure of existentialist themes over the decades, when society was officially introduced to existentialism, the term became quite popular almost immediately.
Examples of works by philosophers, writers and theologians who might be considered forerunners of existentialism include:
* Buddha's teachings,[26]
* Saint Augustine in his Confessions,[27]
* Mulla Sadra's transcendent theosophy,[28]
* William Shakespeare's Hamlet,[29]
* Blaise Pascal's Pensées.
[edit] The 19th century
The Søren Kierkegaard Statue in Copenhagen.
As early as 1835 in a letter to his friend Peter Wilhelm Lund, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote one of his first existentially sensitive passages. In it, he describes a truth that is applicable for him:
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.
—Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835, emphasis added[30]
The early thoughts of Kierkegaard would be formalized in his prolific philosophical and theological writings, many of which would later form the modern foundation of 20th century existentialism.[25][31]
[edit] Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
Main article: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche
Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They focused on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience. Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also considered the role of making free choices, particularly regarding fundamental values and beliefs, and how such choices change the nature and identity of the chooser.[32] Kierkegaard's knight of faith and Nietzsche's Übermensch are exemplars who define the nature of their own existence. Nietzsche's idealized individual invents his or her own values and creates the very terms under which they excel. By contrast, Kierkegaard was a Christian, but one who argued that objective certainty of religious truths was not only impossible, but would eliminate the passionate life required of a Christian who must make a leap of faith to believe in the paradox of the God-man Christ. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also precursors to other intellectual movements, including postmodernism, nihilism, and various strands of psychology.
[edit] Dostoyevsky and Kafka
Two of the first literary authors important to existentialism were the Czech Franz Kafka and the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[33] Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground portrays a man unable to fit into society and unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a Humanism, quoted Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis. He quotes Ivan Karamazov who claims that "If God did not exist, all things would be permitted." Others of Dostoevsky's novels covered issues raised in existentialist philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishment the protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an existential crisis and then moves toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by Dostoevsky himself.
Kafka created surreal and alienated characters who struggle with hopelessness and absurdity, notably in his most famous novella, The Metamorphosis, or in his master novel, The Trial. In his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, the French existentialist/absurdist Albert Camus describes Kafka's oeuvre as "absurd in principle",[34] but he finds the same "tremendous cry of hope" expressed by religious existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Shestov —which Camus rejects.[35]
The cover of Kafka's absurdist 1915 novella Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), about a man who is inexplicably transformed into an insect
[edit] Early 20th century
In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers had explored existentialist ideas, the only difference was in the name. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, in his 1913 book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, emphasized the life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract rationalism. Unamuno rejected systematic philosophy in favor of the individual's quest for faith. He retained a sense of the tragic, even absurd nature of the quest, symbolized by his enduring interest in Cervantes' fictional character Don Quixote. A novelist, poet and dramatist as well as philosophy professor at the University of Salamanca, Unamuno's short story about a priest's crisis of faith, "Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr" has been collected in anthologies of existentialist fiction. Another Spanish thinker, Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1914, held that the human existence must always be defined as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of his life: "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" ("I am myself and my circumstances"). Sartre likewise believed that human existence is not an abstract matter, but is always situated ("en situación").
Although Martin Buber wrote his major philosophical works in German, and studied and taught at the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt, he stands apart from the mainstream of German philosophy. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1878, he was also a scholar of Jewish culture and involved at various times in Zionism and Hasidism. In 1938, he moved permanently to Jerusalem. His best-known philosophical work was the short book I and Thou, published in 1922. For Buber, the fundamental fact of human existence, too readily overlooked by scientific rationalism and abstract philosophical thought, is "man with man", a dialogue which takes place in the so-called "sphere of between" ("das Zwischenmenschliche").[36]
Two Ukrainian/Russian thinkers, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev became well-known as existentialist thinkers during their post-Revolutionary exiles in Paris. Shestov, born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family in Kiev, had launched an attack on rationalism and systematization in philosophy as early as 1905 in his book of aphorisms All Things Are Possible.
Berdyaev, also from Kiev but with a background in the Eastern Orthodox Church, drew a radical distinction between the world of spirit and the everyday world of objects. Human freedom, for Berdyaev, is rooted in the realm of spirit, a realm independent of scientific notions of causation. To the extent the individual human being lives in the objective world, he is estranged from authentic spiritual freedom. "Man" is not to be interpreted naturalistically, but as a being created in God's image, an originator of free, creative acts.[37] He published a major work on these themes, The Destiny of Man, in 1931.
Gabriel Marcel, long before coining the term "existentialism", introduced important existentialist themes to a French audience in his early essay "Existence and Objectivity" (1925) and in his Metaphysical Journal (1927).[38] A dramatist as well as a philosopher, Marcel found his philosophical starting point in a condition of metaphysical alienation; the human individual searching for harmony in a transient life. Harmony, for Marcel, was to be sought through "secondary reflection", a "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" approach to the world, characterized by "wonder and astonishment" and open to the "presence" of other people and of God rather than merely to "information" about them. For Marcel, such presence implied more than simply being there (as one thing might be in the presence of another thing); it connoted "extravagant" availability, and the willingness to put oneself at the disposal of the other.[39]
Marcel contrasted "secondary reflection" with abstract, scientific-technical "primary reflection" which he associated with the activity of the abstract Cartesian ego. For Marcel, philosophy was a concrete activity undertaken by a sensing, feeling human being incarnate — embodied — in a concrete world.[38][40] Although Jean-Paul Sartre adopted the term "existentialism" for his own philosophy in the 1940s, Marcel's thought has been described as "almost diametrically opposed" to that of Sartre.[38] Unlike Sartre, Marcel was a Christian, and became a Catholic convert in 1929.
In Germany, the psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers — who later described existentialism as a "phantom" created by the public,[41] — called his own thought, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche — Existenzphilosophie. For Jaspers, "Existenz-philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself...This way of thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker."[42]
Jaspers, a professor at the University of Heidelberg, was acquainted with Martin Heidegger, who held a professorship at Marburg before acceding to Husserl's chair at Freiburg in 1928. They held many philosophical discussions, but later became estranged over Heidegger's support of National Socialism. They shared an admiration for Kierkegaard,[43] and in the 1930s Heidegger lectured extensively on Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the extent to which Heidegger should be considered an existentialist is debatable. In Being and Time he presented a method of rooting philosophical explanations in human existence (Dasein) to be analysed in terms of existential categories (existentiale); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the existentialist movement.
[edit] After the Second World War
Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely read journalism as well as theoretical texts. These years also saw the growing reputation outside Germany of Heidegger's book Being and Time.
French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
Sartre had dealt with existentialist themes in his 1938 novel Nausea and the short stories in his 1939 collection The Wall, and had published a major philosophical statement, Being and Nothingness in 1943, but it was in the two years following the liberation of Paris from the German occupying forces that he and his close associates — Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others — became internationally famous as the leading figures of a movement known as existentialism.[44] In a very short space of time, Camus and Sartre in particular, became the leading public intellectuals of post-war France, achieving by the end of 1945 "a fame that reached across all audiences."[45] Camus was an editor of the most popular leftist (former French Resistance) newspaper Combat; Sartre launched his journal of leftist thought, Les Temps Modernes, and two weeks later gave the widely reported lecture on existentialism and humanism to a packed meeting of the Club Maintenant. Beauvoir wrote that "not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us";[46] existentialism became "the first media craze of the postwar era."[47]
By the end of 1947, Camus' earlier fiction and plays had been reprinted, his new play Caligula had been performed and his novel The Plague published; the first two novels of Sartre's The Roads to Freedom trilogy had appeared, as had Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others. Works by Camus and Sartre were already appearing in foreign editions. The Paris-based existentialists had become famous.[44]
Sartre had travelled to Germany in 1930 to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger,[48] and he included critical comments on their work in his major treatise Being and Nothingness. Heidegger's thought had also become known in French philosophical circles through its use by Alexandre Kojève in explicating Hegel in a series of lectures given in Paris in the 1930s.[49] The lectures were highly influential; members of the audience included not only Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Louis Althusser, André Breton and Jacques Lacan.[50] A selection from Heidegger's Being and Time was published in French in 1938, and his essays began to appear in French philosophy journals.
French-Algerian philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus
Heidegger read Sartre's work and was initially impressed, commenting: "Here for the first time I encountered an independent thinker who, from the foundations up, has experienced the area out of which I think. Your work shows such an immediate comprehension of my philosophy as I have never before encountered."[51] Later, however, in response to a question posed by his French follower Jean Beaufret,[52] Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre's position and existentialism in general in his Letter on Humanism.[53] Heidegger's reputation continued to grow in France during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s, Sartre attempted to reconcile existentialism and Marxism in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason. A major theme throughout his writings was freedom and responsibility.
Camus was a friend of Sartre, until their falling-out, and wrote several works with existential themes including The Rebel, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Summer in Algiers. Camus, like many others, rejected the existentialist label, and considered his works to be concerned with facing the absurd. In the titular book, Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth of Sisyphus to demonstrate the futility of existence. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll to the bottom again. Camus believes that this existence is pointless but that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it. The first half of the book contains an extended rebuttal of what Camus took to be existentialist philosophy in the works of Kierkegaard, Shestov, Heidegger, and Jaspers.
French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir, an important existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre's partner, wrote about feminist and existentialist ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity. Although often overlooked due to her relationship with Sartre, de Beauvoir integrated existentialism with other forms of thinking such as feminism, unheard of at the time, resulting in alienation from fellow writers such as Camus.
Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquan-born critic of colonialism, has been considered an important existentialist.[54]
Paul Tillich, an important existentialist theologian following Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, applied existentialist concepts to Christian theology, and helped introduce existential theology to the general public. His seminal work The Courage to Be follows Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and life's absurdity, but puts forward the thesis that modern man must, via God, achieve selfhood in spite of life's absurdity. Rudolf Bultmann used Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's philosophy of existence to demythologize Christianity by interpreting Christian mythical concepts into existentialist concepts.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an existential phenomenologist, was for a time a companion of Sartre. His understanding of Husserl's phenomenology was far greater than that of Merleau-Ponty's fellow existentialists. It has been said that his work Humanism and Terror greatly influenced Sartre. However, in later years they were to disagree irreparably, dividing many existentialists such as de Beauvoir, who sided with Sartre.
Colin Wilson, an English writer, published his study The Outsider in 1956, initially to critical acclaim. In this book and others (e.g. Introduction to the New Existentialism), he attempted to reinvigorate what he perceived as a pessimistic philosophy and bring it to a wider audience. He was not, however, academically trained, and his work was attacked by professional philosophers for lack of rigor and critical standards.[55]
[edit] Concepts
[edit] Focus on concrete existence
Existentialist thinkers focus on the question of concrete human existence and the conditions of this existence rather than hypothesizing a human essence, stressing that the human essence is determined through life choices. However, even though the concrete individual existence must have priority in existentialism, certain conditions are commonly held to be "endemic" to human existence.
What these conditions are is better understood in light of the meaning of the word "existence," which comes from the Latin "existere," meaning "to stand out." Man exists in a state of distance from the world that he nonetheless remains in the midst of. This distance is what enables man to project meaning into the disinterested world of in-itselfs. This projected meaning remains fragile, constantly facing breakdown for any reason — from a tragedy to a particularly insightful moment. In such a breakdown, we are put face to face with the naked meaninglessness of the world, and the results can be devastating.
It is in relation to the concept of the devastating awareness of meaninglessness that Albert Camus claimed that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" in his The Myth of Sisyphus. Although "prescriptions" against the possibly deleterious consequences of these kinds of encounters vary, from Kierkegaard's religious "stage" to Camus' insistence on persevering in spite of absurdity, the concern with helping people avoid living their lives in ways that put them in the perpetual danger of having everything meaningful break down is common to most existentialist philosophers. The possibility of having everything meaningful break down poses a threat of quietism, which is inherently against the existentialist philosophy.[56] It has been said that the possibility of suicide makes all humans existentialists.[57]
[edit] Existence precedes essence
Main article: Existence precedes essence
A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called his or her "essence" instead of there being a predetermined essence that defines what it is to be a human. Thus, the human being - through his consciousness - creates his own values and determines a meaning to his life.[58] Although it was Sartre who explicitly coined the phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of many existentialist philosophers, from Mulla Sadra,[59] to Kierkegaard, to Heidegger.
It is often claimed in this context that a person defines himself, which is often perceived as stating that they can "wish" to be something — anything, a bird, for instance — and then be it. According to most existentialist philosophers, however, this would constitute an inauthentic existence. Instead, the phrase should be taken to say that the person is (1) defined only insofar as he or she acts and (2) that he or she is responsible for his or her actions. For example, someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Furthermore, by this action of cruelty such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (a cruel person). This is as opposed to their genes, or 'human nature', bearing the blame.
As Sartre puts it in his Existentialism is a Humanism: "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards." Of course, the more positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: A person can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since man can choose to be either cruel or good, he is, in fact, neither of these things essentially. [60]
[edit] Angst
Angst, sometimes called dread, anxiety or even anguish is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom.
It can also be seen in relation to the previous point how angst is before nothing, and this is what sets it apart from fear which has an object. While in the case of fear, one can take definitive measures to remove the object of fear, in the case of angst, no such "constructive" measures are possible. The use of the word "nothing" in this context relates both to the inherent insecurity about the consequences of one's actions, and to the fact that, in experiencing one's freedom as angst, one also realizes that one will be fully responsible for these consequences; there is no thing in a person (their genes, for instance) that acts in their stead, and that they can "blame" if something goes wrong.
Not every choice is perceived as having dreadful possible consequences (and, it can be claimed, human lives would be unbearable if every choice facilitated dread), but that doesn't change the fact that freedom remains a condition of every action. One of the most extensive treatments of the existentialist notion of Angst is found in Søren Kierkegaard's monumental work Begrebet Angest.
[edit] Freedom
The existentialist concept of freedom is often misunderstood as a sort of liberum arbitrium where almost anything is possible and where values are inconsequential to choice and action. This interpretation of the concept is often related to the insistence on the absurdity of the world and the assumption that there exists no relevant or absolutely good or bad values. However, that there are no values to be found in the world in-itself does not mean that there are no values: We are usually brought up with certain values, and even though we cannot justify them ultimately, they will be "our" values.
In Kierkegaard's Judge Vilhelm's account in Either/Or, making choices without allowing one's values to confer differing values to the alternatives, is, in fact, choosing not to make a choice — to flip a coin, as it were, and to leave everything to chance. This is considered to be a refusal to live in the consequence of one's freedom; an inauthentic existence. As such, existentialist freedom isn't situated in some kind of abstract space where everything is possible: since people are free, and since they already exist in the world, it is implied that their freedom is only in this world, and that it, too, is restricted by it.
What is not implied in this account of existential freedom, however, is that one's values are immutable; a consideration of one's values may cause one to reconsider and change them. A consequence of this fact is that one is not only responsible for one's actions, but also for the values one holds. This entails that a reference to common values doesn't excuse the individual's actions: Even though these are the values of the society the individual is part of, they are also her/his own in the sense that she/he could choose them to be different at any time. Thus, the focus on freedom in existentialism is related to the limits of the responsibility one bears as a result of one's freedom: the relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency, and a clarification of freedom also clarifies that for which one is responsible.
[edit] Facticity
A concept closely related to freedom is that of facticity, a concept defined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness as that "in-itself" of which humans are in the mode of not being. This can be more easily understood when considering it in relation to the temporal dimension of past: One's past is what one is in the sense that it co-constitutes him (or her). However, to say that one is only one's past would be to ignore a large part of reality (the present and the future) while saying that one's past is only what one was in a way that would entirely detach it from them now. A denial of one's own concrete past constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle, and the same goes for all other kinds of facticity (having a body (e.g. one that doesn't allow a person to run faster than the speed of sound), identity, values, etc.).
Facticity is both a limitation and a condition of freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of one's facticity consists of things one couldn't have chosen (birthplace, etc.), but a condition in the sense that one's values most likely will depend on it. However, even though one's facticity is "set in stone" (as being past, for instance), it cannot determine a person: The value ascribed to one's facticity is still ascribed to it freely by that person. As an example, consider two men, one of whom has no memory of his past and the other remembers everything. They have both committed many crimes, but the first man, knowing nothing about this, leads a rather normal life while the second man, feeling trapped by his own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for "trapping" him in this life. There is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he ascribes this meaning to his past.
However, to disregard one's facticity when one, in the continual process of self-making, projects oneself into the future, would be to put oneself in denial of oneself, and would thus be inauthentic. In other words, the origin of one's projection will still have to be one's facticity, although in the mode of not being it (essentially). Another aspect of facticity is that it entails angst, both in the sense that freedom "produces" angst when limited by facticity, and in the sense that the lack of the possibility of having facticity to "step in" for one to take responsibility for something one has done also produces angst.
[edit] Authenticity and inauthenticity
The theme of authentic existence is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is often taken to mean that one has to "find oneself" and then live in accordance with this self. A common misunderstanding is that the self is something one can find if one looks hard enough, that one's true self is substantial.
What is meant by authenticity is that in acting, one should act as oneself, not as One acts or as one's genes or any other essence require. The authentic act is one that is in accordance with one's freedom. Of course, as a condition of freedom is facticity, this includes one's facticity, but not to the degree that this facticity can in any way determine one's choices (in the sense that one could then blame one's background for making the choice one made). The role of facticity in relation to authenticity involves letting one's actual values come into play when one makes a choice (instead of, like Kierkegaard's Aesthete, "choosing" randomly), so that one also takes responsibility for the act instead of choosing either-or without allowing the options to have different values.
In contrast to this, the inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one's freedom. This can take many forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, through convincing oneself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of "mimicry" where one acts as "One should." How "One" should act is often determined by an image one has of how one such as oneself (say, a bank manager) acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm, but this does not mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is inauthentic: The main point is the attitude one takes to one's own freedom and responsibility, and the extent to which one acts in accordance with this freedom.
[edit] Despair
Commonly defined as a loss of hope,[61] Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to the reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the "pillars" of one's self or identity. If one is invested in being a particular thing, a waiter or an "upstanding citizen," for example, and one finds oneself in a situation in which one has done something or had something happen to oneself that compromises this being-thing, one would normally find oneself in a state of despair, a hopeless state. An athlete who loses his legs in an accident may despair if he has nothing to "fall back on," for instance. One is confronted with the irreality of what one had taken to be one's self.
What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the dictionary definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when one isn't overtly in despair: As long as one has based one's identity on such pillars so that one is vulnerable to having one's world break down, one is considered to be in perpetual despair. And as, in Sartrean terms, there is no human essence based in reality from which to constitute one's sense of identity, despair is a truly human condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in his Either/or: "Any life-view with a condition outside it is despair."[62] In other words, it is possible to be in despair without despairing.
[edit] The Other and the Look
The Other (when written with a capital "o") is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity. However, the concept has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn from it differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts. The experience of the Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences), only from "over there", the world itself is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same as them. This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze).
While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective, and oneself as objectively existing subjectivity (one experiences oneself as seen in the Others Look in precisely the same way that one experiences the Other as seen by them, as subjectivity), in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of one's freedom. This is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. As such, when one experiences oneself in the Look, one doesn't experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something. Sartre's own example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole can help clarify this: at first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. The Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity.
Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is quite possible that the creaking floorboard was nothing but the movement of an old house; the Look isn't some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the other sees one (there may also have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that the person was there). It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive them.
[edit] Reason
Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as fundamental, existentialists oppose themselves to rationalism and positivism. That is, they argue against definitions of human beings as primarily rational. Rather, existentialists look at where people find meaning. Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them rather than rationally. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard saw strong rationality as a mechanism humans use to counter their existential anxiety, their fear of being in the world: "If I can believe that I am rational and everyone else is rational then I have nothing to fear and no reason to feel anxious about being free."[citation needed] However, Kierkegaard advocated rationality as means to interact with the objective world (e.g. in the natural sciences), but when it comes to existential problems, reason is insufficient: "Human reason has boundaries".[63]
Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena — "the Other" — that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress their feelings of anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserts, thereby relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the look" of "the Other" (i.e. possessed by another person — or at least one's idea of that other person). In a similar vein, Camus believed that society and religion falsely teach humans that "the Other" has order and structure.[64] For Camus, when an individual's consciousness, longing for order, collides with the Other's lack of order, a third element is born: absurdity.
[edit] The Absurd
Main article: Absurdism
The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world beyond what meaning we give to it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. This contrasts with "karmic" ways of thinking in which "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad thing; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good" person as to a "bad" person.
Because of the world's absurdity, at any point in time, anything can happen to anyone, and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the Absurd. The notion of the absurd has been prominent in literature throughout history. Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky and many of the literary works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus contain descriptions of people who encounter the absurdity of the world. Albert Camus studied the issue of "the absurd" in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
[edit] Relation to Nihilism
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* Its neutrality is disputed. Tagged since May 2008.
* Its factual accuracy is disputed. Tagged since May 2008.
Though nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one another. A primary cause of confusion is that Friedrich Nietzsche is an important philosopher in both fields, but also the existentialist insistence on the absurd and the inherent meaninglessness of the world. Existentialist philosophers often stress the importance of Angst as signifying the absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move that is often reduced to a moral or an existential nihilism. A pervasive theme in the works of existentialist philosophy, however, is to persist through encounters with the absurd, as seen in Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus ("One must imagine Sisyphus happy"[65]), and it is only very rarely that existentialist philosophers dismiss morality or one's self-created meaning: Kierkegaard regained a sort of morality in the religious (although he wouldn't himself agree that it was ethical; the religious suspends the ethical), and Sartre's final words in Being and Nothingness are "All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory (or impure) reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work."[66] Hence, existentialists believe that one can create value and meaning, whilst nihilists will deny this.
[edit] Criticism
Herbert Marcuse criticised Existentialism, especially Being and Nothingness (1943), by Jean-Paul Sartre, for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself: "Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory".[67] In 1946, Sartre already had replied to Marxist criticism of Existentialism in the lecture Existentialism is a humanism.[68] In Jargon of Authenticity, Theodor Adorno criticised Heidegger's philosophy, especially his use of language, as a mystifying ideology of advanced, industrial society, and its power structure.[citation needed]
In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger criticized Sartre's existentialism:
Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.
Logical positivists, such as Carnap and Ayer, say Existentialists frequently are confused about the verb "to be" in their analyses of "being".[69] They argue that the verb is transitive, and pre-fixed to a predicate (e.g., an apple is red): without a predicate, the word is meaningless.
[edit] Influence outside philosophy
[edit] Cultural movement and influence
The term existentialism was first adopted as a self-reference in the 1940s and 1950s by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the widespread use of literature as a means of disseminating their ideas by Sartre and his associates (notably novelist Albert Camus) meant existentialism "was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one."[70] Among existentialist writers were Parisians Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, and playwright Samuel Beckett, the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, and the Romanian friends Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. Prominent artists such as the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning have been understood in existentialist terms, as have filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman.[70]
[edit] Film and video
The French director Jean Genet's 1950 fantasy-erotic film Un chant d'amour shows two inmates in solitary cells whose only contact is through a hole in their cell wall, who are spied on by the prison warden. Reviewer James Travers calls the film a "...visual poem evoking homosexual desire and existentialist suffering" which "... conveys the bleakness of an existence in a godless universe with painful believability"; he calls it "... probably the most effective fusion of existentialist philosophy and cinema."[71]
Stanley Kubrick's 1957 anti-war film Paths of Glory "illustrates, and even illuminates...existentialism" by examining the "necessary absurdity of the human condition" and the "horror of war".[72] The film tells the story of a fictional World War I French army regiment which is ordered to attack an impregnable German stronghold; when the attack fails, three soldiers are chosen at random, court-martialed by a "kangaroo court", and executed by firing squad. The film examines existentialist ethics, such as the issue of whether objectivity is possible and the "problem of authenticity".[73]
On the lighter side, the British comedy troupe Monty Python have explored existentialist themes throughout their works, from many of the sketches in their original television show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, to their 1983 film Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.[74] Of the many adjectives (some listed in the introduction above) that might indicate an existential tone, the one utilized the most by the group is that of the absurd.
Some contemporary films dealing with existentialist issues include Fight Club, Waking Life, and Ordinary People.[75] Likewise, films throughout the 20th century such as The Seventh Seal, Ikiru, Taxi Driver, High Noon, Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Clockwork Orange, Groundhog Day, Apocalypse Now, Badlands, and Blade Runner also have existentialist qualities.[76] Notable directors known for their existentialist films include Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Hideaki Anno and Woody Allen.[77] Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York focuses on the protagonist's desire to find existential meaning as he sees its end.[78]
[edit] Literature
Existentialist perspectives are also found in literature to varying degrees. Jean-Paul Sartre's 1938 novel Nausea[79] was "steeped in Existential ideas", and is considered an accessible way of grasping his philosophical stance.[80] Since 1970, much cultural activity in art, cinema, and literature contains postmodernist and existentialist elements. Books such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) (now republished as Blade Runner) by Philip K. Dick, Toilet: The Novel by Michael Szymczyk and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk all distort the line between reality and appearance while simultaneously espousing strong existentialist themes. Ideas from such thinkers as Dostoevsky, Foucault, Kafka, Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, Gilles Deleuze, and Eduard von Hartmann permeate the works of artists such as Chuck Palahniuk, Szymczyk, David Lynch, Crispin Glover, and Charles Bukowski, and one often finds in their works a delicate balance between distastefulness and beauty.
[edit] Theatre
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote No Exit in 1944, an existentialist play originally published in French as Huis Clos (meaning In Camera or "behind closed doors") which is the source of the popular quote, "Hell is other people." (In French, "l'enfer, c'est les autres"). The play begins with a Valet leading a man into a room that the audience soon realizes is in hell. Eventually he is joined by two women. After their entry, the Valet leaves and the door is shut and locked. All three expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize they are there to torture each other, which they do effectively, by probing each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant memories.
Existentialist themes are displayed in the Theatre of the Absurd, notably in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two men divert themselves while they wait expectantly for someone (or something) named Godot who never arrives. They claim Godot to be an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting they would not recognize him if they saw him. Samuel Beckett, once asked who or what Godot is, replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." To occupy themselves they eat, sleep, talk, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide—anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay".[81] The play "exploits several archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos."[82] The play also illustrates an attitude toward man's experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can only be reconciled in mind and art of the absurdist. The play examines questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in human existence.
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist tragicomedy first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966.[83] The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Comparisons have also been drawn to Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, for the presence of two central characters who almost appear to be two halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass time by playing Questions, impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other or remaining silent for long periods of time. The two characters are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world that is beyond their understanding. They stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the implications, and muse on the irrationality and randomness of the world.
Jean Anouilh's Antigone also presents arguments founded on existentialist ideas.[84] It is a tragedy inspired by Greek mythology and the play of the same name (Antigone, by Sophocles) from the 5th century B.C. In English, it is often distinguished from its antecedent by being pronounced in its original French form, approximately "Ante-GŌN." The play was first performed in Paris on 6 February 1944, during the Nazi occupation of France. Produced under Nazi censorship, the play is purposefully ambiguous with regards to the rejection of authority (represented by Antigone) and the acceptance of it (represented by Creon). The parallels to the French Resistance and the Nazi occupation have been drawn. Antigone rejects life as desperately meaningless but without affirmatively choosing a noble death. The crux of the play is the lengthy dialogue concerning the nature of power, fate, and choice, during which Antigone says that she is "... disgusted with [the]...promise of a humdrum happiness"; she states that she would rather die than live a mediocre existence.
Critic Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd pointed out how many contemporary playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov wove into their plays the existentialist belief that we are absurd beings loose in a universe empty of real meaning. Esslin noted that many of these playwrights demonstrated the philosophy better than did the plays by Sartre and Camus. Though most of such playwrights, subsequently labeled "Absurdist" (based on Esslin's book), denied affiliations with existentialism and were often staunchly anti-philosophical (for example Ionesco often claimed he identified more with 'Pataphysics or with Surrealism than with existentialism), the playwrights are often linked to existentialism based on Esslin's observation.[85]
[edit] Existentialism and Christianity
Main article: Christian existentialism
Christ's teachings had an indirect style, in which his point is often left unsaid for the purpose of letting the single individual confront the truth on their own.[86] This is evident in his parables, which are a response to a question he is asked. After he tells the parable, he returns the question to the individual.
An existentialist reading of the Bible would demand that the reader recognize that he is an existing subject studying the words more as a recollection of possible events. This is in contrast to looking at a collection of "truths" which are outside and unrelated to the reader, but may develop a sense of reality/God.[87] Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing them upon him, but as though they are inside him and guiding him from inside. This is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life-or the learner who should put it to use?"[88] From an existentialist perspective, the Bible would not become an authority in an individual's life until that individual authorizes the Bible to be such. Existentialism has had a significant influence on theology, notably on postmodern Christianity and on theologians and religious thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Wilfrid Desan and John Macquarrie.
[edit] Existentialist psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
Main article: Existential therapy
One of the major offshoots of existentialism as a philosophy is existentialist psychology and psychoanalysis, which first crystallized in the work of Ludwig Binswanger, a clinician who was influenced by Freud, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. A later figure was Viktor Frankl, who had studied with Freud and Jung as a young man.[89] His logotherapy can be regarded as a form of existentialist therapy. The existentialists would also influence social psychology, antipositivist micro-sociology, symbolic interactionism, and post-structuralism, with the work of thinkers such as Georg Simmel and Michel Foucault.
An early contributor to existentialist psychology in the United States was Rollo May, who was influenced by Kierkegaard. One of the most prolific writers on techniques and theory of existentialist psychology in the USA is Irvin D. Yalom. Yalom states that
Aside from their reaction against Freud's mechanistic, deterministic model of the mind and their assumption of a phenomenological approach in therapy, the existentialist analysts have little in common and have never been regarded as a cohesive ideological school. These thinkers - who include Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Eugène Minkowski, V.E. Gebsattel, Roland Kuhn, G. Caruso, F.T. Buytendijk, G. Bally and Victor Frankl - were almost entirely unknown to the American psychotherapeutic community until Rollo May's highly influential 1985 book Existence - and especially his introductory essay - introduced their work into this country.[90]
A more recent contributor to the development of a European version of existentialist psychotherapy is the British-based Emmy van Deurzen.
Anxiety's importance in existentialism makes it a popular topic in psychotherapy. Therapists often offer existentialist philosophy as an explanation for anxiety. The assertion is that anxiety is manifested of an individual's complete freedom to decide, and complete responsibility for the outcome of such decisions. Psychotherapists using an existentialist approach believe that a patient can harness his anxiety and use it constructively. Instead of suppressing anxiety, patients are advised to use it as grounds for change. By embracing anxiety as inevitable, a person can use it to achieve his full potential in life. Humanistic psychology also had major impetus from existentialist psychology and shares many of the fundamental tenets. Terror management theory is a developing area of study within the academic study of psychology. It looks at what researchers claim to be the implicit emotional reactions of people that occur when they are confronted with the knowledge they will eventually die.
(mer-LOH pawn-TEE).
History
Existentialism is foreshadowed most notably by 19th century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. In the 20th century, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (starting from Husserl's phenomenology) influenced other existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and (absurdist) Albert Camus. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka also described existentialist themes in their literary works. Although there are some common tendencies amongst "existentialist" thinkers, there are major differences and disagreements among them (most notably the divide between atheist existentialists like Sartre and theistic existentialists like Paul Tillich); not all of them accept the validity of the term as applied to their own work.[17]
[edit] Origins
The term "existentialism" seems to have been coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s[18][19][20] and adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre who, on October 29, 1945, discussed his own existentialist position in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris. The lecture was published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme, a short book which did much to popularize existentialist thought.[21]
The label has been applied retrospectively to other philosophers for whom existence and, in particular, human existence were key philosophical topics. Martin Heidegger had made human existence (Dasein) the focus of his work since the 1920s, and Karl Jaspers had called his philosophy "Existenzphilosophie" in the 1930s.[19][22] Both Heidegger and Jaspers had been influenced by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard the crisis of human existence had been a major theme.[6][23][24] He came to be regarded as the first existentialist,[20] and has been called the "father of existentialism".[6] In fact he was the first to explicitly make existential questions a primary focus in his philosophy.[25] In retrospect, other writers have also implicitly discussed existentialist themes throughout the history of philosophy and literature. Due to the exposure of existentialist themes over the decades, when society was officially introduced to existentialism, the term became quite popular almost immediately.
Examples of works by philosophers, writers and theologians who might be considered forerunners of existentialism include:
* Buddha's teachings,[26]
* Saint Augustine in his Confessions,[27]
* Mulla Sadra's transcendent theosophy,[28]
* William Shakespeare's Hamlet,[29]
* Blaise Pascal's Pensées.
[edit] The 19th century
The Søren Kierkegaard Statue in Copenhagen.
As early as 1835 in a letter to his friend Peter Wilhelm Lund, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote one of his first existentially sensitive passages. In it, he describes a truth that is applicable for him:
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.
—Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835, emphasis added[30]
The early thoughts of Kierkegaard would be formalized in his prolific philosophical and theological writings, many of which would later form the modern foundation of 20th century existentialism.[25][31]
[edit] Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
Main article: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche
Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They focused on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience. Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also considered the role of making free choices, particularly regarding fundamental values and beliefs, and how such choices change the nature and identity of the chooser.[32] Kierkegaard's knight of faith and Nietzsche's Übermensch are exemplars who define the nature of their own existence. Nietzsche's idealized individual invents his or her own values and creates the very terms under which they excel. By contrast, Kierkegaard was a Christian, but one who argued that objective certainty of religious truths was not only impossible, but would eliminate the passionate life required of a Christian who must make a leap of faith to believe in the paradox of the God-man Christ. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also precursors to other intellectual movements, including postmodernism, nihilism, and various strands of psychology.
[edit] Dostoyevsky and Kafka
Two of the first literary authors important to existentialism were the Czech Franz Kafka and the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[33] Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground portrays a man unable to fit into society and unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a Humanism, quoted Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis. He quotes Ivan Karamazov who claims that "If God did not exist, all things would be permitted." Others of Dostoevsky's novels covered issues raised in existentialist philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishment the protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an existential crisis and then moves toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by Dostoevsky himself.
Kafka created surreal and alienated characters who struggle with hopelessness and absurdity, notably in his most famous novella, The Metamorphosis, or in his master novel, The Trial. In his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, the French existentialist/absurdist Albert Camus describes Kafka's oeuvre as "absurd in principle",[34] but he finds the same "tremendous cry of hope" expressed by religious existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Shestov —which Camus rejects.[35]
The cover of Kafka's absurdist 1915 novella Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), about a man who is inexplicably transformed into an insect
[edit] Early 20th century
In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers had explored existentialist ideas, the only difference was in the name. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, in his 1913 book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, emphasized the life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract rationalism. Unamuno rejected systematic philosophy in favor of the individual's quest for faith. He retained a sense of the tragic, even absurd nature of the quest, symbolized by his enduring interest in Cervantes' fictional character Don Quixote. A novelist, poet and dramatist as well as philosophy professor at the University of Salamanca, Unamuno's short story about a priest's crisis of faith, "Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr" has been collected in anthologies of existentialist fiction. Another Spanish thinker, Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1914, held that the human existence must always be defined as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of his life: "Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia" ("I am myself and my circumstances"). Sartre likewise believed that human existence is not an abstract matter, but is always situated ("en situación").
Although Martin Buber wrote his major philosophical works in German, and studied and taught at the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt, he stands apart from the mainstream of German philosophy. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1878, he was also a scholar of Jewish culture and involved at various times in Zionism and Hasidism. In 1938, he moved permanently to Jerusalem. His best-known philosophical work was the short book I and Thou, published in 1922. For Buber, the fundamental fact of human existence, too readily overlooked by scientific rationalism and abstract philosophical thought, is "man with man", a dialogue which takes place in the so-called "sphere of between" ("das Zwischenmenschliche").[36]
Two Ukrainian/Russian thinkers, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev became well-known as existentialist thinkers during their post-Revolutionary exiles in Paris. Shestov, born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family in Kiev, had launched an attack on rationalism and systematization in philosophy as early as 1905 in his book of aphorisms All Things Are Possible.
Berdyaev, also from Kiev but with a background in the Eastern Orthodox Church, drew a radical distinction between the world of spirit and the everyday world of objects. Human freedom, for Berdyaev, is rooted in the realm of spirit, a realm independent of scientific notions of causation. To the extent the individual human being lives in the objective world, he is estranged from authentic spiritual freedom. "Man" is not to be interpreted naturalistically, but as a being created in God's image, an originator of free, creative acts.[37] He published a major work on these themes, The Destiny of Man, in 1931.
Gabriel Marcel, long before coining the term "existentialism", introduced important existentialist themes to a French audience in his early essay "Existence and Objectivity" (1925) and in his Metaphysical Journal (1927).[38] A dramatist as well as a philosopher, Marcel found his philosophical starting point in a condition of metaphysical alienation; the human individual searching for harmony in a transient life. Harmony, for Marcel, was to be sought through "secondary reflection", a "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" approach to the world, characterized by "wonder and astonishment" and open to the "presence" of other people and of God rather than merely to "information" about them. For Marcel, such presence implied more than simply being there (as one thing might be in the presence of another thing); it connoted "extravagant" availability, and the willingness to put oneself at the disposal of the other.[39]
Marcel contrasted "secondary reflection" with abstract, scientific-technical "primary reflection" which he associated with the activity of the abstract Cartesian ego. For Marcel, philosophy was a concrete activity undertaken by a sensing, feeling human being incarnate — embodied — in a concrete world.[38][40] Although Jean-Paul Sartre adopted the term "existentialism" for his own philosophy in the 1940s, Marcel's thought has been described as "almost diametrically opposed" to that of Sartre.[38] Unlike Sartre, Marcel was a Christian, and became a Catholic convert in 1929.
In Germany, the psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers — who later described existentialism as a "phantom" created by the public,[41] — called his own thought, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche — Existenzphilosophie. For Jaspers, "Existenz-philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself...This way of thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker."[42]
Jaspers, a professor at the University of Heidelberg, was acquainted with Martin Heidegger, who held a professorship at Marburg before acceding to Husserl's chair at Freiburg in 1928. They held many philosophical discussions, but later became estranged over Heidegger's support of National Socialism. They shared an admiration for Kierkegaard,[43] and in the 1930s Heidegger lectured extensively on Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the extent to which Heidegger should be considered an existentialist is debatable. In Being and Time he presented a method of rooting philosophical explanations in human existence (Dasein) to be analysed in terms of existential categories (existentiale); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the existentialist movement.
[edit] After the Second World War
Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely read journalism as well as theoretical texts. These years also saw the growing reputation outside Germany of Heidegger's book Being and Time.
French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
Sartre had dealt with existentialist themes in his 1938 novel Nausea and the short stories in his 1939 collection The Wall, and had published a major philosophical statement, Being and Nothingness in 1943, but it was in the two years following the liberation of Paris from the German occupying forces that he and his close associates — Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others — became internationally famous as the leading figures of a movement known as existentialism.[44] In a very short space of time, Camus and Sartre in particular, became the leading public intellectuals of post-war France, achieving by the end of 1945 "a fame that reached across all audiences."[45] Camus was an editor of the most popular leftist (former French Resistance) newspaper Combat; Sartre launched his journal of leftist thought, Les Temps Modernes, and two weeks later gave the widely reported lecture on existentialism and humanism to a packed meeting of the Club Maintenant. Beauvoir wrote that "not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us";[46] existentialism became "the first media craze of the postwar era."[47]
By the end of 1947, Camus' earlier fiction and plays had been reprinted, his new play Caligula had been performed and his novel The Plague published; the first two novels of Sartre's The Roads to Freedom trilogy had appeared, as had Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others. Works by Camus and Sartre were already appearing in foreign editions. The Paris-based existentialists had become famous.[44]
Sartre had travelled to Germany in 1930 to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger,[48] and he included critical comments on their work in his major treatise Being and Nothingness. Heidegger's thought had also become known in French philosophical circles through its use by Alexandre Kojève in explicating Hegel in a series of lectures given in Paris in the 1930s.[49] The lectures were highly influential; members of the audience included not only Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Louis Althusser, André Breton and Jacques Lacan.[50] A selection from Heidegger's Being and Time was published in French in 1938, and his essays began to appear in French philosophy journals.
French-Algerian philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus
Heidegger read Sartre's work and was initially impressed, commenting: "Here for the first time I encountered an independent thinker who, from the foundations up, has experienced the area out of which I think. Your work shows such an immediate comprehension of my philosophy as I have never before encountered."[51] Later, however, in response to a question posed by his French follower Jean Beaufret,[52] Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre's position and existentialism in general in his Letter on Humanism.[53] Heidegger's reputation continued to grow in France during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s, Sartre attempted to reconcile existentialism and Marxism in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason. A major theme throughout his writings was freedom and responsibility.
Camus was a friend of Sartre, until their falling-out, and wrote several works with existential themes including The Rebel, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Summer in Algiers. Camus, like many others, rejected the existentialist label, and considered his works to be concerned with facing the absurd. In the titular book, Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth of Sisyphus to demonstrate the futility of existence. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll to the bottom again. Camus believes that this existence is pointless but that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it. The first half of the book contains an extended rebuttal of what Camus took to be existentialist philosophy in the works of Kierkegaard, Shestov, Heidegger, and Jaspers.
French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir, an important existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre's partner, wrote about feminist and existentialist ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity. Although often overlooked due to her relationship with Sartre, de Beauvoir integrated existentialism with other forms of thinking such as feminism, unheard of at the time, resulting in alienation from fellow writers such as Camus.
Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquan-born critic of colonialism, has been considered an important existentialist.[54]
Paul Tillich, an important existentialist theologian following Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, applied existentialist concepts to Christian theology, and helped introduce existential theology to the general public. His seminal work The Courage to Be follows Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and life's absurdity, but puts forward the thesis that modern man must, via God, achieve selfhood in spite of life's absurdity. Rudolf Bultmann used Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's philosophy of existence to demythologize Christianity by interpreting Christian mythical concepts into existentialist concepts.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an existential phenomenologist, was for a time a companion of Sartre. His understanding of Husserl's phenomenology was far greater than that of Merleau-Ponty's fellow existentialists. It has been said that his work Humanism and Terror greatly influenced Sartre. However, in later years they were to disagree irreparably, dividing many existentialists such as de Beauvoir, who sided with Sartre.
Colin Wilson, an English writer, published his study The Outsider in 1956, initially to critical acclaim. In this book and others (e.g. Introduction to the New Existentialism), he attempted to reinvigorate what he perceived as a pessimistic philosophy and bring it to a wider audience. He was not, however, academically trained, and his work was attacked by professional philosophers for lack of rigor and critical standards.[55]
[edit] Concepts
[edit] Focus on concrete existence
Existentialist thinkers focus on the question of concrete human existence and the conditions of this existence rather than hypothesizing a human essence, stressing that the human essence is determined through life choices. However, even though the concrete individual existence must have priority in existentialism, certain conditions are commonly held to be "endemic" to human existence.
What these conditions are is better understood in light of the meaning of the word "existence," which comes from the Latin "existere," meaning "to stand out." Man exists in a state of distance from the world that he nonetheless remains in the midst of. This distance is what enables man to project meaning into the disinterested world of in-itselfs. This projected meaning remains fragile, constantly facing breakdown for any reason — from a tragedy to a particularly insightful moment. In such a breakdown, we are put face to face with the naked meaninglessness of the world, and the results can be devastating.
It is in relation to the concept of the devastating awareness of meaninglessness that Albert Camus claimed that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" in his The Myth of Sisyphus. Although "prescriptions" against the possibly deleterious consequences of these kinds of encounters vary, from Kierkegaard's religious "stage" to Camus' insistence on persevering in spite of absurdity, the concern with helping people avoid living their lives in ways that put them in the perpetual danger of having everything meaningful break down is common to most existentialist philosophers. The possibility of having everything meaningful break down poses a threat of quietism, which is inherently against the existentialist philosophy.[56] It has been said that the possibility of suicide makes all humans existentialists.[57]
[edit] Existence precedes essence
Main article: Existence precedes essence
A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called his or her "essence" instead of there being a predetermined essence that defines what it is to be a human. Thus, the human being - through his consciousness - creates his own values and determines a meaning to his life.[58] Although it was Sartre who explicitly coined the phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of many existentialist philosophers, from Mulla Sadra,[59] to Kierkegaard, to Heidegger.
It is often claimed in this context that a person defines himself, which is often perceived as stating that they can "wish" to be something — anything, a bird, for instance — and then be it. According to most existentialist philosophers, however, this would constitute an inauthentic existence. Instead, the phrase should be taken to say that the person is (1) defined only insofar as he or she acts and (2) that he or she is responsible for his or her actions. For example, someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Furthermore, by this action of cruelty such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (a cruel person). This is as opposed to their genes, or 'human nature', bearing the blame.
As Sartre puts it in his Existentialism is a Humanism: "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards." Of course, the more positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: A person can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since man can choose to be either cruel or good, he is, in fact, neither of these things essentially. [60]
[edit] Angst
Angst, sometimes called dread, anxiety or even anguish is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom.
It can also be seen in relation to the previous point how angst is before nothing, and this is what sets it apart from fear which has an object. While in the case of fear, one can take definitive measures to remove the object of fear, in the case of angst, no such "constructive" measures are possible. The use of the word "nothing" in this context relates both to the inherent insecurity about the consequences of one's actions, and to the fact that, in experiencing one's freedom as angst, one also realizes that one will be fully responsible for these consequences; there is no thing in a person (their genes, for instance) that acts in their stead, and that they can "blame" if something goes wrong.
Not every choice is perceived as having dreadful possible consequences (and, it can be claimed, human lives would be unbearable if every choice facilitated dread), but that doesn't change the fact that freedom remains a condition of every action. One of the most extensive treatments of the existentialist notion of Angst is found in Søren Kierkegaard's monumental work Begrebet Angest.
[edit] Freedom
The existentialist concept of freedom is often misunderstood as a sort of liberum arbitrium where almost anything is possible and where values are inconsequential to choice and action. This interpretation of the concept is often related to the insistence on the absurdity of the world and the assumption that there exists no relevant or absolutely good or bad values. However, that there are no values to be found in the world in-itself does not mean that there are no values: We are usually brought up with certain values, and even though we cannot justify them ultimately, they will be "our" values.
In Kierkegaard's Judge Vilhelm's account in Either/Or, making choices without allowing one's values to confer differing values to the alternatives, is, in fact, choosing not to make a choice — to flip a coin, as it were, and to leave everything to chance. This is considered to be a refusal to live in the consequence of one's freedom; an inauthentic existence. As such, existentialist freedom isn't situated in some kind of abstract space where everything is possible: since people are free, and since they already exist in the world, it is implied that their freedom is only in this world, and that it, too, is restricted by it.
What is not implied in this account of existential freedom, however, is that one's values are immutable; a consideration of one's values may cause one to reconsider and change them. A consequence of this fact is that one is not only responsible for one's actions, but also for the values one holds. This entails that a reference to common values doesn't excuse the individual's actions: Even though these are the values of the society the individual is part of, they are also her/his own in the sense that she/he could choose them to be different at any time. Thus, the focus on freedom in existentialism is related to the limits of the responsibility one bears as a result of one's freedom: the relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency, and a clarification of freedom also clarifies that for which one is responsible.
[edit] Facticity
A concept closely related to freedom is that of facticity, a concept defined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness as that "in-itself" of which humans are in the mode of not being. This can be more easily understood when considering it in relation to the temporal dimension of past: One's past is what one is in the sense that it co-constitutes him (or her). However, to say that one is only one's past would be to ignore a large part of reality (the present and the future) while saying that one's past is only what one was in a way that would entirely detach it from them now. A denial of one's own concrete past constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle, and the same goes for all other kinds of facticity (having a body (e.g. one that doesn't allow a person to run faster than the speed of sound), identity, values, etc.).
Facticity is both a limitation and a condition of freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of one's facticity consists of things one couldn't have chosen (birthplace, etc.), but a condition in the sense that one's values most likely will depend on it. However, even though one's facticity is "set in stone" (as being past, for instance), it cannot determine a person: The value ascribed to one's facticity is still ascribed to it freely by that person. As an example, consider two men, one of whom has no memory of his past and the other remembers everything. They have both committed many crimes, but the first man, knowing nothing about this, leads a rather normal life while the second man, feeling trapped by his own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for "trapping" him in this life. There is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he ascribes this meaning to his past.
However, to disregard one's facticity when one, in the continual process of self-making, projects oneself into the future, would be to put oneself in denial of oneself, and would thus be inauthentic. In other words, the origin of one's projection will still have to be one's facticity, although in the mode of not being it (essentially). Another aspect of facticity is that it entails angst, both in the sense that freedom "produces" angst when limited by facticity, and in the sense that the lack of the possibility of having facticity to "step in" for one to take responsibility for something one has done also produces angst.
[edit] Authenticity and inauthenticity
The theme of authentic existence is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is often taken to mean that one has to "find oneself" and then live in accordance with this self. A common misunderstanding is that the self is something one can find if one looks hard enough, that one's true self is substantial.
What is meant by authenticity is that in acting, one should act as oneself, not as One acts or as one's genes or any other essence require. The authentic act is one that is in accordance with one's freedom. Of course, as a condition of freedom is facticity, this includes one's facticity, but not to the degree that this facticity can in any way determine one's choices (in the sense that one could then blame one's background for making the choice one made). The role of facticity in relation to authenticity involves letting one's actual values come into play when one makes a choice (instead of, like Kierkegaard's Aesthete, "choosing" randomly), so that one also takes responsibility for the act instead of choosing either-or without allowing the options to have different values.
In contrast to this, the inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one's freedom. This can take many forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, through convincing oneself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of "mimicry" where one acts as "One should." How "One" should act is often determined by an image one has of how one such as oneself (say, a bank manager) acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm, but this does not mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is inauthentic: The main point is the attitude one takes to one's own freedom and responsibility, and the extent to which one acts in accordance with this freedom.
[edit] Despair
Commonly defined as a loss of hope,[61] Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to the reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the "pillars" of one's self or identity. If one is invested in being a particular thing, a waiter or an "upstanding citizen," for example, and one finds oneself in a situation in which one has done something or had something happen to oneself that compromises this being-thing, one would normally find oneself in a state of despair, a hopeless state. An athlete who loses his legs in an accident may despair if he has nothing to "fall back on," for instance. One is confronted with the irreality of what one had taken to be one's self.
What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the dictionary definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when one isn't overtly in despair: As long as one has based one's identity on such pillars so that one is vulnerable to having one's world break down, one is considered to be in perpetual despair. And as, in Sartrean terms, there is no human essence based in reality from which to constitute one's sense of identity, despair is a truly human condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in his Either/or: "Any life-view with a condition outside it is despair."[62] In other words, it is possible to be in despair without despairing.
[edit] The Other and the Look
The Other (when written with a capital "o") is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity. However, the concept has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn from it differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts. The experience of the Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences), only from "over there", the world itself is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same as them. This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze).
While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective, and oneself as objectively existing subjectivity (one experiences oneself as seen in the Others Look in precisely the same way that one experiences the Other as seen by them, as subjectivity), in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of one's freedom. This is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. As such, when one experiences oneself in the Look, one doesn't experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something. Sartre's own example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole can help clarify this: at first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. The Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity.
Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is quite possible that the creaking floorboard was nothing but the movement of an old house; the Look isn't some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the other sees one (there may also have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that the person was there). It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive them.
[edit] Reason
Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as fundamental, existentialists oppose themselves to rationalism and positivism. That is, they argue against definitions of human beings as primarily rational. Rather, existentialists look at where people find meaning. Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them rather than rationally. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard saw strong rationality as a mechanism humans use to counter their existential anxiety, their fear of being in the world: "If I can believe that I am rational and everyone else is rational then I have nothing to fear and no reason to feel anxious about being free."[citation needed] However, Kierkegaard advocated rationality as means to interact with the objective world (e.g. in the natural sciences), but when it comes to existential problems, reason is insufficient: "Human reason has boundaries".[63]
Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena — "the Other" — that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress their feelings of anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserts, thereby relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the look" of "the Other" (i.e. possessed by another person — or at least one's idea of that other person). In a similar vein, Camus believed that society and religion falsely teach humans that "the Other" has order and structure.[64] For Camus, when an individual's consciousness, longing for order, collides with the Other's lack of order, a third element is born: absurdity.
[edit] The Absurd
Main article: Absurdism
The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world beyond what meaning we give to it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. This contrasts with "karmic" ways of thinking in which "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad thing; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good" person as to a "bad" person.
Because of the world's absurdity, at any point in time, anything can happen to anyone, and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the Absurd. The notion of the absurd has been prominent in literature throughout history. Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky and many of the literary works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus contain descriptions of people who encounter the absurdity of the world. Albert Camus studied the issue of "the absurd" in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
[edit] Relation to Nihilism
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Though nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one another. A primary cause of confusion is that Friedrich Nietzsche is an important philosopher in both fields, but also the existentialist insistence on the absurd and the inherent meaninglessness of the world. Existentialist philosophers often stress the importance of Angst as signifying the absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move that is often reduced to a moral or an existential nihilism. A pervasive theme in the works of existentialist philosophy, however, is to persist through encounters with the absurd, as seen in Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus ("One must imagine Sisyphus happy"[65]), and it is only very rarely that existentialist philosophers dismiss morality or one's self-created meaning: Kierkegaard regained a sort of morality in the religious (although he wouldn't himself agree that it was ethical; the religious suspends the ethical), and Sartre's final words in Being and Nothingness are "All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory (or impure) reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work."[66] Hence, existentialists believe that one can create value and meaning, whilst nihilists will deny this.
[edit] Criticism
Herbert Marcuse criticised Existentialism, especially Being and Nothingness (1943), by Jean-Paul Sartre, for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself: "Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory".[67] In 1946, Sartre already had replied to Marxist criticism of Existentialism in the lecture Existentialism is a humanism.[68] In Jargon of Authenticity, Theodor Adorno criticised Heidegger's philosophy, especially his use of language, as a mystifying ideology of advanced, industrial society, and its power structure.[citation needed]
In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger criticized Sartre's existentialism:
Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.
Logical positivists, such as Carnap and Ayer, say Existentialists frequently are confused about the verb "to be" in their analyses of "being".[69] They argue that the verb is transitive, and pre-fixed to a predicate (e.g., an apple is red): without a predicate, the word is meaningless.
[edit] Influence outside philosophy
[edit] Cultural movement and influence
The term existentialism was first adopted as a self-reference in the 1940s and 1950s by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the widespread use of literature as a means of disseminating their ideas by Sartre and his associates (notably novelist Albert Camus) meant existentialism "was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one."[70] Among existentialist writers were Parisians Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, and playwright Samuel Beckett, the Norwegian Knut Hamsun, and the Romanian friends Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran. Prominent artists such as the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning have been understood in existentialist terms, as have filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman.[70]
[edit] Film and video
The French director Jean Genet's 1950 fantasy-erotic film Un chant d'amour shows two inmates in solitary cells whose only contact is through a hole in their cell wall, who are spied on by the prison warden. Reviewer James Travers calls the film a "...visual poem evoking homosexual desire and existentialist suffering" which "... conveys the bleakness of an existence in a godless universe with painful believability"; he calls it "... probably the most effective fusion of existentialist philosophy and cinema."[71]
Stanley Kubrick's 1957 anti-war film Paths of Glory "illustrates, and even illuminates...existentialism" by examining the "necessary absurdity of the human condition" and the "horror of war".[72] The film tells the story of a fictional World War I French army regiment which is ordered to attack an impregnable German stronghold; when the attack fails, three soldiers are chosen at random, court-martialed by a "kangaroo court", and executed by firing squad. The film examines existentialist ethics, such as the issue of whether objectivity is possible and the "problem of authenticity".[73]
On the lighter side, the British comedy troupe Monty Python have explored existentialist themes throughout their works, from many of the sketches in their original television show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, to their 1983 film Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.[74] Of the many adjectives (some listed in the introduction above) that might indicate an existential tone, the one utilized the most by the group is that of the absurd.
Some contemporary films dealing with existentialist issues include Fight Club, Waking Life, and Ordinary People.[75] Likewise, films throughout the 20th century such as The Seventh Seal, Ikiru, Taxi Driver, High Noon, Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Clockwork Orange, Groundhog Day, Apocalypse Now, Badlands, and Blade Runner also have existentialist qualities.[76] Notable directors known for their existentialist films include Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Hideaki Anno and Woody Allen.[77] Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York focuses on the protagonist's desire to find existential meaning as he sees its end.[78]
[edit] Literature
Existentialist perspectives are also found in literature to varying degrees. Jean-Paul Sartre's 1938 novel Nausea[79] was "steeped in Existential ideas", and is considered an accessible way of grasping his philosophical stance.[80] Since 1970, much cultural activity in art, cinema, and literature contains postmodernist and existentialist elements. Books such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) (now republished as Blade Runner) by Philip K. Dick, Toilet: The Novel by Michael Szymczyk and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk all distort the line between reality and appearance while simultaneously espousing strong existentialist themes. Ideas from such thinkers as Dostoevsky, Foucault, Kafka, Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, Gilles Deleuze, and Eduard von Hartmann permeate the works of artists such as Chuck Palahniuk, Szymczyk, David Lynch, Crispin Glover, and Charles Bukowski, and one often finds in their works a delicate balance between distastefulness and beauty.
[edit] Theatre
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote No Exit in 1944, an existentialist play originally published in French as Huis Clos (meaning In Camera or "behind closed doors") which is the source of the popular quote, "Hell is other people." (In French, "l'enfer, c'est les autres"). The play begins with a Valet leading a man into a room that the audience soon realizes is in hell. Eventually he is joined by two women. After their entry, the Valet leaves and the door is shut and locked. All three expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize they are there to torture each other, which they do effectively, by probing each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant memories.
Existentialist themes are displayed in the Theatre of the Absurd, notably in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two men divert themselves while they wait expectantly for someone (or something) named Godot who never arrives. They claim Godot to be an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting they would not recognize him if they saw him. Samuel Beckett, once asked who or what Godot is, replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." To occupy themselves they eat, sleep, talk, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide—anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay".[81] The play "exploits several archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos."[82] The play also illustrates an attitude toward man's experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can only be reconciled in mind and art of the absurdist. The play examines questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in human existence.
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist tragicomedy first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966.[83] The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Comparisons have also been drawn to Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, for the presence of two central characters who almost appear to be two halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass time by playing Questions, impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other or remaining silent for long periods of time. The two characters are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world that is beyond their understanding. They stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the implications, and muse on the irrationality and randomness of the world.
Jean Anouilh's Antigone also presents arguments founded on existentialist ideas.[84] It is a tragedy inspired by Greek mythology and the play of the same name (Antigone, by Sophocles) from the 5th century B.C. In English, it is often distinguished from its antecedent by being pronounced in its original French form, approximately "Ante-GŌN." The play was first performed in Paris on 6 February 1944, during the Nazi occupation of France. Produced under Nazi censorship, the play is purposefully ambiguous with regards to the rejection of authority (represented by Antigone) and the acceptance of it (represented by Creon). The parallels to the French Resistance and the Nazi occupation have been drawn. Antigone rejects life as desperately meaningless but without affirmatively choosing a noble death. The crux of the play is the lengthy dialogue concerning the nature of power, fate, and choice, during which Antigone says that she is "... disgusted with [the]...promise of a humdrum happiness"; she states that she would rather die than live a mediocre existence.
Critic Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd pointed out how many contemporary playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov wove into their plays the existentialist belief that we are absurd beings loose in a universe empty of real meaning. Esslin noted that many of these playwrights demonstrated the philosophy better than did the plays by Sartre and Camus. Though most of such playwrights, subsequently labeled "Absurdist" (based on Esslin's book), denied affiliations with existentialism and were often staunchly anti-philosophical (for example Ionesco often claimed he identified more with 'Pataphysics or with Surrealism than with existentialism), the playwrights are often linked to existentialism based on Esslin's observation.[85]
[edit] Existentialism and Christianity
Main article: Christian existentialism
Christ's teachings had an indirect style, in which his point is often left unsaid for the purpose of letting the single individual confront the truth on their own.[86] This is evident in his parables, which are a response to a question he is asked. After he tells the parable, he returns the question to the individual.
An existentialist reading of the Bible would demand that the reader recognize that he is an existing subject studying the words more as a recollection of possible events. This is in contrast to looking at a collection of "truths" which are outside and unrelated to the reader, but may develop a sense of reality/God.[87] Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing them upon him, but as though they are inside him and guiding him from inside. This is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life-or the learner who should put it to use?"[88] From an existentialist perspective, the Bible would not become an authority in an individual's life until that individual authorizes the Bible to be such. Existentialism has had a significant influence on theology, notably on postmodern Christianity and on theologians and religious thinkers such as Nikolai Berdyaev, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Wilfrid Desan and John Macquarrie.
[edit] Existentialist psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
Main article: Existential therapy
One of the major offshoots of existentialism as a philosophy is existentialist psychology and psychoanalysis, which first crystallized in the work of Ludwig Binswanger, a clinician who was influenced by Freud, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. A later figure was Viktor Frankl, who had studied with Freud and Jung as a young man.[89] His logotherapy can be regarded as a form of existentialist therapy. The existentialists would also influence social psychology, antipositivist micro-sociology, symbolic interactionism, and post-structuralism, with the work of thinkers such as Georg Simmel and Michel Foucault.
An early contributor to existentialist psychology in the United States was Rollo May, who was influenced by Kierkegaard. One of the most prolific writers on techniques and theory of existentialist psychology in the USA is Irvin D. Yalom. Yalom states that
Aside from their reaction against Freud's mechanistic, deterministic model of the mind and their assumption of a phenomenological approach in therapy, the existentialist analysts have little in common and have never been regarded as a cohesive ideological school. These thinkers - who include Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Eugène Minkowski, V.E. Gebsattel, Roland Kuhn, G. Caruso, F.T. Buytendijk, G. Bally and Victor Frankl - were almost entirely unknown to the American psychotherapeutic community until Rollo May's highly influential 1985 book Existence - and especially his introductory essay - introduced their work into this country.[90]
A more recent contributor to the development of a European version of existentialist psychotherapy is the British-based Emmy van Deurzen.
Anxiety's importance in existentialism makes it a popular topic in psychotherapy. Therapists often offer existentialist philosophy as an explanation for anxiety. The assertion is that anxiety is manifested of an individual's complete freedom to decide, and complete responsibility for the outcome of such decisions. Psychotherapists using an existentialist approach believe that a patient can harness his anxiety and use it constructively. Instead of suppressing anxiety, patients are advised to use it as grounds for change. By embracing anxiety as inevitable, a person can use it to achieve his full potential in life. Humanistic psychology also had major impetus from existentialist psychology and shares many of the fundamental tenets. Terror management theory is a developing area of study within the academic study of psychology. It looks at what researchers claim to be the implicit emotional reactions of people that occur when they are confronted with the knowledge they will eventually die.
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