A History of Philosophy | 67 Introduction to Existentialism

and about some difficulties with pragmatism Richard Bernstein who is at Haverford College used to teach at Yale Richard Bernstein has written on quite a lot on pragmatism trying to adopt pragmatist emphases in his own thinking and in doing so as listed five contributions of pragmatism now I take it these are contributions to his own thinking you may not think from contributions all of them but some of them at least the first is its rejection of foundationalism and you're noticing how that theme keeps recurring it'll be in the existential tradition as well of course the rejection of foundationalism that tradition that comes down to us from Descartes of trying to logically deduce everything else from certain indubitable foundations the second contribution it's fallibilism fallibilism is the view that all human judgments are fallible so that there is no logically indubitable certainty then of course that's part of the rejection of foundationalism but of course the pragmatist accepting falafel is 'm thinks that the pragmatic approach is a self corrective process because the active implementation and experimentation with an idea like a hypothesis is obviously going to be a corrective on crema ture / assurance dogmatism so forth the third contribution he lists is the social character of the self that is to say breaking with the isolated atomistic view of an individual robinson crusoe theory and seeing the self rather as a locus within a whole complex of social relationships this is particularly evident in doing and i think it's understandable that in any big alien influence movement that you'll find this kind of renewed attempt to spell out the notion that we are social beings rather than isolated individuals the animism of the 18th century is rejected by virtue of the Hegelian kind of emergence of an individual and the course of history if you like going back to a Hegel's conception of the concrete universal the individual is the historical realization of universal possibilities from the past so that universality and particularity combined in the individual remember the Hegel's thesis antithesis synthesis of universal particular individual and in as much as this these Universal possibilities or relationships to other humans within society then the individual is that way just as a problem situation is not something isolated but is posed by the whole network of relationships within which we exist biological relationships psychological sociological environmental so on and so forth so that conception significant and tied to that number four is the contingency in human life and human nature not only is life itself contingent on all sorts of things but what I am as an individual is contingent on all sorts of things genetic and environmental and the same is true of human nature generically by virtue of doings evolutionary naturalism contingent on that evolutionary past and then Bernstein's fifth contribution of pragmatism is its acceptance of pluralism philosophical pluralism ethical pluralism religious pluralism which is a phrase a lot of you are well familiar with after the conference last week that is to say an acceptance of the fact that a variety of different viewpoints coexist among which it is in it is impossible to choose with any kind of logical certainty and so there's a relativism about alternative positions except insofar as our belief is experientially verified but of course keep in mind that even experimental verification does not conclusively validate a position simply because a pragmatic test commits the fallacy of a firm the consequent your familiar than that if in our hypothetical syllogism you're saying if a then B and you say yes B is correct so therefore only you're affirming the consequent which logically is fallacious if it rains I shall get wet I'm getting wet so it's raining not at all somebody could have turned the hose on all sorts of other ways of getting wet so that the pragmatic test operating this way may establish some if you like probability that a is true in a traditional sense of true but suddenly no certainty but then the pragmatist is not interested in certainty he's not interested in the traditional sense of true so that contingency inevitably remains and the pluralism remains well this is saying that pragmatism is a kind of post-modernism it's a kind of anti realism and certainly that's the rection in which it has subsequently been taken I mentioned Richard Rorty for instance last time and he is I suppose the endtime realist par excellence in contemporary thought so these things Bernstein's prepared to accept them all I guess I'm prepared to buy the first three and a half four of them rejection of foundationalism fallibilism the social character of the self the contingency of human life so forth my difficult is with pragmatism stem of course from its philosophical naturalism from the underlying naturalism by virtue of which there is no intrinsic value to anything that exists this of course is one of the accompaniments of philosophical naturalism unavoidably the locus of value of course is likely to be what the individual values and do is explicit about that he refuses to talk of what is valuable that implies intrinsic value and only talk of what talks of what is valued so that loss of intrinsic value is a concern if there are no intrinsic values no take it back if there are intrinsic values then obviously pragmatism which is only concerned with relative values it's not enough and the relationship between theory and practice is going to be a lot more than pragmatic because of the intrinsic value but that leads to the the second difficulty that pragmatism 'he's not only rejecting intrinsic values but is accepting only the situational value of a belief or idea so that every situation can be different as if life is made up of a whole lot of discrete situations each different from the other it's a kind of atomism of its own and as such I think it fails to see the the ordered honest that there is in human existence that is to say there are Universal kinds of situations universal kinds of desire therefore universal kinds of values yes a interrelated within the unity of the whole my complaint is that Dewey doesn't have enough of the interrelatedness assistant this is one of the consequences of naturalism but if there are universal time serves problem situations universal human needs values then this is indicating something of a teleology that runs throughout human existence and nature such as would imply that we have not just isolated problem situations but an overall situation the overall project of life has to be addressed the meaning of life in total its purpose not just what is desired in particular situations so it seems to me the the crux of the thing is the fact that naturalism denies intrinsic values but once you get intrinsic values you have a log of structure and a teleology which is going to push you a lot beyond what a pragmatic method can accomplish but let that be said in the context of certain appreciations one other thing that I've long appreciated about pragmatism is its recognition of talking of the intrinsic and intrinsic connection that in theory and practice the tendency in enlightenment thought is to think of theory for understanding st. alone and if there happens to be some application well and good whereas I think one of the things I've learned from Dewey is that theoretical inquiry has as its natural stimulus its natural habitat if you like life itself so that the the theoretical movement of thought is aroused by things that occur in course of life and as a result of which we we find we stand back to try and understand what's going on and the intellectual curiosity continues for largely theoretical reasons as well as practical reasons but there is always the the feedback loop of practice into theory and theory into practice and I I think that's well demonstrated by the history of philosophy where you can see the relationship between crucial issues of the time and theoretical developments as well as well in the stimulus of the theoretical direction as in the feeding back of the theory into the practice so I find dewey helpful in that regard keeping philosophy in life context now does come I see heads nodding as I say that I see some eyes lighting up I see some smiles on Brian's face anybody want to say something no you too captured by the second topic okay let's let's move on to that for the next two weeks we're going to be dealing with existentialism and phenomenology now don't confuse the two we met the term phenomenology in reference to Hegel and we should therefore remember that phenomenology is a method not a position it's a descriptive method rather than a philosophical theory however it's a descriptive method which was adapted and used by some of the 20th century existentialists as so our introduction to existentialism is going to have to be in terms of the 19th century roots in to the garden nature both of whom are included in the gardener anthology and both of whom you're going to be reading this week are you not I was wondering whether I asked you to do thesis statements and in the light of all the reading I'm gonna have to do I've just spent eight hours reading examinations for my other course and and now I'm gonna have to read these book reviews of yours this week I decided that the quality of Mercy towards my self is not strained even though I'd like you to do those theist statements but I wouldn't impose that on myself so I won't do so but Madhuri you'll find them intriguing helpful I'll be referring to them as we go along existentialism was a largely European philosophy and I say was because it really was a philosophical movement that blossomed in the first half of the 20th century and in many ways is now passe I'm inclined to look upon the activist Sixtus as marking the end of existentialism you see if the pessimistic existentialist was saying life is meaningless it has no purpose the sixties had too many meanings and purposes and so it seems to me that there was a phase-out in that context it's not been recovered existentialism is not primarily however a theoretical position a theory a set of doctrines it's not primarily a school of thought it's more a focus of attention of concern a focus that is to say on human existence not on the essence of human nature now that would be essentialism not existentialism it's not a focus on essence but on existence the problem of human existence as we experience it and so some of the phrases we've been meeting in Whitehead and doing a very appropriate concrete experience not that abstractive kind of experience that John Locke talked about but concrete experience and the idea of the self-consciousness being the lens through which everything else is viewed very appropriate because it's self-conscious existence the consciousness of existing in this kind of a world that's what the existentialist is concerned about existence that can be meaningless or inauthentic and the question is how can it be authentic how can it give meaning well how can we give it so I think you can think of this existential focus as a philosophy of human existence philosophizing about human existence human existence in a broken world what does it feel like to live self-consciously inwardly in this kind of a the world waste places TS Eliot and it's that self-consciousness but living in such a world is the thing do you maybe it's too common an experience these days to be peculiar but do you ever feel self-conscious in front of the camera yes a I've gotten over being self-conscious in front of that thing I just ignore it except now when I'm talking to but self-consciousness in the face of one's own dying yeah I remember when we buried my father-in-law I looked down into the dark hole after the casket was lowered and said to myself well next it's me my generation now it's that sort of self-consciousness which is not just an awareness but an emotion loaded awareness there's no self conscious human existence that doesn't come loaded with feeling or anxiety or some other quality of that sort what nowadays we call existential qualities of human existence and so you find in the headings of the Kierkegaard selections words like dread anxiety melancholy because these are the qualities of self conscious being now but this is implying is that humans and not primarily rational animals ruled by reason that enlightenment vision is God we're not romantic creatures living in a romanticized kind of realm everything in the garden Rosie no romanticism is gone if you like existentialism is Remender sysm turned sour the pumpkin rotted now what Cinderella gonna do and this this feeling is augmented in technological society I'm not sure that existentialism would ever have arisen before the Industrial Revolution but in an industrialized technological society there are themes like dehumanization alienation yeah that was a theme in Marx well he and kotha god were contemporaries seeing different dimensions and the same problems alienation ambiguity meaninglessness because a self conscious existence in industrialized society with everything pressing in upon us is a world of fact without value of existence without meaning existence without essence thus our present and one German writer of this period more a phenomenologist than an existentialist max Scheler puts it this way we are the first generation in which man has become fully and thoroughly problematic to himself in which he no longer knows what he essentially is but at the same time knows that he doesn't know yet desperately wants to get the picture now it's in that sort of a situation the anguished self-consciousness at living in a broken world it's in that sort of a situation that the approach of the existentialist is not going to be offering a theory you don't offer a theory to resolve existential anxiety any more than you use a hammer to wash your face the wrong tool the existentialist is not trying to refute an opponent by appeal to some universal nor not universal norms of reason no he's not trying to define the universal essence of human nature as in the Aristotelian or turistic tradition and certainly not trying to achieve some objective detachment from the whole business no rather he's trying to describe the predicament in an illuminating way to describe and illuminate the situation the mess in which we find ourselves trying if you like to uncover what it is that we dread isn't trying to describe these existential characteristics of individual existence the concern the emphasis is upon the individual as a subject who consciously feels her existence a subject with all of the inwardness that accompanies the subject even jerry brown's We the People is too objective and impersonal because the wheelie doesn't have an inner witness a feeling of this it's the individual I so a descriptive task and in this I think it's fair to say that existentialism is influenced in its beginnings in the 19th century is influenced very plainly by can't and by Hegel neither of whom were existentialists but without whom I think it's fair to say that would never have been existentialism at least not in any form that we know there may have been earlier existential motifs in earlier thinkers Agustin Pascal but not the existentialism we know can't seem to fluency accounts Copernican revolution which is you recall was moved from the view that we are objective detached observers of a world and conform ourselves our thinking to what the world is moving from that the revolution moving from that to the view that the world is going to be conformed to us to what we are brain inwardly and so it is the Kantian emphasis on the transcendental self the transcendental ego that is uncovered there is presupposed in the forms of intuition and the categories of understanding this self which brings its own structures and meanings to the world now that sort of theme is running throughout the existentialists so can't influence their Pagels influence yeah the dialectic the dialectic of an unfolding self-consciousness thesis antithesis synthesis the synthesis becoming a thesis for a new and tifos you see this unfolding of the self-consciousness now admittedly Hegel had use this dialectic in moving from one essence to another essence and so on and so forth it's a theoretical dialectic for Kierkegaard it's an existential dialectic you see in the concreteness of our feelings we move from thesis to antithesis and synthesis unless and the final analysis is with such there's no final synthesis which is why such as the pessimist II is so that when you read such transcendence of the ego next week what you'll be finding in the act of being self conscious in any kind of a world yes they're just creating meaning we're creating itself so that you and I are big nothings and we create ourselves as it were afresh in every act of thinking seeing participating so forth well and this is a dialectical process well you'll find that currents description of thesis antithesis synthesis in terms of immediacy mediation immediacy mediation and then the next step of synthesis whatever that is that immediacy mediation those terms characteristic and existential writers in addition from Hegel the phenomenological description using the phenomenological method that's Hegel's so keep in mind that servant master dialectic because that sort of dialectic of the self consciousness is going to be common one other theme perhaps from Hegel of the matter of freedom remember Hegel said that the overall process of history is the absolute cessation of freedom the development of the full self consciousness is the absolute cessation of its freedom well the existentialist forgets about any teleology in history but finds absolute ization of freedom the individual's freedom not part of some absolute of a high gallium salt that is individual and as a result the movement is for the existentialist from existence to essence from being no well-being if that's what you mean by existence via becoming to another kind of being capital B essence rather than existence you'll find that in Heidegger for instance this this mere existence is referred to as we're a Hendon zine just being on hand like any other object you see no inwardness of identity at all your hand inside or if you like as design that there notice near the object as distinct from eXistenZ yeah that's the meaningful terminology varies from one to another but the emphasis is on the the process of unfolding existential self-consciousness in finding creating authentic existence of oneself okay those are the general characteristics characteristics let me let me add this that having said that there are different varieties of existentialism in which some of these characteristics are more prominent than others there are some for instance who are quite irreligious and there are other existential thinkers who are religious now obviously Kierkegaard is one of the religious and Nietzsche is one of the irreligious and so we get our sample there but the other religious ones names like Gabriel of Marcel French Catholic rider it was so disgusted with another irreligious one namely sad that he refused to call himself an existentialist and coined the phrase philosophy of existence instead Marcel or Paul Tillich the Protestant theologian or Martin Buber the Jewish philosopher whereas the irreligious down here you've got sod you've got Heidegger so on and so forth okay now just that distinction tends to trigger another distinction because in people like Marcel and Boober particularly you get the realization that meaning sending existence is found in relationship its Boober who coined not coined but popularized the term I thou - eat it who says that the the basic word is not I not Val but I now and the eye only has meaning as abstracted from the relationship but the experience of we-ness is prior to the experience of the solitary ah okay and I think in young children that's obviously so and with Marcel analogously and of course in Kierkegaard authentic existence is gaining relationship to God yes a so there's no authenticity alone and it's not surprising then that somebody by son likes odd who tends to see relationships as masochistic or sadistic and as irreligious ends up by saying there's no meaning to it oh yeah in his big work Being and Nothingness he has no discussion of love no he has discussion of sexuality but it's all about masochism and sadism you see no positive nurturing kind of relationship involved and reason for that well his phenomenology begins to explain it describe it the explanation ultimately I think is twofold one biographical his autobiography a thing called words is quite revealing but other than that is the fact that in such there's a dialectic that goes on between what he calls Los WA and the poorest wa la soie is simply what is in itself poor soir is what is for itself that zakat echo account the thing in itself the thing for me it's County and language the thing is that the the self conscious individual is concerned with yes the world as it is for me and is blocked all the time by the intransigence of the world as it is in itself how many of you have read Sark's play no exit okay half-a-dozen of you maybe do it the rest of you I was gonna say bums do it my goodness what have you been doing with yourself all your lives you'll read it in an hour if you understand it but you see it's a picture of three individuals two women and a man in a room from which there's no exit oh it turns out there's a door that's open that you just can't bring themselves to leave it's a dramatic setting of hell this is the afterlife now living with their pasts and here they have to put up with each other they try to make up to each other there's two of them seem to be doing pretty well well either the third one breaks it up or else one of them does something which destroys any possible relationship and you get a dramatic picture of this the individual who wants this other one for self being negated by the other which is what it is in itself until at the end of the play you get the line hell is other people all right let's get on with it end of play the antithesis without a synthesis the antithesis of lost wallopers well without were citizens and that's Tenzing mark contrast to Marcel who has a play with another threesome in it play called the men of God a Protestant pastor in France whose relationship it is wife leaves something to be desired and whose daughter is about to run away from home got the picture and just as the crisis seemed to be about to burst knock on the door brings in one of the parishioners with her baby desperately wanting the pastor's help so he tends to the parishioner and then when he comes back to the others he says they all say well now it's for people like that that we have to live and I just said that Marcel is repudiating sunt I think man of God is a conscious repudiation of no exit where instead of libera soir one thing for myself there's a notion of giving of oneself which is the basis for meaningful relationship so it's interesting contrast then between these these two groups all right let's say a few things about Kierkegaard though incidentally one other of the religious types is own Russian Orthodox Nicholas Padilla so you get variety of judeo-christian traditions in there all right kick a good mid 19th century Danish finger educated in Germany time of Hegel and I think it's fair to say that the central theme in Kierkegaard which in a way sets the pace for later existentialism is the theme of becoming a person which for kicker God is becoming a Christian but this is of course the question what is it to be a person in this kind of a world and you you find kicker God criticizing the inadequacies of both the Enlightenment account of a person and the remand assist account of things enlightenment and romanticism neither sufficient we're not rational animals we're not primarily primarily related to external things were not filled with creative spirit that's just wonderful those those images are dead false optimism's rather he he talks about two paths two paths to becoming a Christian and this is most systematically developed in his work called a concluding unscientific PostScript little bit of his famous irony in that title it's about 400 pages hardly a postscript unscientific to say the least you know what existentialist would draw on 18th century 19th century science anyway but the two paths to becoming a Christian that he talks about are the objective and the subjective paths yes now the object if path is the path of natural theology or the path of historical evidences and is complain about that is its various one is the indecisiveness of the rational because you know the way it is with arguments and elements there are counter arguments so you always have to respond to the counter argument and then there's an argument to the counter argument and you have to respond to that counter argument to the counter argument and then there's a counter argument your counter to the counter to the counter argument and so on and so forth and there's always something else that has to be done reminds me of a friend of mine who back in the 50s was going to write a little book on a certain topic and he kept saying well there's something else come out another article in a journal I haven't looked at and so he postponed till that it's now 92 he's retired and the book never was written yeah but Kierkegaard sees that you see that's the tendency of the Germanic scholar 19th century German scholarship you know you remember that three-volume German introduction to the elephant so that objective path leads really nowhere it's it's never finished and says Kierkegaard this is because one it lacks any absolute starting point direct reference to Descartes and because it's logic is able to deal with universal concepts but not with individual existence remember that deductive logic has to have a term universally distributed at least once in a syllogism if there's gonna be any logical connection between the premises so traditional logic is not a logic of the individual the unique individual the unique situation but in addition the objective path cheats us out of the passion oh yes cool calm enlightenment reason you know cheats us out of the passion which alone provides impetus to faith love hope so you'll find on 297 for instance a passage in which Kierkegaard makes the point that a logical system is possible sure lots of logical systems are possible love animals but nodes are light needs hey gold day a logical system is possible but an existential system is impossible because it's universal truths can't catch that slippery eel of individual existence now on the the other hand the subjective path is a different matter because the subjective path the the inwardness responds passionately and responds passionately to God in Christ confronting us that is to say that while the objective path will say well I cannot prove the existence of God or I cannot prove the incarnation or the objective path will say well there seems to be something paradoxical here about the eternal being in time how can that be the subjective path just responds with passion of faith I'm grateful love and that's what becoming a Christian is now notice these terms there are places where he talks of truth as subjective now be careful of that he does not mean that it's just in your mind and nowhere else that pop use of subjective he does not mean it's relative because he uses the terms objective and subjective as ways of describing one's relationship to God or to the truth yes a or more specifically he uses objective for describing your rational relationship to the troops detached measuring how far you have yet to go and so forth and he uses subjective for talking about relationship not to the truth but to God himself focus here on the personal relationship whereas here it's on the logic of natural theology you see the difference well how many of you have gardener with you Boy Scout motto be prepared okay you'll have to have me read to you so I read to you from page 302 and you can reread it yourself to get it more forcefully 302 when the question of truth is raised in an objective manner reflection is directed objectively to the truth is an object to which the nor is related it's focused on the question of whether it is the truth if only the object to which is related is the truth the subject is accounted to be in the truth but when the question of truth is raised subjectively reflection is directed subjectively that is to say with all the inwardness of a being to the nature of the individuals relationship and if only the mode of this relationship is in the truth the individual is in the truth even if she/he should happen to be related to what is not true in other words you might misunderstand some things and be wrong but a subjective relationship can still be there so he talks then of the objective and the subjective their paths and points out that the object is accents what is said the subjective accents how it is set now think of two ways you could recite the Apostles Creed I believe in God the Father Almighty maker of heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ His only begotten Son our Lord who was born at the Virgin Mary and so forth now the objective recites I believe that all these propositions are true the subjective says Lord I believe with all my heart I believe so he has this definition of truth conceived in this subjective way as an objective uncertainty sure you haven't got it logically proven with complete certainty it's against foundationalism an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness now that's the highest truth attainable for an existing individual it's as if his text is the men in the Gospels who said lord I believe help thou mine unbelief yes see that is the same I not having logical certainty that's one thing but passionately beliefs now what the most of the other stuff that cure God does is reflection on this you're saying what is this passionate relationship how are we going to describe that phenomenologically and that's what we'll have to look at next time of it it involves conceptions like faith love melancholy great sickness under death etc etc so we'll pick it up there Winston

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Published: Tue Jun 16 2015