#6 in the series of which AC Grayling said, “I’ve never heard of it”.
What is existentialism? It is the use of pessimistic vocabulary to give apparent depth to shallow concepts. Dark is deep: this is our legacy.
There is an expression, “You never know”. There is also an expression, “The future is uncertain.” I prefer to say, “We must live without hope.” Alternatively, I say we live in despair. Either way, it makes you want to take up smoking, doesn’t it?
Any self-help book will tell you that many people don’t like to take responsibility for their lives and will sometimes pretend they have less choice than they do. I prefer to say that we suffer anguish.
God doesn’t exist and there is no moral code we can take off the metaphysical shelf and follow. That could sound positive and liberating, but I prefer to say we are abandoned.
People say that existentialism is a pessimistic doctrine. How can they think that when I tell them it’s all about anguish, abandonment and despair? It’s the most optimistic philosophy there is.
People say that if you are an existentialist, you can do whatever you want. Let me tell you a story. In the war, a young boy came to me and said, “Look, my mother needs me but so does my country. What should I do?” I said, “Don’t ask me. Work it out for yourself.” That’s why I’m France’s number one thinker and Camus isn’t.
Whatever you choose, you must choose. That sounds like a tautology, so let me rephrase it: You are condemned to be free. Still a tautology, but suitably bleak and deep sounding, so who cares?
In conclusion, I may look deeply serious, but inside, I’m having a laugh.
There is No Exit, enough to give you Nausea , we are forced to be adults, it’s enough to make you constipated or make your homely mistress pimp for you and hope those pretty celebrity seeking swingers don’t retch when counting the warts on your face.
Ah, but there’s always the Soviet Union and Marxism to give a toad hope !
There are two men who I really admire in the history of philosophy. One is Sartre, the other is Russell: both Nobel Prize’s winners; both imprisoned; both fundamentally right about morality and religion; both public intellectuals; and both respectful womanizers!
But, in this last aspect, I think that Sartre was unsurpassed: he could flirt with two girls, in different tables of the Cafè, while talking to Simone de Beauvoir, without the suspicion of any of her! existencialism and womenism !
Anyway, Russell and Sartre: two giants worth of standing in their shoulders to see further… (shoulders that Newton never would stand!)
To the editor: don’t forget Russell in these series, maybe with a Problems of Philosophy (digested) or the Principia (indigested)!
I attempted Being and Nothingness and after a few sessions with it, put it down once and for all, in utter contempt. It is simply (or rather, not simply) a boring and over-difficult book and no amount of reasoning or excusing can justify it’s mind boggling dullness. Yes, you could take the time and trouble to plough slowly through it, mayeb get a study guide and go for it, but really why bother?! Montagine had it right when he said we shouldn’t bash our head over difficult, obscure books. Contrast the pure rush and joy of reading Nietzsche with that of reading Sartre – no comaprison.
…and the title music for the BBC’s dramatisation of “Roads to Freedom” was great.
Who said we are made meaningful with “pure rush and joy?” I used to have this at watching my favourite football team; I still enjoy watching them, but Sartre has helped alter my ‘style of play’. I will look to consolidate this style with contributions from other thinkers and practitioners.
Oh my, how shallow. Existentialism is just the re-hashing of Hume’s observation that reason is the slave of passion. Think a minute; it really is that simple.
It’s pointless discussing dead philosophers’ works. Selfish Gene theory, The Second Law of Thermodynamics and not reading AC Grayling are the answers to life.
We could add Memetics and String Theory so called, but not being foreseeably verifiable, we might have to trash them with the rest of philosophy.
yes we suffer anguish but somehow we can be happy,Dont tell me you never smille?We can be abandoned but we can find adoption,we live in despair but we can achive hope.There’s a saying”If a bird sings in a burned forest it will be the start of hope.”With the freedom given to us we choose which can give us happiness,adoption and hope.That will make us select which religion, groups, beliefs, philosophy ,carreer(illegal or legal works?)…
Who said we are made meaningful with “pure rush and joy?” – I didn’t ! I never said we were made meaningful by anything, I used the words rush and joy to describe the feeling I got from reading Nietzsche in comparison with that of reading Sartre. Sartre has helped ‘alter your style of play’ ? How? Nietzsche was ten times the writer and thinker than Sartre, but then again you’re entitled to your view so fair enough.
jen: “happiness,adoption and hope.”
It appears that you mean something other than “adoption.” I’d really like to know what. “Adaptation” maybe? Honestly, I don’t know.
Dear me, what’s happened to TPM? I can’t see how any of ths helps people get to grips with, or make us of, philosophy. It seems like all you want to do is mock the work of others, and /or laud your own fave writer as better than anybody elses. Really, what’s the point?
I don’t know if Nietzsche was 10 times the writer that Sartre was (I wouldn’t know how to make that call), and I don’t know that existentialism is Hume ‘rehashed’ (though I can see plenty of arguments against this and few for it), but I do know that rubbishing Sartres’ E&H text in the way that this blog does is reprehenisble for a magazine that claims to be promoting philosophy. All your doing is encouraging the view that these works which many of us find deeply stimulating and thought-provoking, are just a waste of time.
Shame on you, TPM.
Dear Phil, what you call ‘rubbishing’ I call expressing opinions in a forthright and honest fashion. And when was this ever an issue for such Freethinkers as one would expect to find on a blog such as this?!Fair enough if this degenreates into wildly abusive polemic then I take your point but if you re-read my entry above it can hardly be classed as this – would you agree? To me how we get to grips with philosophy is through discussing and yes, evaluating these works under discussion. Maybe my evaluation was a little too ‘colourful’ for your particular taste, and something more mildly stated is what you’re after? Then this is a different objection altogether, and I accept your comments, whilst respectfully requesting that you allow me to express my opinions in my own way. Maybe I should have made some technical objections to why I disliked Sartre? I’d be here all day! By the by – why wouldn’t you know how to make the call re- Sartre/ Nietzsche ? Even if you were ‘wrong’ say on wouldn’t you have an opinion to express is you’d read them both? With respect – shame on You if you didn’t !
Oy. The Sartre article is great…I actually started studying philosophy because of it (way back in the 20th century). But the parody was hilarious.
Doug:I mean if a person or even an animal is abandoned somebody will adopt.Even a house abandoned will be reconstructed.
I said so of happiness,hope and adoption bec. the upper article tells we live with anguish,abandonment and despair.But i think so we live that kind of life all our life.
Living in this world, we both sufffered the antonyms and synonyms of these words(Abandoned-adoption,anguish-happiness,despair-hope).
But i dont think so we live all our life with darkness
Doug:I mean if a person or even an animal is abandoned somebody will adopt.Even a house / building abandoned will be reconstructed. So how much more of a person?
I said so of happiness,hope and adoption bec. the upper article tells we live with anguish,abandonment and despair.But i dont think a person live that kind of life only.
Living in this world, we both sufffered the antonyms and synonyms of these words(Abandoned-adoption,anguish-happiness,despair-hope).
you ought to have a subfile directory only for digests for easy navigation.
Richard: the ‘rubbishing’ I was referring to was JB’s “digest” not your posts in particular.
As for the whose “a ten times better writer than anyone else”, I mean I wouldn’t feel comfortable simply making that call without backing it up with some kind of justification. Granted, you talked about the thrill you get reading N. as opposed to S., but I dare say my mother would make the same claim about reading Jackie Collins.
[Now, now, I don't want to get into a debate about whether Jackie Collins is a bad writer or not (oh god, high art/low art J.S Mill here we go...), let's just see if I can get away with saying she is "incommensurable" with our favourite philosophers and leave it at that...
]
It’s pointless discussing dead philosophers’ works. Selfish Gene theory, The Second Law of Thermodynamics and not reading AC Grayling are the answers to life.
Now it is exactly viewpoints such as this one that make existentialism a vital and current player in western thought.
Reductionism of this kind has been occurring for some time now in the west, perhaps an unfortunate reflex of the development and success of science. Despite the obvious validity science itself carries for the items it studies, it falls far short of providing anything like a philosophical anthropology. And philosophical anthropology is just what the subject at stake here is. How are we to classify, explain, and interpret the living experience? What is human life?
In looking towards physical experimentation (science) to explain away the essential qualities of personal life that philosophy is made to address, one short changes the depth of human life to a stunning degree. Its just this sort of thing that thinkers such as Sartre are addressing when they write things such as “Existentialism is a Humanism”.
What Sartre is attempting here is to show a dynamic within life, an ‘emptiness’ as it were, that is unique to us as self aware agents. Because we exist in this way, choice, anxiety, and possible meaninglessness are defining qualities. By using ontology to describe what he’s saying, he makes it as fundamental as possible. He needs the language of existence to say it because the elements he’s referring to underlie all the rest that constitute life. That’s what ontology is for.
Now lets hear it in the words of the man himself:
What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.
What Sartre has done here is to undercut the false basis of scientism and determinism that had been used previously by showing it rested on a false picture of how human existence proceeds through the world. And while I question many of the conclusions he reached on that basis, the foundation he offered continues to act as a platform for a wide range of existential philosophy, all of it grounded on an awareness of choice and its defining role in human existence.
I do also want to say that this article is probably the best thing he wrote. Being and Nothingness was awful. Many of the criticisms of obscure philosophy are properly directed against it. And I really find almost all the French philosophy I’ve tried to be just about as bad. Maybe it’s the language in translation, but I really think it’s a cultural thing.
Regardless, Sartre did produce some of the defining thought of the 20th century, and if you’ve appreciated any of the points I’ve made, I’d strongly recommend existentialism as a ground for ethical thinking.
This is slightly humorous, largely irritating; Platitudes of a stereotypical type. Sartre was a highly astute psychologist and much could be learned about consciousness if people took the time to read him (His largely publicized womanizing is most likely a result of his understanding of human psychology. Admirable, no, but something to consider nonetheless). His critique of psychoanalyses is first rate, and his analysis of multiple consciousnesses and the conflicts that arise when they occupy proximate areas of space is a feat in-itself…i.e…He understood the an integral aspect of moral relations. Sartre excelled in explicating the moral dilemmas of proximate existence with other humans, and the manner in which the depth of moral decisions influenced the conscious mind. His anecdote of the student who comes to his aid is connected to a much more profound point, about morality and freedom, and that is that there efficacy is not guaranteed and cannot be guaranteed, by a system of philosophy or a system of science. It is the nature of our existence that presents these daunting, often day to day, decisions, and Sartre was one of the greatest writers to identify and explain this. His work, and especially his essay on Humanism, is indeed littered with logical inconsistencies, but Sartre’s points of emphasis I believe remain important insights for all.
jp lorence: well said…I could imagine Sartre agreeing with Kuhn that paradigms influence our perception of reality. Sartre was simply suggesting that we could perhaps open our eyes a tad bit more to the depth of experience.
-I just came in to take a look.
You are very wrong about Existentialism, at least according to Sartre, And Camus’ Existentialism was different. For one thing, he did not see our condition as dark and hopeless.
& It Existentialism can be explained in a few words, you did not succeed.
Very useful and informative blog. Recommended for all to see.
http://medsdrugs.blogspot.com/
Phil Stokes, any relation to the author of ‘Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers’ ?
Some additional comments on Sartre and other texts.
http://josearnedo.blogspot.com/search/label/Sartre
“God doesn’t exist and there is no moral code we can take off the metaphysical shelf and follow. That could sound positive and liberating, but I prefer to say we are abandoned.”
I disagree; here’s why:
Even though there is no escaping responsibility for our choices (we are condemned to be free-Sartre) we are not abandoned; rather, upon close inspection of this freedom we will find God! For additional commentary on the freedom/God connection see: http://bwinwnbwi.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/existence-god-structure-logic-love/