/tag/existentialism

18 quotes tagged 'existentialism'

Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

224-225

But the problem of responsibility is seen under a different light when one refers to the traditional doctrine that we saw to have been more or less confusedly shadowed by existentialism itself: if one holds on to the idea that whatever one is as a person in the human condition proceeds from an original, prenatal, and pretemporal choice, wherein one willed, in terms of an 'original project' (as Sartre calls it), everything that would define the contents of one's existence. In this case, it is no longer a matter of answering to a Creator, but to something referring to the very dimension of being or transcendence in oneself. The course of existence, though not attributable to the more exterior and already human will of the individual (the person), follows, in principle, a line that has significance for the I, even though still latent or concealed: as an entirety of experiences important not in themselves but for the reactions that they provoke in us, reactions through which that being that one wished to be can be realized. In that case, life in this world cannot be considered as something that one can arbitrarily throw away, nor can it be considered simply as a bad situation in which the only choice is faith or fatalistic resignation (we have seen that, at best, the horizons of modern existentialism end there), or else being locked into a continuous trial of resistance (as happens along the lines of a dark Stoicism, devoid of the background of transcendence). As in an adventure, a mission, a trial, an election, or an experiment, earthly life appears to be something to which one committed oneself before finding oneself in the human condition, accepting in anticipation whatever difficult, miserable, or dramatic aspects it might bring, aspects that are especially likely in an epoch like the present.

139-140

Some have tried to argue a finalistic view of the unprecedented accumulation of energy in the atomic era. Theodor Litt, for example, has suggested that man might realize his own nature in the face of a crisis situation by using his free will, deciding in full responsibility, taking the risk, in one direction or the other. Currently the decision is over the destructive and military use of atomic energy, or its 'constructive,' peaceful use. \nIn an epoch of dissolution, such an idea seems completely abstract and fantastic, typical of intellectuals with no sense of reality. First it presupposes the existence of men who still possess an inner law and sure ideas about what course should really be followed — and this, beyond anything that relates to the purely material world. Second, it presumes that these hypothetical men are the very ones entrusted with the use of the new means of power, in one direction or the other. Both suppositions are chimerical, especially the second. Today's leaders are caught in a tangle of actions and reactions that evade any real control; they obey irrational, collective influences, and are almost always at the service of special interests, ambitions, and material and economic rivalries that leave no room for a decision based on an enlightened freedom, a decision as an 'absolute person.' \nIn fact, even the alternative suggested above, over which our contemporaries agonize so much, may present itself in terms very different from those advanced by a pacifist, progressivist, moralizing humanitarianism. I truly cannot say what the person who still has hope for man should think of the imminence of quasi-apocalyptic destruction. It would certainly force many to face the existential problem in all its nakedness, and subject them to extreme trials; but is this a worse evil than that of mankind's safe, secure, satisfied, and total consignment to the kind of happiness that befits Nietzsche's 'last man': a comfortable consumer civilization of socialized human animals, aided by all the discoveries of science and industry and reproducing demographically in a squirming, catastrophic crescendo?

81-82

Already in Soren Kierkegaard, considered as the spiritual father of the existentialists, 'existence' is presented as a problem; with a special use of the German term Existenz, different from current usage, he defines Existenz as a paradoxical point in which the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, are co-present, meeting but mutually excluding each other. So it would seem to be a matter of recognizing the presence in man of the transcendent dimension. (Following the abstract habit of philosophy, the existentialists too speak of man in general, whereas one should always refer to one or another human type.) Still, we can accept the conception of Existenz as the physical presence of the I in the world, in a determined, concrete, and unrepeatable form and situation (cf. the theory of one's own nature and law in chapter 7) and, simultaneously, as a metaphysical presence of Being (of transcendence) in the I. \nAlong these lines, a certain type of existentialism could also lead to another point already established here: that of a positive antitheism, an existential overcoming of the God-figure, the object of faith or doubt. Since the center of the I is also mysteriously the center of Being, 'God' (transcendence) is a certainty, not as a subject of faith or dogma, but as presence in existence and freedom. The saying of Jaspers: 'God is a certainty for me inasmuch as I exist authentically,' relates in a certain way to the state already indicated, in which calling Being into question would amount to calling oneself into question.

221-222

Suicide, condemned by most moralities with social and religious foundations, has in fact been permitted by two doctrines whose norms of life are not far from those indicated for the differentiated man in the present epoch: Stoicism and Buddhism. One can refer to the ideas of Seneca regarding Stoicism, recalling above all the general background of its vision of life. I have already said that for Seneca the true man would be above the gods themselves because they, by their very nature, do not know adversity and misfortune, whereas he is exposed to them, but has the power to triumph over them. Moreover, Seneca sees the beings that are most harshly tested as the worthiest, recalling this analogy: in war it is the most capable, sure, and qualified persons that leaders entrust with the most exposed positions and the hardest tasks. Usually it is this virile and agonistic conception that applies when suicide is condemned and stigmatized as cowardice and desertion. (There is a saying attributed by Cicero to the Pythagoreans: 'To leave the place that one is assigned in life is not permitted without an order from the leader, who is God.') Instead Seneca reached the opposite conclusion, and put the justification of suicide directly into the mouth of divinity (De Providentia 6:7-9). He makes the divinity say that he has given the superior man, the sage, not only a force stronger than any contingency, and something more than being exempt from evils, namely the power to triumph over them interiorly, but has also ensured that no one can hold him back against his will: the path to 'exit' is open to him — patet exitus, 'Wherever you do not want to fight, it is always possible to retreat. You have been given nothing easier than death.' \nGiven the presuppositions mentioned earlier with regard to the general vision of life, there is no doubt that Seneca did not intend this decision to refer to cases in which death is sought because a given situation appears unbearable: especially then, one could not permit oneself the act. Here too it is unnecessary to add what is equally valid for all those who are driven to cut their life short due to emotional and impassioned motives, because this would be equivalent to recognizing one's own passivity and impotence toward the irrational part of one's soul. The same is even true for cases in which social motives intervene. Both the ideal Stoic type and the differentiated man do not permit these motives to intimately touch them, as if their dignity were injured by what binds them to social life. They would never be driven to put an end to their own existence for these motives, which are included by the Stoics in the category of 'that which does not depend on me.' The only exception we can consider is the case of a disgrace not before others whose judgment and contempt one cannot bear, but before oneself, because of one's own downfall. Considering all this, Seneca's maxim can only have the meaning of an enhancement of the inner freedom of a superior being. It is not a matter of retreating because one does not feel strong enough before such ordeals and circumstances; rather, it is a matter of the sovereign right — that one always keeps in reserve — to either accept these ordeals or not, and even to draw the line when one no longer sees a meaning in them, and after having sufficiently demonstrated to one- self the capacity to face them. Impassibility is taken for granted, and the right to 'exit' is justifiable as one of the possibilities to be considered, in principle, only for the sake of decreeing that our circumstances have our assent, that we are really active in them, and that we are not just making a virtue of necessity.

174-176

In the present political situation, in a climate of democracy and 'socialism,' the rules of the game are such that the man in question absolutely cannot take part in it. He recognizes, as I have said before, that ideas, motives, and goals worthy of the pledge of one's own true being do not exist today; there are no demands of which he can recognize any moral right and foundation outside that which they derive as mere facts on the empirical and profane plane. However, apoliteia detachment, does not necessarily involve specific consequences in the field of pure and simple activity. I have already discussed the capacity to apply oneself to a given task for love of action in itself and in terms of an impersonal perfection. So, in principle, there is no reason to exclude the political realm itself as a particular case among others, since participating in it on these terms requires neither any objective value of a higher order, nor impulses that come from emotional and irrational layers of one's own being. But if this is how one dedicates oneself to political activity, clearly all that matters is the action and the impersonal perfection in acting for its own sake. Such political activity, for one who desires it, cannot present a higher value and dignity than dedicating oneself, in the same spirit, to quite different activities: absurd colonization projects, speculations on the stock market, science, and even — to give a drastic example — arms traffic or white slavery. \nAs conceived here, apoliteia creates no special presuppositions in the exterior field, not necessarily having a corollary in practical abstention. The truly detached man is not a professional and polemic outsider, nor conscientious objector, nor anarchist. Once it is established that life with its interactions does not constrain his being, he could even show the qualities of a soldier who, in order to act and accomplish a task, does not request in advance a transcendent justification and a quasi-theological assurance of the goodness of the cause. We can speak, in these cases, of a voluntary obligation that concerns the 'persona,' not the being, by which — even while one is involved — one remains isolated. \nI have already said that the positive overcoming of nihilism lies precisely in the fact that lack of meaning does not paralyze the action of the 'persona.' In existential terms, the only exception would be the possibility of action being manipulated by some current political or social myth that regarded today's political life as serious, significant, and important. Apoliteia is the inner distance unassailable by this society and its 'values'; it does not accept being bound by anything spiritual or moral. Once this is firm, the activities that in others would presuppose such bonds can be exercised in a different spirit. Moreover, there remains the sphere of activities that can be made to serve a higher-ordained and invisible end, as when I mentioned the two aspects of impersonality and what is to be gained from some forms of modern existence. \nTurning to a particular point, one can only maintain an attitude of detachment when facing the confrontation of the two factions contending for world domination today: the democratic, capitalist West and the communist East. In fact, this struggle is devoid of any meaning from a spiritual point of view. The 'West' is not an exponent of any higher ideal. Its very civilization, based on an essential negation of traditional values, presents the same destructions and nihilistic background that is evident in the Marxist and communist sphere, however different in form and degree. I will not dwell on this, given that I have outlined a total conception of the course of history, and dismissed any illusion about the final result of that struggle for world control, in Revolt Against the Modern World. Since the problem of values does not come into question, at most it presents a practical problem to the differentiated man. That certain margin of material freedom that the world of democracy still leaves for external activity to one who will not let himself be conditioned inwardly, would certainly be abolished in a communist regime. Simply in view of that, one may take a position against the soviet-communist system: not because one believes in some higher ideal that the rival system possesses, but for motives one might almost call basely physical. \nOn the other hand, one can keep in mind that for the differentiated man, having no interest in affirming and exposing himself in external life today, and his deeper life remaining invisible and out of reach, a communist system would not have the same fatal significance as for others; also an 'underground front' could very well exist there. Taking sides in the present struggle for world hegemony is not a spiritual problem, but a banal, practical choice.

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

102

But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by “the others.” By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of wordly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself … does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.29 This is a superb characterization of the “culturally normal” man, the one who dares not stand up for his own meanings because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be oneself, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe framework of social and cultural obligations and duties. Again, too, this kind of characterization must be understood as being on a continuum, at the extreme end of which we find depressive psychosis. The depressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally stupid. He cannot seem to understand the situation he is in, cannot see beyond his own fears, cannot grasp why he has bogged down. Kierkegaard phrases it beautifully: If one will compare the tendency to run wild in possibility with the efforts of a child to enunciate words, the lack of possibility is like being dumb … for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath.30 This is precisely the condition of depression, that one can hardly breathe or move. One of the unconscious tactics that the depressed person resorts to, to try to make sense out of his situation, is to see himself as immensely worthless and guilty. This is a marvelous “invention” really, because it allows him to move out of his condition of dumbness, and make some kind of conceptualization of his situation, some kind of sense out of it—even if he has to take full blame as the culprit who is causing so much needless misery to others.

It can’t be overstressed, one final time, that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.

I once wrote that I thought the reason man was so naturally cowardly was that he felt he had no authority; and the reason he had no authority was in the very nature of the way the human animal is shaped: all our meanings are built into us from the outside, from our dealings with others. This is what gives us a “self” and a superego. Our whole world of right and wrong, good and bad, our name, precisely who we are, is grafted into us; and we never feel we have authority to offer things on our own. How could we?—I argued—since we feel ourselves in many ways guilty and beholden to others, a lesser creation of theirs, indebted to them for our very birth.

The inner self represents the freedom of thought, imagination, and the infinite reach of symbolism. The body represents determinism and boundness. The child gradually learns that his freedom as a unique being is dragged back by the body and its appendages which dicate “what” he is. For this reason sexuality is as much a problem for the adult as for the child: the physical solution to the problem of who we are and why we have emerged on this planet is no help—in fact, it is a terrible threat. It doesn’t tell the person what he is deep down inside, what kind of distinctive gift he is to work upon the world. This is why it is so difficult to have sex without guilt: guilt is there because the body casts a shadow on the person’s inner freedom, his “real self” that—through the act of sex—is being forced into a standardized, mechanical, biological role. Even worse, the inner self is not even being called into consideration at all; the body takes over completely for the total person, and this kind of guilt makes the inner self shrink and threaten to disappear.

The Great book of Amber

Author: Roger Zelazny

Publisher: Harper Voyager (2010)

Pop Magic

Author: Grant Morrison

Publisher: The Disinformation Company (2008)

The Mind's I

Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett

Publisher: Bantam Books (1982)

Myths to live by

Author: Joseph Campbell

Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation (2011)

A neurotic might be defined, in this light, as one who has failed to come altogether across the critical threshold of his adult 'second birth.' Stimuli that should evoke in him thoughts and acts of responsibility evoke those, instead, of flight to protection, fear of punishment, need for advice, and so on. He has continually to correct the spontaneity of his response patterns and, like a child, will tend to attribute his failures and troubles either to his parents or to that handy parent substitute, the state and the social order by which he is protected and supported. If the first requirement of an adult is that he should take to himself responsibility for his failures, for his life, and for his doing, within the context of the actual conditions of the world in which he dwells, then it is simply an elementary psychological fact that no one will ever develop to this state who is continually thinking of what a great thing he would have been had only the conditions of his life been different: his parents less indifferent to his needs, society less oppressive, or the universe otherwise arranged. The first requirement of any society is that its adult membership should realize and represent the fact that it is they who constitute its life and being. And the first function of the rites of puberty, accordingly, must be to establish in the individual a system of sentiments that will be appropriate to the society in which he is to live, and on which that society itself must depend for its existence.

There is no 'Thou shalt!' any more. There is nothing one has to believe, and there is nothing one has to do. On the other hand, one can of course, if one prefers, still choose to play at the old Middle Ages game, or some Oriental game, or even some sort of primitive game. We are living in a difficult time, and whatever defends us from the madhouse can be applauded as good enough -- for those without nerve.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

The House of the Dead

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Oxford World's Classics (2008)