Phil 450
Existentialism and Phenomenology
Spring 2007
Instructor Information: Instructor, Dr.
Office: HU 229 Phone 7384
Office Hours: 12-1.30 MWF and by appointment.
Best way to contact - e-mail: nlillega@utm.edu
Texts: The Essential Kierkegaard
ed. Hong (
Basic
Writings of Existentialism ed. Marino (Random House)
The purpose of this course: To familiarize students with the some of the principal works of existentialist writers. To meditate critically on the principal themes articulated by those writers, to ferret out their literary, religious, ethical etc. significance.
Course Requirements:
1. 1. Attend class and participate, 25 pts for attendance. One unexcused absence allowed before deductions.
2. 2. Bi-weekly return of assigned study questions. 160 pts.
3. 3. Three exams (one mini exam, 60 pts, a mid-term, 100 pts and a comprehensive final worth 150): The exams will be T/F, multiple choice, fill in the blank, short written answers. (310 pts)
4. 4. A short paper (i.e. not less than 1500 words, worth 150 pts): Topics may be chosen by the student but must be approved by the instructor. There are LOTS of juicy topics. (150 pts. Total). Philosophy majors who want to write a paper for inclusion in their portfolio may expand their paper, with instructor input. Some extra credit available.
5. 5. Papers will be presented in classes (or in a forum) towards the end of the semester. Up to 50 points for a good presentation.
6.
N.B. Students who have not picked a definite and approved paper topic by Jan 26th will be assigned a topic. All papers must be turned in for preview by Mar. 9. All papers must be turned in in final form by April 6.
NO
EXCEPTIONS TO THESE DEADLINES.
See below for possible topics, format, etc.
Occasional short quizzes: these will be worth ca. 6 pts each and will be unannounced. Ca. 45 pts. They are extra credit points!
Extra Credit: Extra points for quality work on paper, paper presentations and exams possible. Quiz points, ca 40- 50 pts. possible
Total points ca. 695. Normally %90 of total points gets you an 'A', %80 a 'B' and so forth, but significant adjustments for curve are made when necessary.
Conduct of class, Role of the Instructor: Classes will be a mix of lecture, discussion, and also possibly some special presentations by students or others. Those who need individual help should feel free to ask, provided they have been spending a reasonable amount of time on the material. I want each student to perform to the best of his or her ability, and I will do all that I can to bring that about (short of patrolling the dorms!). At the same time I will hold each student responsible for completing all the work. Moreover, all students are responsible for knowing what has transpired in every class. Policies on student conduct, and other possibly pertinent information may be found on the instructor’s home page,
You MUST visit www.utm.edu/staff/nlillega/lillegard.htm for pertinent materials and directions.
Course Outline: (Approximate: adjustments and changes are likely.) (Study questions, i.e. those questions which will constitute the final exam, will be provided as we proceed. You are responsible for having a complete and correct list of these questions.)
COURSE OUTLINE: (Approximate. Content and time periods may vary slightly.)
Jan 17. Introduction. Hegel. Kierkegaard selections. Journals, Either/Or
Jan 22. continued etc. PAPER TOPIC DUE OR ASSIGNED, Jan 26.
Jan 29. SUD, etc. .
Feb 5 CUP, Discourses, etc. MINI EXAM I, Friday, Feb. 9
Feb. 12. TA
etc.
Feb. 19. handouts, etc.
Feb. 26.
Dostoevsky MID
TERM EXAM Fri Mar. 2
Mar. 5 Nietzsche
PAPERS TURNED IN FOR PREVIEW Mar. 9.
Mar. 12 -16, Spring Break
Mar. 19. Unamuno
Mar. 26 Sartre.
April 2. de Beauvoir ALL PAPERS MUST BE COMPLETED AND TURNED IN by April 6.
April 9. Camus.
April 16. Paper presentations.
April 23 “ “
April 30 Last day of classes. Review. Study Days May 1, 2.
FINAL
EXAM (see class schedule)
Pick a work by any of the authors we
discuss and do an exegesis. You could do further work on something we discuss,
or pick a work we have not discussed.
Check with instructor for suggestions, and also see Marino’s
suggestions.
Pick a theme: e.g. Freedom, despair,
anxiety, responsibility, rationality/irrationality, and develop it in relation
to one or more of the authors we study.
Write on some existentialist we have not
discussed. E.g. Marcel, Jaspers, Berdaiev, etc.
Discuss existentialist themes in some work
of literature or some film. E.g
Dostoevsky, Rilke, Sartre, Marcel, Camus, Musil, O’Connor, etc.
Existentialism and religion/theology –
Kierkegaard, Tillich, Dostoevsky, Bultmann etc.
Existentialism and atheism – Heidegger,
Sartre, etc.
Existentialism and psychology –
Kierkegaard, Rollo May, etc.
Existentialism and post-modernism.
#C. GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831), was born in
Unlike most earlier philosophers,
Hegel argued that we find all truth, including even truth about God, within
history. Hegel did not believe in a God outside the world, who created it and
sustained it. Instead, he believed that history itself was the unfolding of the
divine, and as such was perfectly rational. Hegel was troubled by the
“contradictions” that arose in philosophy as well as in common life, between
our sense of freedom and the determinism of science, between domination by
government and individual liberty, between an eternal God and a mortal and
contingent history, and so on for many other such cases. Hegel believed that
philosophy could show how everything in history was the result of a completely
rational process in which all such apparent contradictions would eventually be
resolved. In fact Hegel thought his
philosophy showed the resolution of all contradictions in history. Hegel’s view
seemed to many to sanctify the “status quo” (the way things in fact are). That
is to say, on his view it appears that whatever happens in history must happen,
and is even in a sense God’s will. So for example the Nazi regime, or the
career of a serial killer, are all part of the unfolding of the divine! No
merely individual human choices could have made things come out differently
than they have.
(1) Mention two main characteristics of Hegel’s thought.
(2)
Explain how his view seems to “sanctify the status quo.”
Hegel’s ambitions for philosophy as a discipline are extreme. He believes that it is capable of expressing a “concrete universal,” that is, a combination of general or universal truths (such as that all effects have a cause, or general laws of science) with all particular, concrete, historical facts. It is thus capable of bringing to light the “absolute”, the truth without remainder. This belief comes out strongly in his major work, the Phenomenology of Mind, the Preface of which is excerpted here.
Philosophy
as the Tracing of the Development of Reality.
Philosophy arrives at an account of the real by tracing an historical
process. That process is “dialectical” in a sense which will emerge in what
follows, and at the same time “organic.”
.
. . because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of that
universality which encloses the particular within it, the end or final result
seems, in the case of philosophy more than in that of other sciences, to have
absolutely expressed the complete fact itself in its very nature;
(3)
What is it that Hegel hopes to express?
Hegel contrasts his procedure with that of more
conventional historians of philosophy, who present various systems which seem
to contradict each other. For example they explain Descartes’s rationalism, and
show how it is contradicted by Locke’s empiricism. Hegel, on the contrary,
intends to show how these apparently contradictory accounts of philosophy (and
also of other domains such as art, religion, and politics) are organically
related.
...
The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be
fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction
with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the
other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not
conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of
truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety.
(4) In
what way does the “ordinary mind” fail according to Hegel?
The bud disappears when the blossom breaks
through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same
way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of
the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the
blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another
as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own
inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where
they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as
the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and
thereby the life of the whole. But contradiction as between philosophical
systems is not wont to be conceived in this way; on the other hand, the mind
perceiving the contradiction does not commonly know how to relieve it or keep
it free from its one-sidedness, and to recognize in what seems conflicting and
inherently antagonistic the presence of mutually necessary moments.
(5) Is Hegel saying that a contradiction between two philosophical systems is not a sure sign that at least one of them must be false and therefore worthless?
The
foregoing passage sums up much of Hegel’s philosophy in a simple image. It is
the image of a plant bud developing into a flower and fruit developing from the
flower. The flower arrives only by “negating” the bud. Nonetheless the bud is
essential for the appearance of the flower, it contains the flower potentially
or abstractly. Philosophical systems and systems of thought and culture
generally, are like buds which must be “negated” or contradicted in order for
higher truth to appear, but the lower form, like the bud, contains the higher
implicitly, and negating it does not mean destroying it but surpassing it. The
bud, or the “system” (say, for example, the system of Plato) is but a “moment”
or stage in the development or “evolution” of something (the plant, or, the
truth) Each stage is necessary for what follows, and each stage follows from
the “contradiction” or “negating” of the previous stage.
Thus we might think of some of Aristotle’s
thought as arising from the negating of Plato. It too will have to be negated,
just as the flower will, but that does not show it to be worthless or merely
false. The “inherent nature” of Truth is already present in Plato’s thought
just as the inherent nature of the flower is in the bud and indeed the inherent
nature of the entire plant is in the seed. Each moment or stage of the plant is
necessary to the entire thing, the whole. Each moment or stage in the history
of thought and culture is also necessary for the whole, which will be absolute
truth. And the development of the whole is guided by some ultimate purpose or
aim. We can see that Hegel’s own thinking is strongly colored by some
Aristotelian ideas, not least of them being the stress on development in
accordance with some inner “teleology” (striving towards some goal). Hegel’s
account would thus be the final “system.”
We will be returning to this image from time
to time, but for now it should enable you to frame some preliminary
definitions:
(6) Define: negation; system; moment;
contradiction; organic unity
Be
on the look out in what follows for expressions or turns of phrase which suggest
this same “organic” and “developmental” or evolutionary thinking, and also the
stress on “concreteness” and make a note of them.
“External”
Teleology, and Internal Grasp of Truth Hegel believes past
thinkers were trapped in an external viewpoint.
To
trouble oneself in this fashion with the purpose and results, and again with
the differences, the positions taken up and judgments passed by one thinker and
another, is therefore an easier task than perhaps it seems. For instead of
laying hold of the matter in hand, a procedure of that kind is all the while
away from the subject altogether. Instead of dwelling within it and becoming
absorbed by it, knowledge of that sort is always grasping at something else;
such knowledge, instead of keeping to the subject-matter and giving itself up
to it, never gets away from itself. The easiest thing of all is to pass
judgments on what has a solid substantial content; it is more difficult to
grasp it, and most of all difficult to do both together and produce the systematic
exposition of it.
The beginning of culture and of the
struggle to pass out of the unbroken immediacy of naive psychical life has
always to be made by acquiring knowledge of universal principles and points of
view, by striving, in the first instance, to work up simply to the thought of the subject-matter in
general, not forgetting at the same time to give reasons for supporting it or
refuting it, to apprehend the concrete riches and fullness contained in its
various determinate qualities, and to know how to furnish a coherent, orderly
account of it and a responsible judgment upon it.
This beginning of mental cultivation
will, however, very soon make way for the earnestness of actual life in all its
fullness, which leads to a living experience of the subject-matter itself; and
when, in addition, conceptual thought strenuously penetrates to the very depths
of its meaning, such knowledge and style of judgment will keep their due place
in everyday thought and conversation.
An
example of the “unbroken immediacy of naive Psychical life” might be the
habitual handed down beliefs, say about religion or politics, which people
inherit from their parents. Those beliefs are in a sense “thoughtless.” When we
begin to think for ourselves instead of naively accepting what others say, we
begin by looking for general principles, for example, the principle “ only
believe what can be experienced.” These principles turn out to be too abstract
for the “earnestness of actual life in all its fullness” but their use constitutes
a necessary “moment” in the development of thought. They allow us to break with
“immediacy.”
(7) Give an example of an “immediate” belief in
Hegel’s sense.
The systematic development of truth
in scientific form can alone be the true shape in which truth exists. To help
to bring philosophy nearer to the form of science-that goal where it can lay
aside the name of love of knowledge and be actual knowledge-that is what I have
set before me. The inner necessity that knowledge should be science lies in its
very nature; and the adequate and sufficient explanation for this lies simply
and solely in the systematic exposition of philosophy itself. The external
necessity, however, so far as this is apprehended in a universal way, and apart
from the accident of the personal element and the particular occasioning
influences affecting the individual, is the same as the internal: it lies in
the form and shape in which the process of time presents the existence of its
moments.
The external (for example, scientific laws such
as the gravitational law, which hold objectively, apart from thought) is the
same as the internal! That could only be true if the scientific law was arrived
at by a process of thought which conforms perfectly to the way things are. It
is an old “rationalist” idea, that reality must conform to thought. Hegel’s
particular spin on the rationalist tradition emphasizes development in a new
way.
To
show that the time process does raise philosophy to the level of scientific
system would, therefore, be the only true justification of the attempts which
aim at proving that philosophy must assume this character; because the temporal
process would thus bring out and lay bare the necessity of it, nay, more, would
at the same time be carrying out that very aim itself.
For
Hegel “scientific” refers simply to genuine systematic knowledge. You must keep
this use of “scientific” and “science” in mind in all that follows. It does not refer
to physics, chemistry, etc.
(8) “The time process raises philosophy to the
level of scientific system”. What does this mean? See if you can figure it out
in relation to previous discussion and questions.
When we state the true form of truth
to be its scientific character-or, what is the same thing, when it is
maintained that truth finds the medium of its existence in notions or
conceptions alone I know that this seems to contradict an idea with all its
consequences which makes great pretensions and has gained widespread acceptance
and conviction at the present time. A word of explanation concerning this
contradiction seems, therefore, not out of place, even though at this stage it
can amount to no more than a dogmatic assurance exactly like the view we are
opposing. If, that is to say, truth exists merely in what, or rather exists
merely as what, is called at one time intuition, at another immediate knowledge
of the Absolute, Religion, Being – not being in the center of divine love, but
the very Being of this center, of the Absolute itself – from that point of view
it is rather the opposite of the notional or conceptual form which would be
required for systematic philosophical exposition. The Absolute on this view is
not to be grasped in conceptual form, but felt, intuited; it is not its
conception, but the feeling of it and intuition of it that are to have the say
and find expression.
(9) So the “absolute” in Hegel’s usage is identical with what (or, who)?
Science,
Reason, and Feeling, “Intuition” is never enough for a philosopher
like Hegel. Nonetheless thought alone can be cold and kill our sense for the
concreteness and warmth of real life.
[Thought] has not merely lost its
essential and concrete life, it is also conscious of this loss and of the
transitory finitude characteristic of its content. Turning away from the husks
it has to feed on, and confessing that it lies in wickedness and sin, it
reviles itself for so doing, and now desires from philosophy not so much to
bring it to a knowledge of what it is, as to obtain once again through
philosophy the restoration of that sense of solidity and substantiality of
existence it has lost. Philosophy is thus expected not so much to meet this
want by opening up the compact solidity of substantial existence, and bringing
this to the light and level of self-consciousness – is not so much to bring
chaotic conscious life back to the orderly ways of thought, and the simplicity
of the notion, as to run together what thought has divided asunder, suppress
the notion with its distinctions, and restore the feeling of existence.
Thought
may literally lead us to “divide asunder” and we may have to kill something, in
ourselves or the world, to divide, and thus to think. Wordsworth, the romantic
poet and close contemporary of Hegel complained that “we murder to dissect.”
That is what we do in biology labs, right? Of course we dissect in order to
further our “thinking.”
What it [the human mind or soul]
wants from philosophy is not so much insight as edification. The beautiful, the
holy, the eternal, religion, love – these are the bait required to awaken the
desire to bite: not the notion, but ecstasy, not the march of cold necessity in
the subject-matter, but ferment and enthusiasm-these are to be the ways by
which the wealth of the concrete substance is to be stored and increasingly
extended.
We might feel there is a “march of cold
necessity” in the way the physical sciences have developed, with each theory
developing with necessity out of earlier ones. A clearer example of such a
“march” would be the development of theorems out of axioms and postulates in
geometry. They follow “with necessity.”
A further example has been used elsewhere in
this text. A bachelor is necessarily unmarried. That follows from the concept
bachelor. But Hegel thinks that the sort of necessity found in true thought is
not at all trivial, in the way “bachelors are unmarried” is trivial.
(10) Hegel uses the word “notion” to refer,
roughly, to what is conceptual. Notions are the stock in trade of philosophy.
How then does the “notion” connect up with the “march of cold necessity” in his
thought? Consult earlier questions.
With
this demand there goes the strenuous effort, almost perfervidly zealous in its
activity, to rescue mankind from being sunken in what is sensuous, vulgar, and
of fleeting importance, and to raise men’s eyes to the stars; as if men had
quite forgotten the divine, and were on the verge of finding satisfaction, like
worms, in mud and water. Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out
with endless wealth of thoughts and pictures. The significance of all that is,
lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven; instead of
dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the
present to the Divine, away, so to say, to a present that lies beyond. The
mind’s gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what is earthly, and kept
fixed there; and it has needed a long time to introduce that clearness, which
only celestial realities had, into the crassness and confusion shrouding the
sense of things earthly, and to make attention to the immediate present as
such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value. Now we have
apparently the need for the opposite of all this; man’s mind and interest are
so deeply rooted in the earthly that we require a like power to have them
raised above that level. His spirit shows such poverty of nature that it seems
to long for the mere pitiful feeling of the divine in the abstract, and to get
refreshment from that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for the merest
mouthful of water. By the little which can thus satisfy the needs of the human
spirit we can measure the extent of its loss.
Hegel has just describe the transition from a
medieval world view, with its’ “heavenward glance” to the enlightenment, with
its stress on experiment and reason. Now he goes on to attack the romantic
reaction, which is full of longing for a lost divinity, but lacks the rigor
needed in philosophy (“science” in Hegel’s sense).
This easy contentment in receiving,
or stinginess in giving, does not suit the character of science. The man who
only seeks edification, who wants to envelop in mist the manifold diversity of
his earthly existence and thought, and craves after the vague enjoyment of this
vague and indeterminate Divinity-he may look where he likes to find this: he
will easily find for himself the means to procure something he can rave over
and puff himself up withal. But philosophy must beware of wishing to be
edifying.
Still less must this kind of
contentment, which holds science in contempt, take upon itself to claim that
raving obscurantism of this sort is something higher than science. These
apocalyptic utterances pretend to occupy the very centre and the deepest
depths; they look askance at all definiteness and preciseness (horos) of meaning; and they deliberately
hold back from conceptual thinking and the constraining necessities of thought,
as being the sort of reflection which, they say, can only feel at home in the
sphere of finitude. But just as there is a breadth which is emptiness, there is
a depth which is empty too: as we may have an extension of substance which
overflows into finite multiplicity without the power of keeping the manifold
together, in the same way we may have an insubstantial intensity which, keeping
itself in as mere force without actual expression, is no better than
superficiality. The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth
only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself when spending and giving
out its substance. Moreover, when this unreflective emotional knowledge makes a
pretence of having immersed its own very self in the depths of the absolute
Being, and of philosophizing in all holiness and truth, it hides from itself
the fact that instead of devotion to God, it rather, by this contempt for all
measurable precision and definiteness, simply attests in its own case the
fortuitous character of its content, and in the other endows God with its own
caprice. When such minds commit themselves to the unrestrained ferment of sheer
emotion, they think that, by putting a veil over self-consciousness, and
surrendering all understanding, they are thus God’s beloved ones to whom He
gives His wisdom in sleep. This is the reason, too, that in point of fact what
they do conceive and bring forth in sleep is dreams.
For the rest it is not difficult to
see that our epoch is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of
man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the
old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths
of the past and to set about its own transformation. It is indeed never at
rest, but carried along the stream of progress ever onward. But it is here as
in the case of the birth of a child; after a long period of nutrition in
silence, the continuity of the gradual growth in size, of quantitative change,
is suddenly cut short by the flat breath drawn – there is a break in the
process, a qualitative change – and the child is born. In like manner the
spirit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to
assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its
previous world. That it is tottering to its fall is indicated only by symptoms
here and there. Frivolity and again ennui
[boredom], which are spreading in the established order of things, the
undefined foreboding of something unknown – all these betoken that there is
something else approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not
alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise,
which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure
of the new world.
But this new world is perfectly
realized just as little as the new-born child; and it is essential to bear this
in mind. It comes on the stage to begin with in its immediacy, in its bare
generality. A building is not finished when its foundation is laid; and just as
little, is the attainment of a general notion of a whole the whole itself. When
we want to see an oak with all its vigour of trunk, its spreading branches, and
mass of foliage, we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead. In the same
way science, the crowning glory of a spiritual world, is not found complete in
its initial stages.
Once again we see Hegel using the imagery of
biological development to describe historical changes, in this case, the
changes wrought by the enlightenment and the revolution of 1789 in which “the
spirit of man” broke with “the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and
with the old ways of thinking.”
(11)
What is he comparing the revolution to, and what is he warning us not to
do?
THE
UNITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT.
We have come to think of knowledge as the grasp
of something which exists independently of thought. Hegel denies that there is
any such “something” even though he does not equate reality with what any
individual thinks.
Absolute
Spirit.
Reality is what is thought by absolute Spirit, which is simply Hegel’s
immanent God. That Spirit must not be thought of as some thing (some being)
which stands apart from the object which it thinks.
In my view – a view which the
developed exposition of the system itself can alone justify –
everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as
Substance but as Subject as well. At the same time we must note that concrete
substantiality implicates and involves the universal or the immediacy of
knowledge itself, as well as that immediacy which is being, or immediacy qua
object for knowledge. If the generation which heard God spoken of as the One
Substance was shocked and revolted by such a characterization of his nature,
the reason lay partly in the instinctive feeling that in such a conception
self-consciousness was simply submerged, and not preserved. But partly, again,
the opposite position, which maintains thinking to be merely subjective
thinking, abstract universality as such, is exactly the same bare uniformity,
is undifferentiated, unmoved substantiality. And even if, in the third place,
thought combines with itself the being of substance, and conceives immediacy or
intuition as thinking, it is still a question whether this intellectual
intuition does not fall back into that inert, abstract simplicity, and exhibit
and expound reality itself in an unreal manner.
The
preceding passage is rich in fundamental Hegelian ideas. Ultimate truth must be
expressed as both subject and substance (or object). Spinoza , the 17th
century rationalist, seemed to submerge the subject as consciousness or
thinking in abstract being. The idea of substance in Spinoza is impersonal,
lacking any subjectivity or “personality.” God is simply the one being of which
all things are aspects. The idea was shocking because people like to believe in
a personal God. The other pole consists in construing thinking as merely
subjective thinking, i.e. my thought conceived as simply or merely mine,
without attention to the way in which my capacity for thought is function of a
larger whole.
(12) What larger whole might be necessary in order for me, as an individual, to be able to think and reason?
The living substance, further, is
that being which is truly subject, or, what is the same thing, is truly
realized and actual solely in the process of positing itself, or in mediating
with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite.
As subject it is pure and simple negativity, and just on that account a process
of splitting up what is simple and undifferentiated, a process of duplicating
and setting factors in opposition, which [process] in turn is the negation of
this indifferent diversity and of the opposition of factors it entails. True
reality is merely this process of reinstating self-identity, of reflecting into
its own self in and from its other, and is not an original and primal unity as
such, not an immediate unity as such. It is the process of its own becoming,
the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its
beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only by being carried out, and by the
end it involves.
The life of God and divine
intelligence, then, can, if we like, be spoken of as love disporting with
itself; but this idea falls into edification, and even sinks into insipidity,
if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the
negative. Per se the divine life is
no doubt undisturbed identity and oneness with itself, which finds not serious
obstacle in otherness and estrangement, and none in the surmounting of this
estrangement. But the “per se” is abstract generality, where we abstract from
its real nature, which consists in its being objective, to itself, conscious of
itself on its own account; and where consequently we neglect altogether the self
movement which is the formal character of its activity. If the form is declared
to correspond to the essence, it is just for that reason a misunderstanding to
suppose that knowledge can be content with the “per se”, the essence, but can
do without the form, that the absolute principle, or absolute intuition, makes
the carrying out of the former, or the development of the latter, needless.
Precisely because the form is as necessary to the essence as the essence to
itself, absolute reality must not be conceived of and expressed as essence
alone, i.e. as immediate substance, or as pure self intuition of the Divine,
but as form also, and with the entire wealth of the developed form. Only then
is it grasped and expressed as really actual.
The truth is the whole. The whole,
however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the
process of its own development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is
essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth; and
just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, or
self-becoming, self-development.
Think
again of the bud – flower – fruit analogy. In a sense we only understand the
whole at the end, when we see what it was all headed for. In that sense “only at
the end is it what it is in very truth.” “The truth is the whole.” This is a
classic axiom of a certain kind of idealism. Tennyson, for example, writes,
Flower in the crannied wall
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in
my hand,
Little flower – but if I could
understand
What you are, root and all, and
all in all,
I should know what God and man
is.
Should
it appear contradictory to say that the Absolute has to be conceived
essentially as a result, a little consideration will set this appearance of
contradiction in its true light. The beginning, the principle, or the Absolute,
as at first or immediately expressed, is merely the universal. If we say “all
animals”, that does not pass for zoology; for the same reason we see at once
that the words absolute, divine, eternal, and so on do not express what is
implied in them; and only mere words like these, in point of fact, express
intuition as the immediate. Whatever is more than a word like that, even the
mere transition to a proposition, is a form of mediation, contains a process
towards another state from which we must return once more. It is this process
of mediation, however, that is rejected with horror, as if absolute knowledge
were being surrendered when more is made of mediation than merely the assertion
that it is nothing absolute, and does not exist in the Absolute.
This horrified rejection of
mediation, however, arises as a fact from want of acquaintance with its nature,
and with the nature of absolute knowledge itself. For mediating is nothing but
self-identity working itself out through an active self-directed process; or,
in other words, it is reflection into self, the aspect in which the ego is for
itself, objective to itself. It is pure negativity, or, reduced to its utmost
abstraction, the process of bare and simple becoming. The ego, or becoming in
general, this process of mediating, is, because of its being simple, just
immediacy coming to be, and is immediacy itself. We misconceive therefore the
nature of reason if we exclude reflection or mediation from ultimate truth, and
do not take it to be a positive moment of the Absolute. It is reflection which
constitutes truth the final result, and yet at the same time does away with the
contrast between result and the process of arriving at it. For this process is
likewise simple, and therefore not distinct from the form of truth, which
consists in appearing as simple in the result; it is indeed just this
restoration and return to simplicity. While the embryo is certainly, in itself,
implicitly a human being, it is not so explicitly, it is not by itself a human
being; man is explicitly man only in
the form of developed and cultivated reason, which has made itself to be what
it is implicitly. Its actual reality is first found here. But this result
arrived at is itself simple immediacy; for it is self conscious freedom, which
is at one with itself, and has not set aside the opposition it involves and
left it there, but has made its account with it and become reconciled to it.
What has been said may also be
expressed by saying that reason is purposive activity. The exaltation of
so-called nature at the expense of thought misconceived, and more especially
the rejection of external purposiveness, have brought the idea of purpose in general
into disrepute. All the same, in the sense in which Aristotle, too,
characterizes nature as purposive activity, purpose is the immediate, the
undisturbed, the unmoved which is self-moving; as such it is subject. Its power
of moving, taken abstractly, is its existence for itself, or pure negativity.
The result is the same as the beginning solely because the beginning is
purpose. Stated otherwise, what is actual and concrete is the same as its inner
principle or notion simply because the immediate qua purpose contains within it
the self or pure actuality. The realized purpose, or concrete actuality, is
movement and development unfolded. But this very unrest is the self; and it is
one and the same with that immediacy and simplicity characteristic of the
beginning just for the reason that it is the result, and has returned upon
itself-while this latter again is just the self, and the self is self-referring
and self-relating identity and simplicity.
The
jargon is starting to get thick! The crucial concepts operative in the
preceding paragraphs are ‘immediacy’, ‘mediation’ ‘negativity’ ‘purposive
activity.’ The first two are obviously related. We can think of mediation as
essentially a kind of articulation, a spelling out. Thus if I simply open my
eyes and let the world flood in, the result might be called “immediate”
experience, but when I begin to articulate that experience, to say something
about it or think about it, I find that I am dividing one thing from another,
and that is one way to describe what “ mediating” is. Thus if in my visual
field there is a tree and a house, to the extent I distinguish them from each
other, to that extent I am mediating. In effect I see the tree as a tree, and
thus as distinct from, as not, a house. ‘Not’ is of course a ‘negative’
so you can see from this example that mediation essentially involves negating
activity, or “negativity.’ To think, in the sense of articulating or
distinguishing anything from anything, always involves saying or thinking
something as being itself and thus not
something else.
It
is interesting in this connection to recall the Eleatic contention that it is
not possible to say or think what is not. From this fundamental premise the
Eleatics concluded that being is one, eternal and unchanging. One way to put
this would be to say that they conceived (or tried to conceive) being or the
real as totally devoid of articulation. Perhaps that explains why the views of
Parmenides seem to be unexpressible. One cannot say or think “the one” at all.
One must remain mute, with all thought set aside.
Now
thought conceived in this way seems to break everything apart, and thus
contribute to unintelligibility but at the same time how could anything be
intelligible if not thought about? So thought seems to be at war with itself.
For in thinking I seek unity, the “universal” as a condition of
intelligibility. I bring a variety under unifying concepts, I try to have
oneness (immediate unity) together with manyness (articulation). This is the
dialectic (back and forth argument) that so preoccupied the ancients, from the
Presocratics through Aristotle and beyond to their philosophical offspring
right up to the present.
Aristotle’s
solution to this problem consisted in attempting to show how everything is
purposively structured, so that change (which is simply articulation in the
most general sense, the disintegrating of what is one in space or time)
acquires unity and thus intelligibility by virtue of the direction or
goal of the change. Each stage in the
career of a changing thing is achieved by negating, shedding or shuffling off
(the way the flower shuffles off the constricting surface of the bud) something
of the previous stage. But the whole process is intelligible by virtue of its
direction.
Activity,
whether it is the activity of something in nature or the activity of an
individual mind thinking about something or the activity of a culture as it
develops thus requires mediation and negation, and the intelligibility of the
entire process derives from the goal, the “result” at which the process aims.
Hegel takes this Aristotelian solution and gives it a remarkable application,
in which everything that is, the entire history of the universe, is simply a
goal oriented articulation of mind, or spirit, or God conceived as entirely immanent.
(13) Try to give a preliminary definition of
the following: mediation; immediacy; negation; purposive activity.
.
. . Among the many consequences that follow from what has been said, it is of
importance to emphasize this, that knowledge is only real and can only be set
forth fully in the form of science, in the form of system; and further, that a
so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, even if it
is true, is yet none the less false just because and in so far as it is merely
a fundamental proposition, merely a first principle. It is for that reason
easily refuted. The refutation consists in bringing out its defective
character; and it is defective because it is merely the universal, merely a
principle, the beginning. If the refutation is complete and thorough, it is
derived and developed from the nature of the principle itself, and not
accomplished by bringing in from elsewhere other counter assurances and chance
fancies.
An
example of a fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy might be
Descartes’ ‘I think’ or the empiricist claim that all knowledge arises from
experience. Hegel thinks that such principles are always defective and can be
“internally” refuted. Thus these principles are seen to founder when we
consider just what the ‘I’ must be, or just what ‘experience’ may be. Yet the
process by which these principles are refuted is itself the unfolding of
genuine knowledge, unconditioned knowledge which is real science. So these
principles are not strictly false; they are a “moment” in the unfolding of the
absolute. Thus one should not take account “solely of the negative” aspect,
i.e. the refutation. The flower “refutes” the bud, but the bud is nonetheless
essential to the reality of the flower.
(14) What might lead a person to give up the claim that all knowledge arises from experience? Does it follow that experience is irrelevant to knowledge? Explain.
The
Absolute Truth as “Spirit”. Hegel is arguing that the truth of real
science is nothing less than the truth of “Spirit” developing, flowering into a
final form in which subject and object are one. The struggle of the human race
to know and understand the world IS a process, which includes all of culture,
in which all the variety and conflict in history is brought together into a
“system,” a unity which is identical with Spirit or an immanent God. This
history of the universe is the unfolding, the blossoming so to speak, of God!
That the truth is only realized in
the form of a system, that substance is essentially subject, is expressed in
the idea which represents the Absolute as Spirit (Geist) – the grandest
conception of all, and one which is due to modern times and its religion.
Spirit is alone Reality. It is the inner being of the world, that which
essentially is, and is per se; it
assumes objective, determinate form, and enters into relations with itself-it
is externality (otherness), and exists for self; yet, in this determination,
and in its otherness, it is still one with itself-it is self-contained and
self-complete, in itself and for itself at once. This self-containedness,
however, if; first something known by us, it is implicit in its nature; it is Substance spiritual. It has to
become self-contained for itself, on
its own account.; it must be knowledge of spirit, and must be consciousness of
itself as spirit. This means, it must be presented to itself as an object, but
at the same time straightway annul and transcend this objective form; it must
be its own object in which it finds itself reflected. So far as its spiritual
content is produced by its own activity, it is only we [the thinkers] who know
spirit to be for itself, to be objective to itself; but in so far as spirit
knows itself to be for itself, then this self-production, the pure notion, is
the sphere and element in which its objectification takes effect, and where it
gets its existential form. In this way it is in its existence aware of itself
as an object in which its own self is reflected. Mind, which, when thus
developed, knows itself to be mind, is science. Science is its realization, and
the kingdom it sets up for itself in its own native element.
(15)
What is “Spirit” or God for Hegel?
Kant tried to show that in so called empirical
knowledge one becomes aware of an object in which one’s own self is reflected.
The “object” is constituted, and is what it is, by virtue of the minds own
activity. Hegel is generalizing this idea to all knowledge whatsoever, and
claiming that ultimately the object encountered in “science” is entirely
constituted by the subject. Science just is this unity of subject and object.
HISTORY
AS RATIONAL
It is natural to think of
historical events as contingent, that is, such that they might not have happened. If, for example, Hitler had not held back but
had decided to invade
What happens cannot just “happen to happen” on
Hegel’s view. Since history is the unfolding of the divine mind, the perfectly
rational mind, it must have a perfect “logic” to it.
The
Necessity of Spirits Development The unfolding or “budding” of
Spirit which constitutes world history is unlike the budding of a flower in
this sense: everything that takes place in history takes place necessarily, in
a sense close to “logical” necessity. (If it is true that either Gore or Bush
wins, and if it is true that Gore does not win, then it follows with “logical
necessity” that Bush wins. Either A or B. Not A. Therefore, B. )
. . .This movement of the spiritual
entities constitutes the nature of scientific procedure in general. Looked at
as the concatenation [joining together] of their content, this movement is the
necessitated development and expansion of that content into an organic
systematic whole. By this movement, too, the road, which leads to the notion of
knowledge, becomes itself likewise a necessary and complete evolving process.
This preparatory stage thus ceases to consist of casual philosophical
reflections, referring to objects here and there, to processes and thoughts of
the undeveloped mind as chance may direct; and it does not try to establish the
truth by miscellaneous ratiocinations, inferences, and consequences drawn from
circumscribed thoughts. The road to science, by the very movement of the notion
itself, will compass the entire objective world of conscious life in its
rational necessity.
The
notion of “necessitated development” or of the “rational necessity” of
conscious life is of course essential to Hegel’s thought. The development of
absolute mind or spirit, its unfolding, is not a merely natural process (thus
unlike the bud turning to a flower in that respect) but is driven by rational
necessity. So Hegel thinks there is necessity in things, and in history. He
thus contravenes a principle which has been influential in 20th
century philosophy, to the effect that necessity is a function of meaning
(perhaps, of the meaning of logical constants, as given in a truth table). It
is as though, for Hegel, each moment in history “follows from” previous moments
in somewhat the way that a conclusion “follows from” premises in a deductive
argument, as in the Gore/Bush example.
. . .What seems to take place
outside it (i.e., mind), to be an activity directed against it, is its own
doing, its own activity; and substance shows that it is in reality subject.
When it has brought out this completely, mind has made its existence adequate
to and one with its essential nature. Mind is object to itself just as it is,
and the abstract element of immediacy, of the separation between knowing and
the truth, is overcome. Being is entirely mediated; it is a substantial
content, that is likewise directly in the possession of the ego, has the
character of self, is notion. With the attainment of this the Phenomenology of
Mind concludes. What mind prepares for itself in the course of its
phenomenology is the element of true knowledge. In this element the moments of
mind are now set out in the form of thought pure and simple, which knows its
object to be itself. They no longer involve the opposition between being and
knowing; they remain within the undivided simplicity of the knowing function;
they are the truth in the form of truth, and their diversity is merely
diversity of the content of truth. The process by which they are developed into
an organically connected whole is Logic or Speculative Philosophy.
There
is an obvious sense in which logic, unlike empirical disciplines, is self
contained. You might say that its object is itself. Logic is simply thinking
about thinking. In a logic course we discuss the standards for correct
thinking. Thus in the Gore/Bush example, it is not the particular subject
matter (politicians, elections) that matters, but the abstract form, ‘A or B’,
‘not A’, therefore B. Logic has no other “subject” matter than “thought” in
this very abstract sense. You might even describe it as mind thinking on
itself, so that the thinking and the object of the thinking are the same. Hegel
is taking this intuitively plausible notion of logic on a very wild ride.
(16)
Make this a logical argument by filling in the blank:
1.
If Mary is here, Bill will be glad.
2.
Mary is here.
3.
So, _______.
Can you see that 3 follows necessarily from 1
and 2? But, you might say, “life isn’t like that, it isn’t perfectly
‘logical.’” Well, Hegel thinks that if you understand fully enough, you will
see that life is like that in a very fundamental sense.
Hegel’s envisions a world which is dynamic and evolving, according to a perfectly rational plan. Everything that happens makes sense within that plan or system. What appear to be conflicts or “contradictions”, say between democracy and monarchy, or empiricism and rationalism, or for that matter between marrying Jane rather than Joan, are really illusory, for when fully understood or “mediated” they all fall into place in the system. Thus, in some peculiar sense there is no room for “choice,” since there are no real alternatives to choose between. It only looks as though there are.
Hegel quotes:
mediating is nothing but self-identity working
itself out through an active self-directed process
But this very unrest is the self; and it is one
and the same with that immediacy and simplicity characteristic of the beginning
just for the reason that it is the result, and has returned upon itself-while
this latter again is just the self, and the self is self-referring and
self-relating identity and simplicity.
Week I
Hegel questions. I will collect 8 and 13 and one other.
Week II
Study Early Journal Entries, answer the following:
1. Provide textual support
for the claim that each of the following is already central to SK’s thinking:
freedom, individuality vs conformism, subjectivity (ethical passion), the
sidelining of “objective” truth,
anti-“rationalism”, anti-Hegelianism, the temporal character of human
existence.
Study the Concept of Irony selection, starting on
p. 27., and Either/Or I and answer the following:
2. What is the
relation between Subjectivity and irony?
3. Distinguish
objective and subjective irony, and explain the Hegelian feature of the former.
Cite relevant text.
4. Explain this (cf.
p. 34). Socrates’ knowledge of his own
ignorance was not knowledge of something.
5. Cite textual
evidence that ‘A’ is not a follower of ‘young
6. Cite some
expressions of “anti bourgeoise” sentiments in ‘A’
7. Describe the
“immediacy” of Don Juan, and contrast with the ironic search for pleasure in
Johannes the seducer.
8. What is the
positive value of possibility and recollection for A? What bearing does this
have on the temporal character of human life?
Study Either/Or II and
answer the following:
9. Judge William says
“inner history is the only true history (p. 67).” What “existential theme” is stated here, and
how does it conflict with history as experienced by A? (consider what “outer
history” would be).
10. A mocks
“either/or” (that is, he mocks the importance of decision). Why? Why is
decision so important to William?
11. An aesthetic
choice is no choice . . .to choose is a stringent term for the ethical. p. 73
Give an example of an aesthetic “choice” and of an ethical choice and explain
the difference between them.
12. Know the
definition of the aesthetic and the ethical given on p. 77 (top) and be able to
explicate it.
13. The person who
(authentically) despairs chooses himself in his absolute or eternal
validity. Explain ‘despair’, ‘eternal
(absolute) validity’ and cite text.
*14. William sounds
Aristotelian on p. 82. Is he? Remember this from EN book III; “character is
revealed more fully in choice (prohairesis).”
Is he then anti-Kantian?
15. Describe a case of
aesthetic repetition. Ethical rep. Religious rep.
Study CUP and answer
these.
16. Contrast Climacus’
vocation (to make things more difficult) with the spirit of his age. Cite text.
Bring in Hegel.
17. The subjective
thinker exists in his thinking, and that rules out direct communication.
Why? Use the lover analogy, and cite
text, in answering this. Contrast the subjective thinker with the objective
thinker who has “inhumanly become speculative thought”( 191)
18. A logical system
is possible, a system of existence is not.
Why?
19. One can only get
from a historical (i.e. contingent) truth (e.g. Jesus lived in 30 CE) to an
eternal, non-contingent (and paradoxical) truth (e.g. Jesus is God who saves)
by a “leap.” Discuss what the leap is and whether it could be rational in any
sense. v. 194-95
20. What is affirmed,
and what denied, in the claim that existence can be a system only for God?
22. Give Kierkegaard’s
(Climacus’) definition of truth p.207. Ditto what faith is NOT p.. 219
23. Compare the
Socratic relation to the paradox (eternity, or eternal truth, in time) to the
xtian relation to the paradox (the God in time) cf. p.208-18
24.What then IS the
role of thinking in existing? 226
25 Religiousness A and
B. What is the difference?
SUD
26. What is despair,
and what resolves it? Use SK’s language.
27. Try to describe an
example of the despair of weakness.
28. Explain: the self
is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite.
28. Explain: the self
is a relation which relates itself to itself.
29. Use the following
to illustrate the distinction between negative unity and positive unity.
General Sash. Madame Bovary. Ivan Illich.
30. What does #29 have to do with being a self?
31.Contrast the
Socratic understanding of sin (vice) with the Christian.
How is the latter
“offensive?”
Nietzche
32. On FN’s view, what
must a “genealogy” of morals do?
33. Outline, and give some of the details of, FN’s
view on the historically accurate account of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Contrast with
utilitarianism.
35. Discuss at length
the contrast between aristocratic (master) morality and slave morality. Be sure
to discuss “ressentiment.”
36. How does the
aristocrat understand ‘enemy’? The slavish man?
37. What, according to
FN, is the origin of bad conscience. Discuss the “right to make a promise, the
place of cruelty, the relation of bad conscience to debt.
38. How is the realm
of justice NOT reactive?
39. How does hatred of
the “animal self” and the idea of a debt so great as to be unpayable play a
role in xtian thinking, as opposed to pagan (e.g. Greek polytheist) conceptions
of God?
Doestoevsky.
40. How is the
underground man’s rejection of a kind of rationality linked to his perverse
infliction of suffering upon himself?
41. What is “the whole
meaning of life” according to the Underground man?
42. Draw out the parallels between SK and FD in
the latter’s grand inquisitor legend. Discuss all three temptations.
43. How does FD’s
opposition to socialism etc. surface in the legend?
44. Discuss the view
of the “herd” in both selections from FD.
45. Discuss the
relations between Jesus’ view on power and freedom to the inquisitor’s view.
Heidegger.
Explain each of the
following passages. Attend to the particular terminology, and try to illustrate
what it means.
That in the face of which one has anxiety is
Being-in-the-world as such. What is the
difference phenomenally between that in the face of which anxiety is anxious
and that in the face of which fear is afraid? That in the face of which one has
anxiety is not an entity within-the-world. Thus it is essentially incapable of
having an involvement. . . .That in the face of which one is anxious is completely
indefinite. Not only does this indefiniteness leave tactically undecided which
entity within-the-world is threatening us, but it also tells us that entities
within the-world are not ‘relevant’ at all. Nothing which is ready-to-hand or
present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety
is anxious...
. That which
anxiety is anxious about is Being-in-the world itself.
Death is Dasein’s ownmost possibility. Being towards this
possibility discloses to Dasein its ownmost
potentiality-for-Being, in which its very Being is the issue. Here it can
become manifest to Dasein that in this distinctive possibility [the possibility
of death] of its own self, it has been wrenched away from the ‘they’...
We may now
summarize our characterization of authentic Being-towards-death as we have
projected it existentially: anticipation
reveals to Dasein its lostness in the
they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself,
primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather in
an impassioned freedom towards death
- a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the ‘they, and which
is factical, certain of itself, and anxious... [Heidegger’s emphasis] cf.
p. 335
“Resoluteness”
signifies letting oneself be summoned out of one’s lostness in the “they.”
Heideggerian musings:
How are things with me
today? In my world? In fact I am in more than one world, the world of teacher,
parent, colleague, friend, enemy, etc. The world at home. There is no such
thing as just plain “the world.” Unless that is shorthand for all the worlds
possible.
That it . . .being in
the world is the kind of being people have, the only kind.
Always stuff to do, to
think about. Get this paper done. Finish that prep. Mow the grass and try to
plant a few things before it is too late, too hot. Anyway, I am always in “the
world,” surrounded by what is relevant to my projects, worries, etc. by what is
‘ready to hand.’ People, tools, equipment, for getting on with this and that.
Mow the grass. Need to change the mower
oil. Mower stands out as a thing needing something else (with a use) for its use. Hermeneutics of the
mower. To be in the world
understandingly (unlike a child?) is to see things as means to other things, to
experience everything, everything, in terms of purposes, goal, anxieties, what
is not yet done, what needs to be made up, what is coming or maybe coming. That’s me. Hmm, that is everybody. Lost in everydayness. From moment to moment.
Nothing gets nailed
down until I actually do it, and then something else steps in immediately. Got
the mower done. Now, need to mow. Etc. etc. that is the way with us. Always
ahead of ourselves. Nothing is holding down the fort, even though I would like
to think I could, or someone else could, someone powerful, smart etc. who could
plan my life. Maybe I should turn life over to a smart planner who can “take
care of” life. What am I saying? THOSE people? Really , what garbage. Who would
they be?
This is life. Everyday
life. I chat with others. About everday life. The weather. The price of gas.
The war. My grouchy grandmother who died 25 years ago after living too long. My
daughter who thinks life is supposed to be fun. Students who think life is
supposed to be fun. The troubles of life. We all hope nothing too bad will
happen. But if it does, well, we can talk, chat about it, try to not get upset.
We do not wish anything to happen
Seven years we have lived quietly,
Living and partly living
There have been oppression and
luxury,
There have been poverty and licence,
There has been minor injustice
…..
We have brewed beer and cider,
Gathered wood against the winter,
Talked at the corner of the fire,
Talked at the corner of the streets,
Talked not always in whispers,
Living and partly living.
We have seen births, deaths, and
marriages
We have had various scandals,
We have been afflicted with taxes
…
Several girls have disappeared
Unaccountably, and some not able to.
We have all had our private terrors.
(T.S.Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral)
Life goes on, “they”
say. But of course, you have to either keep busy or turn into some sort of
zombie. Have to engage with “the world”
and we have what we need to do it.
I use tools, I use
equipment, I chatter, I fill the air with clichés, and get clichés in response.
I realize life is pretty loose. Nothing sticks.
The floating character of everyday life does explain the undertone of
anxiety, which however shows up only now and then. For the most part I try to
conceal it, in fact, all this talk and busyness does conceal it usually. It is
essential to being human that I be engaged, dealing with what is ready to
hand. I hardly ever just stand back and
look at something (the mower say). It is there for use, it is “in order to.” I
am always already engaged with just about everything even when I’m not doing
much. Because I’m thinking about what to do (worrying about it etc). That
involves taking everything one way or other, or other or other or other. Lots
of ways to engage, and nothing mandates which.
I can go in a thousand different directions and nothing holds me down,
or my worlds down. Well, but I don’t think about that. Mowing holds you down.
Yeah, but even then I’m thinking about what I’m going to do. And nothing is
certain, cause I can go so many ways. I feel like I’ve been thrown into the
world without instructions on how to make something definite out of myself.
There are some things
that are certain of course. Death and taxes.
Everyone dies. No avoiding that. But what does death have to do with
everyday life? Wait a minute. Everday life in the world is just this always
being ahead of oneself. That is what it,
my life, any human life, most
essentially is. Being ahead of oneself. So, isn’t death relevant to life since
it too is almost by definition ahead of me?
In fact, it is even more possible for me, than that I will mow the
grass. It is as possible as anything can get before being actual. Yuk. I would
rather not think about it. Hard not to though since a friend died
recently. Well, I can live with that. I
mean, his death was an event in the world. It did not have to happen, but it
did. The ol grim reaper catches us all sooner or later (chatter chatter). So they say.
Hmm. There was
something dishonest, concealed, in that. Something about
Me. Something not a topic of conversation, not
what they talk about when death is
the topic. Namely, MY death. Of course, it will happen, another event in the
world. But, it will not be that for me. For
me it will be the end of . . .of what? Of everyday being ahead of oneself. Which is just about all I have ever been. In that sense of me it will be the end of me.
ME, baby, and there is nothing else, no after life (what would that be,
being ahead of oneself in eternity?)Not just the stopping of my ticker etc. It
will be the end of all possibilities. Death is itself pretty special as a
possible (i.e. not yet actual) future when you consider that. In fact, thinking
about it (which I would rather not do) makes it perfectly clear what sort of
thing I am, as nothing else does. So, why do I, and everyone else, conceal it, lie about it, dissimulate,
joke, watch horror films? Maybe that finiteness of myself just doesn’t sit well
with me. So I will join (or rather, I will just fall into ) the everydayness (which is inevitable anyway) in which
my “ownmost” possibility is concealed.
What is so bad about that? Concealment is bad (truth=un concealment,
Greek aletheia). It is to live a lie,
not just to tell one. It is what being inauthentic is. i.e. phoney, or fundamentally dishonest.
To be resolute is to
be called out of that falleness in the they.
Of course there is no such thing as being permanently called out of it.
That would be to cease being (human). But it is possible to not be entirely
defined by the they. It is possible to be an individual in that sense.
Course Outline;
Existence ism. A reaction against various forms
of “rationalism” in the 19th and 20th centuries, that downplay
or ignore or misunderstand the ways in which human existence cannot be
programmed, grasped, assimilated to a system.
Consequently
an emphasis upon ?
Kierkegaard