"If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company."

How I’ve adored the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. It was difficult for me to sit through this lecture without making stupid comments, for I love the man and wished I had the option to present on him. Sartre is a genius and his discussions of free will excite me. With god dead (as is of no contest to Sartre) there is no one to be responsible for your actions but yourself. You choose the actions for there is no higher power to choose them for you. 

His writing gives me such inspiration when he elaborates on his belief that “existence precedes essence.” Certainly I believe that a man makes of himself what he chooses to be. Sartre declares that morality is subjective, and with the lack of god there is no objective good and evil. What is good or evil for sartre is simply what a man thinks is good and evil. Personally I have done a lot of things that people may consider to be evil or wrong, yet with his philosophy in mind it has allowed me to reach the understanding that perhaps my way is the good way, at least to myself. 

Let me partake in Dionysian delights if I find it enjoyable and good. Perhaps that is what the ideal man should be, but there is no way to know for sure. For your ideal man may be different than mine. My favorite line from Sartre’s lecture on Existentialism is “If I hear voices, who can prove that they proceed from heaven and not from hell, or from my own subconsciousness or some pathological condition?” (Sartre, 209). What I believe Sartre is saying is that this inability to know for sure an objective morality and the abandonment into this world where we are left responsible for all of our choices gives us anxiety. So really, the atheist existentialist wants there to be a god, it would take away this burden. 

Doesn’t this echo “The Grand Inquisitor” by Feodor Dostoevsky and how the inquisitor wanted to relieve the burden of choice from the populace by placing it on his own shoulders? Sartre says that that the struggle for atheistic existentialists is to come up with moral values which everyone agrees upon with the absence of a god. Hopefully I can assume that most people don’t believe that murder and genocide cannot be considered good. There is difficulty in making this assumption when morality is subjective, for a murderer or an instigator of genocide might find his actions to be “Good.”

One revelation I had when reading Sartre was his explanation that all human actions are indeed human. This includes genocide, torture, imprisonment, and war. I came to the conclusion that I will never again use the word “inhumane” when describing social injustices. These atrocities are committed by humans, therefore they are all too human. It all demonstrates the power of humanity’s free will.

Lastly there was Sartre’s phenomenological explanation of emotions. Sartre strongly opposed the belief that emotions are largely instinctual. He instead favored a view that we are in control of our emotions. He says emotional responses are truly attempts to change the world when there is a difficult situation. Emotions are a way of denying or fleeing from this difficulty. Does this mean that we are able to choose our emotions? I think Sartre would say yes. This is the first time i’ve found myself disagreeing with Sartre. I would like to believe that some emotions are instinctual such as fear or anxiety. I was once told by my stepfather who was a psychoanalyst that fear and anxiety are necessary instincts from our evolution which allowed us to survive when there were threats. Maybe someone can help me to better understand his sketch of emotions, for I am obviously having trouble with it. I would like to believe that I have control over my emotions, but it seems to be the other way around.  

Anyhow, Sartre is a bold man. I love the fact that he refused the nobel peace prize. I watched a video where he said that the west wanted him to apologize for his marxist views and that was partly his reason for refusing the award. How can you not love the tenacity of this man?

When He Died I Was Hoping That It Wasn't Contagious

Death is an interesting subject to me, and I found it to be one of the best parts of Heidegger’s reading. Hopefully that does not sound morbid but I do believe it is an important subject that we seem to neglect in the west (and perhaps other parts of the world). Heidegger writes of “Being-toward-death” or in other words the human that is on his way to his inevitable death. Death is the only end and it is a very profound thing to think about. One day this thing that “I” am, this “Me” will one day cease to exist. Now many of my peers find this thought scary but it has a powerful effect on me, and somehow makes life seem a bit more significant. That is my understanding of what Heidegger might be trying to say, though i’m no expert. He speaks of the “they” or the other beings who are not “you” and he explains that the they tranquilize the Da-sein (the individual being) by saying death is nothing to worry about. They tempt the being-toward-death with illusions that death might not happen, and that you can continue to live your everyday life. The “they” make it a social faux pas for the Da-sein to even think about death. 

Another thing Heidegger mentions, is that death is something only experienced by the Da-Sein, and the they never truly experience it. He says that people are always just “there.” As someone in class brought up, you can never really experience death until you die, until then it is just a phenomenon. Everything we know about death is from what we’ve seen, read, or heard. Another interesting point brought up by the lecturers in class is that once the Da-sein dies, it’s death becomes a part of the “they.” I can understand this by the knowledge that when people die, they no longer exist yet we have funerals and grieve for them. The irony is that these events are for ourselves or the “they” who have lost someone. We are the ones who are sad and require funeral services to help us in the grieving process. The Da-sein no longer exists to need such trivialities.

I find this all very relatable to American culture and perhaps i’m not the only one. Death is a very taboo subject here (other places too I suppose), and we never properly discuss it. Instead we worry about finances, or trivial drama about being called nasty things. We are sedated by material possessions and lousy entertainment. But when death comes around we are devastated. It should really be something we acknowledge in our day to day life and realize as an ultimate end to our time here on earth. Perhaps this understanding of death allows us to be “authentic” as Heidegger calls it. 

Now authenticity is a difficult thing to talk about, but Heidegger claims that the being-toward-death must acknowledge and understand his death in order to be authentic. Does this mean he has to experience it? No matter how hard I try to prepare for death, I know that I will never be prepared. On the other hand, I do understand that death is the end of the road so does this make me authentic? Perhaps it makes me authentic in one respect, however authenticity is such a broad topic. I have difficulty believing i’m ever authentic. Or maybe it’s more true to say that i’m always authentic, because everything I do is my own doing (or choice), even if the things I do are not how I would act ordinarily. This might be a more semantical approach to authenticity because I don’t believe Heidegger is specifically talking about this kind of authentic existence, but a more primitive or stripped down authentic existence which is merely concerned with “being” and “death.”

I am what I Is

For last monday’s class we read some writers who were unknown to men prior to the readings. These men were Karl Jaspers and Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno seemed to favor a more subjective stance to truth very similar to Kierkegaard. He favored passion of rationality which is something I have a hard time understanding. To me, when one rejects god it is a rational rejection, but Unamuno insists that the rejection of god is a passionate rejection. While Unamuno’s writing is intriguing it did not leave me with the feeling that perhaps subjective truth is superior to objective truth in the way that Kierkegaard did.

The following reading’s were mainly focused on being. Jaspers for instance, attempts to systematically understand Existenz while Heidegger attempts to explain the Da-sein. Da-sein is the being who understands being. This has led me to believe that the Da-sein is the understanding of the being of a human being, for humans understand that they are “being.” Isn’t this one of the main themes of existentialism; The human analyzing his very existence, his essence, or his being? The Da-sein seems to me to describe the individual self who just “is.” Both of these works seemed to parallel each other as often is seen with these existentialist writers. Heidegger’s explanation of Da-Sein and his conception of the “they” seemed to describe Nietzsche’s herd mentality. As well as his conception of the falling pray being present in Camus’ The Fall. “It has not fallen prey to some being which it first runs into in the course of its being, or perhaps does not but it has fallen prey to the world which itself belongs to its being” (Heidegger, 128). Call me crazy, but I believe this is strikingly similar to Jean’s struggle in The Fall. Apparantly Camus was inspired by Heidegger, as well as Sartre being Heidegger’s pupil which i’m sure we will discuss later on in the semester.

Our class spent a large amount of time trying to understand what Heidegger meant by Da-sein and I’m still left with a feeling of uncertainty. The way in which he describes it is frustrating because he uses the same words to mean different things, but this may be unavoidable with such a complex concept as “being.” I fell in to the same trap earlier in this post trying to explain it. 

We were asked in class if we believe that we are our authentic selves to which I answered “No.” As I understand Heidegger’s claim of authenticity, a Da-sein would fully understand it’s own being, and I cannot confidently say that I fully understand “being.” Sure there are times when I have a heightened sense of being, where perhaps I transcend “averageness” as he calls it, but generally I slip back into the average. I am average no matter how much I would like to think otherwise. The “they” is too enticing for me, because it disburdens me of this struggle to understand myself. I try to be normal and average, because that is what is most comfortable. It’s easy to say I am different than the average or mundane “being” for taking an existentialist class, but there are at least 20 students in that class who share similar thoughts (not to mention in the entire world), so doesn’t that make us beings-among-one-another? “The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in the being-among-one-another”  (126). It is just far too easy to give up the burden of this existential question of “Who am I?” although I must admit that this question will follow me to my grave, and I know I will ever come up with an answer. Therefore, I must deny that I will ever have an authentic existence and find it highly improbable that anyone could.