I've just finished reading William Barrett's most excellent Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. And it has totally changed my understanding of what Existentialism is.
I had basically thought that it was a complete turn away from everything, absolutely everything, that came before and that it was essentially Sartre, Camus and De Beauvoir with Merleau-Ponty as the less familiar but marginally more interesting (in my view) fourth proponent. What Barrett does is to give a context rooted in, astonishingly Hebraism and Hellenism, Christianity and Swift's Laputa section of Gulliver's Travels. He then focused on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre, with the whole work book-ended by the vision of 1990s America.
The book is immensely readable and creates a coherent and powerful narrative that suggests that Existentialism has long and far-reaching roots, resonances in other traditions (notably Buddhism and Taoism), contradictions between the thinkers and immense relevance in the modern age.
What interested me, rather than the connections between the four key figures, was the differences between them, and how that maps onto concepts of morality, authenticity and, most crucially, what being a human is.
Barrett offers a critique of Sartre in that he sees him as the archetypal Frenchman in being a thorough-going Cartesian (which Heidegger, categorically, was not) and thus rooting existence in the rational psyche. For that reason, Sartre's only option in being 'free' was to make that rational choice in deciding something - and he, having great generosity and social conscience, chose social action, in fighting for all to be free. He couldn't sense freedom in religious commitment or in being absorbed in nature or in family or in dance, for example. His primary conception of freedom was in saying 'no' to authoritarian dictats.
Kierkegaard, as I mentioned in the previous post, has his conception of faith and the individual's attitude to faith.
Nietzsche gives us the assimilation of good and evil to be a better self (a superman?), the denial of authorities and the refusal to be bound by convention. I'm sketchy here - although Barrett was not.
Then there's Heidegger. And this is where it's incredibly complicated. So. He was eager to go back to the core of Western philosophy and address the Platonic idea of Ideals, by refuting the claim that there is something outside nature and reality which manifests perfection. He wanted to break that subject/object divide. He stated that being a human is being-in-the-world. We are thrown into this place, this nation, this time. We are historical and we are in the world, absorbed and engaged in it. Our being-ness is like a 'field of being' rather than a cognitive response to what's outside. We open our eyes and the world, this world, rushes in with its truth: it is revealed.
He was fascinated by the way in which words, Greek words, express these truths. The Greek word for truth - aletheia - is un-hidden - what is revealed. We talk of phenomena - the roots involve what is revealed, light and language. All that is there in the word - the phenomenon is revealed by the light in its truth and then related to language. This links with a point made by Alasdair MacIntyre in A Short History of Ethics - he says that one of the accepted 'rules' of human societies is to tell the truth because language, the learning and development of language, depends on being able to trust someone when they say 'that is a bear' or 'that is a river'. Truth is what we see when we open our eyes and the world rushes in and that phenomenon is encapsulated in language. But if we are restricted by a Cartesian conception, we cannot trust, see truth, in phenomena - truth lies only in a proposition. 2+2=4. There is no 'truth' in the world, only in the propositions stated about the world.
I don't think that I am explaining well. But essentially, Heidegger did not, despite his seemingly abstract and inchoate texts, feel that being was an abstract matter but a concrete, physical and grounded experience. He, like Nietzsche, felt that philosophy had got lost in the theoretical model and needed to be brought back to being.
So, Heidegger could understand freedom in being open to nature, in appreciating the truth of poetry and art, in dance and action in the world - like hammering a nail into wood. It wasn't, as for Sartre, a purely cognitive term, but an experiential one.
What Barrett claims is that we have lost freedom though the abstractions of technology and media. It's not just about a failure in rationalising, but that we see the world in statistics, mechanisation and in reflection. That last is crucial. We are open not to the being-in-the-world but to how the world is presented to us. How can we be open to truth if all we see is what is represented to us? And here comes the value of thinking for ouselves... and yet we are stuck in the place we are in, the time we are in, the books we have come across, the ideas that have been placed before us. We seek out ideas according to what we have already assimilated. What is ever truly authentic in that patchwork quilt of ideas? Who can ever be free with the unconscious drives and biases that direct our thoughts, choices and actions? With the genetic and cultural conditioning?
Heidegger tried to step out of all that - which is why he had to coin phrases and words.
It seems to me that ultimately his philosophy offers the only real freedom. The best that Sartre can offer is saying 'No' to the inquisitor and the best Camus can offer is seeing Sisyphus happy.
At least Heidegger offers us the chance of being open to the world that is revealed when we open our eyes. At least we can be free when lost in painting or walking in the fields or cutting up vegetables.
Existentialism as a whole, says Barrett, reminds us that we must come face to face with life and face to face with death, our finitude. We can't just respond with reason but with the whole of what it is to be human - the subterranean depths of body and unconscious, of evil within (as Nietzsche saw, following Goethe) and of the fear and the trembling. The view that Sartre's view or Camus's is just about taking responsibility and stopping complaining is to caricature the movement into an Instagram poster. Existentialism is about embracing the totality of being, not just its enlightenment bright side. To seek to escape from the darkness is just another modern twist on the ongoing attempt to flee the self.
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