Existentialism:
Existentialism is the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject. That the human subject is not simply characterised by thinking alone but through acting, feeling and living as a human individual.
In doing so they face a sense of confusion in a seemingly meaningless or absurd world. Consequently it is down to the individual to give their own life meaning.
To summarise; existentialism is concerned with finding the self and the meaning of life through free will, choice and personal responsibility. That is to say personal responsibility of choices made without the guidance of laws, ethics or culture.
Culturally existentialism became prominent in post World War II years as a way to express the importance of the individuality and freedom of the human individual.
Existentialism marked a rejection of teleology which was concerned with the extrinsic and intrinsic finality of actions or things, of ‘becoming’ whilst existentialism focused on ‘being.’
Existentialism consequently marked a broad literary, political and philosophical movement.
Politically it served as inspiration for the ongoing fight for feminism, gay rights and civil rights. Further to this it served to inspire the French as they resisted Nazi occupation.
Philosophically the movement would inspire many thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche whose ethic focused on self-control and self-determination.
"What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome. "
It is worth noting that Neitzsche felt Christian virtues made people weak thus a bad thing. Especially when they follow a religion whose God Nietzsche proclaimed to be dead.
Critical Thinkers:
Edmund Husserl:
Edmund Husserl looked at the notion of intentionality, the idea that what characterises mental phenomena as distinct from the physical is that the mental is directed towards objects.
A thought is made up of two things; content and a possessor.
Content is what the thought is about, specifically what it is about i.e. you are thinking about e.g. a sheep and not a table.
The possessor is the person who is thinking of the content.
Husserl states that a thought is an act with a matter. I.e. that the thought was intentional towards an object, in this example; a sheep.
Husserl is responsible for founding the school of philosophical thought known as phenomenology which is the study of the conscious experience.
The aim of phenomenology was the study of the immediate data of the conscious.
Husserl wrote in 1901 that: ‘It makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is fictitious, or is perhaps completely absurd. I think of Bismarck, of the tower of Babel as I think of Cologne Cathedral, of a regular thousand-sided polygon as of a regular thousand-faced solid.’
He is stating that the intentionality of thought does not distinguish between reality and constructs of the mind. That is to say that if one were to think about aliens and then think about a bagel, there would be no difference in the intentionality of thought. Furthermore, this means that the intentionality of thought of an object is indistinguishable from that of a hallucination of an object. Thus the experience is the same irrespective of how that experience of the subject is had whether that be in reality, hallucination or dream.
Subsequently Husserl believed that one should suspend their judgement of existence i.e. of the natural world so that a phenomenological analysis can deal with one’s subjective perception of an experience in its purest form.
Martin Heidegger:
Heidegger was a pupil of Husserl who focused on the question of being through his work in extentialism and phenomenology.
Heidegger felt that phenomenology didn’t go far enough, that before we can study experience we must study the concept of Being which precedes the link between conscious and reality.
Thus whilst Husserl based phenomenology on the study of conscious, Heidegger focused on the study of Being.
To do this, Heidegger had to invent his own terminology including the concept of ‘Dasein.’ Dasein is a being that is capable of asking philosophical questions.
It differs from Descartes’s Cartesian ego in the fact that the Cartesian ego is simply a thinking thng whilst Dasein incorporates thinking as only one of its features of being and only one way of interacting with the world.
Dasein can be defined as caring, as only through caring will a being be interested in the world enough to ask philosophical questions.
Dasein is temporal in nature, distinct from substance in the fact it represents the continuation of life. Thus in defining Being, Heidegger notes that the future has priority over past and present, that goals determine the significance of the present. Consequently the view of the past is negative in the fact it brings up guilt and anxiety. This is because one must make the distinction when examining life, between what a person is, and what they might have been.
Dasein operates within a biological, social and cultural context and according to Heidegger, Dasein has three fundamental aspects:
Attunement: Situations we are in manifest themselves at an emotional level e.g. dangerous or boring and thus we respond to them with a mood of appropriate emotional reaction.
Dasein is discursive: That Dasein operates within which discourse is conveyed through language and culture.
Understanding (in a spatial sense): That activities are directed towards goals, some of which will make sense of a life within its cultural context.
Heidegger claims there is no such thing as human nature which dictates the activities of the individual. Dasein itself is existence.
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