fuckyeahexistentialism

“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”

— Nietzsche, 1892, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”

— Soren Kierkegaard (via harkaway)

 

“Oh! I see my life clearly now […] a passionate, frantic search. […] I didn’t know that one could dream of death by metaphysical despair; sacrifice everything to the desire to know. […] I didn’t know that every system is an ardent, tormented thing, an effort of life, of being, a drama in the full sense of the word, and that it does not engage only the abstract intelligence. But I know it now, and that I can no longer do anything else.”

— Simone de Beauvoir: The Coming of Age (translated by Patrick O’Brian) (via fuckyeahphilosophy) (via fairphantom)

“I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing… When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow past; suddenly you see people pop up who speak and who go away, you plunge into stories without beginning or end: you make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or, story too tall to be believed in cafes.”

—Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

1959 edition, pp 14-5

“Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate – for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.”

— Albert Camus (via thickets) (via muteoilydiscolour)

 

“Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn’t original sin. He’s born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it’s a tragedy. A lot of people don’t have the courage to do it.”

— Helen Hayes

An Existential Term a Day

The hedgehog’s dilemma, or sometimes the porcupine dilemma, is an analogy about the challenges of human intimacy. It describes a situation in which a group of hedgehogs all seek to become close to one another in order to share their heat during cold weather. However, once accomplished, they cannot avoid hurting one another with their sharp quills. They must step away from one another. Though they all share the intention of a close reciprocal relationship, this may not occur for reasons which they cannot avoid.

Both Arthur Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud have used this situation to describe what they feel is the state an individual will find themselves in relation to others. The hedgehog’s dilemma suggests that despite goodwill, human intimacy cannot occur without substantial mutual harm, and what results is cautious behavior and weak relationships. With the hedgehog’s dilemma one is recommended to use moderation in affairs with others both because of self-interest, as well as out of consideration for others. The hedgehog’s dilemma is used to justify or explain introversion and isolationism.

An anecdote from my Kierkegaard professor at the University of Copenhagen

In the original text of Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard plays with the Danish language to describe humanity’s relation to the self. He writes that our selfhood is not a “gave” but an “opgave.” This roughly translates to say that the self is not a gift, but a given. In other words, the fact that we have a self is an assignment rather than a blessing. We are not given a self, but are forced to choose and create ourselves.

“Existence. It can be doubted very much whether existence is a perfection or degree of reality; for it can be doubted whether existence is one of those things that can be conceived – that is, one of the parts of essence; or whether it is only a certain imaginary concept, such as that of heat and cold, which is a denomination only of our perception, not of the nature of things. Yet if we consider more accurately, [we shall see] that we conceive something more when we think that a thing A exists, than when we think that it is possible. Therefore it seems to be true that existence is a certain degree of reality; or certainly that it is some relation to degrees of reality. Existence is not a degree of reality, however; for of every degree of reality it is possible to understand the existence as well as the possibility. Existence will therefore be the superiority of the degrees of reality of one thing over the degrees of reality of an opposed thing. That is, that which is more perfect than all things mutually incompatibles exists, and conversely what exists is more perfect than the non-existent, but it is not true that existence itself is a perfection, since it is only a certain comparative relation [comparatio] of perfections among themselves.”

— Leibniz in Determinist, Theist, Idealist by Robert Merrihew Adams.

 

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

—Albert Einstein

Anxiety:

For Kierkegaard (writing as a pseudonymous author, Vigilius Haufniensis), anxiety/dread/angst is unfocused fear. Kierkegaard uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. When the man looks over the edge, he experiences a focused fear of falling, but at the same time, the man feels a terrifying impulse to throw himself intentionally off the edge. That experience is anxiety or dread because of our complete freedom to choose to either throw oneself off or to stay put. The mere fact that one has the possibility and freedom to do something, even the most terrifying of possibilities, triggers immense feelings of dread. Kierkegaard called this our “dizziness of freedom.”

Kierkegaard focuses on the first anxiety experienced by man: Adam’s choice to eat from God’s forbidden tree of knowledge or not. Since the concepts of good and evil did not come into existence before Adam ate the fruit, which is now dubbed original sin, Adam had no concept of good and evil, and did not know that eating from the tree was “evil”. What he did know was that God told him not to eat from the tree. The anxiety comes from the fact that God’s prohibition itself implies that Adam is free and that he could choose to obey God or not. After Adam ate from the tree, sin was born. So, according to Kierkegaard, anxiety precedes sin, and it is anxiety that leads Adam to sin. Kierkegaard mentions that anxiety is the presupposition for hereditary sin.

However, Kierkegaard mentions that anxiety is a way for humanity to be saved as well. Anxiety informs us of our choices, our self-awareness and personal responsibility, and brings us from a state of un-self-conscious immediacy to self-conscious reflection. (Jean-Paul Sartre calls these terms pre-reflective consciousness and reflective consciousness.) An individual becomes truly aware of their potential through the experience of anxiety. So, anxiety may be a possibility for sin, but anxiety can also be a recognition or realization of one’s true identity and freedoms.

“Loneliness is an unhappy compound of having lost one’s point of reference, of suffering the fate of individual and collective discontinuity and of living through or dying from a crisis of identity to the point of alienation of one’s self.”

— Ludwig Binswanger

 

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431

 

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

— Hunter S. Thompson (via whiteysplace)(via whiteysplace-deactivated2016080)

The Captain: Go on, Montag, all this philosophy, let’s get rid of it. It’s even worse than the novels. Thinkers and philosophers, all of them saying exactly the same thing: “Only I am right! The others are all idiots!”. One century, they tell you that man’s destiny is predetermined. The next, they say that he has freedom of choice. It’s just a matter of fashion, that’s all. Philosophy. Just like short dresses this year, long dresses next year.

“The human condition being what it is, with man small, helpless, insecure, and unable ever to fathom the world in all its hopelessness, death, and absurdity, the theatre has to confront him with the bitter truth that most human endeavor is irrational and senseless, that communication between human beings is well-nigh impossible, and that the world will forever remain an impenetrable mystery. At the same time, the recognition of all these bitter truths will have a liberating effect: if we realize the basic absurdity of most of our objectives we are freed from being obsessed with them and this release expresses itself in laughter.”

— Martin Esslin, Kepos 345.

Suicide and Living

• suicide settles the absurd by agreeing to it.
• living is experiencing the absurd fully but without reconciliation.

not being reconciled with the absurd doesn’t free one of it but serves to disqualify suicide from the genuine absurd experience of living.3

“I can’t meet anyone. I have no understanding of anything but my own panic and self-loathing and pathetic, little existence. It’s like the only thing I’m actually qualified to write about is myself and my own self-”

— Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), Adaptation (via caitie-did, oldfilmsflicker)

 

“We play the part of heroes because we’re cowards, the part of saints because we’re wicked: we play the killer’s role because we’re dying to murder our fellow man: we play at being because we’re liars from the moment we’re born.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre (via tameourways) (via senjensenjensen) (via jmek)

 

Excerpt from Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1877)

I suddenly dreamt that I picked up the revolver and aimed it straight at my heart–my heart, and not my head; and I had determined beforehand to fire at my head, at my right temple. After aiming at my chest I waited a second or two, and suddenly my candle, my table, and the wall in front of me began moving and heaving. I made haste to pull the trigger.

In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wake up from it. It was the same in my dream. I did not feel any pain, but it seemed as though with my shot everything within me was shaken and everything was suddenly dimmed, and it grew horribly black around me. I seemed to be blinded, and it benumbed, and I was lying on something hard, stretched on my back; I saw nothing, and could not make the slightest movement. People were walking and shouting around me, the captain bawled, the landlady shrieked–and suddenly another break and I was being carried in a closed coffin. And I felt how the coffin was shaking and reflected upon it, and for the first time the idea struck me that I was dead, utterly dead, I knew it and had no doubt of it, I could neither see nor move and yet I was feeling and reflecting. But I was soon reconciled to the position, and as one usually does in a dream, accepted the facts without disputing them.

And now I was buried in the earth. They all went away, I was left alone, utterly alone. I did not move. Whenever before I had imagined being buried the one sensation I associated with the grave was that of damp and cold. So now I felt that I was very cold, especially the tips of my toes, but I felt nothing else.

I lay still, strange to say I expected nothing, accepting without dispute that a dead man had nothing to expect. But it was damp. I don’t know how long a time passed–whether an hour or several days, or many days. But all at once a drop of water fell on my closed left eye, making its way through the coffin lid; it was followed a minute later by a second, then a minute later by a third–and so on, regularly every minute. There was a sudden glow of profound indignation in my heart, and I suddenly felt in it a pang of physical pain. “That’s my wound,” I thought; “that’s the bullet …” And drop after drop every minute kept falling on my closed eyelid. And all at once, not with my voice, but with my entire being, I called upon the power that was responsible for all that was happening to me:

“Whoever you may be, if you exist, and if anything more rational that what is happening here is possible, suffer it to be here now. But if you are revenging yourself upon me for my senseless suicide by the hideousness and absurdity of this subsequent existence, then let me tell you that no torture could ever equal the contempt which I shall go on dumbly feeling, though my martyrdom may last a million years!” 

Husserl’s Triad: Ego, Cogito, Cogitata

What a phenomenologists considers important is that which can be experienced via the human senses. After reduction and abstraction, what remains is what an individual knows, regardless of the scientific or transcendental data. After removing the transcendental and the scientific, what remains is the Phenomenological Residue of the phenomena. This residue exists in three forms: ego, cogito, and cogitata.

Phenomenological Ego is the stream of consciousness in which one acquires meaning and reality from the surrounding environment. Husserl considered it a great mystery and wonder that a group of beings was aware of their existence, in effect human consciousness is the phenomenological result of introspection. By observing that “I can touch and see my being,” we recognize that we exist. The science proving we exist is not of value to human consciousness. The ego is always present, or nothing exists for the individual.

Cogito or cogitations comprise all the acts of consciousness, including doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, et cetera. The ego exists only as a result of these cogitations and these cogitations continue only as long as we are self-aware.

Cogitata are the subjects of thought or objects of consideration. One cannot deny or understand nothing — something must be under consideration for thought to occur. In the presence of nothing, there is no person, no individual.

American phenomenology: origins and developments

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

— Bertrand Russell (from the prologue of ‘The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell’, 1951)

 

“Philosophy, then, is not a doctrine, not some simplistic scheme for orienting oneself in the world, certainly not an instrument or achievement of human Dasein. Rather, it is this Dasein itself insofar as it comes to be, in freedom, from out of its own ground. Whoever, by stint of research, arrives at this self-understanding of philosophy is granted the basic experience of all philosophizing, namely that the more fully and originally research comes into its own, the more surely is it “nothing but” the transformation of the same few simple questions. But those who wish to transform must bear within themselves the power of a fidelity that knows how to preserve. And one cannot feel this power growing within unless one is up in wonder. And no one can be caught up in wonder without travelling to the outermost limits of the possible. But no one will ever become the friend of the possible without remaining open to dialogue with the powers that operate in the whole of human existence. But that is the comportment of the philosopher: to listen attentively to what is already sung forth, which can still be perceived in each essential happening of world. And in such comportment the philosopher enters the core of what is truly at stake in the task he has been given to do. Plato knew of that and spoke of it in his Seventh Letter:

‘In no way can it be uttered, as can other things, which one can learn. Rather, from out of a full, co-existential dwelling with the thing itself – as when a spark, leaping from the fire, flares into light – so it happens, suddenly, in the soul, there to grow, alone with itself.’

”

—Heidegger

In German “Dasein” means life or existence. in philosophy, the word is used to talk about the existence of any entity. Heidegger breaks the word down to its components “Da” and “Sein,” and relates it to the question of who the human being is. Dasein, that being which we ourselves are, is distinguished from all other beings because it makes issue of its own being. As Da-sein, it is the site, “Da”, for the disclosure of being, “Sein.”

 

“Viewed from an existential standpoint, questions of choice, freedom and responsibility cannot be isolated or contained within some separate being (such as ‘self’ or ‘other’). In the inescapable interrelationship that exists between ‘a being’ and ‘the world’, each impacts upon and implicates the other, each is defined through the other and, indeed, each ‘is’ through the existence of the other. Viewed in this way, no choice can be mine or yours alone, no experienced impact of choice can be separated in terms of ‘my responsibility’ versus ‘your responsibility’, no sense of personal freedom can truly avoid its interpersonal dimensions.”

— Ernesto Spinelli, 2001, The Mirror and the Hammer: Challenges to Therapeutic Orthodoxy, p. 16

 

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself; In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”

— Soren Kierkegaard

 

“Nihilist or nothingist (riennist): one who doesn’t believe in anything.”

— Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s dictionary of neologisms (1801)

 

“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.”

— Celia Bown (The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern)

 

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

— Emil Cioran (via comfortably-dumb)(via zenlikeme-deactivated20111123)

 

“Ours is not to know why; ours is but to do and die.”

—

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 

“Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceeded that; though as the narrator’s voice receeds the connections will grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were its own making. Thus the pagan will be sancitified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clock word toys. Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amoung them is a filigree which will with time become a world. It must be arbitrary then, the place we choose to embark. Somewhere between a past half forgotton and a future as yet only glimpsed.”

– Clive Barker (Weaveworld)

“My alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts- but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively.”

— Erich Fromm

 

Consciousness.

A philosophy of being is based upon a simple principle. The term “being” is important to understand, but it is elusive and hard to define. Saint Augustine had a brilliant way of helping us understand its meaning. He showed us that it is the difference between what has value and what value is. He would ask students, “Would you rather have a beautiful pearl or a mouse?” The answer was always the same, of course, because we would all rather have the valuable pearl than the mouse. Then he would ask, “Would you rather be a beautiful pearl or a mouse?” The answer changed at that point. A mouse, limited as it is, has more being, more power to act than a lifeless pearl. Absolute nonbeing is OK for a pearl. But for a human being, it is an unthinkable disaster. To explore the issue further, what is the difference between a mouse and a human being? In the judgment of a deist, the human being is more than a complicated animal. We, as humans, possess a higher kind of consciousness. The mouse knows, the human knows she knows. For the human, there is always the observer. That essence that cannot be observed itself, because the observer cannot be the thing observed. Viktor Frankl called this the ultimate essence of being. From this ultimate essence springs the human will. Consciousness is what this ultimate essence is aware of within the immense realm of thought. The ultimate essence of being, the observer, is the single unchanging platform in the universe, it is where we stand. All else, life itself, is constant motion.

— Larry Mullins.

 

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

— Fernando Pessoa (via alanarene

 

Existential Vacuum — The psychological condition in which a person doubts that life has any meaning. This new neurosis is characterized by loss of interest and lack of initiative. According to Viktor Frankl, the existential vacuum is apparently a concomitant of industrialization. When neither instinct nor social tradition direct man toward what he ought to do, soon he will not even know what he wants to do, and the existential vacuum results.

Because of social pressure, individualism is rejected by most people in favor of conformity. Thus the individual relies mainly upon the actions of others and neglects the meaning of his own personal life. Hence he sees his own life as meaningless and falls into the “existential vacuum” feeling inner void. Progressive automation causes increasing alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and suicide.
— Victor Frankl

“Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year has gone by and how little we’ve grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake, we know it’s not
to be, that for the rest of our sad, wretched pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably; happy birthday? No such thing.”

—

Jerry Seinfeld.

“The Visa.”

 

“Real life’s an often fruitless quest for intermittent patches of happiness interspersed with toil, ennui, divorce, bad hair cuts, overpriced box sets, stomach bugs, repetition, stomach bugs, gas bills, sexual dysfunction, Justin Bieber, and wasps.”

— Charlie Brooker, How TV Ruined Your Life (via shellygrrl)

(via doesntlivehereanymore)

 

“It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness…”

— James Joyce (Ulysses)

 

“People disappoint me so much that I am more curious about flowers, and many other things that one can’t see from one’s bedroom.”

— Marcel Proust, as quoted in William Carter’s Marcel Proust: A Life, 2000 (via proustitute)

 

 

“I am an invisible man….I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

— Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man)

 

The Kantian conditional imperative

“[N]othing is left but the conformity of actions to universal law as such, and this alone must serve the will as its principle. That is to say, I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law.

Thus I need no far-reaching ingenuity to find out what I have to do in order to possess a good will. Inexperienced in the course of world affairs and incapable of being prepared for all the chances that happen in it, I ask myself only ‘Can you also will that your maxim should become a universal law?’ Where you cannot, it is to be rejected, and that not because of a prospective loss to you or even to others, but because it cannot fit as a principle into a possible enactment of universal law.”

–Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysic of Morals

 

“The man of flesh and blood; the one who is born, suffers and dies – above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and is heard; the brother, the real brother.”

— Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, The Tragic Sense of Life, 1913

 

“Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.”

— Miguel de Unamuno

 

“Birth is suffering, growth is suffering, the seed suffers the earth, the root suffers the rain, the bud suffers its flowering. Destiny hurts.”

— Hermann Hesse

 

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”

—

Kierkegaard (Submitted by chundaa)

 

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

— Milan Kundera, Slowness

 

“

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that’s alive.

My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought.

Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain.

The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings.

While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self.

In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self.

Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.

”

— Milan Kundera (Immortality)

(via lesgroper)

“I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream; that’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor… and surviving.”

— Lt. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now (Submitted by jacobhaller)

“He walked out into the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of an intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

— Cormac McCarthy. The Road (Submitted by tophersaurus)

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

The Nietzsche Reader.

“To be existential is to have those dark nights of the soul when the loneliness of existence becomes transparent and the structure of our confidence lies shattered around us. To be existential is to wrestle most fully with the jagged awareness of one’s own finitude, with the thunderbolt fact that I will die and that my death will be my own, experienced by no one else. To be existential is to recognize that in the face of all these somber truths, we must act…we must take responsibility for our lives; we must create the world anew.”

— George Cotkin, Existential America (Submitted by calvinmarkus)

“I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.”

— The Collector – John Fowles (via suchaheavenlyartefact)

(via theviciousair-deactivated201106)

An Existential Term a Day

Facticity (throwness): We find ourselves existing in a world not of our own making and indifferent to our concerns. We are not the source of our existence, but find ourselves thrown into a world we don’t control and didn’t choose.

“No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself… My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.”

– Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir (via planetcaravan)

You have created accepted or promoted whatever you are experiencing. That’s the great news, because you’re in charge and you can change it if you want. You are your own writer, producer and director and yet merely an extra in everyone else’s play. The best teams know and expect the integrity of the players. The best players manage their own game no matter what. We’re all alone in this together.”

— David Allen

“Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals being as a whole.”

—

Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? (1929)

Without stimulus or focus, the individual is confronted with nothingness, the meaninglessness of existence, and experiences existential anxiety.

Don’t you think I understand? The hopeless dream of being. Not seeming, but being. In every waking moment aware, alert. The tug of war… what you are. with others and who you really are. A feeling of vertigo and a constant hunger to be finally exposed. To be seen through, cut down…even obliterated. 

Every tone of voice a lie. Every gesture false. Every smile a grimace. Commit suicide? That’s unthinkable. You don’t do things like that. But you can refuse to move and be silent. Then, at least, you’re not lying.You can shut yourself in, shut out the world. Then you don’t have to play any roles, show any faces, make false gestures. You’d think so… …but reality is diabolical. Your hiding-place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in everywhere. You’re forced to react. Nobody asks if it’s real or not, if you’re honest or a liar. That’s only important at the theater, perhaps not even there. I understand why you’re silent, why you don’t move. Your lifelessness has become a fantastic part. I understand and I admire you.

Persona, Ingmar Bergman.

“Everything we do is futile, but we must do it anyway.”

— Gandhi

Not doing, just being. Aware and watchful every second. And at the same time the abyss between what you are for others and what you are for yourself. The feeling of dizziness and the continual burning need to be unmasked. At last to be seen through, reduced, perhaps extinguished. Every tone of voice a lie, an act of treason. Every gesture false. Every smile a grimace. The role of wife, the role of friend, the roles of mother and mistress, which is worst? Which has tortured you most? Playing the actress with the interesting face? Keeping all the pieces together with an iron hand and getting them to fit? Where did it break? Where did you fail? You were left with your demand for truth and your disgust. Kill yourself? No—too nasty, not to be done. But you could be immobile. You can keep quiet. Then at least you’re not lying.

Persona, Ingmar Bergman (1966)

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter similarity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

— Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, David Foster Wallace (via ourcatastrophe)

(via browcatastrophe-deactivated2013)

“Imagine: the mind exists isolated in a chaotic wasteland; four white walls, an even whiter ceiling and a floor that has no color surround it. It is this limitation that protects it from the harsh weather of insignificance that lies outside. Over time these walls slowly close in towards the center and when they meet they vanish along with everything else.”

— Michael Szymczyk (via paranormallyscrutinizedexistence)

(via paranormallyscrutinizedexistenc)

Kierkegaard – The Individual

“Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all….To be a particular individual is world-historically absolutely nothing, infinitely nothing — and yet, this is the only true and highest significance of a human being, so much higher as to make every other significance illusory….If initially my human nature is merely an abstract something, it is at any rate the task which life sets me to become subjective, the uncertaintly of death comes more and more to interpenetrate my subjectivity dialectically. It thus becomes more and more important for me to think it in connection with evey factor and phase of my life; for since the uncertaintly is there in every moment, it can be overcome only by overcoming it in every moment….An objective uncertaintly held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual…All knowledge about reality is possibility.  The only reality to which an existing individual may have a relation that is more than cognitive, is his own reality, the fact that he exists; this reality constitutes his absolute interest.”

This excerpt from The Concluding Unscientific Postscript by the danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard exemplifies quite nicely why Kierkegaard is often called the father of Existentialism. Kierkegaard emphasizes the importance of the individual’s subjective quest for truth, and condemns the attempt by many philosophers, especially the german idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to establish objective universal truths.

Traditionally, philosophers have spoken of two different kinds of truth: objective and subjective truth. Whereas the former has been usually approached systematically via reason, empiricism and logic, the latter rather deals with what is passionate, personal and practical. Hegel claimed that if one has a perfect understanding of a comprehensive system of logic, one gains an objective understanding of the whole of existence. Kierkegaard rejected the idea of an objective system to understand existence and shifted the focus towards subjective truth: “I always reason from existence, not toward existence.[…] Knowledge has a relationship to the knower, who is essentially an existing individual, and that for this reason all essential knowledge is essentially related to existence.” We can see here a precursor to Sartre’s claim that existence precedes and rules essence. For Kierkegaard, objectivity focuses on what is said, whereas subjectivity accentuates how it is said. Kierkegaard believed that “to exist” meant to realize oneself through self-commitment to the choices one makes as a free subjective individual. His method is moving away from a philosophy that is searching to accumulate a set of facts about the world and goes back to the socratic question of how to live one’s life. The way to answer this question must be completely subjective and personal, since ‘the crowd is untruth’ and that one cannot attain authentic truth if one does not look for it through ‘passionate inwardness’. In fact, to become an individual, one must move away from the crowd by making personal choices, since taking the choices of the crowd as an example moves oneself further away from subjective, autentic truth. One must become an individual to become a christian, and become a christian to become human.

Kierkegaard was deeply religious and ridiculed the tradition of religious philosophy to attempt to link faith to objectivity and reason. Faith, for Kierkegaard, is fundamentally absurd and cannot be reconciled with any objective truth even in principle. If one would attempt to justify faith via recourse to any objective practices like reason or science, it would defeat the purpose of faith. Faith can only be approached by the individual through the constant choice to passionately embrace the absurdity and the paradoxes that are at its very core. However, the absurd is both the origin of faith and is yet resolved by it:”When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd—faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd.” To become christian is an act of choice, that can only be made if one is aware of one’s own subjectivity, which leads to the ability to make the intensely personal and passionate decision to accept faith. For Kierkegaard, it is a process that is never finished and relies on one’s responsibility to always make choices. As Daniel Johnson put it in his analysis of Kierkegaard, to live subjectively is to live decisively.

“Christianity is spirit, spirit is inwardness, inwardness is subjectivity, subjectivity is essentially passion, and in its maximum an infinite, personal, passionate interest in one’s eternal happiness.”

Although Kierkegaard’s philosophy is very different from the other existentialist philosophers I will write on due to its religious nature, we can clearly see many themes in it that would be picked up by the atheist philosophers. The importance of subjectivity, choices and the quest for authentic individual truth. The essence of Kierkegaard’s view on truth is, that truth is not a set of propositions to be learned, but a process of choices to be made, which is never completed. Subjective truth is a ‘work in progress’ and impossible to be encapsulated in any absolute system. As Socrates said to Xenophon: “If I do not reveal my views on justice in words, I do so by my conduct”. For Kierkegaard and other existentialists, philosophy has to focus on what it is like to be an individual in this world, and how one must act accordingly.