they lacked the knowledge of the cosmos of the modern day — SteveMinjares

What like which app gives the better discount on fast food burgers? lol

It just seems to me the teachings revolve around fear, fear of losing ones own individuality and fear of mortality and fears of there own conscious awareness. Since I personally don’t carry those fears and struggles and I find the teachings hard to rationalize. — SteveMinjares

Reminds me of the ol' switcheroo where one sign says danger and the other says.. I don't know fluffy bunnies or cheeseburgers or whatever you happen to fancy.

To each there own I guess... — SteveMinjares

Yeah. Guesses are great. Acknowledgement is transcendental.

In the utmost respectful way possible I find Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche philosophy teaching in my personal opinion outdated. It was probably more applicable to that generation and culture of there time. — SteveMinjares

No. All of that was written by this philosophers and thinkers, can be applied today. It is not about culture or generation. They developed a very important theory: existentialism and the absurdity of living. Here we can debate a lot of how we can interpret this aspect. One of the elements I like is about Kierkegaard’s or Schopenhauer’s pessimism rationalist. The way I can see my life with zero motivations or fantasies, more realistic and yes, negativism. But this completely logic because there are plenty or arguments we can share about how acceptable this path of seeing our lives is so accurate.
Conclusion: Existentialism is logic and crucial. It was very important back in XIX century. Now is so developed with anti-natalism thoughts.

Tell us, what do you think existentialism is? What are the actual tenets you find so unappealing? You seem to think it has something to do with meaning, but what?

Existentialism seems illogical and borderline to following the same principle thinking which you would find in conventional religious belief just omitting God from the picture. — SteveMinjares

There are many religious existentials who by no means 'omit God from the picture'. Or they may claim that God is not something which can be part of a picture. Gabriel Marcel is a splendid example, and I bet London to a brick you'd never read that name before this sentence. (Check this out. Kierkegaard is also worth understanding, although I don't have time to study him in depth. Emmanuel Levinas is another. There are plenty of religious existentialists.)

To each there own I guess. — SteveMinjares

'their'

Actually I should add a few points. 'Existentialism' is not a school or tradition or theory. It's a mood, an attitude, a type. It literally means 'grappling with the problems of existence', but as a product of late modernity, it also understands existence in a different way to the ancients or medievals. But existentialism as such doesn't imply any particular commitment to or against theism. It is trying to articulate a response to the problems of meaning and the nature of lived existence, at this place, at this time, without recourse to some scripted answer or dogmatic solution. It's very much parellel with impressionism in art and improvisation in music, which is why it is one of the paradigmatic movements of the 20th century.

The common trait of existentialism is to reject any system or logic anyway. It was to revolt against the domineering hegemony of Hegelianism and Kantianism, which were based on absolute spirit and reason.

It denies groups or societies, but focuses on individual's life, freedom and absurdity. It is about what life is, and how one should live. Existence is more essence than reason or logic, and predates them.

There are also different schools in Existentialism. Dostoyevsky and Kierkeggard's existentialism is based on God, and religion, whereas Satre, Camus and Heidegger are atheistic, and even deny they are existentialist.

Completely agree with your argument, but why do you think existentialism is not a school or theory?
I think it could be because there are an important number of writers or thinkers involved in this attitude. Depending in which author we are speaking about, existentialism has different perspectives. Then, probably we can classify it in some academies.

Tell us, what do you think existentialism is? What are the actual tenets you find so unappealing? You seem to think it has something to do with meaning, but what? — Banno

Exactly.



So I think one of the core ideas of Existentialism is the idea of "authenticity". By this we mean that we are a species that has justifications for things. We identify with values and reasons, yet we don't necessarily have to. Are you lazily filling a role, or are you doing it because this is something that aligns with your own attitudes? Are you letting others think for you or are you choosing to agree because this conforms with your constructed values? There is a difference. Other animals much of the time must react according to instinct. We need linguistically-based frameworks for understanding the world, and with this, we can self-reflect on what we are doing as we are doing it. We are a species that can hate the concept of work while knowing we must work to survive. No other animal has this self-reflective burden of knowing but still doing and having to justify each day's efforts with their own self-reflective capabilities.. We don't have to do anything but we usually don't like the consequences if we don't follow our self-imposed justifications.

Also there is the idea of "thrownness". When born into the world, there are givens that one must contend with.. The social structures, the physical and social arrangements that have developed long before our individual existence. One cannot change them easily and often one must navigate that which one has no control over. We cannot remake the world in our own image, yet we have imaginations that can wish the world was arranged in a different way. One of the frustrations of life is the fact that the world cannot/would never conform to our own needs, and thus we are constantly aware of the rupture between what we might have wished and what is reality.

I suppose I shouldn't expect better. Heidegger, as he claims, was not an existentialist. He was a crypto-existentialist. And so his work is not a useful source for understanding existentialism. Authenticity is a mode of anticipation. Anticipation is not a mode of existence. It is a hunger for not "there". If anything, existentialism is an angst over having this hunger, so clearly at odds with being real. The mantra is "existence precedes essence", being real takes precedence over being explained mechanistically or analytically.

Completely agree with your argument, but why do you think existentialism is not a school or theory? — javi2541997

Major part of existentialism is disagreement about what it is.

I feel they they lacked the knowledge of the cosmos of the modern day. I doubt that if they were alive today would maintain there philosophical convictions if they knew then what we know now about the Universe — SteveMinjares

Struck a chord in me, that. I'm going to go Aristotle on you and say a being's purpose is defined by what that being excels in. So, a lion, built-for-the-kill, must kill, that's the lion's purpose :fear: Likewise, as Aristotle thought humans are good, not the best of course, thinkers - they seek knowledge and do so rationally and, once upon a time, via revelation. The meat and potatoes of man's quest seems to be, if all goes well, understand the cosmos itself.

Thus, our (humanity's) purpose is to comprehend the universe in all its magnificent splendor however that might be interpreted - that's the meaning of life, of human life.

Existentialist philosophers were top-notch intellectuals in their own right and though their weltanschauungs were as limited as the prevailing paradigms and accumulated knowledge database were, it wasn't the case that this had escaped their notice. They did then what we do now - assume dominant ways of looking at the world and refer to what is known and come up with a coherent snapshot of what can be inferred and from that the ramifications, all this knowing full well that a time might come when they'll be ridiculed for their beliefs. Sometimes, ancient sages are the imbeciles of the present - an effect of gathering information, something we seem to be good at, just as Aristotle thought. Sometimes, past fools are modern visionaries - imagination, luck, and insight playing key roles.

Existentialism is what happens when systems of grasping reality and ordering our lives succumb to irresolvable aporia. Failing to grasp the crisis of mind and inure ourselves to familiar themes is no rebuttal. Or, as Nietzsche put it, the man of the future will witness the greatest wonders and enigmas of life and the universe, and just..., blink. Responsibility for the truth of it is personal, not mechanistic.

Few of you have actually bothered to read any existentialist texts, have you.

Seems to be a pattern on the forums of late.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground can even be read as downright anti-rational.

The renaissance was a reaction by ancients modes of thought to rebelliousness in the northern reaches of Europe against them. Latin forms embellished extravagantly against the spartan barrenness of Lutherans. This set up a convoluted opposition between Latin symbolism and Protestant introspection, between reading the world as a crude and corrupt array of divine signs of an ineffable hereafter and a here and now embodied divine perfection in the knowable proportions of phenomena. You need a codebook of symbolism to understand the art of the rococo era, while phenomenal examination would extract the smells and pigments of the rose to analyze its components, and to draw conclusions about the nature of reality from this, rather than citing mythic meaning to it. But if the symbolic age ultimately succumbs to phenomenal analysis, and people have to throw away the codebook, phenomenology also succumbs to a strain between the actual entities and events in the world and the intellectual tools derived from the analysis. The rose may not represent blood or loyalty, or whatever, but it does not represent chemical and mathematical formulas either. In an important and highly pertinent sense, we have exchanged mythical superstition for a rationalist one. What occurs in the mind when this dilemma is recognized is a personal dynamic through which the terms of myth and analysis have their origin, and kinship. Superstition is superstition, whether it is a belief that myth and magic rule the world, or that the axioms of reason are self-evident, rather than a mere condition to our conviction in it. And, whether losing the codebook of mythic symbols or the contiguity of that conviction, the personal drama that ensues from that loss is no impertinence to our vital interest in understanding how the language or either that faith or that conviction is pursued.

It is a misunderstanding to read Hegel's phenomenology as rationalist. He was well aware of the shortcomings of Kant's thesis (as was Kant himself!) but his position, so hard fought to achieve and sustain, meant he had to be cagey about it. The undeniable fact of his work is that our humanity is central. Dehumanized reason is antithetical to any real appreciation of the phenomenon. Hegel was the first and founding existentialist.

In the utmost respectful way possible I find Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche philosophy teaching in my personal opinion outdated. It was probably more applicable to that generation and culture of there time. — SteveMinjares

You have not, I suspect, read Kant? to understand existentialists, one has to understand phenomenology, this requires Kant. Of course, existentialists are not rationalists, but, you could say, post rationalists, and in some ways in opposition to rationalism. To get this, you go from Kant, to Hegel to Kierkegaard to Husserl to Heidegger, and others along the way. Then the move can be made to post modern thinking like Derrida, and beyond.

If there are limits to reason it is perfectly rational to acknowledge them. Some will use this as a pretext for abandoning rigor, and even endorsing ideology, and this can motivate vilification of a serious exposition of the rational consequences of those limits. But if we arrive at the recognition of the limits of reason through a process of rigor we can recognize in each other the character of that recognition, however personal it is to each, is every whit as rigorous as the discipline we can recognize in each other there. And though that recognition is not itself a rational term, our recognition of the terms that commit us, each alone, to perform reasoning as if its limits were never operative or real are transformed by that recognition. The structure of reason may not seem to alter, but the terms do, suddenly, wholesale, and in the personal character of our participation in the moment of that change. It is because we can come to recognize, through each other, changes in our terms at least as rigorously rational as the rational functions performed along the way that we can come to think and to share our thoughts at all. It is hardly illogical to recognize this.

improvisation in music, — Wayfarer

Was around long, long before the 20th century, so not paradigmatic movement of the 20th C. Jazz maybe.

that's what I meant. Serious French people in cafes smoking Gauloise, drinking black coffee, Django Reinhardt playing in the background.

The inventive harmonies in Jazz also have their roots in 19th century classical music and even earlier like late Beethoven, though, not in blues.

Of course. But the connection between impressionism in art, jazz improv, and existentialism, is indelibly printed in my mind.

Actually I did a unit on Sartre as an undergraduate. I must confess I could literally not understand the first page of Being and Nothingness. Since then I've become more familiar with the jargon, and understand him a little better. I admire his fortitude during WWII, and his obvious intellectual integrity, but I can't say I like him, he's too close to nihilism. I've read a few articles by Gabriel Marcel, another existentialist of about the same vintage, who is more congenial to my outlook.

There are some convergences between existentialism and contemporary Zen Buddhism although they shouldn't be overstated. But one of the books on my 'must get around to reading' list is Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy, Carl Olsen.

Hegel was the first and founding existentialist. — Gary M Washburn

Not the first existentialist exactly, but a theorist whom proto-existentialists like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche reacted to.

Sartre of course rejected the term... do we allow him this luxury?

Was around long, long before the 20th century, so not paradigmatic movement of the 20th C. Jazz maybe. — Janus

I suspect that the first music made by early humans was improv.

Few of you have actually bothered to read any existentialist texts, have you. — Banno

What would you say people get most frequently get wrong in their understanding of existentialism? I 'read' a few existentialist texts and was never much the wiser.

But one of the books on my 'must get around to reading' list is Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy, Carl Olsen. — Wayfarer

Sounds interesting; I might check that one out myself...but I already have too much to read.

I suspect that the first music made by early humans was improv. — Tom Storm

You know what? You just might be right! :up:

I was also thinking of the great composers, Bach Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt who were reputed to be amazingly skilled extemporizers. I have read that many pieces had a supplementary "movement" between or within the scripted movements called a cadenza, where the solo performer would improvize on harmonic themes from the other movements.

Yes, and in the case of Chopin especially, anything written and now known is a codified version of something he generally performed with extravagant curlicues of innovation.

Try Sartre's two tracts on imagination. You cannot distinguish Husserl's intentional object from the intentional act, image from imagining.

https://books.google.com/books?id=b-g_yf7kVeIC

Try Sartre's two tracts on imagination. You cannot distinguish Husserl's intentional object from the intentional act, image from imagining. — Gary M Washburn

Are you saying Sartre agrees with Husserl on this or differs from him?

I'm saying that Sartre produced rigorous philosophy, not just the impertinent fictions. I'll let you decide whether he agrees with Husserl or critiques him. I just wish people would stop citing what supports and omitting what repudiates their views. Existentialism needs revision, but it may make a lot more sense than the uncritical obeisance people pay to analysis. Language is a dynamic of familiarization, not information or definition. It's opposite is not gaps in knowledge, but a wholesale loss of familiarity, or alienation. Alienation is the bane of the current consensus, and passing it off with a glib or facile "illogical" is just not gonna cut it.

Language is a dynamic of familiarization, not information or definition. It's opposite is not gaps in knowledge, but a wholesale loss of familiarity, or alienation. Alienation is the bane of the current consensus, and passing it off with a glib or facile "illogical" is just not gonna cut it. — Gary M Washburn

I agree with you about language. I’ve been arguing the same thing on the ‘what is information’ thread. Biosemiotics is all the rage these days, but it’s hard to explain to its adherents why it shares with physicalistic materialism the problem of reductionism. I notice you’ve written a lot on temporality. That’s a central theme of my work, too.

Time is not a dimension. It is the qualification of dimensionality. Not an extension, but a revaluation of the character of extension, or the characterology of that revaluation. Where the existentialists went wrong is that they were caught between individualism and collectivism. The truth of it is that the only individualism is the act of loss, and the only extension of that loss is the response to it in recognition of its worth. The act of loss and the response of love (responsibility that the worth of the lost be recognized) is the engine of mind, not rational structures. No more than, say, our autonomic heart rhythm is anything more than a framework facilitating its autonomous role in slight adjustments to the second-by-second changing needs of the body, every cell in the body. It's a community in which each individual is far more effecting of the whole in contrariety to its autonomic functions than obedient to them. And how much does this have to be the case for agency to have a portal through which to break into the otherwise rigid framework of the causal nexus or systems of rational extension? Is the geometric modulus really axiomatic to the completion of space? That is, does a geometric ratio really extend, in the real world, as a constant without residue? How much residue would undo the axiom, if only enough to let the character of time slip through? What if the least residue is all the differing time ever really is? How much quantifiable extension does it take to give the qualifier a venue to become recognized? If logic can never outstrip its quantifier, time is a personal drama of the recognition of its worth. But neither one alone, nor the full collective count, can ever breach the gap between the act of loss and recognition of the worth of the lost that the personal drama of human discourse does with such apparent facile obliviousness to the strangeness of it. Time is change that occurs even in the face of a complete commitment to the conservation of it terms. Even bored out of our skulls, we are constantly re-characterizing what time is. Even when we are most burdened by time unchanging, we are exhibiting its being change.