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Existentialism is the greatest philosophy to ever be developed, and if you’re smart enough to be reading this, then you've made an authentic choice in good faith. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLDvdzSwG20 Though you can probably make some whiney argument about the seeds of the ideas being contained in the writings of some ancient Greek philosopher or something, existentialism starts with this melancholic Dane right here:  Sřren Aabye Kierkegaard Like most people with slashes and unpronounceable bits in their middle name, Kierkegaard is metal is gently caress. He was born in 1813, and wrote a poo poo ton of books, pamphlets, and tracts under various pseudonyms (kind of the precursor to the “internet handle”, for those of you who don’t know). The most famous of these is probably Fear and Trembling, a fictionalized account of his drug fueled romp through the Mint 500 race and the Las Vegas District Attorney's Convention with his friend Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta. His pseudonym, Johannes Silencio, muses about the story of Abraham and Isaac, and the degree of faith that must have been required to ignore all the rational and logical parts of his brain and surrender himself completely to the idea that God required this of him, and he must obey. Uniquely among Christian writers, Kierkegaard does not pretend that faith has any basis in rationality, and is quite absurd. If it was something that could be easily acquired without sacrifice and struggle, what worth would it possess? And the doubt that one will experience is the angst the will follow one for their entire life. Another major theme of Kierkegaard’s work is cuckolding. I know, I know, but I’m serious. His ideal is the Knight of Faith, who is contrasted with the Knight of Infinite Resignation. The Knight of Faith is the one who has fully realized themselves, and fully given themselves over to religion without losing the understanding of the temporary, mortal realm. There have only been two Knights of Faith: Abraham, and the Virgin Mary. The Knight of Infinite Resignation, on the other hand, is the guy who gets tripped up in this, and is constantly whining about how the lady he rescues from the dragon always gets taken away by the handsome prince, rather than staying with him. Whereas the big, strong, awesome Knight of Faith believes that with God, All Things Are Possible, and that you don’t need some sort of wussy “At least we’ll be together in heaven” excuse for loving the princess -- if they were meant to be together, God will provide, and if not, who gives a poo poo, the Knight of Faith is too busy living their awesome Godly life. (There’s also the people stuck in the aesthetic stage of development, but gently caress those guys) Now, you may recognize that the Knight of Faith sounds awfully familiar, and you’d be correct, and that leads us to the next, most famous guy in the existentialist school:  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Nietzsche is a misunderstood bad rear end. Basically no one understands Nietzsche, because of his nazi sister and journalist/racial superiority theorist H.L. Mencken. Everyone assumes that Nietzsche is this big atheist superman who wants everyone doing whatever they want forever because some people are just better once they realize it. And this is such an egregious misreading of his work that it’s no wonder those jackasses usually end up worshipping Ayn “I Have Daddy Issues” Rand. In his early life, Nietzsche was one of the most brilliant classical greek linguists and historians that Germany had ever seen, becoming a full tenured professor at age 24 without having finished a dissertation and being basically handed a doctorate because “He’s that smart”. He fought briefly in the Franco-Prussian war, was an excellent horseman, and then quit everything due to medical issues -- he had major migraines, probably had syphilis, and throughout his life, his body would try to kill him. His first major philosophical idea was the split between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, named after the two Greek gods. Apollo represented Order, and Dionysus chaos, and the struggle between these two impulses in any figure of tragedy was what made a play great. But you don’t care about that, so I won’t elaborate on it, and we’ll get to the stuff you’re interested in: the ubermensch and “god is dead” The ubermensch is actually a lot like Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, but with the religious aspect. The ubermensch is the guy who has realized that the world, right now, is all he’s got, and lives life to the fullest. The anti-goon. He’s got so much self-confidence, it doesn’t occur to him that confidence is a problem. He doesn’t give a poo poo about what others think or do, he does what makes him happy, free from any external pressure or concern. Many of these external pressures come from what Nietzsche calls “Master-Slave Morality”. Originally, the world was divided into the nobility and the peasants -- the nobles were good (rich, healthy, warm, well fed), and the peasants were bad (poor, dirty, starving, cold). But somewhere along the way, there was a shift from good vs. bad to good vs. evil. Suddenly, it was the peasants who were good, because they were morally virtuous, they were blessed with humility, they would receive their reward in the afterlife for having suffered in this one. It inevitably leads to nihilism, because under this form of morality, you deny this world completely -- everything good about it is considered evil: being happy, being content, not submitting to the authority of the other wretches... Thus, “God is Dead.” The modern world has killed him. Not, “God doesn’t exist” or “God has never existed” but “We, with our modern approaches to things, have slain him”. And what’s more, we don’t need him. We should live our lives as such that, if we were forced to live them over and over and over again for all eternity (think Groundhog Day) we wouldn’t want to change a single thing. We can sum Nietzsche’s approach to morality up in three quotes from Thus Spake Zarathustra: quote:“Verily I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws” quote:“And there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest.” quote:“Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you.” Despite being amazing, Nietzsche himself was actually pretty much a huge goon. He was obsessed with this Russian philosopher named Lou Salome, and proposed to her three times, getting shot down every one. After health problems forced him to leave the university, he spent most of his time alone in his apartment reading philosophy books and writing both compilations of witty one liners and long screeds that almost no one would ever get to read until years after his death, the modern day equivalent of forum posting. He finally had a nervous breakdown in public when he saw a cabdriver beating his horse, and lived for the rest of his life in his mom’s attic. And this section is getting long and doesn’t have nearly as many jokes, so we’ll move on.  Martin Heidegger While Nietzsche might not have been a nazi, Heidegger definitely was. As in, like, an actual card carrying party member who was actually kicked out of the party for being too strict and regimented with his running of the University of Freiburg during his 11 month rectorship. He privately expressed a lot of regret for being a nazi, and he was best friends/lovers with Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher who wrote extensively about the banality of evil, fascism, and stuff like that. Heidegger’s most famous work is Being and Time, a work which almost no one understands, especially if they tell you they’ve read the entire thing and understood it. It has something to do with dasein (German for dasein), which is the state of being into which one is thrown in right at this very moment, fully aware of the temporary nature of its being, but simultaneously aware of the fundamental aloneness and isolation of the self even when together with others. Or something. We don’t really give a poo poo because Heidegger isn’t really an existentialist, and actually disliked existentialism. We’re interested in his primarily because Jean-Paul Sartre misread him, and had a huge mancrush on him.  Jean-Paul Sartre This wall-eyed pussy magnet is the the guy people think of when you say existentialism if they don’t think Nietzsche. When he wasn’t plowing his way through the various young women that his open relationship partner Simon de Beauvoir brought along when she was done with them, he was writing all sort of things -- plays, novels, essays, philosophical treatises -- and the latter often recanted the earlier. The one’s we’re concerned with have to do with Authenticity vs Bad Faith and Existence Preceeding Essence. Sartre was part of the Free French resistance during World War II, and ended up in one of the cushier POW camps. He loved it there. Despite the filth, the squalor, the starvation, he and all the other men shared everything, were all best friends, and slept in one big man pile. Sartre escaped from the camp by telling the guard he needed a new prescription for his glasses, and after going to get the prescription filled, just never went back to prison. Back at his apartment with de Beauvoir, he found he hated all the comfort and isolation -- where was the sense of community? where was the enjoyment of food when it was so much easier to procure? De Beauvoir put a stop to that poo poo real quick. But during his adventures in the war, Sartre was writing a book called Being and Nothingness, which as you can guess ripped it title off from Heidegger’s Being and Time. Sartre’s whole thing in this book is that you always have a choice, and if you’re whining that you don’t, you’re a loser. You might not like that the world has presented you with obstacles that seem unfair, or that other people have it easier, but crying about it is for pussies and hypocrites. And you have to live with the consequences of your actions. A famous example from early in the book is of a guy who wants to go fight in the war and be a big hero, but also “needs” to stay at home and take care of his mother. No matter which one he chooses, he has to give something up. But if he says “Aww, I can’t go fight, because my mother, she needs me...” or “I have to go fight, because I need to serve my country...” he’s living inauthentically. He’s lying to himself. No one is forcing him to do a drat thing. He needs to sack up and say “Going and killing nazis is more important than my mom. Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, so sorry not sorry ma, I’m out” or “You know what? gently caress the war. This is my moms, and she’s old. I want to be with her in her last few years.” Authentic living is acknowledging your desires and being honest with yourself. Bad faith is inventing excuses as to why you can’t do them. Why the gently caress are you pretending to be a waiter when you want to be a ship captain or a racecar driver? Now, lest you think this is some sort of bullshit self-help stuff, the initial reason comes because Existence precedes Essence. What this means is, there is no intrinsic meaning to anything, no internal nature, no innate what have you. You are self-determined, and the choices you’ve made put you in the place that you are. If you’re in prison, it’s because you’re too big of a pussy to try and escape. Conventional ethics, even, don’t have any innate basis, and are pretty much just an excuse for the bourgeois to control the lower classes, so why bother with them? It’s actually even more complicated than that, but if you want to know more, you can read the book.  Simon Bolivar The other half of this strange duo, Bolivar is arguably the more original and influential of the pair, despite Sartre’s much more considerable fame. You may have noticed that a lot of Sartre is basically just Nietzsche and Heidegger with a new coat of paint, and, well, you’d be 100% correct. Well, Bolivar not only wrote one of the most accessible introductions to existentialism, The Ethics of Ambiguity (which also cleaned up a lot of the places where Sartre hosed up), she also kick started second wave feminism with her justifiably famous book The Second Sex. Her thesis in that book is that society, and men in particular, have made women the Other. Basically, we consider men to be the regular thing, and women to be this exotic, bizarre thing that needs all sorts of special attention and care.  By pretending that women are mysterious and strange, men have an excuse to not to bother trying to understand them, much the same way that they don’t bother trying to understand savage tribes of Africa or the inscrutable ways of the Chinamen. One “becomes” a woman, because man is the default. Woman is a role which is played, while men are simply the baseline upon which everything is judged. Men are normal, women are “Other”. And this is bullshit, Bolivar says. Because Existence Precedes Essence, there is nothing particularly special about being a woman. They don’t have some weird thing that prevents men from understanding them, men and society simply choose not to because it allowed women to be kept oppressed. But this is obviously untrue, as anyone who has actually talked to a woman will understand. This anticipates the notion that “gender is a social construct” pursued by later feminists, because of its focus on the role of women, rather than their biology. There’s no reason why women should be expected to keep house and wear dressed, beyond the social pressure to do so. Bolivar herself gave about as much a gently caress for social opinion as Sartre did. She was as much a pussyhound as he was, and kept many lovers, both male and female, often passing her girlfriends to Sartre when she was done with them. And speaking of philosophers who got a lot of women, let’s talk about  Albert Camus Camus was a superhot Algerian who played professional soccer, fought Nazis with the underground French resistance, rode a motorcycle, smoked constantly, and always seemed to lose his shirt at the most convenient time. Also, he has one of those romantic wasting diseases (consumption or tuberculosis, whichever), so women flocked to him like files to a corpse, even more so than the weird toad man and his girlfriend. He wrote mostly about the Absurd. Because we live our lives knowing that we will one day die, doesn’t it make sense to just commit suicide? Every happiness we have will fade, every moment of joy will end, and when it’s all over, the eventual collapse of society and the heat death of the universe means that any action you take is, in the end, completely meaningless. And yet we act as though our lives are of great importance, we puff ourselves up, we plan for the future, we hope and dream. How to resolve this paradox? Even our self-created meaning are eventually just an evasion of the end. To continue, we must simply try to balance these conditions, acknowledging them and living with them. Suicide is just as irrational. It is as much an evasion of the question as self-created meaning is. Death is no more meaningful than life. We must consider both possibilities, but not come down completely on one side or the other. And this is exactly the kind of talk that gets people into bed with you, if you’re the right kind of handsome and exotic French war and sports hero who is also a journalist and playwright and novelist. There are more philosophers to consider, and we will be addressing them in a later post.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:37
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unpleasantly turgid posted:conflating western philosophy and anime seems really cheapening. can you at least use screenshots of CGI models in the modeling environment? I am attempting a pedagogical method taught to me by the "cool" professor at school who always wore sunglasses, called everyone "Dude" or "Dudette", and wore sandals with jeans by relating philosophy to the real world. I am hoping this will be a "Dangerous Minds" moment, with me playing the part of Coolio. Some representative quotes: Kierkegaard posted:Anime is the highest passion in a man [...] no one gets further. Hegel posted:What experience and anime teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from anime... Kant posted:I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for anime. St. Augustine posted:God judged it better to bring good out of anime than to suffer no anime to exist.
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Jan 10, 2017 20:40
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^^Kripke kicks rear end, and is a real good readGRILLARY CLINTON posted:thanks for this op. this is a good post. I'll give being and time a ton of credit; I own two heavily marked up copies of the Macquarrie and Stambaugh translation, and it's a great way to lose an evening. But if it's someones first exposure to heidegger, I'd give them Introduction to Metaphysics or What is Called Thinking? first. And if we're going to get into analytical vs continental debates: 
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Jan 13, 2017 15:49
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signalnoise posted:Useful but not respected vs Interesting but not respected Bingo! Ain't no Žižek going to build a spaceship or engineer a bridge, but reading Searle is dry as gently caress and just plain uninteresting 99% of the time.
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Jan 13, 2017 16:14
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Let’s talk about one of the last of the major league guys. We’re going out of order this time, because who gives a poo poo about sequence now that we have a rough idea of the development of the thought? The big guy I left out of the last post is this depressing and uplifting Russian right here:  Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский (Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky) Unlike all the other folks we’ve discussed so far, Dostoievski was primarily a novelist, and was famous for editing the Crime and Punishment comic book series for Lev Gleason Publishers. He didn’t write long, systematic treatises or exhaustive essays all about how he saw life and the world. He suffered from epilepsy, and had a very severe gambling addiction, which resulted in some of the greatest works of existentialist literature ever written. He spent 5 years in exile in Siberia for murdering a pawnbroker (to whom he was in hock to due to his gambling debts) and her step-sister with an axe, but got off with a lighter sentence when he confessed to the crime, and during which he was cared for by one of his wives, Sonya, a former prostitute whose drunken father he had been friends with. He may or may not have moonlighted as Russian vigilante "Raskol" (lit. "The Axe-Haver", or, better translated, "Axe-Man" ), but there is also convincing evidence to suggest that this was Anton Chekov, so the mystery to his identity remains open.  While in Siberia, he recorded in his journal a very long dialogue with one of the inquisitors there about whether or not Jesus was a good guy. According to the grand inquisitor, Jesus is no longer necessary to the church’s mission -- in direct opposition to the message stated in the Bible. The inquisitor was angry with Jesus for not doing more back in the Gospel days. He should have turned the stones into bread, because men follows those who feed them, “Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!”. He should have thrown himself off the cliff and been caught by the angels, because then the people would know without a doubt that he was god. And he should have ruled over them on Earth, and insured that everyone go to heaven, because with such a wise ruler, how could he but insure the goodness of all mankind? If Jesus had directly refuted Satan’s challenge, the would would have been much better off; he would have provided direct, miraculous proof of God’s existence, and robbed humanity of a freedom which they are not capable of using or understanding, and thereby damned to hell as a result of their choices. And so it is the inquisitor and men like him who will shoulder the burden that Jesus should have taken up, leading the people and making their moral choices: "Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him".  Portrait of Doztoeveskee and his brothers, after he let himself go a little Post-Siberia, he wrote mainly to cover his gambling debts, was widely recognized as one of the greatest authors in Russia, and died age 59 from a pulmonary haemorrhage caused either by the police raiding his neighbor's apartment looking for anti-Tsarist terrorists or himself looking for a dropped pen holder.  Today we will be looking at one of his most important novels: Notes from Underground Notes from Underground is widely considered the first existentialist novel, and is all about a goon. Seriously. Our narrator, the Underground Man is a middle aged former civil servant who lives on an inheritance and pension. He lives in a crappy basement apartment, and suffers from liver pain and a bad toothache. He hates everyone and everything around him, because the world is suffering and any attempt to better the world is doomed to failure. The book is divided in half, with the first taken up by the Underground Man’s personal thoughts and feeling about utopianism and the world in general, and the second about his encounter with a police officer and visiting a prostitute. The main thesis of the first half, which is as close as Dostoyevski ever gets to writing a direct statement of intent, is that utopianism is doomed to fail, because people can always chose to act against their own self interest. Even if the great progressives and liberals are working their asses off to make the world a better place, there will always be bitter and vengeful people like him who will hurt themselves simply to prove that they can, that their lives are not predetermined, that they have free will. This is a direct refutation to Socrates’ claim that no man ever does evil, he simply does what he thinks is good. In the second half, the Underground Man is convinced that there is a police officer who is always around, but never seems to notice him. This infuriates him, because despite his self-loathing, he cannot stand the idea of someone being able to pass him over like that. He sees this man everywhere he goes, and decides that he will take revenge by dressing up like a rich person, then bumping into him without saying “Excuse me”. Like I said, he is a goon. He does so after weeks of planning, coordinating his shoulder bump like a general planning a coup, and the officer Doesn’t. Even. Notice. Needless to say, the Underground Man is angered by this. Next, he attends a going away party for an old friend from school, but the group fails to tell him that the time of the dinner has been changed from five to six, so he arrives early to find no one there. He hated them back then, but felt obligated to go. When they do finally come, he quickly gets into a fight with them, believing that they stand for everything he hates about the world. They abandon him and head off to a whorehouse, and he follows them, wanting to continue the argument, but by the time he gets in, they’ve already gotten rooms and are busy loving. So, like any good goon, the Underground Man hires himself a hooker and proceeds to tell her all about how horrible her life will be once she’s old and no longer pretty and no one will want to sleep with her and how she’ll die alone and unloved in the gutter. Unlike a goon, however, she is eventually won over by this vision of horror, and sees him as her savior. He gives her his address, and tells her to come over sometime. But he quickly descends back into goonhood, as he realizes that having a GIRL in his apartment would be scary, because look at this dump! He’s busy trying to make the place look respectable when she arrives and sees the sort of life he leads, and, rather than seeing him as the cool and detached Camus-like existentialist he presented himself as at the brothel, she instead sees the basement dwelling goon for what he is. Trying to save face, he yells at her, saying that he was just trying to humiliate her, trying to neg her, just like the guys in The Game said to, but she’s having none of it. He starts crying, embarrassed by his poverty and his lovely apartment and his lovely life. She gives him a hug. "They—they won't let me—I—I can't be good!" he chokes out. He then immediately goes back to treating her like poo poo, and then tries to pay her (it is implied that she has pity sex with him), but she throws the money back in his face and stalks off. He never sees her again. He ruminates on this, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to fantasize about what’s happening to her now, and how his treatment of her will change her life forever, and how this whole incident just proves that he was right all along, that the world is poo poo and that he’s right for treating people badly. It makes him unhappy whenever he thinks about it. So, as we can see, this novel contains many existentialist themes: the narrator wishes for perfect freedom in spite of social pressure, but unlike in, say, Sartre, it is contrasted with the actual difficulty of doing so. The Underground Man wants the freedom to say that 2+2=5, but is constrained by the laws of nature. He will never be perfectly free. There will always be obstacles in his way, both societal (the police officer will never notice or care about him) and personal (he will never be the sort of dashing hero that can help Liza the prostitute). He knows and acknowledges these things, despite how painful they are. Freedom and self-awareness are scary and awful things, and perhaps it would be better to live in a fantasy world, but to do so would be to delude one’s self and not face reality. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 17:24
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