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Some passages from Walter Kaufman's "Existentialism from Dostoevsky
to Sartre," Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter
Kaufman (New York: Penguin Books USA, Inc, 1975) 11-52
"The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaciton with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life -- that is the heart of existentialism" (12)
". . . individuality is not retouched, idealized, or holy; it is wretched and revolting, and yet, for all its misery, the highest good." (12)
Discussing Kierkegaard:
"Owing to the vast prestige of Greek philosophy, which in turn was influenced by a profound respect for mathematics, Western thought has made its calculations, as it were, without the individual." (16)
"Reason alone, to be sure, cannot solve some of life's most central problems." (18)
"The initial impulse of Jaspers' Existenzphilosophie was
not a doctrine but a dissatisfaction with mere doctrines and the conviction
that genuine philosophizing must well up from a man's individual existence
and address itself to other individuals to help them to achieve true existence."
(23)
1. Existence precedes Essence
Choice is definitive of the nature of an individual. You don't know
a person's choices until they make them. Therefore, our nature unfolds
in the time of living our lives.
2. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself
We make decisions, and these decisions constitute our nature.
3. Man exists and only afterwards defines himself
Three Distinctions:
1. Existence / Essence: Focusing on the former
places emphasis on the decision points we work through under conditions
of finitude. Focus on the later emphasizes the possibility of ideal
conditions which transcend limitations of existence.
Existentialists are suspicious of using an essentialist/ idealized conception of human nature to live by. Life is in concrete choice under conditions of finitude.
2. Pure consciousness / Self: One's mental state is transparent to one's own consciousness or immediate intuition. [From EOP:] The self, unlike pure consciousness, does not disclose itself exhaustively to immediate intuition and for precisely this reason belongs among the objects that transcend consciousness. (Again, our situation with respect to our "self" is characterized by finitude. Note influence of depth psychology here.)
3. En soi / Pour soi: En
soi: the being which is complete in itself. Pour Soi:
the being that it aware of itself. Sartre's question, "What
must the pour soi be that self-deception is possible?"
Kaufman's example: "A man is not a ... waiter, or a coward in
the same way in which he is six feet tall or blond. Choice enters
into the decision to have our being pour soi.
A knowledge of the general conditions of the human situation does not by itself tell us how to live.
At its heart, existentialism is a philosophy based on a description
of the human situation which tries to appeal to nothing but the direct
experience of human choice -- coupled with a strong suspicion that
we use ideas for solace and to bugger us from the pain and difficulty of
existence.
©1997 by Mark Alfino, Department of Philosophy, Gonzaga University.