Transcript EXISTENTIALISM

EXISTENTIALISM
IN AMERICAN FICTION
AND
PARADIGM SHIFTS IN
ETHICS AND MORALITY
Existentialism?!
Paradigm shifts?!
Postmodernism?!
EXISTENTIALISM
(term coined by Gabriel Marcel)
- A school of philosophy in the 20th century which focuses on human individual
existence and lived experience.
- Emerges after World War II, when questions about freedom and responsibility arise.
- Representatives : Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Alber
Camus (France); Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich
(Germany); Jose Ortega y Gasset (Spain)
- Forerunners in literature: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka (foreshadowing
existentialism: St. Augustine’s Confessions, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Voltaire’s
Candide)
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
(1874-1963)
EXISTENTIALIST THEMES
-
Concrete existence
Freedom
Responsibility
Anti-systematic thought
Affectivity: moods, emotions (love, hate, etc.)
The subjectivity of truth(s)
Forerunners of existentialism in philosophy
Søren Kierkegaard
(1813-1855)
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844-1900)
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind [about]
what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in
so far as a certain knowledge must precede every
action. The thing is to understand myself, to see
what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to
find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for
which I can live and die. (Kierkegaard in a letter to
Peter Lund)
Being and Nothingness
(1943)
Freedom
Choice
Responsibility
Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905-1980)
en-soi (in-itself) vs pour-soi (for itself)
[W]hat are we then if we have the constant obligation to make
ourselves what we are if our mode of being is having the
obligation to be what we are? Let us consider this waiter in the
café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a
little too rapid. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his
eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the
customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the
inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his
tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a
perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he
perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and
hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to
changing his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one
regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seems to be
mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity
of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he
playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is
playing at being a waiter in a café.
The “waiter-thing”
The “doctor-thing”
The “soldier-thing”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(1821-1881)
Notes from Underground
(1864)
(1952)
(1914-1994)
(1951)
(1919-2010)
The motto of Pencey Prep:
“Since 1888, we have been
molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young man”
*(1944)
Saul Bellow
(1915-2005)
(1956)
Then his mother had made the mistake of mentioning her
nephew Artie, Wilhelm’s cousin, who was an honor student at
Columbia in math and languages. [. . .] He was now a
professor, this same Artie with whom Wilhelm had played
near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on Riverside Drive.
Not that to be a professor was in itself so great. How could
anyone bear to know so many languages? And Artie also had
to remain Artie, which was a bad deal. But perhaps success
had changed him. Now that he had a place in the world
perhaps he was better. Did Artie love his languages, and live
for them, or was he also, in his heart, cynical?
(Seize the Day p.16)
Philip Roth
(b. 1933)
All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no
self, and that I am unable to perpetrate upon myself the
joke of a self. [. . .] What I have instead is a variety of
impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—troupe
of players that I have internalized, a permanent company
of actors that I can call upon when a self is required, an
ever-evolving stock of pieces and parts that forms my
repertoire. But I certainly have no self independent of my
imposturing artistic efforts to have one. Nor would I want
one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.
(The Counterlife 320-21)
Minimalism
Raymond Carver
(1938-1988)
“I suppose I began to drink heavily after I'd
realized that the things I'd wanted most in life for
myself and my writing, and my wife and children,
were simply not going to happen. It's strange. You
never start out in life with the intention of
becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat
and a thief. Or a liar.” (Carver in an interview)
PARADIGM SHIFTS IN
ETHICS AND MORALITY
Paradigms
Patterns of thought and
discourse within a certain
field of study or discipline.
MORAL/ETHICAL
PARADIGMS
METAPHYSICAL
(Essentialist)
CULTURAL
CONSTRUCTIVIST
(Anti-essentialist)
PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND
Socrates (Plato)
knowledge = virtue =
happiness; if you know what is
right, you will act morally
Aristotle
The ultimate goal of a
good life is self-realization
Deontological ethics (ethics of duty)
Categorical Imperative
– a single a priori (intrinsically valid ) moral
obligation deriving from
an innate sense of “duty”
Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804)
“The starry sky above me and the moral law inside me”
Marc Hauser: “[W]e are born with abstract rules or
principles, with nurture [socialization] entering the picture
to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of
particular moral systems” Moral Minds: How Nature Designed
Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (2006)
Utilitarian ethics
Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832)
John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873)
Moral value is determined by utility. The goal to be
attained is the greatest happiness of the greatest
number for the greatest number of people.
Solidarity-based views of ethics
Judith Shklar (1928-1992)
Cruelty is the worst thing we do, solidarity is to
be based upon the avoidance of cruelty and
humiliation at all costs.
Richard Rorty (1931-2007)
Solidarity is a matter of “we-intentions,”
contingent on our membership in a community.
Cultural anthropology
Ruth Benedict
(1887-1948)
No one civilization can possibly utilize in its
mores the whole range of human behavior. [. . .]
Normality, in short, within a very wide range, is
culturally defined. We [should] not any longer
make the mistake of deriving the morality of
our own locality and decade directly from the
inevitable constitution of human nature. [. . .]
We recognize that morality differs in every
society, and is a convenient term for socially
approved habits (“Anthropology and the
Abnormal”)
ETHICS AND LITERATURE
“Seventy Thousand Assyrians”
1. If I have any desire at all, it is to show the
brotherhood of man.
2.
We grow up and we learn the words of a
language and we see the universe through
the language we know…
William Saroyan 3. I am thinking of Theodore Badal, himself
seventy thousand Assyrians, [. . .] and man,
(1908-1981)
standing in a barber shop, in San
Francisco, in 1933, and being, still, himself,
the whole race.
William Styron
(1925-2006)
(1951)
(1979)
(1979)
Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave
statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever
understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with
more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about
Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how
absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz
itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet
made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a
response.
The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"
And the answer: "Where was man?”
“Good Country People”
Flannery O’Connor
(1925-1964)
Bret Easton Ellis
(b. 1964)
(1991)
(1985)
When we get to Rip's apartment on Wilshire, he leads us into the
bedroom. There's a naked girl, really young and pretty, lying on the
mattress. Her legs are spread and tied to the bedposts and her arms are
tied above her head. [. . .] She keeps moaning and murmuring words
and moving her head from side to side, her eyes half-closed.
Someone's put a lot of makeup on her, clumsily, and she keeps licking
her lips, her tongue drags slowly, repeatedly, across them. Spin kneels
by the bed and picks up a syringe and whispers something into her ear.
The girl doesn't open her eyes. Spin digs the syringe into her arm.