Transcript consequences analysis and the problem of a sense

Existentialist views- consequences
analysis and the problem of a sense
of existence
Aura Ciobotaru
[email protected]
Existentialist views
-consequences analysis and the
problem of a sense of existence
Introduction
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In this paper I want to present shortly some different existentialistic views, in their
main ideas. I want to identify the common assumptions, and to analyse the
consequences of one or other view. In the end, I want to compare them, and make
some conclusions.
I also want to sustain one of those points of views, because of its consequences on
human life and need of sense.
First I will present Sartre’s view on freedom and being- for- itself, as opposed to beingin- itself, and his portrait of the person which chooses violence and destruction as an
attitude towards the facticity and inexistence of necessary truths in the external world.
But in the end, he admits a possible different solution.
Then, I will analyse Nietzsche’s idea of suverainity of the powerfull will, with its
reasons and consequences; I will present also his theme of eternal return, as passing
Schopenhauer’s pesimistic view on life, as a solution. I will make many interrogations
on his assumptions on his life perspective.
The answers to these interrogations, I will search in Dostoievski’s novels, “Crime and
Punsishment” and “Karamazov Brothers”, where the supremacy principle is largely
argued, with reference to concrete situations and characters. In the end, it is rejected.
Existentialism
• Existentialism starts with some common assumptions,
as: we did not choose to live, but we live, we are lonely
and free with not excuses, with lack of other people in
our most significant life situations, we will day,
unexpectedly, and we do not find in this world a
superior significance or an undoubtable truth.
• On these problems, authors and philosophers found
some perspectives that they addopted: the conflict, the
will to power, as construction or destruction of an
world, bad faith, or moral responsibility, faith, as free
choices, even without necessary moral truths.
• Any of those view has the same degree of sustainability,
even any of them has different consequences and
significance in our lives.
1. Jean Paul Sartre’s main
existentialist ideas
One of the founders of the existentialism is Jean Paul Sartre
a. Theory
The existence is placed between "the nothing“, “being in-itself"
and “being for-itself“. This is the freedom.
-Being in itself refers to things and to others, which we can
give a determination
-Being for itself brings at light the incompleteness and at
the same time freedom of human existence.
• Presence for itself, is followed of absurd and contingence, as
existence is opposite to necessity.
b. The problem
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Individuals feel abandoned, with a sense of anger at the
universe.
-Anger and despair lead to a tendency to embrace "Bad Faith."
-Bad Faith represents a self-deception in which the person
views self as an object, not as a person with free will.
Violent type is a form of bad faith, which bases on the possesion
of the world, which offers him continuous new things needed to
be destroyed.
Violent person believes in an evil world with an evil will.
-Generosity itself is nothing else than a craze to possess.
In this view, people had lost the sense. It misses them.
c. The solution of Sartre
• Sartre’s solution is a moral existentialist
approach, opposed to the one of enjoying the
possession of this world or things, in any
possible sense.
• We are free to avoid bad faith and to create our
own nature and values.
• The despair and rebellion we feel for the missing
of external sources of value, are the way to find the
value within. That value is invulnerable.
2. The existentialism of Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer
• a. Problem:
• Schopenhauer founds they are only two alternatives to existence: boring
or suffering.
• Nietzsche passes Schopenhauer, with his concept of will to live and
eternal return.
• Schopenhauer’s two alternatives represents an aesthetic stage, how
Kierkegaard would say.
• In this stage, either individuals are concerned with only experiences, searching
to accomplish their wishes and pleasures, which leads to suffering, or with
collecting abstract data, as the pure intellectual-type which observes world in a
detached objective manner.
• The Schopenhauer solution: ‘willing must become not-willing’. (ibid.)
• This solution is much closer to death and non-existence.
• Nietzsche’s solution: the‘will backwards’- the full assumption of the
creative powers of the will.
b. The solution of Nietzsche
• Nietzsche’s “love fate” means to be able to choose in
the completeness of present moment, above past and
future, and be able to conclude that our life is worth
living over and over again.
• This is an more optimistic solution to the problem of
existence.
• On the ‘gateway’ described in Zarathustra, is the
Moment from which we can consider: ‘my life is worth
living again and again and such is my will’.
3.1. Nietzsche’s will to power
and assumptions
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Nietzsche discusses separately or connected to the love of fate, on “the will to power”.
Will to power is connected and leads to the idea of the supremacy of the powerful will.
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Assumptions:
Nietzsche starts with the idea that there are not necessary moral truths, as, generally there can
not exist an absolute truth.
The world itself is a will to power.
We can not really care about our fellows, we may love better the one which is further.
Everyone has their world and their will. Our worlds are separated one with another.
The love for our fellows is just a lye, a general concept, which hides our incapacity to really love
any certain particular individual.
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So, the result on which we may arrive, is that life for every individual is will to his own power.
This is the expression of an attitude towards a world as Nietzsche describes it.
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Problem: We arrive at one problem here. In this context, the will to power becomes the will for
the supremacy.
3.2. Dostoievsky and the consequences of the
will to power
a. The problem of will to power
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The idea of the will to power on Nietzsche, Dostoievski also analyses in his writings.
He explores in his writings the same problems, to one point, with ones of Nietzsche.
Common problems : the impossibility to love our fellows, or to found a moral in the
absence of necessary and a priori moral truths.
So, if nothing is truth, then everything is allowed.
But where does this leads?
In Crime and Punishment, it is the idea of Raskolnikov, and in The Brothers
Karamazov, is that of Ivan- that the powerful one, has the right to be above the
others, and to have the supremacy on them.
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Starting from the same problems, still, Dostoievski and Nietzsche arrive to different
solutions.
b. The idea of will to power analysis
• Dostoievski analyses the principle of supremacy, and its consequences, that
are negative. They are negative for the person who tries to apply them.
• In his novel, Crime and punishment, he starts from a case that illustrates the
injustice of a social norm.
• The denial of this norm by the hero of the novel, and the wish to change an
unfair world order leads him to the idea to apply the supremacy principle.
• But how can be the supremacy principle applied?
• Is it possible to change a world, with an idea?
• Or, the new world, like the old one, are both parts of the same world- the real
one? And then, the powerful one isn’t just part of the same world with the
others?
• “Real” isn’t just our interpretation, which stays upon our own expectations,
wishes and needs, isn’t this what Nietzsche himself says?
• Nietzsche himself can be interpreted by his own conception and perspective
of world.
c. The consequences of will to power
• Raskolnikov kills in the name of an idea, and as an
exponent of Good.
• He wants to make a better world order.
• But his act, the crime, makes him an exponent of Evil.
• This bounds him on the old world, in which he is now
just an usual killer.
• Much more, being in the situations to make nondeliberated acts, he fails to apply his idea, he looses his
basic connections with the world.
• He did not succeed, after all, to make a new world.
Conclusions
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After all, isn’t there the idea of the supremacy only the wish to
deny an world that never was the one we wished, more then the
will to make a new world?
Isn’t it this idea and trying just the expression of a failure to ever
have that world that we would have wished, but never was real?
Maybe this is the reason for which people wish the power.
Because that world they would have wished, never was and will
never be.
Maybe wish to change the world or change something in it, is
not the right way.
Which is, than, the right way to act and to be in such an world,
which every existentialist philosopher seems to conceived in a
similar way?
Solutions
• Maybe it is from inside that we can value the world and other
people.
• The right way is to live our live with the faith that the source of
our value can only be internal.
• And this gives value to the world.
• In consequences, we must act moral, by expressing our free will
and capacity to create and project sense in the world, according
to Sartre, by avoiding bad faith and honoring the responsibility
we have to create our own nature and values.
The despair and rebellion we feel at the loss of our external
sources of value are the necessary price of a greater value and
happiness that comes from within, or the punishment for having
wanted that the value and sense having been in the world, in the
outside.
The choice
• One might imagine that if one could face one's death, face the impossibility of
getting any value from any external accomplishments, and still find value
within oneself, that value would be invulnerable. It could never be taken
away.
• So, authenticity is only right solution, and then will come the value that we
projected to the world, which now changes, the same world which wasn’t
have a given meaning, and no meaning, before.
• First, in choosing our own human nature, according to Sartre, we choose
human nature for all humans. Hence, we must choose courses of action that
we would wish all humans to take. In choosing for ourselves, we choose for
all men.
• This is what finally concludes Sartre, and Dostoievski- by Dmitri’s choice in
the end, by the solution of general assumed moral responsibillity, with the
price that it is.
• Freedom means we are free to create: value, sense, for us, into the world and
for all others people.