For
the following three weeks, we will take a detour from Continental
thought to consider the Analytic and Pragmatic traditions of Britain and
America, as well as the philosophy of science. After this, we will
return to France to consider Structuralism, Poststructuralism and
Postmodernism. Note that as we turn from Heidegger to Sartre, we turn
from German to French philosophers of the Continental tradition.
Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)
Just
as Nietzsche had studied to be a Lutheran minister before turning to
philosophy, Heidegger originally studied to be a Catholic theologian,
but after exposure to medieval European Neoplatonism he switched to
philosophy and wrote his thesis on the Neoplatonist Duns Scotus. Fun
fact: Because Duns Scotus argued that all things are alive, including
rocks, he was labeled an idiot, and this is where the term ‘dunce’ comes
from (which is oddly not in spellcheck, perhaps because the term is no
longer much in use).
Husserl,
the phenomenologist, took Heidegger under his wing as his star pupil at
the University of Freiberg, and as Husserl’s phenomenology rose to fame
and gathered followers Heidegger began to gather fame and followers of
his own. Husserl wanted a science of the mind, a radical criticism of
all philosophy and psychology up through Kant’s metaphysics and Hegel’s
phenomenology. Husserl is famous for the idea of intentionality, that
consciousness is always directed toward something or away from something
by intention, similar to Fichte’s idea of Das Ich and the dynamic of
assertion and resistance. Husserl studied the various and often subtle
ways we are intentional in our world. Husserl kept writing and
expanding his work, but rather than develop a new alphabet for thought
as he had originally intended his work snowballed out of control and
continued to amass until his death. Heidegger picked up Husserl’s work,
but merged it with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and took it in an
Existential direction. Heidegger forms his own insights based on the
work of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl.
Heidegger
wrote his central work, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), in 1927.
Unlike the work of Nietzsche, it was immediately popular. Heidegger
argued in Being and Time that philosophy is a beginning, the way one
weighs anchor while setting sail out into the vast ocean. This recalls
Schopenhauer’s ship, bobbing on the stormy sea. For Heidegger, we are
thrown into the world, which Heidegger calls ‘thrownness’, and find
ourselves in an inhabited world as a ‘there-being’, or ‘Dasein’, a term
Heidegger borrows from Hegel just as Sartre would later borrow the term
‘existential’ from Heidegger. For Heidegger, the goal is not the system
of absolute knowledge as it was for Hegel, but attaining an authentic
transparency of one’s own self and purposes.
Heidegger
asks: How do we experience reality before and as we arrange it? What
is the ground of being that supports our views and values? We approach
the world, each other, and objects either as closed and identified or as
mysterious, uncanny and miraculous. For Heidegger, industrialization
and technology have disenchanted the world, and so we must question the
world and re-enchant it to live authentically, choosing ourselves as
Kierkegaard saw it, in a world of manufactured commodities. Mystery and
truth appear only in the cracks of our industrialized reality when
things break or go missing. My good friend who got me interested in
philosophy, who was a Heideggerian, used the example of dropping the
soap as you take your morning shower. Objects and persons all but
disappear until they are out of place or misused, until they are
problematic, and then we become conscious of them. Consider a poster on
a wall that we stop seeing after time, which then becomes new again and
leaps out if we call attention to it.
Heidegger
argues that every revealing is a concealing, that history both gives us
our meanings as it removes others from our sight, using the metaphor of
a forest clearing, an open space that is also enclosed, revealing what
is within while concealing what is outside. For Heidegger, Being and
beings withdraw from our grasp as we grasp them, similar to
Merleau-Ponty’s insight that we do not perceive things as we perceive
them. Time continuously gives us the present as it takes the present
from us. Meaning is always historical, always has “historicity” for
Heidegger. Remember that Hegel’s great contribution to philosophy was
thought as a historical process. For Heidegger, being is always bound
up with time, and thus his title, “Being and Time”. Time is the horizon
of being. Time gives us our meanings and then threatens to take them
away as it stretches beyond. As time and being are seen and unseen, so
there can be no absolutely grounded judgment, interpretation or meaning.
Care and life are always as much for oneself as much as for something
else that never fully arrives, just as we never reach the horizon.
For
Freud, thought is denial of sex. For Heidegger, thought is denial of
death. Understanding oneself as a simple and singular being, the
conception of closed scientific facts and categorical, eternal, absolute
truths is the way we cope with the fear of death. This is similar to
Lacan’s idea of our self-image. We are in a basic state of anxiety
towards our world that extends over the horizon just as we are afraid of
particular people and objects. The things in front of us distract us
from our more basic and fundamental fear of the world. Nietzsche gives
Heidegger this picture, arguing that we can ignore the void by turning
to absolute immutable morality, or we can give up, find no universal
meaning in life and embrace nihilism, but rather than either of these we
should create our own meaning, though Nietzsche sees this as an
individual activity that is corrupted by participation in social
movements.
Heidegger
agrees that we must make our way from absolute being to nihilism and
beyond to understand ourselves as essentially becoming and
transformation. Out of the basic state of anxiety spring love, fear,
rejoicing, suspicion, and a variety of ways we interact with our world.
True freedom is realizing this and gaining self-conscious transparency.
We must resist reducing ourselves, our truths and even objects as
“ready-to-hand” if we wish to truly live. We kill the world and
ourselves continuously in the attempt to avoid death, but if we accept
death and meaninglessness, we are free to live and give our lives
meaning. If we realize we are running off into the woods to avoid being
lost, we can learn to dwell comfortably at home.
For
Hegel, to recognize being is non-being is to understand becoming. For
Heidegger, to recognize we, our world, and everything and everyone in it
is enclosed but remains open and alive is to live authentically. To
get what one truly wants, one has to accept and encompass its opposite.
Nietzsche also argued for just this sort of encompassing, a rejection
of exclusive limitation and an embracing of inclusive limitation. For
Heidegger, there can be no metaphysics, either Platonic rules of the
world or Kantian rules of the mind. Recall that Leibniz and Kant argued
for the metaphysical rules of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
For Heidegger, there can be no complete theory about how theory is
possible. This is terrible news for philosophy, in that it will never
be complete, but good news for philosophers, who will always have more
to do, and thus can continue to eat if they can find employment in the
first place.
Like
Nietzsche, Heidegger argues that things can always be variously
interpreted, as can the process of interpretation itself. Heidegger
called this ‘hermeneutics’, a term which was originally used to refer to
the interpretation of religious texts but that Heidegger applies to all
interpretation of meaning. Heidegger argues that we cannot fully
understand our understandings, nor would we want to. The basic way that
we are in the world is only partly articulated, only partly controlled
and explicit. Like self-contradiction for Nietzsche, this is both a
good and a bad thing, good when it is authentic and accepted, bad when
it is inauthentic and dishonest.
Our
reality is unclear, not fully determined, which is what makes choices
meaningful. Like Kierkegaard, who influenced Heidegger, we must choose
for ourselves how we interpret the world self-consciously if we wish to
be authentic. Our thinking rests on a complex situation that is never
fully thought, our behavior resting on automated behaviors that are not
consciously chosen. Even if we were to have a complete modeling of the
brain, it rests in a situation that surpasses any explanation or
modeling in it complexity. We do not need to conceive of gravity or the
solidity of the earth for these to support our process of thinking.
Similarly, only the articulated part of thought, that occupied by our
focus of attention, is at issue for us.
Our
being, which Heidegger calls Dasein, is open-ended, always at issue for
itself. We are constantly projecting ourselves into the future, and
interpreting ourselves in terms of the past. Dasein is often thought of
as an individual being, but it is in fact any identity an individual
takes on, any ‘they’ in which we participate. In the same way that I
propose to speak for my left hand, in one way giving it no say in the
matter, but in another speaking for it as it, our projected being is
social, as are our various forms of identity. To work with a group is
to be the group, to assume its identity, while also ambiguously
remaining an autonomous individual. We are our culture and subcultures
as we are ourselves.
Heidegger
also places emphasis on language, as we define ourselves using whatever
language we use. Children learn culture and language without the need
to fully articulate it as a system of explicit rules. As Dreyfus, the
respected Heidegger scholar at Berkeley and my Heidegger professor,
rightly points out, Heidegger’s thought is very similar to the later
work of Wittgenstein. When we are not fitting together with our
culture, we are uneasy even if we do not know an explicit reason.
Dreyfus uses the example of standing too close during a conversation,
which varies with culture. Zizek cynically uses the example of actually
explaining how one’s day has been after being asked casually by a
waiter, when the ‘correct’ reply is to simply say, ‘good’, regardless of
how good or bad it has been. Unfortunately, we live in a culture in
which things are largely ready-at-hand, and quite disposable and
replaceable. Heidegger fears this, setting the stage for the Frankfurt
School’s fear of the culture industry and commercialism, which they
considered to be the new highly evolved form of fascism.
Human
being is essentially self-interpretation. We are constantly trying to
close and ground our being, give ourselves a limited meaning, but this
is inauthentic and ignorant, as we are interpretation and nothing more
specific than this. Heidegger refers to inauthentically trying to fix
one’s meaning and identity as ‘falling’ and ‘fleeing’. Like
Kierkegaard, we can foolishly run from our true selves into socially
constructed meanings as set and given, or we can take up our being as
authentically open-ended. Unlike Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, however,
Heidegger allows for this to be social as well as individual. As long
as choices are recognized as open and remaining at issue, we can take
social as well as individual stands authentically.
We
are the things we live with, as well as the others. One is the food
one eats, the clothes one wears, even the ground upon which one walks.
We automatically and unconsciously use the things that are involved in
our daily routines, just as we do the social roles we inhabit. We are
surrounded by equipment, as Heidegger says, which we use automatically
without articulating it. It becomes a part of us, an extension of
ourselves, as we use it. Heidegger uses the example of a walking stick,
through which we feel the ground. Groups of equipment belong together
in systems that, like culture and language, need never be fully
understood or articulated. We best use equipment when we are not paying
particular attention to it, when we and our world are in sync. It
exists for us, but as “unthought”, just outside of focus.
The
interesting cases, where we focus on equipment, is when there is a
problem that interrupts the flow. Originally, shamans were often
individuals who survived near-death experiences or other ordeals, that
caused them to look at the world differently. Great periods in the
history of human thought often involve terrible crises and times of
trouble. We only pay attention, giving things articulation, when there
are problems. There can be slight problems, total breakdowns, as well
as things and people completely missing. The worse the problem, the
more long term planning must be involved, the more we are concerned with
time. The greater the issues, the farther forward in time we must
project ourselves, the larger and longer view that we must take.
Heidegger uses the example of a hammer, which one could find is too
heavy or light for the job at hand, or missing entirely. Things are not
articulated, are not different from other things, unless we are paying
attention to them. Heidegger calls the present (such as a rock) and
available (such as a hammer) “modes of presencing”, as well as “modes of
concern”.
Heidegger
argues that the equipment which best allows us to be absorbed into its
use while also calling our attention to the situation of its use is the
sign. Signs became important for later Structuralist, Poststructuralist
and Postmodern thought in France. Heidegger uses the example of a turn
signal on an automobile, which seems oddly secondary to road signs, an
example Wittgenstein uses around the same time writing in Britain.
Signs orient us in a situation, revealing the social situation of their
use to us. Later, members of the Frankfurt School such as Adorno and
Marcuse consider the more problematic example of mass advertising, which
they argue distracts our attention from the present social situation.
The
world is disclosed by equipment used and social roles enacted. It is
not experienced as fully articulated, but as a whole with which one is
familiar, out of which particulars that are required or that become
problematic are articulated. Our world and the situations in it are
thus only partly articulated, similar to Gestalt theory of psychology
which famously argues that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
For Heidegger, the whole is more integrated than an articulated set,
only becoming articulated when it is in focus, similar to the
individuation of Schopenhauer. Most of our activity, including the use
of equipment and the enacting of and reacting to social roles is
unthought, in the background, though not inexperienced. Our familiarity
with things allows us to interact and experience them without
articulation, without paying particular attention to them.
Much
as Schopenhauer argued that it is conceptualization that individuates
the world, creating individuals, Heidegger argues that our world is not
articulated, does not consist of individual things, unless we articulate
and individuate it with our thinking. Given that there are no absolute
vacuums in the universe, no complete exclusive separations outside of
our conceptions of exclusive difference, this is surprisingly plausible.
Our actively disclosing things as problematic, of concern and at
issue, is the separation and bounding of all individuality and
exclusivity. We are constantly oriented in our world by care, but when
care becomes a problem things are brought to attention and given
limitation. When our absorption in the world is disturbed, things
become distinguished. While it appears that our world originally
consists of individual things that are exclusive, whether or not we are
paying attention to them, this is only because anything that comes to
our attention is then distinguished and individuated, unlike the
majority of our experience which lies just outside of our attention but
is still part of our experience.
Just
as for Hegel reality is both subjective and objective together, a
social construction, for Heidegger the world is not dictated by the
subject, but neither is the subject dictated by the world. Both are in a
symbiotic relationship of mutual affectation. Heidegger argues that we
can inauthentically ignore the role of the subject, and believe our
world to be simply objective, or we can inauthentically ignore the role
of the world, and believe our world to be simply subjective, but if we
grasp things authentically we understand that each is empowered to
codetermine the other. Our environment determines us, but we can
recreate our environment. While a sign directs us, orienting us in our
shared world, we can, individually or socially, ignore or redesign (not
“read de sign”), and can reappropriate our equipment and social roles.
This recalls the work of the Dada artists, some of the first modern
artists, who as Heidegger wrote Being and Time were recontextualizing
familiar objects as art, as well as question social roles by making them
obscure and obscene.
For
Heidegger, knowing is primarily a familiar how, not a given what.
Outside of a context of use, structures and measurements are
irrelevant. Things are meaningful for us only given what we have done
and what we are going to do. A hammer is only useful given that it has
been located, materials for its use have been gathered, there are hours
in the day left, and it is not lunchtime. Similarly, Wittgenstein uses
the example of the brake lever of a train cabin, arguing that it is
meaningless when detached from its complex situation. Heidegger is
adding temporality to this picture, arguing that our situation is also a
temporal situation.
Times
are socially coordinated, such that activities have appropriate times
as well as appropriate scopes of time. These are not simply given in
the world, or entirely determined by a culture or an individual, but
codetermined by the interaction. I could decide all on my own to use a
hammer to build a bookcase, but I will have difficulties if I decide to
build it at night over my neighbors’ objections. The possibilities are
not entirely enclosed, but relatively disclosed, and we are constantly
moving from one situation to another, with different concerns and
expectations. We share space and time publicly and privately, without
any complete gap between these two. Our concerns conform to and are
opposed to the concerns of others, and this determines how we experience
space and time.
Heidegger
calls this “distancing”, the process by which we are near to that which
concerns us and far from that which does not concern us. ‘Near’ and
‘far’ here are superspatial, not merely concerned with physical distance
in space but with the focus of our concern, accross time, space and the
social. We are near to “where our mind is”, and far from where it
isn’t. Consider that intimacy is considered ‘closeness’, or the song
title, “I Left my Heart in San Francisco”. Heidegger says that Dasein
is essentially “distantial”, becoming whatever it is concerned with, as
it is its concerns. We make things present to us regardless of distance
in space or length in time. Consider that when we say, ‘humanity’ or
‘science’, we are bringing before ourselves, as ourselves, countless
people and things that span continents and millenia. Recall that
Merleau-Ponty, who was very influenced by Heidegger along with his
friend Sartre, recognized that we use the word ‘grasp’ to signify
understanding, as well as ‘see’ to signify reasoning. Heidegger uses
the example of the ground beneath our feet, which we use but do not
feel, as more distant from us than the friend we see from accross the
street. Just like Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger would argue that this is not
“merely metaphorical”, but rather fundamental, even if also
metaphorical, to our world, which is our experience of it.
For
Heidegger, we are thrown into a world occupied already by a ‘They’,
which we are a part of even as we are opposed to it in our
individuality. Consider the expression, “You know what they say”. Like
Fichte, Heidegger believes that one can join the They authentically, as
a true calling and creation of new meaning, but also like Kierkegaard,
Heidegger argues that that the They can easily make us inauthentic,
presenting us with meanings that we are afraid to question, making us
feel bound to conform, enraptured by culture as an open opportunity and
terrified of culture as a closed conformity. Heidegger argues that
Descartes, as well as the solipsist, are aware of and argue for their
own isolated existence, for their own self-certainty apart from the
They, only when they consider the issue a problem. Before this, the
They is just as primordial to our world as our individual selves. In
fact, Heidegger goes so far as to say that our world and our own selves
are more the They then they are anything else. We are as certain of
others as we are of ourselves, and only question the existence of others
(like the solipsist) or question the existence of ourselves (like the
Buddhist) when we engage in deep philosophical questioning.
Because
we are what we do, we and our world are our opportunities, conditioned
by our culture, and these can be lived as authentically open or
inauthentically closed. The fact that much of our experience is
unthought is both a blessing and a curse. While we can only be
authentic or inauthentic given what we do with what we think, not with
what we don’t think, the unthought conceals itself as unthought, and so
we may not get around to rethinking it. Similarly, the fact that we are
a part of the They is both a blessing and a curse. While our social
world gives us all of our opportunities, including countless pieces of
equipment that are designed for anyone to use and social roles that many
can enact, if via distancing we question the They too much, we feel
that we have lost our ground, the bedrock of all meaning. However, if
we look at things authentically, we realize that neither the They nor
our own selves can give complete grounding to any meaning. Just as
Nietzsche argued, if we face this courageously, this is the greatest
opportunity for the creation and recreation of meaning.
Heidegger
says that there are various moods or attunements by which we experience
the world. These moods can be individual or social, the mood of a
classroom, a culture, or an age. Consider German pessimism, and how it
affected popular culture and intellectual thought for a certain culture
at a particular historical period. In his later thought, Heidegger
claimed that the ancient Greeks experienced the world primarily as
wonder, that modern society experiences the world primarily as anxiety,
and that Germans should seek to recreate the mood of the ancient Greeks
for themselves, to re-enchant a world enclosed by technology and
information. Consider the hippies and the revival of primitivism in the
wake of the Vietnam war. Moods determine how things are for us,
determine our relationship to them and what opportunities they present
us with. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger is critical of the idea that we can
be objective and escape our moods, and both argue that a great scientist
should be attuned to the mood of discovery and expectation of new
opportunity.
Heidegger
does not give a complete catalog of moods, but he does distinguish fear
from anxiety. We fear particular things and flee from them, but
anxiety has no object. We experience anxiety when we do not know what
to do, when our situation breaks down and opportunities evaporate.
Heidegger argues that in anxiety we face the total groundlessness of
our world and all possible meaning. Just like Nietzsche, who argued we
must have the courage to face the void and then create for ourselves,
Heidegger argues that we can inauthentically run from anxiety by finding
something to fear, or we can face it, learning to transform it into
excitement, a fearless calm that is ready for gaining or losing any
particular opportunity. Many scholars have compared this to Buddhist
enlightenment, while many others have attempted to draw distinctions.
It is known that Heidegger had a copy of the Dao De Jing in his
personal library, and there are passages of his works that sound similar
even though no sure conclusions can be drawn from this.
Authenticity
is an acceptance of anxiety and the world, and the joy that results
from this acceptance is the ability to appreciate the world as open and
groundless just as it is. The earth is not grounded, but floating in
space. Authenticity is not so much a choice as an ability acquired
through questioning and learning to dwell in a world that is endlessly
questionable. One is able to see more opportunity for growth and
overturning than before, which is why philosophy should not grounded in
metaphysics and science should not be grounded in fact. In every
situation there are unique opportunities that have never been present
before. In his later work, Heidegger sought how this could be greater
achieved for a culture, as he hoped that the modern Germans would return
to the ancient Greek mood of awe. Unfortunately, ancient Germanic
culture was largely obliterated by the Romans, or Heidegger might have
well wondered, like Neopagans, how to return to the mood of the ancient
Germans.
As
with the ethical thought of Kant and the political thought of Locke, we
will only briefly in this class cover Heidegger’s political involvement
with the Nazis, which I cover more extensively in the political
philosophy class along with fascism and the thought of Mussolini and
Hitler. The Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s was the time when
Heidegger did his critical writing and gained fame and position, a time
when many feared the fall of Western European civilization. Heidegger,
like Rousseau and Nietzsche, was an anti-modernist anti-technology
romantic who spoke of Greece as a more glorious and meaningful time.
Like Fichte, a German nationalist and antisemite, Heidegger idealized
the simplicity of the German common Volk.
For
a period of seven years, from 1931 to 1938, Heidegger was a member and
supporter of the fascist Nazi party as it rose to power and took
authoritarian control of Germany and Austria. Though he eventually came
to doubt the party, spoke critically of its development and was put
under surveillance by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), he
enthusiastically embraced their rise and seizure of power, spoke at
propaganda rallies in several cities, and openly spoke of the Nazis as a
rebirth of Western civilization, a return to the revolutionary times of
ancient Greece. How is it that he believed the Nazis, a fascist regime
enthusiastic about racism, censorship, and brutality were a magnificent
chance for questioning, renewal and transformation? Heidegger told the
Allied Denazification committee that he had hoped the Nazis would drop
the racism eventually. Heidegger had, in the early 30s, been having an
affair with a Jewish student named Hannah Arendt, who went on to become a
political philosopher and supporter of Heidegger.
Jean Paul Sartre (1905 - 1980)
Sartre
(pronounced, ‘Sart’, though the British pronounce it ‘Sar-truh’), who
coined the term ‘Existentialism’, is often known better as an author of
novels and plays than as a philosopher in Britain and America. This is
in part political. With Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in Russia, many
European intellectuals had to choose whether to continue to be Marxists
or to abandon Communism all together, often remaining socialists or
‘post-Marxists’. Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), a friend of Sartre,
author of The Stranger and The Rebel, chose to abandon Marxism, while
Sartre decided to continue to identify with Communism, continuing to
believe that violent revolution was unfortunate but in the interests of
the common people, much like his friend Fanon. Camus rejected the label
‘Existentialist’, calling himself an ‘Absurdist’, like the Dada
artists.
Sartre
saw his own philosophy as an extension of the work of Heidegger. In
response to Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre wrote his Being and
Nothingness. In it, he argues like Heidegger that the basic condition
of humanity is anxiety, inauthentically interpreted as fear of
particulars in the face of the indefinite unknown, and that much of the
time we avoid this deeper fear by trying to keep what we like and avoid
what we hate. In the process, we become ignorant of ourselves, of the
world, and of our relationships with our fellow human beings. Sartre,
as a Heideggerian, argues that there is a consistent way that we
inauthentically try to avoid the dynamic life of our relationships with
others, both those with whom we are intimate (family, friends, partners)
and those whom we pass on the street or encounter in a shop.
Sartre
uses his famous example of a waiter in a cafe to illustrate. Sartre
did much of his writing in the cafes of Paris, and he describes the
scene as if he is witnessing it firsthand. The waiter in a cafe plays
his role, overemphasising the rigidity and seriousness of the gestures,
the bows, the distribution and collecting of menus, the seriousness with
which orders are taken, to define himself as a waiter, filling his
role. We and he come to inauthentically see him as a waiter, and not as
a human being. The waiter becomes a robot, and his individuality
disappears, both for our and his comfort. We find it easier to interact
with a role than with the actor as a person, and the actor finds it
easier to lose himself in the role than to try to retain individuality
while serving in his position. Recall Zizek’s earlier example. For
Sartre, it becomes easy for us to lose sight of the situation as a
whole, that this is not a waiter in essence but a human being playing
the role of a waiter. While it would be tiresome to say, “Excuse me,
authentic human individual playing the temporary role of a waiter, can I
have another espresso?”, our substitution of the word ‘waiter’ for the
individual does violence to our awareness of the situation.
Sartre
wrote Antisemitism and Jew in 1944, as Paris was liberated from the
Nazis. Like Nietzsche, Sartre argues that racism, that which the Nazis
had for Jews as well as that which the French had for North African
Arabs and native Africans, is a similar violent inauthentic effort to
box up the other rather than deal with the complexity of our fellow
human beings. In one of his plays, Sartre’s main character famously
says, “Hell is other people”. We are constantly faced with others who
do and do not know themselves as we do and do not know ourselves. Like
the horizon of time for Heidegger, the ‘other’ threatens to give us new
meanings while taking our meaning away. To face this authentically is
to have a good and positive faith in life and the creation of meaning.
To have what Sartre calls “bad faith” is to trust that meanings are
closed and dead, that the waiter is nothing more to oneself than a
waiter, that the Jew or African is nothing more to oneself or one’s
nation than simply ‘Other’ with no relation.
Sartre,
like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, believed that art can liberate us from
the common human condition, however most art for Sartre is inauthentic.
Much literature reinforces our prejudices and ideas, giving us a
shallow and false substitute for meaning in an increasingly mechanized
and commodified world. Sartre sought to write and entertain in ways
that opened up audiences to examine themselves, their world, and each
other with new possibilities of meaning and activity. This is as true
of the individual, who could come to identify with the waiter as a
friend, as it is of society, which could come to identify with the
marginalized and oppressed. Rather than hold up barriers between self
and other, we must, as Hegel argues, seek resolution of contradictions
not merely to gain the powers of reason, but to be truly alive.
Sartre’s
circle of fellow Existentialists included Merleau-Ponty, whom we have
already discussed, as well as Simone De Beauvoir and Franz Fanon.
Simone De Beauvoir (1908 - 1986) was a novelist and philosopher who had
a central impact on the second wave of feminism that rose in the 1960s.
She studied mathematics and philosophy, writing her thesis on Leibniz.
She began teaching at the same school as Merleau-Ponty, and then took
the top test for philosophy in France, placing second just after Sartre.
The two became close, and Sartre asked her to marry him, but instead
the two shared a lifelong open relationship, never sharing a house or
having children. Some have argued that Sartre took many of his best
ideas from discussions with her, presenting them as his own. Today, the
two are buried next to each other.
De
Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in France in 1949, arguing that women had
been marginalized as the mysterious yet inferior Hegelian ‘Other’, and
that, just like in marginalization of ethnic groups and the poor, women
were cast as irrational and so their voices and problems went unheard
and disregarded. Famously arguing that one is not born a woman but
becomes one, she argued as an Existentialist that women must recreate
their identity, choosing themselves as individuals as Kierkegaard would
have it. For this, she is known as the founder of Existential Feminism,
or Feminist Existentialism, both terms in use. Judith Butler, one of
the most famous feminist philosophers today, similarly argues that
gender is a performance.
Franz
Fanon (1925 – 1961) began his career in psychiatry and became a
revolutionary whose writings are a central source for Postcolonialism.
Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony.
Though middle class, he witnessed the racist brutality of the French
military toward the African population who were descended from slaves
brought by the French to Martinique to work on plantations. Fanon went
to France and studied psychology and medicine, becoming a doctor and
psychiatrist. He also studied philosophy, and attended lectures by
Merleau-Ponty. Later, he ran a hospital in Algiers, applied
experimental methods in anti-racist psychiatry, and supported the
Algerian rebels against French colonialism.
In
Fanon’s Damned of the Earth, which was published in 1961 just before
his death, Fanon argued that colonialism had taught black people to
interiorize racism such that they considered themselves evil and ugly
and thus became self-destructive and violent against their fellow black
people. Fanon, in accord with the Existentialism of Nietzsche and
Sartre, saw racism as a form of lying to oneself to avoid the endless
transformation of our existence and the questioning gaze of the Other.
The black body and mind is devalued to affirm and celebrate the West,
white culture and achievements including colonial control of the globe.
His writings have been an inspiration to many anti-racist and
anti-establishment groups, including the Black Panthers.
