The problems of existentialism

[Santino]

what of the ascetic who does squirrel themself away in a monastery and pursue some search for inner enlightenment/realisation of the absolute self (which I've decided is what Hegel's stuff about consciousness basically is - a variant on Buddhist enlightenment/nirvana) - or even an isolated woodsman? Basically any human who isolates themselves from others...

They are options only available to us precisely because we are essentially social beings (we are being-with-others as Heidegger would say).

Similarly, when a human doesn't care about something, it's different from the way a rock or a tree doesn't care about something. Not caring about something for a human is possible only on the basis of having a general structure of caring about stuff.

 

[Jenerys]

Any more?

I have an essay to write by Monday.

*breathes*

Oh my god...how did you get it written

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Oh my god...how did you get it written

There was no essay.

Failed joke.

 

[Jonti]

eh but CJohn wasn't saying that is all existentialism is about, simply responding to the bullshit accusation that existentialism ignore wider social relations.

as for it being obvious, well is it? If you look at the approaches to mental health you see issues like depression are individualised and medicalised likewise rather than focussing on the social relations that is making record numbers of people 'depressed'. If you look at the readiness with which bullshit evolutionary psychology just so stories are pimped by the media and readily accepted by many. How this or that social mailaise is being reduced to some sort of gene?

What about the pathetic misanthropic humanism that was being spouted in that thread about the 'self destructiveness of man' and how man hasn't learn from history etc?

That points to a systematic failure of left-wing thought to understand existentialism alright.

Now what?

 

[goldenecitrone]

There was no essay.

Failed joke.

Just shoot your tutor on the beach.

 

[Jonti]

For existentialism the universe is irrational; for Marxism it is lawful. The propositions of existentialist metaphysics are set in a context of cataclysmic personal experience. They all flow from the agonising discovery that the world into which we are thrown has no sufficient or necessary reason for existence, no rational order. It is simply there and must be taken as we find it. Being is utterly contingent, totally without meaning, and superfluous.

I see the problem. Existentialist metaphysics, eh? Don't miss next week's exiting installment on "Philatelic Positivism".

For dialectical materialism, reality has developed in a lawful manner and is rationally explicable. The rationality of nature and human history is bound up with matter in motion. The concatenation of cosmic events gives rise to cause-and-effect relations that determine the qualities and evolution of things. The physical preceded and produced the biological, the biological the social, and the social the psychological in a historical series of mutually conditioned stages. The aim of science is to disclose their essential linkages and formulate these into laws that can help pilot human activity.

Oh, great, the author now sets about constructing an arbitrary metaphysic with which to oppose an unnecessary one. This can only get better!

The existentialists go wrong, say the Marxists, in making an eternal absolute out of the occurrence of chance events and unruly phenomena.

Along with the particle physicists, no doubt.

Marxism says that nature is prior to and independent of humanity. Human existence, as a product and part of nature, is necessarily dependent upon it. Existentialism holds that the objective and subjective components of being do not exist apart from each other, and that in fact the subject makes the world what it is.

This is the contradiction the author has laboured to produce.

Yet we know that humans are animals, Homo sapiens, a species that emerged in the natural world according to the principles of evolutionary biology (*not* a determinist science). To be a conscious human body is exactly to experience that inexplicable consciousness in the midst of a brute reality.

There's no contradiction here. All that's going in is a shifting between two complimentary views. We can look at ourselves from the outside, as might a biologist. Or we can see the world from the personal perspective of a particular conscious organism, a person in the world with its fellows.

quotes

 

[Jonti]

Nature is prior to and independent of humanity. Human existence, as a product and part of nature, is necessarily dependent upon it. The objective and subjective components of being do not exist apart from each other; the organism, the conscious body, makes its world what it is by interpreting nature. Interpretation is the essence of consciousness; so one is condemned to freedom.

 

[Meltingpot]

I'm not being silly about this, but do we actually need to ponder our existence? Cows don't wonder about why they're there; they just eat grass, make messes in the fields, copulate once in a while and probably admire the scenery too. Are we any better off for feeling we have to figure things out all the time, especially since far cleverer people than me don't seem to have come up with answers having any degree of substance?

What's wrong with just saying, "You might as well live" (Roxy Music lyric, though I think Ferry was quoting someone else)?

I've done tons and tons of thinking in my life, but with the occasional exception all I've ended up knowing are the limits of my intellectual ability.

 

[joe_infinity]

the difference between humans and cows, is that cows dont know they are going to die

 

[goosegrease]

the difference between humans and cows, is that cows dont know they are going to die

Probly going off the point but cows do seem to have a sense of death and of each other in relation to them selves. Having worked with them I've noticed some interesting things about their more subtle behaviour.
First of all they have a pecking order, sorted out almost straight away when you introduce a number of them together. The ones lower down will not run at the feeders but hang back, let the others eat and eventually take it's turn. Says to me that on some level that animal understands the consiquence of it's actions, if it runs at the food first it will face the wrath of a more aggressive member of the herd.
The way they react when one or two of them are seperated from the rest. The others don't like it, they become agitated and seem to act fearful. Weather its just because it leaves a gap in the pecking order to be filled or if the cows actually sense some kind of impending death for that animal I don't know.
If one of them goes off it's feet and is left behind when the herd is moved the others seem to take in turns to nose at it before leaving. Saying good bye almost, to see it is almost humbling, what appears to me to be an act of sensitivity towards the fate of their friend.
Finally, and not to be crass they know when the knacker man arrives. They don't just look on dumbly but can become very agitated as soon as the gun is pulled out on show, even the illest and lamest will attempt to stand up.

Am I projecting human concience onto animals where it dosn't exist? Is it simply the herding instinct distorted by domestication? Can a cow on some level contemplate it's own fate and project it onto other cows?