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But will the absence of the death
dread eliminate the absurdity of
existence? Suicide, indeed, would be sense-giving because it
does give
choice to the one who ends his life, allowing him or her to have
control over the indefiniteness of life. It is thus that the
existentialists would claim that meaning can be derived from
nothingness.
Sisyphus, the
condemned man, has to go back down the hill, for that is when
the consciousness of his fate and his acceptance begins.
Sisyphus is without the merest hope, and yet he becomes the
absurd man the moment he
accepts this and "says yes to his task", when he
himself chooses to continue the torture which has been imposed
on him. He becomes master of his own fate. The absence of any
controlling force in the universe (or "essence") thus
becomes a positive factor. Sisyphus is the perfect symbolic hero
in that he attempts to save mankind from death which in its very
incomprehensibility, is also a kind of pointlessness.
But who are
these absurd people, for no one agrees to being classified as
existentialist. There is no single existentialist position.
Camus aligned himself faithfully to the philosophy of the absurd
while Sartre veered more and more towards Marxism claiming that
existentialism was "a parasitical
ideology on its margin". Sartre had spent a year in Berlin
studying Husserl and existentialism’s chief technical
philosopher, Heidegger. Husserl, following quantum theory,
interrogated how any proposition offered by science could be
objectively true. Like Descartes, Husserl too leans towards
reductionism in giving certainty to consciousness ("I
think, therefore I am").
Husserl served
as a philosopher at the University of Freiburg from 1916 to
1929. Originally a mathematician and a physicist like Descartes,
Husserl approached philosophy from the standpoint of precision
and accuracy which he
had already imbibed from his training. That is how his version
of "cognito" came into being. But where cognito was
the thinking individual for Descartes, for Husserl it is
consciousness of the world which constitutes being. In Husserl’s
thought, only consciousness is certain, which, on its part, is
connected with the world through "intentionality".
Sartre drew as
much on Husserl as on his student, the German existentialist
Martin Heidegger. For a while Heidegger disowned the philosophy
of his mentor and blew the trumpet of Nazism while poor Husserl
languished as a
Jew. Heidegger taught Sartre the distinction between the world
of conscious being and the world of things. Heidegger borrows
the Kierkegaardian Christian categories of despair, anguish,
nothingness, fallenness, anxiety, which in existential thought
arise from the concept of essences in every
age. For Heidegger, the relationship of existence to essence may
be related to the bigger issue of being. Neither Kant nor
Kierkegaard look at being as ontological.
The chief
existential proclamation that "existence precedes
essence" may be attributed to Heidegger. A life full of
essences can only produce inauthentic impersonal experience. But
the genuine existence of self-determination demands that one
take upon oneself one’s own destiny. All these concepts and
themes were to converge in Sartre’s thought. Appignanesi
treats Sartre, like the others, in a diffused manner. The
spectacled and thickset Sartre, as he is well caricatured by the
partner
artist, Oscar Zarate, is seen accompanying Husserl and Heidegger
on most pages of the book. Sartre uses the Heideggerian notion
and posits that the human self has existence but no essence. He
takes up Hegel’s ideas of "being-in-itself" and
"being-for-itself". The former implied a kind of
"is-ness"; the latter indicates what one "has to
be". Sartre’s hero, Roquentin (nausea), comes to this
realisation as he rides in a streetcar in Bouville: "This
thing I’m sitting on, leaning my hand on, is called a seat.
They made it purposely for people to sit on, they took leather,
springs and cloth, they went to work with the idea of making a
seat and when they finished, that was what they had made."
Roquentin
surmises that things as they are have no relationship with what
is attributed to them or the names that we give them. The world
is too full of words and explanations, essences, reasons and
truths that determine the nature of things or being. That the
streetcar’s seat is a seat is only one interpretation. Since
essences hardly fit existence, Sartre/Roquentin is faced by
nausea at the world. Everything around is nothing and yet
something at the same time. Suffocated, Roquentin jumps off the
streetcar and sits on a bench in a park where he sees the
exposed roots of a chestnut tree: "Never until these last
few days had I understood the meaning of ‘existence’ . . .
and then, all of a sudden, there it was clear as day."
Sartre’s
famous chestnut tree vision indicates how there is complete lack
of reason and rationality in the being of all things in this
world. Nothing is necessary or desirable. This is Sartre’s
view of the absurd and the end of Roquentin’s nausea.
This visionary
experience spells out the end of God and the Cartesian thinking
individual, all of which are essences created to approximate to
the self. Descartes claimed that every time one was conscious of
thinking, one confirmed that one existed. But Sartre reworks
Descartes and says that consciousness is empty. To think, for
the consciousness, is an act of essentialism. We think only when
an object imposes itself upon the consciousness.
The final
premises one can establish are those of individuality, freedom
and choice. As Kierkegaard, the earliest existentialist, wrote:
"I must find a truth that is true for me . . . the idea for
which I can live or die." This passionate individuality
allowed Nietzsche to proclaim the death of God, of orderly
universe and systematic reasoning. This is not the sort of
freedom that makes us only celebrate but one that simultaneously
fills us with dread because it allows us to choose
"choice", a choice so existential
that it brings about an alienation from consensus and the
majority. This choice also involves the freedom not to choose.
Hence, Sisyphus will not choose a life without torture that all
of us undoubtedly will. And thus Hamlet will always
procrastinate between being and not being.
The major drawback of
"Introducing Existentialism" is that it does not begin
with the beginning. Appignanesi is on a philosophical quest,
overlooking
that many might have purchased this book for origins and
definitions of a complex concept. Instead of taking the reader
to the deep end, I would advocate a simpler understanding of the
concept derived, perhaps, from Fuller who writes: "Their
major and differentiating thesis is the metaphysical
pronouncement that ‘existence is prior to essence.’ What
this means for the existentialist is that human nature is
determined by the course of life rather than life by human
nature."
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