existentialism, phenomology, alienation, nausea
existentialism
Word first appeared 1941: Branch of philosophy based on the situation of the individual in an absurd or meaningless universe where humans have free will. Existentialists argue that people are responsible for and the sole judge of their actions as they affect others. The origin of existentialism is usually traced back to the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard; among its proponents were Martin Heidegger in Germany and Jean-Paul Sartre in France.
All self-aware individuals can grasp or intuit their own existence and freedom, and individuals must not allow their choices to be constrained by anything - not even reason or morality. This freedom to choose leads to the notion of nonbeing, or nothingness, which can provoke angst or dread.
phenomenology
The study of all possible appearances in human experience, during which considerations of objective reality and of purely subjective response are left out of account.---The American Heritage® Dictionary
Phenomenology, 20th-century philosophical movement dedicated to describing the structures of experience as they present themselves to consciousness, without recourse to theory, deduction, or assumptions from other disciplines such as the natural sciences. The founder of phenomenology, German philosopher Edmund Husserl, defined phenomenology as the study of structures of consciousness that enable consciousness to refer to objects outside itself. This study requires reflection on the content of the mind to the exclusion of everything else. Husserl called this type of reflection phenomenological reduction. He identified the abstract content of activities such as remembering, desiring, and perceiving, which he called meanings. These meanings, he claimed, enabled an act to be directed toward an object. He held such directedness, called intentionality, to be the essence of consciousness.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Husserl's colleague and most brilliant critic, claimed that phenomenology should manifest what is hidden in ordinary, everyday experience. He thus attempted to describe what he called the structure of everydayness, or being-in-the-world, which he found to be an interconnected system of equipment, social roles, and purposes.
In the mid-1900s French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre attempted to adapt Heidegger's phenomenology to the philosophy of consciousness. Sartre agreed with Husserl that consciousness is always directed at objects but criticized his claim that such directedness is possible only through special mental entities called meanings.
Phenomenological versions of theology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, and literary criticism have been developed in 20th-century thought, and phenomenology remains one of the most important schools of contemporary philosophy. ---Encarta® 98 Desk Encyclopedia
alienation
----By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts- but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively. ---Erich Fromm
----Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals. ---Václav Havel
----There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation. ---Eugène Ionesco
----Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. ---R. D. Laing
nausea
In the best ordered of lives, there always comes a moment when the structures collaspe. Why this and that, this woman, that job or appetite for the future? To put it all in a nutshell, why this eagerness to live in limbs that are destined to rot?
The feeling is common to all of us. For most men the approach of dinner, the arrival of a letter, or a smile from a passing girl are enough to help them get around it. But the man who likes to dig into ideas finds that being face to face with this particular one makes his life impossible. And to live with the feeling that life is pointless gives rise to anguish. From sheer living against the stream, the whole of one's being can be overcome with disgust and revulsion, and this revolt of the body is what is called nausea. ---Albert Camus
bad faith
(French mauvaise foi) in the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, a type of moral self-deception, involving our behaving as a mere thing rather than choosing authentically. In bad faith, we evade responsibility and anxiety by not noticing possibilities of choice, or by behaving in a role others expect of us.
Sartre derives the concept from his metaphysical analysis of being. Humans must strive to escape mere being-in-itself and to achieve their true being, being-for-itself.
angst
(German 'anxiety') emotional state of anxiety without a specific cause. In existentialism, the term refers to general human anxiety at having free will, that is, of being responsible for one's actions.
being
All essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge ---Soren Kierkegaard
In philosophy, the basic state of existence shared by everything and everybody. Being is a fundamental notion in ontology and metaphysics generally, but particularly in idealism and existentialism.
ethics and morality
Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him. ---Rémy de Gourmont
The school of existentialism proclaims moral relativism. All individuals, it says, have their own life situations. No two are identical, for everyone else is part of the environment in which decisions must be made. All choices involve risk. There are no principles or standards that are right for all people at all times. New situations demand new approaches. What was once valid may be inappropriate now. In the world of the 20th century--with its rapid changes, endless wars, and moral upheaval--the ideas of existentialism have seemed correct to many people in the world.
Some existentialists base their position on religion. Even here they say it is impossible to fall back on moral laws or principles in making decisions. Choices must be made on faith, often in conflict with traditional moral guidelines. Individuals trust that what they are doing is right, but they can be entirely wrong. They commit themselves to the unknown, and the decision can often be an agonizing problem.
demythologized
Reinterpret what are considered to be mythological elements of (the Bible). Rudolf Bultmann was a pioneer of form criticism (the analysis of biblical texts in terms of their literary form), he made the controversial claim that the Gospels are largely composed of 'myths', which have to be reinterpreted in existentialist terms if they are to be relevant to contemporary needs.
In his two central works, History of the Synoptic Gospels 1921, and Jesus 1926, he argues that the Gospels not a reliable guide to the life or even to teachings of Jesus, being not 'biographies', but collections of various 1st-century Christian texts brought together by the evangelists. Many of these texts, he claims, embody mythic forms of thought and expression of the period, which are irrelevant or misleading in a scientific age and hence need to be reinterpreted, or 'demythologized', if their essential meaning - Christ's call to the spiritual life - is to be recognized. For this reinterpretation, Bultmann draws heavily on the existentialist approach of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (a colleague at Marburg during the late 1920s), and in effect reaffirms the Lutheran principle of 'justification by faith'.
Theatre of the Absurd
We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd. . . . Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste? . . . Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding? ---Norman Mailer
Avant-garde drama originating with a group of dramatists in the 1950s, including Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter. Their work expressed the belief that in a godless universe human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence, as in Beckett's play Breath 1970.
nothingness
Nonbeing. The concept is much used in existentialism, as in the title of Jean-Paul Sartre's work L'Etre et le néant/Being and Nothingness 1943.
In logic, it is an error to assume that every subject of a grammatical sentence is the name of a thing. So when 'nothingness' is used as the subject of a grammatical sentence, it must not be assumed that 'nothingness' is itself a thing, or the name of anything.
Some philosophers think that the problem of why something, rather than nothing, exists is the deepest metaphysical conundrum, whereas others consider it irrelevant.
Existentialism and Moral Individualism
Most philosophers since Plato have held that the highest ethical good is the same for everyone; insofar as one approaches moral perfection, one resembles other morally perfect individuals. The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who was the first writer to call himself existential, reacted against this tradition by insisting that the highest good for the individual is to find his or her own unique vocation. As he wrote in his journal, "I must find a truth that is true for me ... the idea for which I can live or die." Other existentialist writers have echoed Kierkegaard's belief that one must choose one's own way without the aid of universal, objective standards. Against the traditional view that moral choice involves an objective judgment of right and wrong, existentialists have argued that no objective, rational basis can be found for moral decisions. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche further contended that the individual must decide which situations are to count as moral situations. --Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia
Subjectivity and Existentialism
All existentialists have followed Kierkegaard in stressing the importance of passionate individual action in deciding questions of both morality and truth. They have insisted, accordingly, that personal experience and acting on one's own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth. Thus, the understanding of a situation by someone involved in that situation is superior to that of a detached, objective observer. This emphasis on the perspective of the individual agent has also made existentialists suspicious of systematic reasoning. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and other existentialist writers have been deliberately unsystematic in the exposition of their philosophies, preferring to express themselves in aphorisms, dialogues, parables, and other literary forms. Despite their antirationalist position, however, most existentialists cannot be said to be irrationalists in the sense of denying all validity to rational thought. They have held that rational clarity is desirable wherever possible, but that the most important questions in life are not accessible to reason or science. Furthermore, they have argued that even science is not as rational as is commonly supposed. Nietzsche, for instance, asserted that the scientific assumption of an orderly universe is for the most part a useful fiction. --Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia
Existentialism, Choice and Commitment
Perhaps the most prominent theme in existentialist writing is that of choice. Humanity's primary distinction, in the view of most existentialists, is the freedom to choose. Existentialists have held that human beings do not have a fixed nature, or essence, as other animals and plants do; each human being makes choices that create his or her own nature. In the formulation of the 20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, existence precedes essence. Choice is therefore central to human existence, and it is inescapable; even the refusal to choose is a choice. Freedom of choice entails commitment and responsibility. Because individuals are free to choose their own path, existentialists have argued, they must accept the risk and responsibility of following their commitment wherever it leads. --Encarta(R) 98 Encyclopedia
On Existentialism's Dread and Anxiety
On Existentialism: Man and Human Relationships
On The Problems of Existential Theology
On The Significance of Being
and any more links...
or quotes.
For believe me!- the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you men of knowledge! The time will soon be past when you could be content to live concealed in the woods like timid deer!
~Nietzsche