EXISTENTIALISM
FINAL EXAM STUDY REVIEW
Exam date: Monday, 12/9/02
CB 431, 12-3 pm
I) CONTENT
A) JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-80)
1. Definition(s) of
existentialism: two kinds, human subjectivity,
facticity and freedom, dignity, responsibility for one’s existence, atheism.
2. Essence and Existence:
ontological categories referring to specific modes of being
3. Essence precedes existence:
fixed, pregiven, predetermined, nature; being-in-itself (l’ętre-en-soi);
manufactured object (paper-cutter); technical view of the world.
4. Existence precedes essence:
atheistic existentialism (God is dead), subjectivity as starting point, two
senses of subjectivism, anti-essentialism, man as “thrown project,”
existence as self-transcending (ekstasis) temporal project or plan.
B) FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
(1844-1900)
1. Nietzsche’s Unifying
Philosophical Focus: The Historical Problem of
Nihilism
2. Diagnosis of
modernity:
an age of nihilistic décadence
in which European man’s highest values have devaluated themselves.
3. Modernity as nihilistic décadence:
the “death of God,” devaluation of highest values, transitional nihilism
(loss of historical teleology and transcendent values), new modern idols,
reductive leveling to the herd, the “death of God,” loss of higher types,
the order of rank, or the pathos of distance (egalitarianism,
democracy, rights, equality, etc.); modern myth of progress (cf. to
strong ages like the Renaissance), pity, altruism/egoism, the Madman
and the “death of God,” nihilism as disorientation and as despair,
etc.
4. Platonic-Christian nihilism:
dualistic and otherworldly metaphysics, historical teleology, slave
morality, réssentiment, the ascetic ideal, decadent decline of
natural instincts (décadence), otherworldly orientation, escapism,
and life-denial (heaven, immortality, the afterlife as reward and
punishment, devaluation of this world); Christianity, pity, hatred of
the earth, genealogy of the “shabby origins” of morality (beyond good and
evil)
5. Nietzsche’s project to overcome nihilism:
the will to power, revaluation of all values, amor fati (love of
fate), overcoming nihilism and man, age of the “last men,” Zarathustra and
the overman (Ger., übermensch), “beyond good and evil” (slave
morality), slave morality versus master morality, we higher types, we free
spirits (the order of rank), freedom, Dionysus against the Crucified,
affirmation of life,
C)
SŘREN KIERKEGAARD (1813-55)
1. Diagnosis of modernity: Modernity is a
spiritless age plagued by the social-political, religious, and philosophical
dissipation of the existing individual through a reductive leveling
of spiritual tensions essential to authentic selfhood.
2. Social-political dissipation in the leveling
crowd: negative equality of leveling
(Danish, Nivellementet) to the herd or crowd, the existing individual
and passion, bourgeois society, mass media, passionate disjunctions,
universality over particularity, bloodless abstraction of individual
(Danish, Individet) as a ghost, mirage, shadow, living dead, number
in the crowd, numerical instant, etc.; passionless reflection as derived
image and paralyzing deliberation (Danish, Reflex or Reflexion),
envy (Danish, Misundelse), the public, the press, abstractions, etc.
3. Attack on Christendom:
lifeless formalism, mechanized doctrinal conformity, bourgeois social
institutions (domesticates and anesthetizes restlessness of existing
individual [Enkelte]), conformism, social stability, leveling of
passionate disjunctions (either-or), oppression of objectivity, etc.
4. The Dissipating Effects of the Reflective
Philosophy of Objectivity: Hegel’s philosophy as
reflective, objective, speculative, abstract, pagan; as a theoretical
dissolution of the individual in the absolute system that precludes existing
as a passionate individual with inwardness (Danish, Inderlighed);
Hegel’s mediation of all distinctions absorbs all passionate disjunctions of
the existing individual (homogenous uniformity), harmonization of all
opposites and tensions in the speculative unity of reason, etc.
5. Proposed
solution: restoration of restless, spiritual
tensions (passionate either-or choices) necessary for spiritual existence
(eternity/time, infinite/finite, sacred/profane, universality/particularity,
etc.), the present age needs to reestablish oppositions, contradictions, and
existential/spiritual tensions leveled by bourgeois Christendom and its
philosophical expression in Hegelianism.
D) G. W. F. HEGEL (1770-1831)
1. Diagnosis of
Modernity: Modernity is a spiritless age plagued
by personal, social, political, religious and philosophical fragmentation,
alienation, and conflict.
2. Social and
Political Fragmentation: industrialization,
commercialization, machinery of state, economic competiveness, class
divisions, abstract specialization of cognitive spheres, abstract and
atomistic individualism, etc.
3. Religion and
Self-Alienation: subjective (folk, living,
fully individuated, effective in the inwardness of one’s being, active in
outward behavior, based on universal reason) vs. objective
religion (formalistic, ceremonial, dogmatic, codified, abstract, positive,
authoritarian, alienating, mechanistic, heteronomous); Folk religion vs.
positive religion, unhappy consciousness (reified dualisms as unsurpassable
oppositions rendering reunification impossible and self-alienation
unavoidable), the oppression of objectivity, etc.
4. Reflective
Philosophy of Subjectivity: reflection,
understanding/reason distinction, alienating dualisms or dichotomies,
fragmentation: estrangement, alienation, bifurcation, division,
diremption;
5. Proposed
Solution: Spiritless fragmentation (bifurcation,
alienation, disunity) of the present time requires unifying philosophical
comprehension in order to mediate the full range of conflicts characteristic
of the age; sole interest of reason (German, Vernunft):
reconciliation of fixed, absolute, rigid oppositions alienating human nature
from itself and the world; dialectical unity of union and nonunion, identity
and difference, self and other; etc.
E) RECURRENT THEMES
1. Rejection of
Traditional Speculative Metaphysics: transcendent
absolutism, essentialism, the spectator attitude, Nietzsche’s parable The
Madman, Platonic-Christian nihilism, otherworldly orientation, dualistic
metaphysics and the devaluation of temporal, embodied, natural, historical
existence;
2. Critique of
Modernity: Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche
3. The “Death of
God”: Nietzsche and Sartre
4. Reductive
Leveling: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
5. Prominent
Concepts and Distinctions: essence/existence,
facticity/freedom, abstract/concrete, involuntary/voluntary, human
temporality, situated interpretation, autonomy/heteronomy,
subjectivity/objectivity, particularity/universality, spirit/spiritlessness,
existing individual/anonymous and leveled herd, crowd, masses;
being-in-the-world or being-in-situation,
II) FORMAT
1. 20 Multiple choice
questions (40 points)
2. 8 Short answer questions
(40 points)
3. 2 Essay questions (20
points)
4. Extra credit (5 points)
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