Basic Trends of Existentialism

Existentialism is one of the major currents of philosophy in Western Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, which was the era of the loss of traditional religious values and moral orientations, the era of human solitude in the flow of Being. Unlike philosophical anthropology, existentialism offered another paradigm of man. A fundamental feature of existentialism was understanding of man as a unique being. This paradigm was called the philosophy of human existence. Being of each individual is considered as absolute by existentialists. The central philosophical concept of this theory is existence as a specific human being, being on the verge; being in some boundary conditions, namely, despair, fear.

One must bear in mind another essential feature of existentialism – understanding of man beyond his rationalism in emotional self-experiences and empathy, which open the door to the true mysteries of human Ego.

Existentialism is usually divided into atheistic and religious forms. These directions interpret boundaries of human existence and the possibility of overcoming them in different ways. Religious existentialism is the result of Christian culture. So it may be called the Christian Existentialism. The best-known representatives of this direction are Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. Among the outstanding representatives of the atheistic Existentialism are Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. What does atheistic existentialism stand for? Atheistic existentialism is based on the assertion that human essence is the deployment of human existence in this world. Transcendent nature of human nature is denied. Atheistic existentialism left man alone without ideas of God. Atheistic existentialism philosophy is a philosophy of quite lonely man. This is the philosophy of man who piled on the knowledge of the illusory promises of religion and like Sisyphus he took it up to the summit of his life.

Religious existentialism is based on the idea of creation of man by God. But God created man not completed and open to dialogue and development. God did not limit man with the frame of some ready-made essence, he should become himself through his existence. In contrast to the atheistic Existentialism, religious Existentialism believes that the essence of man is beyond the limits of earthly existence. It is Man’s existence seeks to attain transcendence (God and one’s own Eternity) through the inner, intimate break for it. This is what makes religious existentialists claim the eternity of human existence that raises man above the absurdity of some certain situations of life.

The founder of German existential ontology was Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). He taught chiefly with an interlude at Marburg. In 1933 he became Rector of Freiburg and expressed his adherence to Nazism, which he never expressly repudiated. He had his own sort of cultural nationalism, thinking that philosophy could only be done in German (though once it could be done in Greek). Like Wittgenstein he was something of a guru. His phenomenology of the individual is, though obscure and full of neologisms, interesting. First he saw the individual as thrown into his world — not the cosmos but the world for him, where things are “to hand”, to be used and treated. He was a maker rather than primarily a thinker. The Cartesian picture of us being inside a cabin looking out with interest is not Heidegger’s. A person is a temporal being, reaching out beyond himself, but recognizing his finitude, for we are bounded by death. Dread of death and nothingness calls us towards authentic existence: only the individual in silence can come face to face with his nothingness and create destiny for himself. While Heidegger’s analysis, especially in his “Being and Time” (1927), saw the individual ineluctably made of time, it is not very much interested in history in the wider sense, though Heidegger looked on himself as in continuity with such a philosopher of history as Dilthey.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1988) was born in Paris and studied there and later at Freiburg with Heidegger. He taught at high schools before World War II. After capture and release by the Germans he lived in Paris during the war and completed his major philosophical work “Being and Nothingness” (1944). He emerged as the leader of existentialism after the war, and with his novels, plays and philosophical writings became the most brilliant intellectual of his day. He tied in his existentialist ideas with Marxism, but with no great consistency.

While he accepted Heidegger’s time-bound view of the individual he added new qualities to the concept of authenticity. The human being is characterized by “being-for-itself”, while things have “being-in-itself”. So the individual is forced to think of himself as free, beyond the world of things into which he is projected, and beyond any definitions which may be imposed upon him by others (for instance, he might be thought by others to be essentially a waiter). Authenticity means not accepting these external definitions or roles, but by the same taken decisions cannot be laid out in advance by criteria of rationality. Such stark choices as we authentically make, then, are non-rational. Sartre’s existentialism is atheistic, but God’s absence is positive.

The problem of the meaning of life, choice, freedom, responsibility is a central theme of existentialism Sartre. Freedom – is man’s choice of himself, his project and responsibility for choices made. Man, according to Sartre is absolutely free. Recognizing determination of his actions by the nature, God or society – means to limit his freedom and the specifics of his existence, bring him to the state of things. In any situation there are choices; in any case, man may choose death, and this would be an expression of his freedom. But by choosing life, he should bear all responsibilities arising from this choice. Sartre was little interested in social and political freedoms. He put the main emphasis to existential freedom. At the existential level, he said, even the slave is free and no one is powerful to destroy the possibility of his choice.

Sartre’s emphasis on freedom doubted moral values as social regulators of human relations. If a particular individual freedom is something quite positive as a manifestation of his existence, then all that limits its value becomes negative. To accept general moral norms means to bring a unique existence of an individual under the subjection of the universal law that is tantamount to loss his existence. Thus, the question arises: what values man should choose to remain Man?

Sartre declares that man himself is the source and purpose and the criterion of values. He creates values and chooses among them. In choosing moral values man relies neither on nature nor on God. He is doomed to act on his "fear" and "risk". Hence the anxiety and despair seized him. Man appears alone and abandoned in the world; anxiety and despair are his charge for freedom. "We are freedom which chooses - Sartre emphasizes - but we do not choose to be free, we are condemned to freedom" (Jean-Paul Sartre: “Existentialism is Humanism”).

But such total freedom requires the same total responsibility. Being condemned to freedom, man carries the burden of the world on his shoulders.In Sartre work "Existentialism is humanism” there is a very original study of the real" existence” human character. Humanism here is that as man continually transcends and goes beyond the limits of himself (so-called phenomenon of intentional orientation), the human subjectivity is an essential characteristic of man’s being in the world. It reminds man that the meaning of the world passes through him and he is responsible for everything that happens around.
So the problem is only that man ought to have a "clear conscience" while choosing. The choice should not be made on rational account or under pressure of circumstances, or pre-defined rules, but on recognition that each individual is the creator of human values and that his original ("ontological") freedom is the foundation of all values.

In analysing some of the existential and phenomenological motifs of French and German philosophy it is necessary to mention one important figure of Karl Jaspers (1883-1969). Apart from his noble way of standing up to the Nazis (he was saved from concentration camp by the arrival of American forces at the end of World War II), he is notable in his interest in world-wide worldviews.

He was critical to attempts to identify philosophy with science, and his justification for including sages among the philosophers lay in the fact that worldviews are ways of interpreting the signs of the Transcendent in the world around us, rather than to explain particularities of scientific theories of nature.

It should be noted that Karl Jaspers (like the whole philosophy of existentialism) gives an important place to such existential quality as freedom. It is the result of human awareness of uncertainty of his position in the world and the need to solve the very problem of existence on his own. Freedom, in his opinion, is a direct result of human finiteness and the origin of our actions and realization of the whole being. Thus, freedom in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers conceptually does not exist as a self-goal. It can not be owned, it is shown when man striving to realize himself makes his choice.

Jaspers represents his communication conception as existential that can express itself only through communication.

Modern Spiritual crisis Jaspers connected with the collapse of traditional values, with the decline of religious faith in particular. Therefore, he suggested his version of faith instead of religion and its ideological replacements - a philosophical belief turned to human soul and to the conditions of his true self-being. Philosophical faith is the faith into human possibilities, freedom breathes within it.

Positivism: essence and historical forms Прослушать

На латинице

Прослушать

На латинице

The work of Nietzsche, the coming of Sigmund Freud, the expansion of socialist thinking, evolutionary theory and the rapid development of European nationalism all took the mood of thinking away from the rational ideals of the Enlightenment. But on the other hand the Victorian age saw the heyday of liberalism, which took up some parts of the earlier concerns, such as the rights of man. The explosive impact of the new discoveries of irrationality in the very fabric of the human psyche had greater effect between the two World Wars than they did before 1914. Meanwhile, though, a large change had been effected as a result of post-Enlightenment social and political changes. This was the increasing concentration of philosophy upon the universities. Increasingly philosophers were university professors, and the art became more and more professionalized. Knowledge in the nineteenth century was getting to be much more specialized. The scope for such wide-ranging thinkers as Descartes or Leibniz was lessening. The tendency was, too, for sub-branches of philosophy to get hived off - into political science, psychology, sociology, and so forth.

There were some discoveries likely to make traditional philosophers pause. Notably, there was the work of Nikolai Lobachevski (1793—1856) and Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (1826—1866) in creating non-Euclidean geometry, which was bound to affect the whole post-Kantian tradition. There were new developments in logic.

There were other remarkable advances in logic, which assisted in the emergence of technical ways of doing philosophy, especially after World War II, and which helped along the process of professionalization in philosophy.

After the eighteenth-century's critical work in the Encyclopedia the nineteenth century could make a new one which would prepare the new industrial and scientific system, prepared the way for the systematic Positivism of August Comte (1798—1 857). He studied science in Paris, and became secretary to Saint-Simon, though the two men quarreled after seven years. Comte lived somewhat marginally thereafter, tutoring and lecturing. His lectures on Positivism were published as a “Course of Positive Philosophy” (1830-42). Various other works followed, including his “Positivist Catechism” (1852). In effect he was founding his own religion of humanity, which he outlined in his “Discourse on Positivism as a Whole” (1848).

One of his most influential ideas was his theory of three stages of human development. This he applied both to human history and to individual growth (less plausibly). The first stage is the theological - beginning with a rather vague endowment of material beings and forces with wills and feelings somewhat analogous to human ones. There are three sub-stages: animism (or fetishism), polytheism (when the gods are more personalized) and theism or monotheism. The next stage Comte described as the metaphysical, when gods and Gods are transformed into abstractions: an inclusive Nature is postulated, along with such forces as ether or gravitation. The third stage is the positive one. Henceforth people give up the search for the real, and confine themselves to phenomena and descriptive laws, enabling prediction. Comte coordinated these stages to forms of society — the first involves the imposition of order by the warrior class and issues in militaristic authoritarianism. Next we have a critique of the preceding era, and the evolution of the idea of the rule of law. Finally, in the positive period there is the growth of a scientific and industrial society, dominated by scientific elite. This period also needs the development of a new study, namely sociology. Both nature and society will be under human control. Comte divided the new science into two branches, namely social static, to do with the structure of society at a given time, and social dynamics, which deals with the evolution and progress of society. He thought that the age of science and industry would naturally tend to peace and love, since these are unifying ideas. To reinforce this he proposed a positivist religion, to worship the Great Being - now that God but Humanity itself. (This attracted fierce criticism from John Stuart Mill.)

The second wave of positivism was that of Machism of scientifically oriented German philosophers E.Mach (1838-1916) and R. Avenarius (1843-1896), who wished just not to find a scientific base for philosophy but to find a means of banishing metaphysics, or what they considered to be metaphysics. In comparison with the first stage they aimed to work out the theory of knowledge. In fact they came back to traditions of gnosiology of subjective idealism presented by D.Hume and G.Berkley. One of the central concepts of Machism is "experience" which, according to Mach, is a collection of original sensitive data, "elements", ostensibly neutral in relation to physical and mental. The philosopher argued that the concept of physics, no matter how abstract they are, can always be traced to the sensory elements of which they are built. E. Mach actually brought philosophy to the methodology of scientific knowledge. He considered that knowledge to be a process of progressive adaptation to the environment. He believed that the basis of scientific knowledge is not facts but sensations.Прослушать

На латинице

The third step of Positivism named Logical Positivism and Linguistic Philosophy was attempted at the beginning of the 20 century by a group of philosophers rallied round M.Schlick. It included such scientists as R. Carnap, Fr. Waismann, L. Wittgenstein and B. Russell.

Their chief move was to formulate a criterion of meaning, namely the verifiability principle, often called the verification principle, which stated that the meaning of a sentence lies in its method of verification. That verification was usually thought of in terms of sense-data reports. It follows that any statement which cannot be verified by sense-data is meaningless. The Logical Positivists believed that this would dispose of all metaphysics, including God. Some, such as Carnap, built up impressive edifices out of the bricks of sentences about sense-data.

But Positivism, so brashly anti-metaphysical, broke down. For one thing, what was the status of the verification principle itself? Merely a stipulative definition that tells us how it is best to use “meaning”? In that case, other paths can be taken. How, too, can universal claims ever be verified? You cannot count all electrons. Or should we take it in a weak form as proposed by neopositivists sense-data are relevant to the truth of meaningful utterances but need not be able to prove or establish them? But God could creep back here on the weak criterion. Then again, sense-data takes us back to Hume and Berkeley. How to break out of phenomenalism, which looks suspiciously like idealism? Positivists looked as if they had walked in from the eighteenth century.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a much larger and more adventurous figure. Not only did he do remarkable work in mathematics, but published on a huge range of philosophical topics, from Leibniz to pacifism, and from logic to marriage. His most important books are ”Principia Mathematica”, with A.N. Whitehead (1910-13), “The Analysis of Mind” (1910),”Our Knowledge of the External World” (1914), “An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth” (1940) and his “Collected Papers”, in 7 volumes (1983-84), edited by Kenneth Blackwell and others. He was educated at Cambridge and in Berlin, and spent most of his career teaching in Cambridge. But he was in prison for pacifism in World War I, and taught in the US during part of World War II. The latter part of his life he devoted to anti-nuclear campaigning. He shared the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950 with William Faulkner.

Various views of Russell came to have very wide influence. One was his and Whitehead’s derivation of mathematics from pure logic. Another was his theory of types, in which he tried to avoid logical paradoxes, and his theory of descriptions. The paradoxes seemed to wreck the basis of mathematics.

In metaphysics Russell, partly under the influence of Wittgenstein, adopted a form of what was called “logical atomism”. He tried to build the world and scientific knowledge out of elementary propositions describing simple sense-data. This was the reappearance of Hume in modern guise, and did not work either. Simple particulars were built into molecular propositions by logical connectives, such as “and” and “or”. All this connected up with another doctrine, later fashionable, those truths are either analytic (tautologies) or synthetic (contingent propositions).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) came from a well-known Vienna family. He studied natural sciences in Linz, and engineering at Manchester. From there in 1912 he moved to Cambridge to work with Russell. He served in the Austrian army in World War I, and afterwards became a primary teacher in Austria. He taught in Cambridge from 1930, and took up hospital portering during the war. In 1939 he had succeeded to Moore’s Chair, and he resumed teaching after the war till 1947. He lived in Ireland for a time and returned to Cambridge, where he died. The only book published during his life was the “Tractatus Logico Philosphicus” (1922). “The Philosophical Investigations” (1953) is the most important of the many manuscripts published after his death. The latter work was in effect a critique of the Tractatus.

He made an attempt to create a structure of propositions on the assumption that every proposition can be analyzed into simple propositions (they are bound together by logical connectives). Every proposition, whether simple or complex, pictures reality. He considered that there must be elementary propositions which show their sense immediately. Apart from tautologies (and mathematical equations), all propositions are only contingently or accidentally true. There can then be no necessity outside of logic and mathematics.

From 1929 onwards he underwent conversion to a different point of view. His later view was that language is already all right and does not need explication in the ideal or logical way he tried in the Tractatus. The logical atomism of the latter was replaced by a more empirical ranging through forms of language. He took up a pluralist position language games. He came to a much more elaborate view than Moore’s, but one which was.

Philosophy results from diseases of language, and can be cured by going back through language to see where the mistakes giving rise unnecessarily to philosophical problems have been made. Philosophy became a kind of therapy turned in upon itself.

All this gave impetus to ordinary language philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s great influence was in part due to his guru-like effect on his circle of disciples. The mystique of his apothegms and of secret manuscripts had a curious influence upon philosophy, which at the same time was heir to Enlightenment motifs of the appeal to reason and the rejection of revealed authority. But linguistic philosophy, as it emerged out of an amalgam of commonsense philosophy, empiricism, analytic philosophy and the later Wittgenstein had some strong contributions to make in the elucidation of different areas of language and life, from ethics and religion to the philosophy of science. Its consequences became more pluralistic, moving away from the attempt to impose a strait-jacket, as in the days of the Vienna Circle.

The latest step of positivism is critical rationalism.

Karl Popper (1902-1997) has proved to be perhaps the most fertile and original of the philosophers of this ambiance. He used the notion of falsification or refutability to characterize scientific hypotheses: the best stick their necks out, challenging the evidence, so to speak, to rebut them. He did not have much use for a criterion of meaning, however, and thus for two reasons distrusted the verifiability principle. His wide range of writings had much to say about society and politics.

Critical rationalism takes science as an integrative system of knowledge which has been constantly in the process of development and can not be divided into separate statements or stages. Apart from its contribution in logic itself it is notable for certain philosophical positions. For one thing if attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction which underpinned so much in usual formulation of logical positivism. For another thing it made a revisionary view of the subject matter of philosophy in any case the sharp distinction between philosophy had become highly preoccupied with the nature of science and had often come to use logic as its key to the analysis of problems.

Under the influence of Karl Popper in 1970-s of the twentieth century. Post-positivism flow evolved. P ost-positivism became a new stage in the development of philosophy of science. Its main representatives were T. Kuhn, I. Lakatos S. Tulmin, W. Sellars and others. The problems of falsification of credibility of scientific theories, rationality, understanding and sociology of knowledge are characteristic of Post-positivism. Almost all representatives of Post-positivism had a significant impact on justification of the essence of scientific theory. Unlike traditional positivism, which was focused on the gnosiological problem of facts and theories coincidence, they drew attention to study the role of social factors in the development of science. In 1963 T. Kuhn published “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” “to characterize the historical development of science and to introduce the concept of “normal science” "paradigm", "scientific revolution", "scientific community" and others. British philosopher I. Lakatos developed a universal conception of science based on the idea of competing research programs.

Phenomenology

Much of Western philosophy since Descartes has started from inwardness. Here was perhaps a movement towards being realistic about introspection. Edmund Husserl (1859—1938) tried to purify introspection in order to create a phenomenological method in which the philosopher would only look at what is presented to consciousness. For instance, in examining time we suspend our judgment or, as he said, practice epoche concerning theories of time, but look at time as it presents itself to consciousness. On the whole his successors as phenomenologists did not practice epoche very thoroughly, but rather presented views of the nature of consciousness from within the framework of a philosophical theory (particularly Sartre and Heidegger, whose “phenomenology” appears within the ambit of existentialist views). But Husserl’s general point about epoche is very important in the social sciences — it is necessary for us to suspend our own values in trying to see what values and perceptions animate others, whether groups or individuals. This links up with the ideas of Wilhelm Dilthey in his advocacy of understanding distinction between social and physical sciences. But for the existentialist tradition, phenomenology involved novel analyses of the self.

Religious philosophy of the XX century

Remarkable development in religion aroused some interest. The post-Hegelian period became a fertile one in the self-critical examination of Christianity, through the use of historical methods on the texts and through attempts to reconcile traditional religion and modern science. Evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis called in question uncritical views of the biblical message. Liberal Protestantism emerged as a viable movement; Catholicism, however, resisted modernism

Meanwhile the non-Western world, especially Asian religions and philosophies, was percolating into Western consciousness.

The modern western religious philosophy has many directions and conceptions for comprehending human being. It has gained development in different ways - depending on the characteristics of the different direction of the Christian religion (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant religious philosophy), Jewish, Islamic, and so on. It reflected the nature and the way of thinking – either more mystical (close to Theology) or more rational (convergent to science).

The most typical in this respect is Neo-Thomism direction - a modern version of the Thomas Aquinas (XIII century) teaching. In his time Thomas Aquinas set the goal to unite religion and science, to reconcile faith and reason. Neo-Thomism combines the ideas of medieval Thomism with philosophy of Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. The leading representatives of the stream are J. Mariten J., E. Zhilson, J. Bohensky. They do not deny the scientific knowledge about nature and society, their reality, but insist on their dependence on God. Human mind learns the ideas laid in the world by God.
Thus, religious philosophy develops investigations of Theism, the existence of God, his nature and his relation to the world and man.

The most famous representatives of Neo-Thomism are: E. Zhylson (1884-1978) J. Mariten (1882-1973) in France and K. Runner (1904-1984) - in Germany. They refused "rational" proofs and carried an emphasis on existential and anthropological reasons for faith in God in the sense that this belief, the idea of God as an absolute being, intelligent and moral original, expresses a fundamental human need and purpose, gives man a correct orientation for solving his everyday problems, provides humanistic dimension of modern science and technology and social progress.

The specific feature of Neo-Thomism and religious philosophy as a whole is engagement of society, science and human existence problems into these doctrines.

Christian evolutionism of Teyard Pierre de Chardin (1881-1955) is one of the leading trends of religious philosophy in the twentieth century. In his work "The Phenomenon of Man" the prominent theologian, philosopher, paleontologist and anthropologist represents the conception of cosmic origin of man, and proclaims inevitability of man and mankind evolution toward God, resulting in personalist conversion of being in the world. Space, in his opinion, is in the process of evolution; a natural transition from “proto-being" to life takes place; there is man who becomes the center of further evolution and unity of people

In summary, we note that the main direction of the evolution of modern religious philosophy evolution is its "anthropologism", i.e. setting forth the problem of man in the world, underlining the humanistic meaning of religion which is believed to be able to be fruitful in solving the problems of spiritual, moral and social life.

Поиск по сайту: