Late morning. You did your forty minutes of
exercises and are feeling better though it is another day of cool fog up from
the river to Mason. Carol is changing the sheets in the guest room in
anticipation of Craig and Alta arriving on the thirteenth. You are both looking
forward to their visit.
1135
hours. Not much going on in my head right now. I don’t really know why I got on
the posting. I have nothing to say presently, that is, I am not thinking about
anything let alone anything particular at the moment. Maybe I need a nap.
Later, dude. – Amorella
Mid-afternoon.
You had lunch at Smashburgers and after a stop at the bank, a stop at Kroger’s
on Mason-Montgomery Road for essentials plus. Earlier you sent Donna S., your retired
realtor, a note saying you would be happy if she kept herself in the loop if
and when you decide to put the house up for sale. – Amorella
1700
hours. Yesterday, Amorella, you said, “imagination swallows you up and makes
you whole.” I think I understand this to mean that if I didn’t express my
imagination I would not be a whole person but then with further thought, it
could mean the only reason I fully exist is because I have had the imagination
to do so, that if I didn’t use my imagination I would not have the spirit to
keep on living.
Dusk. You have always wanted to write a
trilogy, and its first self-published book, at the dawn of the twenty-first
century, was Stuck, the second book, as you know, was to be Home,
and the third book was to be titled, On Earth. If you throw in a literary
definition of existentialism. Let’s go with this definition you found online. -
Amorella
** **
Existentialism in
Literature
Commentary by Karen Bernardo
The term
"existentialism" refers to a literary movement of the mid-twentieth
century, which holds that man has complete freedom to determine his own fate.
The actions he chooses in fact determine his existence. Existentialists believe
that a particular individual is not the way he is because God made him that
way, or because he is part of a great human community with common
characteristics. He is the way he is because -- that’s how he is. He is an
individual; he is unique and independent. His destiny is his own, his choices
are his own to make, and he should make the choices that are right for him. No
general rules apply. It is this singular individuality, in fact, that allows
him to exist at all. Although existentialists tend to have as many areas of
disagreement as agreement, the concept of "existence before essence"
is relatively universal.
Another
relatively universal point is that a person who is unaware of his
"essence" -- in other words, a person who is not conscious of his own
freedom to choose the path he follows, and who is not sufficiently self-actualized
to choose that path freely -- can not really be said to exist. Existence, for
the existentialist, implies not only awareness of existence but of its
implications.
Existentialist
literature deals extensively with the theme of alienation, because existentialists
believe that each individual human being is fundamentally alone. One’s
essential lack of communion with others makes the individual ultimately
responsible for his or her own decisions. For this reason, the existentialist
avoids doctrine and ideology, but holds to a few basic tenets.
First,
existentialists seek to avoid intruding on the lives and "boundaries"
of others. Since there is no such thing as absolute right or wrong, one has no
business telling others how to behave, or imposing standards from outside that
the individual should develop for himself.
Secondly,
existentialism disavows a sense of "pattern" in the universe, a grand
scheme in which we all play a part. There is no ultimate meaning, they argue;
all people have to forge their own meaning for themselves, and therefore one
person’s decisions have no cosmic interrelationship with another’s.
Therefore,
creativity is prized much more highly than conformity, since a creative (and
unorthodox) approach to life’s problems implies that one is grappling with them
in an individualized way. Effort is prized much more highly than skill, for
skill derives from having done something the same way repeatedly, and since no
two problems are exactly alike, treating them as if they were is ineffective.
Sincerity, self-analysis, and conviction, existentialists feel, is all one can
expect with regard to ethical decisions, because there are no absolute
standards of morality to which people can turn.
Ultimately, the
most common denominator of existentialists is a rejection of authority. The
only authority which any person has is himself; he is answerable only to
himself as well. The existentialist teacher attempts to inculcate his pupils
with a sense of their own autonomy, as well as giving them tools they can use
to forge their own set of moral principles and define their own destiny. The
existentialist political leader (if such a thing can be imagined) delegates
responsibility back onto the shoulders of the people involved, helping them to
recognize that they alone are responsible for themselves. In general,
existentialists avoid positions of power because authoritarianism conflicts
with their basic views of life.
The fact that
existentialists stubbornly insist on the primacy of the individual self does
not mean they are selfish, immoral, or uncaring. They tend to be deeply
compassionate people, because they care for their fellow man out of sincere
altruism and not because they think God expects it of them. They also tend to
be extremely moral, because they have given a great deal of thought to their
system of ethics (much more, in fact, than most people do).
Existentialism
has played a significant role in the twentieth century as humanity struggles to
come to grips with new challenges. The threat of sudden nuclear destruction;
the overwhelming loss
of community brought about by increased social mobility; the disintegration of
the family -- all have reinforced man’s sense of alienation and fear.
Existentialism, which freely admits these situations and offers no palliative,
has been considered to be a rather dismal philosophy for dismal times.
But in fact it is
not. It simply relocates the burden of responsibility back onto some rather
uncomfortable shoulders -- our own -- and asserts that only through our own
self-actualization and self-determination will we actually be able to look at
the problem realistically, without doctrine, dogma, or ideology, and forge some
solutions that work for us. Although many people attribute to the humanism
inherent in existentialist literature a devaluation of "traditional moral
values" and the centrality of God, existentialists see in their creative
and deeply sincere approach to the study and practice of ethics a new ray of
hope for humanity.
http://www.storybitesDOTcom/literary-terms/existentialism-in-literature.php
** **
1801
hours. The above mostly fits with my personal concepts. The notes below also mostly fit with
my concepts of existentialism in literature.
** **
rho’s Existentialism Notes for C.P. & A.P. English IV (H.S.
Seniors)
Sources
of Notes from The Discovery of Being by Rollo May and Existentialism
from Dostoevsky to Sarte by Walter
Kaufman.
Existentialism
in Literature shows:
1.
immediacy of experience
2.
unity of thought and action
3.
importance of decision and commitment
Subjective
Reality – how you feel
Objective
Reality – what everyone else sees
4.
repression felt from loss of freedom
5.
character development caused by loss of freedom and/or the gains to freedom
6.
self-affirmation of character (finding your inner self)
7.
fears and anxieties (what you have before your self-affirmation) [resolved]
Elements:
1.
common characteristics with traditional philosophies:
A. having a perfervid individualism (exaggerated
emotional life);
B.
questioning the adequacies of any body of belief
2.
story must show lots of detail – someone has to be suppressed (which can lead
to obsession with their suppression; preoccupation with being free
3.
strained protest – notice flaws, must overcome and inform people
4.
lack of serenity – pacing back and forth; knowing you have something to do but
haven’t done it yet
5.
gives way to poses of character [acting a persona that one is not]
6.
‘songs’ of individualism – “let me be myself; let me be free”
7.
the individual is not retouched – what you see is what you get
Asks
from - Kant’s ‘Four Basic Questions’:
1.
What can I know?
2.
What shall I do?
3.
What can I hope for?
4.
What is a human being?
** **
You
both had left over chili for supper. Carol can’t taste it but you think it was
better tonight than last night. You both watched the national NBC News and the
latest “Modern Family”. Carol is watching one or two of her DVRed programs. –
Amorella
2047
hours. I somewhat disagree with the ‘definition’ of existentialism above because it does
not take in Kant’s view.
** **
Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher who is considered the central figure of modern philosophy. Kant argued that fundamental concepts of the human mind structure human experience, that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment, that space and time are forms of our understanding, and that the world as it is “in-itself” is unknowable. Kant took himself to have effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy, akin to Copernicus’ reversal of the age-old belief that the sun revolved around the earth. His beliefs continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics.
Kant in
his critical phase sought to 'reverse' the orientation of pre-critical
philosophy by showing how the traditional problems of metaphysics can be
overcome by supposing that the agreement between reality and the concepts we
use to conceive it arises not because our mental concepts have come to
passively mirror reality, but because reality must conform to the human mind's
active concepts to be conceivable and at all possible for us to experience.
Kant
thus regarded the basic categories of the human mind as the transcendental “condition
of possibility” for any experience. Politically,
Kant was one of the earliest exponents of the idea that perpetual peace could
be secured through universal democracy and international cooperation. He
believed that this eventually will be the outcome of universal history,
although it is not rationally planned. The exact nature of Kant's religious
ideas continue to be the subject of especially heated philosophical dispute,
with viewpoints ranging from the idea that Kant was an early and radical
exponent of atheism who finally exploded the ontological argument for God's
existence, to more critical treatments epitomized by Nietzsche who claimed that
Kant had "theologian blood” and that Kant was merely a sophisticated
apologist for traditional Christian religious belief, writing that "Kant
wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common
man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul.”
In
Kant's major work, the Critique of Pure
Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), he attempted to explain
the relationship between reason and human experience and to move beyond the
failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. Kant wanted to put an end
to an era of futile and speculative theories of human experience, while resisting
the skepticism of thinkers such as David Hume. Kant regarded himself as ending
and showing the way beyond the impasse which modern philosophy had led to
between rationalists and empiricists, and is widely held to have synthesized
these two early modern traditions in his thought.
Kant
argued that our experiences are structured by necessary features of our minds.
In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience so that, on an abstract
level, all human experience shares certain essential structural features. Among
other things, Kant believed that the concepts of space and time
are integral to all human experience, as are our concepts of cause and effect.
One important consequence of this view is that our experience of things is always
of the phenomenal world as conveyed by our senses: we do not have direct
access to things in themselves, the so-called noumenal world. Kant
published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics,
astronomy, and history. . . .
Kant
aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The
former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter
maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience
is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said
that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical
illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was a theme
both of the Age of Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various
problems of philosophy. His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during
his lifetime, and he moved philosophy beyond the debate between the
rationalists and empiricists. . . .
Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's doctrine maintains that human experience of things is similar to the way they appear to us – implying a fundamentally subject-based component, rather than being an activity that directly (and therefore without any obvious causal link) comprehends the things as they are in themselves. . . .
Kant
Perhaps the best way to approach transcendental
idealism is by looking at Kant's account of how we intuit objects, and that
task demands looking at his accounts of space and of time. Before Kant, some
thinkers, such as Leibniz, had come to the conclusion that space and time were
not things, but only the relations among things. Other thinkers, including
Newton, maintained that space and time were real things or substances. Leibniz
had arrived at a radically different understanding of the universe and the
things found in it.
According to his Monadology,
all things that humans ordinarily understand as interactions between and
relations among individuals (such as their relative positions in space and
time) have their being in the mind of God but not in the Universe where we
perceive them to be. In the view of realists, individual things interact by
physical connection and the relations among things are mediated by physical
processes that connect them to human brains and give humans a determinate chain
of action to them and correct knowledge of them. Kant was aware of problems
with both of these positions. He had been influenced by the physics of Newton and
understood that there is a physical chain of interactions between things
perceived and the one who perceives them. However, an important function of
mind is to structure incoming data and to process it in ways that make it other
than a simple mapping of outside data.
The salient element here is that space and time, rather than being real things-in-themselves or empirically mediated appearances are the very forms of intuition by which we must perceive objects. They are hence neither to be considered properties that we may attribute to objects in perceiving them, nor substantial entities of themselves. They are in that sense subjective, yet necessary, preconditions of any given object insofar as this object is an appearance and not a thing-in-itself. Humans necessarily perceive objects as located in space and in time. This condition of experience is part of what it means for a human to cognize an object, to perceive and understand it as something both spatial and temporal. "I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition…” Kant argues for these several claims in the section of the Critique of Pure Reason entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic. That section is devoted to the inquiry of the a priori conditions of human sensibility, i.e. the faculty by which humans intuit objects. The following section, the Transcendental Logic concerns itself with the manner in which objects are thought.
The salient element here is that space and time, rather than being real things-in-themselves or empirically mediated appearances are the very forms of intuition by which we must perceive objects. They are hence neither to be considered properties that we may attribute to objects in perceiving them, nor substantial entities of themselves. They are in that sense subjective, yet necessary, preconditions of any given object insofar as this object is an appearance and not a thing-in-itself. Humans necessarily perceive objects as located in space and in time. This condition of experience is part of what it means for a human to cognize an object, to perceive and understand it as something both spatial and temporal. "I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition…” Kant argues for these several claims in the section of the Critique of Pure Reason entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic. That section is devoted to the inquiry of the a priori conditions of human sensibility, i.e. the faculty by which humans intuit objects. The following section, the Transcendental Logic concerns itself with the manner in which objects are thought.
Historical parallels
Xenophanes of Colophon in 530 BC anticipated Kant's
epistemology in his reflections on certainty. "And as for certain truth,
no man has seen it, nor will there ever be a man who knows about the gods and
about all the things I mention. For if he succeeds to the full in saying what
is completely true, he himself is nevertheless unaware of it; and Opinion
(seeming) is fixed by fate upon all things.” Certain interpretations of some of
the medieval Buddhists of India, such as Dharmakirti, may reveal them to be
transcendental idealists, since they seemed to hold the position of
mereological nihilism but transcendental idealists who held that their minds
were distinct from the atoms. Some Buddhists often attempt to maintain that the
minds are equal to the atoms of mereological nihilist reality, but Buddhists
seem to have no explanation of how this is the case, and much of the literature
on the aforementioned Buddhists involves straightforward discussion of atoms
and minds as if they are separate. This makes their position very similar to
transcendental idealism, resembling Kant's philosophy where there are only
things-in-themselves (which are very much like philosophical atoms), and
phenomenal properties.
Schopenhauer
Briefly, Schopenhauer described transcendental
idealism as a "distinction between the phenomenon and the thing in itself,
and a recognition that only the phenomenon is accessible to us because "we
do not know either ourselves or things as they are in themselves, but merely as
they appear.” Some of Schopenhauer’s comments on the definition of the word
"transcendental" are as follows:
*
Transcendental is the philosophy that makes us aware of the fact that the
first and essential laws of this world that are presented to us are rooted in
our brain and are therefore known a
priori. It is called transcendental because it goes beyond
the whole given phantasmagoria to the origin thereof. Therefore, as I have
said, only the Critique of Pure Reason
and generally the critical (that is to say, Kantian) philosophy are
transcendental.
— Parerga
and Paralipomena, Volume I, "Fragments for the History of
Philosophy," § 13
**
Schopenhauer contrasted Kant's transcendental critical
philosophy with Leibniz's dogmatic philosophy.
**
With Kant the critical philosophy appeared as the
opponent of this entire method [of dogmatic philosophy]. It makes its problem
just those eternal truths (principle of contradiction, principle of sufficient
reason) that serve as the foundation of every such dogmatic structure,
investigates their origin, and then finds this to be in man's head. Here they
spring from the forms properly belonging to it, which it carries in itself for
the purpose of perceiving and apprehending the objective world. Thus here in
the brain is the quarry furnishing the material for that proud, dogmatic
structure. Now because the critical philosophy, in order to reach this result,
had to go beyond the eternal truths, on which all the previous dogmatism
was based, so as to make these truths themselves the subject of investigation,
it became transcendental philosophy. From this it follows also that the
objective world as we know it does not belong to the true being of
things-in-themselves, but is its mere phenomenon, conditioned by those
very forms that lie a priori in the human intellect (i.e., the brain);
hence the world cannot contain anything but phenomena.
-- The World as Will and
Representation, — Vol. I, Appendix: “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy”
**
Opposing realism
Opposing Kantian transcendental idealism is the
doctrine of philosophical realism, that is, the proposition that the world is
knowable as it really is, without any consideration of the knower's manner of
knowing. This has been propounded by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, G.
E. Moore, Ralph Barton Perry, and Henry Babcock Veatch. Realism claims,
contrary to idealism, that perceived objects exist in the way that they appear,
in and of themselves, independent of a knowing spectator's mind.
Selected and edited from Wikipedia – Immanual Kant
** **
2109
hours. I like to view my notions on these matters by settling in with
transcribed similar views. Existentialism as I view and use it focuses on the
general definitions that I have above. I am an existentialist but bent by
reason towards the Kantian ideal. Intuition follows Plato first and Aristotle
second, that’s what it ultimately comes down to. That, and I have to allow for
the concept of G---D, the Creator of all Things and Beyond to exist because to
do less discredits an open mind. – rho
You feel better about all this, though you
know by morning much of it will have dissipated from consciousness. – Amorella
2116
hours. This is encased in humor. I understand better when I read my thoughts.
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