Catholicism and Existentialism
420
Monday 5:30-8:20
Fall 2004
STV 234
Reid
Office: Stevenson 215
438-7894/jhreid@ilstu.edu
Homepage:  http://lilt.ilstu.edu/jhreid/
Class homepage:  http://lilt.ilstu.edu/jhreid/CatholicismExistentialism/420syl(S2004).htm
Office Hours: T/R 1-3, by apt., or just knock

Existentialism began, as a movement, with Sören Kierkegaard's, Christian writings in the nineteenth century, although it developed of the work of previous philosophers and writers, including Christian writers.  It was developed and transformed in Germany, by the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, and in France, by the French existentialists Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and by the Christian existentialist, Gabriel Marcel.  Kierkegaard and the French existentialists privileged the experience of the individual mind and its choices of action.  They argue that what we call our world and our selves are illusions, an illusory "essence" in Sartre's language.  All that matters is "existence."  What exists is our self-consciousness and our choices of ours actions out of multiple possibilities.  Existentialism tends to argue that we have a responsibility to seek to become fully conscious of our existence -- of our consciousness, our choices, and our actions -- and that "authentic" choices are made possible by the search for the highest level of self-consciousness.

Existentialism has played a major role in modern thought.  Whereas Marxian and historicist thought over the last 150 years have developed the ways in which the structure of society at any historical moment influences how we, as individuals, think and act, existentialist thought in particular, and Continental philosophy in general, have explored the question of freedom from social influences, which is opened up by the ways in which our individual mind constructs what each person calls society and self.

Useful Links

• Grammatical Correction Abbreviations 

• Common French Grammatical Errors

• French Media on-line (TV,Newspapers,Magazines,Radio)

• Passé Composé vs.Imparfait

GLC:  Guide de lecture critique.  A remplir chaque soir et à remettre en classe.

Jan. 12 Introduction to Course

Jan. 19.  No Class

Jan. 26 Le Noeud de vipères 15-60 Chps. I-VI; Histoire de la civilisation: "Le redressement catholique," 346-55

Feb. 2  Le Noeud de vipères 60-113 Chps. VII-XIII;  Histoire de la civilisation: "Niveaux de vie," "Masses et élites," 392-407

Feb. 9 Le Noeud de vipères 113-166 Chp. XIV-conclusion

Feb. 16

Feb. 23   MAKE APPOINTMENT WITH ME TO DISCUSS YOUR PROSPECTUS

Mar. 1 La Condition humaine 9-78; Histoire de la Chine (Lisez "La Dynasite Qing 1644-1911" et "Les Débuts de la république 1911-49")

Mar. 12  Spring Vacation

March 15  La Condition humaine 78-159   Histoire de la civilisation:  "Vie et pensée ouvrières," 324-35;

March 19 PROSPECTUS DUE, prospectus guidelines

Mar. 22 La Condition humaine 165-252; Histoire de la civilisation: "Politique et syndicalisme," 357-60

Mar. 26 FIRST DRAFT OF TERM PAPER DUE

Mar. 29 La Condition humaine 252-338

 Apr. 5  Huis clos, Existentialism and Humanism (on reserve).

Apr. 12 Les Mots I, 11-70 Histoire de la civilisation: "Les années noires," 423-39

Apr. 19  Les Mots II, 60-135 

Apr. 26  Les Mots III, 136-206; Histoire de la civilisation:  "Lever du rideau, "440-63"

Apr. 30 FINAL DRAFT TERM PAPER DUE

May 3  Final Exam

Required Texts:

Camus, Albert.  La peste
Duby, Georges and Robert Mandrou.  Histoire de la civilisation française. vol. II
Malraux, André.  La condition humaine
Mauriac, François.  Le noeud de vipères
Sartre, Jean-Paul.  Huis clos suivie de Les mouches

On Reserve:

Augustine.  The Confessions
Bernstein, Richard J.  Praxis and Action
Duby, Georges and Robert Mandrou.  Histoire de la civilisation française
Kierkegaard, Sören.  Fear and Trembling, Repetition
Pascal, Blaise.  Pensées
Sartre, Jean-Paul,  Existentialism and Humanism.

Term Paper

As marked on the syllabus, a prospectus will be due before spring break. Guidelines for the prospectus are attached to the syllabus.  The prospectus will include a bibliography of works that you will probably use in writing your term paper.  

There will be two drafts of the term paper.  Both drafts should be fully researched, composed, and interpreted.  

The term paper will refer to specific passages or words in critical articles or books as a means of interpreting the literary or non-literary cultural texts that you are discussing in the term paper.

Final Grade

Graduates
Class participation 15%
Class preparation 20% 
Term Paper 45%
Final Exam  20%
 

Introduction to Existentialism

The comments on Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Sartre in following introduction to Existentialism is strongly beholden to Richard J. Bernstein's Praxis and Action.

Existentialism is a term that refers to the texts of a number of writers and philosophers.  Existentialism developed out of the writings of the Danish, Lutheran writer Sören Kierkegaard.  Kierkegaard's writings focus on individual existence:  the individual mind's experience of his or her life, his consciousness of them, as opposed to an external world of which we are conscious.  His focus on individual, mental experience has been studied by European philosophy since the catholic writer, Pascal, in the seventeenth century.  This is what we now call "continental philosophy," in opposition to English and American, analytical philosophy.  Continental philosophy recounts an individual search for truth about the world, ourselves, God as a means of guiding one's action.   In Kierkegaard's words  “I must find a truth that is true for me . . . the idea for which I can live or die.” 

But truth for existentialism. and for much of continental philosophy, cannot be found.  Hence existence, as a search for truth, is inextricably linked with despair in the face of our failure to satisfy our desire for truth.

The belief in the search for truth inside oneself and in the impossibility of knowing truth can be traced back in philosophy to Socrates, in 5th century B.C. Greece.  Socrates exhorts us to seek to know ourselves, but what we discover in this process is our ignorance.  Awareness of our ignorance can go even further to pre-Socratic philosophers, like Heraclitus, for whom we never step in the same river (experience) twice. 

Existentialism also has roots in Catholicism.  In the Confessions, written at the end of the fourth century A.D. in Italy, St. Augustine sees Christianity as a search for truth about one's self as a means of knowing God:  "Seek for yourself, O man; search for your true self. He who seeks shall find himself in God."  In addition, Augustine sometimes (but not always) argues, as does Socrates, that  to claim to know God, is false pride, a sign of our ignorance.  Here are some questions that Augustine asks God:  "Since, then, thou dost fill the heaven and earth, do they contain thee? Or, dost thou fill and overflow them, because they cannot contain thee? . . .  But when thou dost fill all things, dost thou fill them with thy whole being? Or, since not even all things together could contain thee altogether, does any one thing contain a single part, and do all things contain that same part at the same time? . . . Do greater things contain more of thee, and smaller things less? Or, is it not rather that thou art wholly present everywhere, yet in such a way that nothing contains thee wholly?"  Throughout the Middle Ages there were those who argued that God was unknowable.  But it is the Pensées of Blaise Pascal in seventeenth-century France, which, under the influence of Augustine, argues that God, the world, and the self, are unknowable.  Unlike Socrates, Pascal believes we cannot even know that we are ignorant: 

• "This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance."  

• La vérité se trouve en pensant à sa propre condition misérable:  [T]out le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre. . . . avec plaisir.  [I]l y en a un bien effective, qui consiste dans le malheur naturel de notre condition faible et mortelle, et si misérable, que rien ne peut nous consoler, lorsque nous y pensons de près." ("Divertissement" 139, Brunschvig)

• The only hope to escape from this horrible situation, from "la misère de l'homme," is through faith in God:  "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point." 

• In Pascal, we see a move towards defining existence in terms of one's inner experience of actively constructing images of the world ("phenomenology"), which will later characterize Hegelian and Existentialist philosophies and writings.  "Instead of receiving the ideas of . . . things in their purity, we colour them with our own qualities, and stamp with our composite being all the simple things which we contemplate."   We cannot know the things we contemplate, that we perceive, since our consciousness of the world, of our selves, and of God is colored by our preconceptions and by "[o]ur reason [which] is always deceived."  We do not passively see the world as it is; we actively construct an image of it, a consciousness.  ("Disproportion de l'homme" 72).

A number of philosophers begin to concentrate on how our mind constructs reality, including the English philosopher Hume and the German philosopher Emmanuel Kant.  But it is the German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel's Idealist philosophy of consciousness, in the early nineteenth century that will radically change our understanding of how the mind actively constructs what we call our world, our selves, and our consciousness of them.  According to Hegel, the course of history is determined by divinely inspired Reason to seek to make individuals rationally explain how our mind constructs the world:  to be conscious of how our mind constructs consciousness.  This search repeatedly fails.  Our consciousness is alienated from itself, from its own structure.  Hegel's dialectic follows three steps. 

• He first argues, as does Pascal, that our consciousness is never a universal, objective representation of the world, of myself, or of itself as they are. Consciousness thus appears to be  ignorant about the world, to be totally subjective. 

• Secondly, he argues, like Pascal, that there is no way of knowing objectively that our consciousness is purely subjective, ignorant.  The consequence is what Hegel calls the "Unhappy Consciousness," the painful knowledge that  I objectively know neither the world around me or myself, nor my subjective way of constructing the world in my mind.  All consciousness is in error, deceptive.

• Whereas Pascal escapes the "la misère de l'homme" through faith in God, Hegel  escaped  his "unhappy consciousness" through his idealization or divinization of historically determined Reason.  History ultimately reveals to individuals, over the course of generations, that "[t]he individuality of . . . consciousness is seen to be in itself absolute reality, it discovers the world as its own new and real world. . . . Reason is the consciousness of being all reality" (Phenomenology of Spirit).  History ultimately makes individuals discover that their unhappy consciousness is reality itself.  This is Hegel's final synthesis ("aufhebung," "sublation") of the contraries (like objectivity vs. subjectivity) that alienate man  from himself. 

Kierkegaard, in the late nineteenth-century, is the first "existentialist" writer.  Specifically, he was a Christian existentialist. Individual self-consciousness is reality for Kierkegaard, as it is for Hegel, but it is not a product of Reason as it is for Hegel; indeed it is opposed to all human reason.  Kierkegaard also rejects Hegel's notion that self-consciousness unfolds itself only over historical time.  Rather, he asserts that it takes place within each individual life at any time in history.  Self-consciousness is thus a question of "psychology," rather than history, Kierkegaard, who called himself a psychologist and had a substantial influence on Freud and the development of modern psychology.  Since self-consciousness is not entirely rational, Kierkegaard, like Pascal, contradicts Hegel's argument that there is a rational escape from our unhappy consciousness.  Reason can only disclose the impossibility of synthesis.   Rationally, man is irreducibly divided by contraries.  He is only "potentially a synthesis."  We repeatedly fail to be the person we choose to be, we remain in a state of only becoming someone, divided from ourselves. 

• Kierkegaard's writings seek to raise the reader's consciousness to the realization that the existential choice to be someone always produces despair, in front of which we can only learn resignation, in the face of the rational conclusion that we repeatedly fail to be the person we choose to be. 

• But, Kierkegaard, like Pascal, seeks a further raising of consciousness, to the realization that man can also repeatedly make a "spiritual" leap beyond rational impossibility, and thus beyond despair, to belief in the possibility of becoming someone, even though we know this to be impossible.  This leap, for Kierkegaard, is a task for freedom and an atonement, an ethical requirement, which is made possible by God's grace.  It is an ethical act of individual freedom,  a passionate and "absurd" choice to become a self that we rationally know can never be. Only those who go through despair have a possibility of receiving God's grace, which enables us to make this leap of faith. Because Kierkegaard, like Pascal, rejects the centrality of reason, and thus philosophy, neither is technically a philosopher.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism was carried on by Christian existentialists, particularly, the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel.  He also strongly influenced the majority of existentialist philosophers who exclude the question of God, of "metaphysics," from their philosophy:  in Germany, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers; in France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.   

The most rigorous of French existentialist philosophers is the philosopher and atheist Jean-Paul Sartre.  In Being and Nothingness Sartre accepts Kierkegaard's argument that we can choose to become, but can never be, a particular identity, but he eliminates any escape from this condition through Kierkegaard's faith in God or Hegel's divine Reason.  Man cannot escape his unhappy consciousness of his failure to be the person he wants to be.  Although Sartre was a student of Heidegger, his philosophy develops and critiques of Hegel's philosophy of self-consciousness from the individualist perspective of Kierkegaard. All that exists for Sartre is self-consciousness, choice, and action. 

• Unlike Hegel and Kierkegaard, however, Sartre believes that we can "know," we can have a clear and distinct (Cartesian) consciousness of, one reality.  This reality is the reality of the absence of a real world or self.  World, and self are self-deceptions, the illusion of "essence."   Consciousness is a (pre-reflective or reflective) awareness of the nothingness of the self, the world, or of God. 

Sartre thus rejects Pascal's and Kierkegaard's assertion that we can know nothing, not even that we are ignorant, and he replaces it with a certain knowledge:  that we are are a consciousness of the nothingness of world and self.

For Sartre, our existence is not only self-consciousness; it is free choice and action.  Our awareness of our nothingness makes us desire to be something or someone.  We do "have" a self, which is created by our past actions, the choices we have made, the roles we have played, be we can never identify with, we cannot "be," this self.  The very impossibility of our being the past self that our actions create, frees us from the past in our choices of a future self. 

• I am, according to Sartre,  radically free from what my actions have made me in the past.  I am aware of this past and of influences upon my actions -- historical, social, psychological, forces that tell us to be someone -- but I am no longer this self, this deceptive "essence."  My choices, my existence, are not constrained by this past self.

Even when my emotions dictate my actions, I have chosen to let them do so.  For Sartre, therefore, I create myself and the world anew through my choices and actions, although I am always not yet this future self, nor am I in this future world.  Consciousness (of our nothingness) is thus inextricably bound up with desire and choice (of what we will become), and action (in order to become this person).  We are always conscious of what we are choosing, as opposed to those who believe that our thoughts and actions are determined by our socio-historical context, our parents, or by our psychology.  This consciousness of my freedom is not exhilarating.  Rather, my realization of my freedom to choose and act makes me feel anguish, because I can depend upon nothing and no one to tell me how to choose and act in the future.  Nothing justifies or excuses my choices and actions.  They are absurd.

Sartre believes that we are ethically responsible for our choices and for making them "authentically," in full awareness of their absurdity and their freedom from all past constraints. 

• My repeated attempts to hide from myself my freedom and responsibility, by deceiving myself into believing that I can really be or become someone, is what Sartre calls "la mauvaise foi."  I can live authentically, I can escape bad faith and the anguish of their being no justification for my actions, only  if I lucidly accept that I am free, if I will myself to be free to choose my actions without their being any justification, and if I "commit" myself ("m'engager") to the project I choose.  In doing so, I  choose my values (what is important or moral for me). 

Although Sartre speaks of "responsibility" and "authenticity", his philosophy clearly  invalidates any distinction between ethical/moral choice and a non-ethical/non-moral choice.  Why should one live according to the value of being authentic rather than in bad faith, when all value choices are unjustified?  To that extent, Sartre's philosophy of self-consciousness contradicts his own value of authentic choice.  

Sartre and Kierkegaard put individual, existentialist freedom, absurd choice, and action at the center of human existence, in contrast to Hegel, for whom freedom is produced by  by history's necessary, rational development of self-consciousness.  But Sartre, and to some extent Kierkegaard, lose sight of the constraints on our choices and our consciousness of these choices.  Sartre ignores the impossibility of being totally free from the constraints of history, society, and psychology, which Marx and Freud have developed.  He also ignores that, not only bad faith, but the absurd, "mad" act of asserting freedom, necessarily repeats itself at the same time, as developed by Kierkegaard..