420 Catholicism and Existentialism

Catholicism and Existentialism
420
Monday 5:30-8:20
Spring 2011
STV 216
Reid
Office: Stevenson 204
438-7894/jhreid@ilstu.edu
Homepage: http://lilt.ilstu.edu/jhreid/
Office Hours: T/R 11-1, by apt., or just knock
userid: jhreid
password: reid

Existentialism is generally considered to have begun with Sören Kierkegaard's Christian philosophy in the nineteenth century, although some of its main ideas had already developed in the work of previous philosophers such as Blaise Pascal and Georg Hegel. In the twentieth century 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, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the Christian existentialist, Gabriel Marcel. Kierkegaard and the French existentialists privileged the experience of the individual consciousness and its choices of action. They argue that what we call the "essence" of our world and our selves is an illusion. 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.

Jan. 24 Le Noeud de vipères 15-60 Chps. I-VI; Histoire de la civilisation: "Le redressement catholique," 346-55

Jan. 31 Le Noeud de vipères 60-113 Chps. VII-XIII; Histoire de la civilisation: "Niveaux de vie," "Masses et élites," 392-407

Feb. 21 La Condition humaine 78-159 Histoire de la civilisation: "Vie et pensée ouvrières," 324-35; MAKE APPOINTMENT WITH ME TO DISCUSS YOUR PROSPECTUS

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

de Beauvoir, Simone, La Femme indépendante
Malraux, André. La condition humaine
Mauriac, François. Le noeud de vipères
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L'Existentialisme est un humanisme
---. Les Mots.

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

Each student will complete a 15 page term paper on one of the novels discussed in class or on another novel by the same author.

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 texts that you are discussing in the term paper.

Final Grade

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

French film series: Students in 200 to 400-level French courses are required to attend tw of the three French films listed below. Students unable to attend the screenings will need to see the films on their own (either in the Media Resource Center at Milner Library or at home) and will be required to write a paragraph in response to questions your instructor will provide. In order to comply with copyright laws, admittance to the films will be limited to students currently enrolled in a French course at Illinois State. Attendance will be taken and students will need to show their ISU identification card as they enter the room. The films will be shown in Stevenson 101 beginning at 7:00 PM on the following Wednesday evenings:

The word "Existentialism" was first adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre in the mid-twentieth century to describe his philosophy. It has since been applied to similar thinkers at that time, like Albert Camus, and retroactively to the texts of a number of writers and philosophers. The earliest "existentialist" was the nineteenth-century Danish, Lutheran philosopher Sören Kierkegaard.

Existentialist writers seek truth and right action in the individual person's consciousness of the world and of himself or herself. This consciousness involves perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. Kierkegaard, thus says “I must find a truth that is true for me . . . the idea for which I can live or die.” Existentialist writers tend to show how rationality fails to find the truth of who we are or justify our actions.

Existentialism's roots lie in part in those early thinkers who believed that our rational mind cannot understand the world or God and those who study consciousness as the means by which we seek truth.

The Greek pre-Socratic philosophers of the 6th century B. C., like Heraclitus, questioned whether reason could arrive a permanent truth and argued that everything is always changing. Thus said: "You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you."

In fifth century A. D., St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, emphasized the search for self through God, rather than just reason: "Seek for yourself, O man; search for your true self. He who seeks shall find himself in God." Only faith in God can make reason work.1

In the seventeenth century, the catholic philosopher Pascal, following medieval mysticism, made subtle arguments that any rational search to know, not only the truth, but the self and God, is doomed to failure. In "La Disproportion de l'homme," he argued that our perceptions, imagination, or rational ideas -- our "consciousness" -- cannot understand the universe and thus our relationship to it. The universe is infinitely large, vastly bigger than what we can observe or explain. Compared to the universe we are nothing. But we also cannot observe or explain the smallest of particles. Compared to us those particles are nothing: "Car enfin qu'est-ce que l'homme dans la nature ? Un néant à l'égard de l'infini, un tout à l'égard du néant, un milieu entre rien et tout. Infiniment éloigné de comprendre les extrêmes, la fin des choses et leur principe sont pour lui invinciblement cachés dans un secret impénétrable, également incapable de voir le néant d'où il est tiré, et l'infini où il est englouti."2 "This is our true state; this is what makes us incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance." Because our awareness and logic are caught between extremes, we cannot arrive at a certain knowledge of the world, ourselves, or God. That, for Pascal, is "la misère de l'homme."

Pascal finds a way out of this despair, and that is faith. Faith arises out of the heart rather than the mind: "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point."

Consciousness: Hegel's dialectic

Existentialist writers thus put rationality in questions, like Heraclitus, Augustine, and Pascal, but also consciousness as Pascal does. The philosophical exploration of consciousness began with the eighteenth-century philosophy Emmanuel Kant, but has its deepest roots in the early nineteenth-century philosophy of, G. W. F. Hegel, who called his study of consciousness "phenomenology." We cannot know anything without being conscious, so it is critical to understand consciousness if we are to arrive at knowledge.

Stage I
A) We would like to think that when we look at something we see it, him, or her actually as they are. This is what Hegel calls "sense certainty" ("la certitude sensible"). We want to believe that our perceptions of things are objective. And we also want to believe that we can freely possess the things that we desire: that our self is knowledge and power. Sense-certainty, Hegel tells us, gives us a sense that we are free to do whatever we want.4 If we believe this thesis, we will try to act upon our knowledge. My daughter, when she was 3 years old, once looked at the fire in the fireplace and said: "It's pretty Daddy, I want to eat it." She was sure that she could see that it was tasty and she was ready to go get and eat what she wanted. Similarly, the notion of "Love at first sight" assumes that what you see is what you can get. If you see a handsome man for the first time and immediately fall in love with him, you can just approach him . . . but you run risk of an experience as unpleasant as the one my daughter would have had if she had tried to eat the fire.

For Hegel, consciousness is never totally objective. And desire, which depends of the object we perceive, cannot be fully satisfied, because it is always somewhat different from what he imagine. People and things resist our attempts to treat them as what we want to believe they are. When we don't, we get burned. For Hegel, therefore, the more we try to assert our freedom by treating people and things as if the were no more than objects of our desires, the more they resist us. This resistance teaches us that we are not autonomous, we are not free from the constraints of others. We are dependent upon the characteristics of things and on the characteristics and desires of other people that we do not perceive or control. And dependence on others is the opposite of freedom to do what we want, the antithesis. When men look at a woman or women first look at a man, do they see the whole person or just those parts that make him or her attractive to them? Do they know what the other person wants? How much do they see what they want the other person to be and to want. And this makes them aware of their dependence on them. What often happens when a couple first lives together? They are often surprised and frustrated, because their partner is not entirely the object that they imagined they were. Their partner is also a subject of desire and actions, and we depend on them if we want to satisfy some of our desires. For Hegel, the very attempt to freely possess the objects of our senses only demonstrates the contrary, our dependence on others, on their different thoughts, feelings, and desires. Similarly, the consciousness of our power over others is evidence of our blindness. The thesis produces its antithesis.

If the attempt to assert our freedom only brings evidence of dependence, then all we can do is try to convince ourselves that we are free and we can do this if we pick someone who will treat us as if we are free, recognize us as free, by obeying our commands. A nice obedient partner. But when someone recognizes us as free, then they themselves lose their freedom. Think of couples in which one person lets the other make all the decisions. This is what Hegel explored in his dialectic of the master and the slave, where the master insists on being free, on making the decisions, and the slave is forced to recognize the master's freedom by following his decisions. But the master is deceiving himself, since he cannot attain recognition. Think of the man who chooses a totally obedient wife and ignores her differences. He has no respect for her. Her recognition doesn't matter. If he wants confirmation of his power he's going to try to get it from other men who compete for the same goal, and such men are unlikely to recognize each others total freedom. The master cannot feel recognized by anyone, either a slave or an equal. This failed search for recognition plays a big role in Sartre's philosophy, as we will see.

Stage II
The master is imprisoned in his drive to gain a recognition that is impossible. He cannot become self-aware. But Hegel's slave has no illusion that he is free from the master. He knows he is a mere thing for the master. But he discovers that the master cannot control his consciousness, which is independent of the master. At first, therefore, he flees his desires to possess things and seeks freedom in his abstract thoughts, as if this search defined his self, and he denies contingent reality others and things that might impinge on his thought, and thus his perceptions of them and his desires for them. This thought thus becomes his self.

But he cannot free himself of contingent reality, because pure thought "lacks the concrete filling of life." The slave discovers that pure thought is only a a notion of freedom, "not living freedom itself." He thus becomes self-aware and self-critical, as opposed to the master who is obsessed with proving his freedom and power. Imagine a philosopher who shuts herself up in her room in order to give full reign to her thoughts without ever trying to publish them? Is she freeing her rational thoughts or us she imprisoning them so no one else will know about them? The very attempt to free one's thoughts from the outside world thus only demonstrates the contrary, the dependence of our thoughts on the outside world. Consciousness of freedom of thought thus becomes evidence of blindness to what freedom is.

Stage III
This leads Hegel's slave to reject the truth of thoughts as being self-contradictory -- both free and dependent, aware and blind. He thus tries identifying with the discontinous flow of his perceptions through consciousness. Like the pre-socratic philosopher, Heraclitus he "den[ies] that there is anything fixed or permanent" in us. There is no unified self.

But his consciousness is not just a flow of disparate perceptions, for the slave is aware of this flow, and this awareness is continuous, unified. He thus discovers that his consciousness is divided between a flow of discontinuous perceptions and unified awareness of this flow. Consciousness is a contraction. The very attempt to see consciousness as a contingent flow of perceptions without a self, demonstrates the contrary, that consciousness is also a unified awareness of flow of perceptions which is a self. It is double and contradictory.

To understand this contradiction try to pay attention just to the perceptions that flow through your mind: the changing images in your eyes, the changing sounds in your ears, the changing feel of your seat. And try to shut out any thoughts about this flow. This flow of perceptions is a first level of consciousness, a discontinuous consciousness. But how do you know that your perceptions are flowing through your mind? You are aware of your flow of thoughts, conscious of this flow. This second level of consciousness does not change. It is like a single camera and microphone focused on changing images and sounds.

Now close your eyes and try to pay attention only to the thoughts flow through your mind. Try to ignore any judgment of these thoughts, whether you like or do not like these thoughts. Just let them flow. This flow of thoughts is a first level of consciousness, a discontinuous consciousness. But how do you know that your thoughts are flowing through your mind? You are aware of your flow of thoughts, conscious of it. And this second level of consciousness does not change.

But when you are aware that your consciousness is both a discontinuous flow of thoughts and perceptions and a unified awareness of this flow, you achieve a third level of consciousness, the consciousness of being double. If you want to be a unified self or to have no self, then you are likely to be dissatisfied, unhappy, miserable as Pascal would say.

This third-level consciousness of being split between a discontinuous and a continuous consciousness is what Hegel calls the "unhappy consciousness" ("la conscience malheureuse"). It is his version of Pascal's "misère de l'homme" when man is caught between extremes and cannot know the truth. Hegel calls the the person who has an unhappy consciousness "the Alienated soul," because consciousness is alienated from itself.

However, Hegel, argues that there is an ultimate rational synthesis of the two levels of consciousness, a happy ending. It is related to the realization that everyone in the world shares this consciousness.

Existentialism accepts Hegel's dialectic but rejects his rational synthesis. It seeks a solution outside reason or just accepts that there is no solution. Pascal found a non-rational solution in the heart, feeling, as the source of faith in God.

In the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard then Nietzsche borrowed Hegel's dialectic but criticized his rational synthesis. Whereas Kierkegaard, the Christian, found a solution in what he call a "leap of faith" beyond rationality, Nietzsche, the atheist, denied that there was any solution and turned to figuring out how to act in a world where consciousness is alienated from itself, where it can never arrive at a truth.

Whereas Hegel argued that the dialectic consciousness was unfolded over time by the history of Reason, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are interested in how this dialectic takes place within the individual consciousness. Self-consciousness thus becomes a question of individual psychology. Both had an influence on Freud.

Kierkegaard is primarily interested in ethics: how do we know how we should act? In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard asks about the nature of Abraham's choice when God asks him to kill his own son. Abraham can say no to God, since to kill his son would be an immoral act according to God's own Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not kill." Or he can say yes, but in doing so he puts into question the universality of God's law. Abraham is thus caught between God's command to obey his law, the Ten Commandments, and God's command, this time, that he disobey his law. Awareness of being caught in this conflict produces what Kierkegaard calls "despair," since it seems to render moral laws arbitrary in the face of critical, individual decisions, and leaves us with no certain guide about how we should act.6 In individual circumstances how can we distinguish good and evil? Like Hegel's unhappy consciousness, Abraham is caught between contradictory thoughts, in this case of what is ethical, but like Hegel's slave, he must choose.

Kierkegaard's answer in a later philosophical book is that Abraham's choice to kill his son is a purely subjective choice. He cannot know whether this command came from God or from someone else. Only by a leap beyond reason to faith in God can Abraham decide that the command comes from God and obey it.6 The problem for us, if we find ourselves in a situation where the moral action is unacceptable, is that we, unlike Abraham, have no God to tell us what to do. We have to choose We have to find what Kierkegaard calls a passion within us that tells us what is good in this situation.

For Nietzsche, the awareness that our consciousness is double and that truth is contradictory produces neither misery, unhappiness, nor despair. It is liberating. Like Hegel's master, he finds freedom in the exercise of power, in what he calls the "will to power." But unlike Hegel's master, he has no illusion that others are going to recognize his freedom. And unlike Kierkegaard, he has no illusion that some internal passion is going to help us decide between good and evil when moral law cannot help us. For Nietzsche moral law is a purely human creation that society imposes on us in order to increase it power over us, enslave us. When human's internalize this moral law and believe it, they become what Nietzsche calls a "herd" that blindly follows the will of the powerful. Moral laws or learned values are thus life-denying for Nietzsche. The only life-affirming choice is to exercise our will to power, to follow moral law only when it increases our power. In doing so we create our own values, as opposed to receiving our values from the religion or, nowadays, the media. Nietzsche's ideal is that we construct our world and self creatively.

Nietzsche put a greater emphasis on language than on consciousness, since consciousness, he believed, is a product of metaphors, of language. Our minds artificially construct consciousness by means of metaphors. They artificially produce consciousness by means of signs. Life is about constructing, not only our consciousness of world and self, but the world and the self as we manipulate language and people in order to maximize our power.5

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 alsoinfluenced the majority of the existentialist philosophers who, like Nietzsche, exclude the question of God, or "metaphysics," from their philosophy. In Germany, the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, in France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir.

It needs to be noted that similar notions of an alienated or double consciousness and the rejection of reason have been part of some Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, for thousands of years. For example, Theravada Buddhist meditation, called mindfulness, teaches us to become, like Hegel's slave, aware of the discontinuous flow of our perceptions and thoughts through our minds. It also teaches us to accept them in all their arbitrariness as ours, rather than try to pick certain ones an say that these alone are our self. It also encourages us to recognize, as does Hegel's slave, our continuous awareness of this flow. It then teaches us to identify with neither the discontinuous flow of thoughts nor the continuous awareness of them, so we stop trying to make one of them our self. The overall goal is to teach us to stop trying to be someone in the eyes of others and in our own eye. It also seeks to give us a certain distance from our thoughts, which allows us better to decide how to act upon them.

1. Mendelson, Michael, "Saint Augustine", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/augustine/>.

2. Pascal, Blaise, "La Disproportion de l'homme",

3. Smith, David Woodruff, "Phenomenology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/phenomenology/>

4. The following discussion of Hegel's dialectic follows closely Bernstein, Richard. Praxis and Action. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971: 84-96. Illustrations of Bernstein's discussion are mine.

5. Crowell, Steven, "Existentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/existentialism/>

How do the actors and set and costume designers make the most of what the script has to offer?

In what ways can Le Retour du Grand Blond be considered a parody of conventional spy thrillers? For example, what parallels and differences do you see between the main character François Perrin and James Bond?

On a different note, what do you think of the friendship between François and Maurice? How is it different from friendships typically portrayed in American films?