God and Existentialism - Admittedly Less Exciting than Michael's Pictures

The first two paragraphs are mostly re-cap from Tuesday, so if you were in class, feel free to skip ahead. The juicy stuff's in para. 3.

On Tuesday, we considered whether or not it is possible to be an existentialist and still believe in God. Before we did, though, we tried to nail down some of the trademarks of existentialism, beginning with the ways in which Samuel Beckett’s play, An Act Without Words, illustrates the absurd. By creating a character who, despite continued reflection, gets no closer to the carafe of water he is reaching for, we come to realize he is engaged in a completely futile activity. Likewise, the existentialist argues that as life unfolds, we often come to realize much of it is a rather pointless activity despite all of our efforts to make it otherwise. Thus, the fact that we keep trying is fairly absurd. Beckett illustrates the pain associated with realizing the absurdity of life quite beautifully at the end of the play when the defeated character puts his face in his hands as the curtain falls.

However, we also discussed how in realizing this absurdity, the existentialist argues we also recognize our freedom and the possibilities that come with it. Though the existentialist suggests there is nothing inherently meaningful about life, the freedom life’s absurdity gives us makes it possible to inject our own tailor-made meaning into it. Camus demonstrates this in his discussion of Sisyphus. Though Sisyphus has been eternally condemned to push a bolder up a hill, Camus argues that in continuing to do it, Sisyphus does what only human beings are capable of - he makes meaning out of meaninglessness. By forcing meaning into the experience, “[Sisyphus’] fate belongs to him. The rock is his thing…The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile…The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus is happy (198). In other words, although life is absurd and our action seems futile (as Beckett’s character suggests) we are free to create meaning in our lives, which makes it all worthwhile.

Upon discovering these existential nuggets, we were led to the question of whether or not it is possible for the existentialist to believe in God. Kierkegaard, our resident Christian existentialist, argues faith in God is in fact the very thing that brings the absurd to light. For instance, in the case of the binding of Isaac, Abraham had to suspend all of his rational beliefs about the nature of right and wrong in order to obey God. “As the individual, he became higher that the universal: this is the paradox which does not admit of mediation” (17). Thus, by exercising his faith, Abraham engaged in a sort of absurd, but beautifully human activity. Like the other existentialists, Kierkegaard argues that coming face to face with this absurdity creates a sort of anxiety. However, unlike the others, he suggests that only faith can soothe it.  

The problem with this, and the question we raised in class, is that it seems we lose something fundamentally existential when God enters the picture. If there is a God, it means there is something that can make sense of the world, thereby negating the absurd and taking away our freedom to make life meaningful on our own. Insofar as this kind of freedom forms the backbone of existentialism, it seems the true existentialist cannot put it by the wayside. Thus, although the religious existentialist can develop ideas of the absurd and anxiety in relation to God (the way Kierkegaard does), I wonder if it is possible to fully recognize the sort of freedom necessary to be an existentialist while also being a theist. Though my intuitions say no, I would really like to hear everyone’s thoughts, as the issue seems pretty important to establishing what the existentialist is really committed to. 

Not-So Happy* Holidays courtesy of Existentialism! (But what really constitutes happiness anyway?)

As I sit here enjoying my Thanksgiving holiday I find myself in the midst of a mild existentialist crisis. Everyone present has clearly been waiting patiently for an entire year to come so that they can enjoy the holiday and all its trimmings. As much as I love spending time with my family and friends, eating my body weight in turkey and stuffing, and enjoying the gorgeous scenery of Northern Wisconsin, I begin to ruminate on my existentialist readings. Why do we make such a huge deal over holidays? I know the traditional answers to this question include such items as spending time with family, relaxing and being away from work or school, but from an existentialist viewpoint there are many items worth pointing out when it comes to holidays. First of all, if we are simply truly alone in this world, as discussed by some of our more recent readings then why do we hold so much joy in the time spent with our loved ones? Why even bother with them if we are simply meant to be alone? The dark existentialist concept that our lives are simply the path to our impending death also creeps up on me. Why do we spend so much time looking forward to a holiday if really it means it is just another year closer to our death? I know this is really depressing to think about but it is true, at least for the existentialists. The reminder is also made manifest in the little things, like maybe one day those who like to cook in my family will be gone and by some evil twist of fate I will be called upon to prepare the Thanksgiving feast. Anyone who knows me at all well knows that cooking is not my strong suit. Even I probably would not want to eat anything that I would not even want to eat something I personally had made. Yuck. Just another pleasant reminder from the existentialists about our own personal responsibilities (if we even can have them when the world is simply pretty much against us anyway). A reminder of my own attempts at getting what I want only to find that they are futile. Thanks existentialism, for instead of making my holidays a pleasant and happy time filled with warm memories, warmer cocktails, and the beauty of nature, you remind me that none of it matters because we will all just die alone anyway. Happy Holidays!

No Task:

Sartre holds that the essential existential belief is "existence precedes essence," and not the other way around, as is the case with all other things in life (i.e. the paper cutter). Since we all know that there is no God, it follows that we were not created by any thing, much less for any purpose. But if we exist without a purpose--that is, if we have not been given a task--we are condemned to find our own purposes, our own tasks to carry out. 

David Shrigley's only task, apparently, is to fill the page, and I dare say that this philosophy carries over into each of our lives as well. With no grand scheme in mind, with no final plan or ultimate end for our lives, the task we create for ourselves may often feel as insignificant or as inconsequential as simply filling a page. Many of us have found this idea to be more pessimistic or depressing than it actually is, assuming that by "filling up the page" we are saying that we will all sit in tiny little desks in tiny little rows with our tiny little pencils, copy down words from a medical dictionary until we fill up both sides (the front and the back) of the page with our tiny little handwritings, sign the honor code like good boys and girls, and die. 

I am sorry to disenchant you, my friends, but there is so much more to existentialism than this. Existentialism, Sartre wants to tell you, is ultimately the most optimistic and humanistic philosophy available: do not become forlorn by the fact that your task is "merely" to fill a page. Instead, consider the possibilities. Fill it up with love poems, erase them, and fill it back up again. Cover it in stickers. Cover it cupcake sprinkles. Cover it in glitter glue. Trace the contours of your hand. Make that tracing a turkey. Wipe your ass with it. 

Write the opening lines of your novel. Write the heartbreaking conclusion. Draw every shape you know, then every shape you don't know. Fill the page with black marker; paint back over it in white. Flick some pink in there to be trendy. Make a Warhol. Make a Pollock. Make Friedrich Nietzsche's mustache. Copy "I will not be in bad faith" until your hand begins to cramp. Finish the rest of it with your left hand. Break out the old Spirograph. Blow your runny nose and fold the page over. 

Hell, go ahead prick your thumb and leave the bloody print there in the corner. No one will mind. In the end you will not have been asked to draw anything in particular. You will not have been graded for accuracy (there are no still-life mannequins), or even creativity. There are no grades, and if there is, they are completion grades, so do whatever you want. 

You cannot fail. 

You cannot fail.

You simply. cannot. fail.

So have at it. 

Venn Diagram:

Do you really feel this alone? Why or why not? 

As Fast As You Want:

Do you feel limitless yet?

If I would still like to only go 55 mph, what does this say about me? 

Does Existentialism really eliminate a speed limit?

Ought we to drive a certain speed anyway?

Do you feel safe with no speed limit?

Really? You look kind of afraid. 

How many accidents actually occur on the Autobahn anyway?

How fast would you drive if there were no limit?

The Beast is Near:

Buber and the Ethics of Care

In our recent discussions in class, the question has been raised: is there an ethic that stems forth from an Existential Philosophy? And as I have considered this, I have thought more and more about the ideas presented between Nel Noddings' Ethics of Care and Martin Buber's I and Thou. I would like to present their philosophies in a manner of co-dialogue per se, and hear your response; does a form of the ethics of care arise out of Buber's philosophy? I would like to say that it does, though it seems odd that an ethic of care would surface with regards to Existentialism.

The Ethics of Care is an ethic based on myriad factors, but I am only going to explicate the ones I find most relevant to our discussion. The first aspect I would like to discuss is the notion of the relationship. A caring relationship centers on dialogue between the one-caring and the cared-for. Within both the one-caring and the cared-for, (and within everyone you may randomly pass on the street) there are what Noddings' calls, "An Ethical Ideal." The Ethical Ideal, is essentially, exactly what it sounds like: it is the best picture of oneself, and with each interaction a person has, either as one-caring or as a cared-for, their ethical ideal can either grow or diminish. Now, there are two different types of caring for someone: natural care and ethical care. Natural care arises innately from within you--this is the sort of care perhaps a mother has for her child; it is seemingly easy to care for this person because natural affection flows towards this person. The second kind of care is one called ethical caring; this is the kind of caring we are called to do even when it is hard--we ethically care when we are not already in a relationship with someone, and do something for them anyway. Perhaps an example of this would be, imagine you are at the grocery store and a woman drops her gallon of milk next to you--you have a choice: either you keep going, and perhaps neither yours nor her ethical ideal moved in any direction, but perhaps you stopped, picked up the milk, handed it to her, and then kept going: perhaps then, both of your ethical ideals were increased. You had no obligation per se to her because you were not engaging in any sort of previous caring relation with her, but you decided to ethically care for her nonetheless. This feeling of the "I must" that appears within you, is called "obligation"; however, obligation is a choice, and you are free to reject obligation. There are two last things that I would like to discuss before I move on to a discussion on Buber, and those things are Engrossment/Motivational Displacement and the notion of dialogue. Engrossment and Motivational Displacement go hand in hand, in the sense that they occur subsequent of one another. When one-caring engages in dialogue with a cared-for, the one-caring "engrosses" in the cared-for. To engross means to fully engage; to step outside of who you are for the time being, outside of your time constraints, your hunger, your annoyances of the day, and fully and actively engage in what the other person is saying and feeling: by doing this, you "motivationally displace" yourself in order to care for the other. The last thing I want to emphasize is dialogue. Noddings says that dialogue is absolutely essential to the nurturing and the maintenance of the ethical ideal; one must practice both speaking and listening; acting as both one-caring and a cared-for in order for natural care to occur more frequently. With practice, although we are not obligated to do this, we eventually care more naturally, more frequently. It requires less effort to simply desire to nurture others' ethical ideals, and when we are nurturing, very often, and this is also important, people begin to reciprocate that care, and it becomes a cyclical process of relationships.
Finally, I get to Buber. Again, I am only going to address a few specific things here, as this is already quite long, (basically to the bottom of p. 321 in the book.) I specifically want to begin with the ways in which his focus on the I-It relationship and the I-Thou relationship seem to be analogous to those of a caring relationship. He says that the word of humans is two-fold, that in our nature we have the potential to treat or name something an "it" or a "thou", but only by naming something does the "I" come into the picture--thus, creating a sense of dialogue between two things--either the it or the thou. However, Buber says that

"The world of experience belongs to the founding word I-It, whereas the founding word I-Thou grounds the world of relating".

By this, I take Buber to mean that when humans engage with something they enter into this two-fold (I-it or I-thou) relationship; however, the I-it is called forth when a human engages with something that either does not reciprocate that engagement or something that you simply experience. In opposition, the I-thou, is said to truly call forth the I in the relationship. Buber says that in the process of becoming the I, I utter Thou. I take this to mean that in a relationship, where both the I and the thou are being treated as a "thou", thus engaging one another, they encounter one another, and they stand in the process of relating.
The last thing I want to do briefly is show how some of these philosophies are analogous. Both Noddings' and Buber have a distinct philosophy that is based on relation with the "other", and the ways in which we respond to that other. For Noddings' it is treating them as a cared-for, and working to displace yourself and nurture their ethical ideal. For Buber, it is the recognition of the "person" as separate from the recognition of the person as a thing or an experience. Consider the aforementioned possibility of the woman in the grocery store. How might Buber respond to her? Would he say that she was an I-it or an I-thou? The I-It versus the I-Thou seems similar to the caring relationship with regards to the one-caring and the cared-for and the ways in which we choose to treat and engage the people with which we come into contact; in the sense that just as we are both ones-caring and ones-cared for, we have also both been the "its" and the "thous", perhaps we have been treated as an it by a random passer-by, while our mother or best friend treats us as a thou. And although Noddings is not religious in nature while Buber is, it could also be construed that just as Buber says that in experiencing each "I-thou" relationship, where we stand in the process of relation, we come closer to the ultimate "I-thou" it could possibly be said that, every relationship that is reciprocal, we come closer to the ultimate one-caring, whether that be a God, the ultimate friendship, or a soul mate or sorts, just so long as it recognizes the essence of the relationship as dialogical and relational.

Secondly in the analogy, Buber says: "Founding words do not assert anything that would exist beyond them, but spoken, they ground an inventory of states of affairs. Founding words are uttered by the essence." I wonder how this line might appeal to Nodding's idea of the ethical ideal being the best picture of yourself--she calls it a "reservoir of care" that is completed through all of your past experiences of caring or non-caring relationships. So, these founding words--thus, a person entering into relationship with someone else, naming them an I-thou--call upon an inventory of the state of affairs. What does that mean per se? Well, perhaps it means, it calls upon this reservoir of all of your past engagements of relationship, and considers all of those relationships in preparation for your about-to-be relation with this new I-thou.

Here are just some thoughts about Buber and Noddings, clearly there is a lot more that could be said, but this is already quite long. Please add your own thoughts. But, to answer the original question, I do think that some sort of ethic can arise from an Existentialist philosophy, because humans interact with one another--period. And somewhere, there is a driving force behind that relatedness and dialogue. I didn't talk about this much, but I also wonder how the idea of "vulnerability" which is quite relevant in Noddings' would play into an Existentialist ethic.

Assorted thoughts about Buber

In class on Thursday we talked about Buber and what he calls the “dialogical existence.” He says that relationships are always in one of two realms: either I-thou or I-it. While I read Buber and while we talked about him in class, I kept thinking about a conversation I’d just had with one of my best friends. This friend is in Professor Shade’s Ethics class, and he was telling me about this book that he was reading for class. He talked about how the woman who wrote the book believes that men and women care in different ways. She says that men care in a more general sense, where they care about everyone equally, and they treat everyone they know in the same way. However, women are more discerning in the way they care about people, and they really love the people that they care about. Women are more protective of and loyal to the people that they care about, whereas men see everyone as equal to each other. The way my friend described it to me, it seems like (to use Kierkegaard terms) men live in a universal realm, where everything belongs to everyone, and women live in a more personal realm in which they treat people differently due to how they feel about them and the situations that exist.

This reminded me a little of Buber’s I-thou, I-it relationships. He distinguishes between these relationships by saying that I-it is essentially detached, while I-thou involves the whole person. I don’t want to assume connections that aren’t there, but I did see parallels between Buber’s ethics and the care ethics discussed above. Because if the idea is that men treat everyone the same, isn’t that essentially treating people as objects, taking away their individuality to be their own person? And if women have fewer relationships but they are stronger and with people that they really care about, isn’t that an I-thou relationship in the sense that it’s a deeper relationship, involving the whole person? When my friend and I were talking about this, I kept thinking that men caring about everyone is really like men caring about no one. Because it’s like stretching man too thin, to the point where their relationships don’t mean anything. But women have fewer, but stronger relationships that actually may end up being more meaningful.

I like the idea that Buber creates an ethics that differs from Sartre’s in the sense that it is a religious ethics. While Sartre flat out denies that God exists, Buber’s ethics definitely has a religious feel to it, even though he never mentions God. Sartre believes in man taking full responsibility. And I think Buber believes in that too, but it seems like his view is a little more forgiving maybe. An overlying sense of faith, maybe not necessarily God, but certainly spirituality. Buber uses words like “grace” and “essence” and it seems clear that his whole I-Thou concept has some religious implications to it. Perhaps the Ultimate Thou is what we are all meant to strive for, what we should all have the goal of reaching and experiencing.