Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophy dating back to the mid-to-late 19th Century. It is characterised by an inability, or feeling of inability, to understand a world that makes no sense. In this regard it is far removed from the empirical ideas that preceded it, and lends itself to the senselessness of the observable mind psychoanalysis looks at. Influential philosophers and writers include Nietzsche, Kafka and Heidegger. All German, although there are others such as Dostoevsky and Sartre, Russian and French respectively.

An important idea in this philosophy is Heidegger's idea of Dasein. Literally meaning 'being' or 'entity', Dasein is a person capable of philosophic thought. Dasein is caring, as we must care for something to think philosophically on it. It is not stable or constant but a changing, evolving concept definitive of our conception of the world. As life goes on and our evaluation of the world changes, so does our Dasein. It is our potential or ability to be something more, and this aiming of life determines the significance of what we currently are. What we are, what we might be and what we actually achieve is terminated by death. Terminated, not completed. Thus life has two opposing aspects of what we will be and what we could be; from this comes guilt and anxiety.

According to Kenny,

If Heidegger is right, there is something absurd in the attempts of philosophers, from Descartes to Russel, to prove the existence of an external world. We are not observers trying, throug the medium of experience, to gain knowledge of a reality from which we are detached. From the outset we are ourselves elements of the world, 'always already being-in-the-world'. We are eings among other beings, acting upon and reacting to them. And our actions and reactions need not at all be guided by consciousness. It is, in fact, only when our spontaneous actions misfire in some way that we become conscious of what we are doing. This is when the 'ready-to-hand' becomes 'unready-to-hand'.

So existentialism is, in its own way, a refutation of previous ideas which saw the singular person as separate of the world. We are all apart of the same, absurd world.

Dasein has three aspects:

• The situations we find ourselves are manifested as attractive, boring, etc, and we have our own emotional responses to these.
• Dasein is discursive, meaning it is expressed through the language and culture we share with others.
• There is a goal with which Daisein aims for, and through this direction is sense made of a person's life.
• These three aspects correspond to the past, present and future.

Another existentialist, Sartre, brought forward a few important ideas, the one which I will focus on being the human necessity to choose.

Sartre believed that there is no fate nor destiny to any life in any form, there is only the choices of life. Human freedom is so absolute that most of us hide away from it, either through the predetermination of religion or through the cultural, social and political norms that narrow our choices in things. But these efforts are bound to fail, creating double-minded thoughts, where we're aware of our potential freedom, but continue to constrict ourselves. Sartre calls this 'bad faith'.

'Good faith', on the other hand, is embracing this freedom. Do what you want to do, be want you want to be - that sort of talk, if followed through, is good faith. Freud saw indulgence in our immediate desires, i.e., obeying the Id, as a negative force. Sartre, however, sees such indulgence as living truthfully to our lives; here existentialism meets hedonism.