Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who focused mainly on morality and the meaning of existence. Most people associate him to nihilism, derived from the Latin meaning of nothing. It’s the philosophical doctrine that argues that life has no true inherit meaning, purpose, or value. When humanity eventually has to deal with the fact that life is inherently meaningless, most would see this as a crisis. The appearance of this idea led to his famous work of “the death of God,” where the emergence of philosophical thought and science lead to a decline in Christianity and traditional religion.

Nietzsche was born on October 15 1844 in the town of Röcken, near Leipzig He was the son of Karl Ludwig and Franziska Nietzsche. Karl Nietzsche was a Lutheran Minister in a small Prussian town. When Nietzsche was around five years old his father died of a brain hemorrhage, followed shortly by the death of his brother leaving Friedrich the only male of his house hold with his mother, sister, grandmother, and aunt. Upon his father’s death, Friedrich’s family moved to Naumburg, Saxony, where Friedrich gained admittance to the prestigious prep school of Schulpforta. In 1964 Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn, where he started to focus on philology. After a mandatory serving in the Prussian military, Friedrich began contributing articles to a major philosophical journal that was edited by Nietzsche’s professor at Bonn, Friedrich Ritschl. Friedrich’s esteem and Ritschl’s recommendation led him to become a Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Basel in Switzerland in January of 1869 at the age of 24.

His teaching was postponed in 1870 when he joined the Prussian military, serving as a medical orderly at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. Because of illness he returned to Basel and continued his teaching there. For around half a decade Friedrich was greatly influenced by the artist Richard Wagner, who many thought of as a type of father figure for Nietzsche. The two eventually had a falling out due to the dominance Wagner had on Nietzsche’s thoughts and publishing’s, which only helped Nietzsche to focus on his own philosophies. Around 1878, at the age of 34, after failing to reposition himself into the philosophy department, Nietzsche got to a point where both he and the University of Basel agreed that he should not continue teaching there anymore. Like the split with Wagner, leaving the University only further liberated him.

While studying in Leipzig the philosopher by the name of Arthur Schopenhauer caught Nietzsche’s attention. Nietzsche upheld the idea that the most important aspect of philosophy was the philosopher behind the work. Nietzsche would skip lectures to devote time to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which was stricken with ethical pessimism. Ultimately Nietzsche broke away from Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Again, like leaving Wagner and Basel, the split only further liberated Nietzsche’s philosophical ideals.

By the end of the 1880’s Nietzsche’s health worsened. On January 3^rd 1889 after watching a horse get flogged by its owner outside of his apartment, Nietzsche had an apparent complete mental and physical breakdown. After time spent in psychiatric clinics he was released to the care of his mother, and later to his sister. During the early 1890’s Elisabeth (Friedrich’s sister) gained access of all of Friedrich’s literary remains, both published and unpublished. She began spreading the writings which ultimately lead Nietzsche’s work to reach the acclaim it did. However, Elisabeth was said to alter and edit the intent and meanings of his original works to make them more popular, and occasionally as a political motive. Friedrich received almost none of this fame. After never really recovering from his mental and physical breakdown, Friedrich spent his last years at Villa Silberblick and passed away on August 25, 1900. He was buried in Röcken, near Leipzig. Elisabeth continued to show influence over Nietzsche’s work and reputation until her death in 1935.

Nietzsche’s work was very existentialistic. His connection with nihilism (the idea that life is inherently meaningless) and his idea that “god is dead” tried to convey that our old ways of depending on religion were gone and that our civilization had to rely on new methods of the justification of life. Once a culture overcomes nihilism and finds meaning in life, they then have a new foundation on which to thrive. Friedrich wanted to enhance the individual and their role of existence. 

How psychology became an empirical science in the latter half of the 19th century and broke off from philosophy?

Behaviors and mental processes began to be examined under the lenses of Philosophy and the Natural Sciences. In India, the Buddha considered that thoughts are the products of what we sense and perceive from the environment. In China, Confucius preached that thoughts come from the inside and not from the external world. In the West, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle debated about the nature of the mind. Modern philosopher Rene Descartes, on the other hand, claimed that the body and the mind are separate and distinct from each other.

The word empirical denotes information acquired by means of observation or experimentation. Psychology was a branch of philosophy until the 1870s, when it developed as an independent scientific discipline in Germany and the United States. Today, psychology is largely defined as "the study of behavior and mental processes.” Both metal processes and behaviors can be measured. As a science, Psychology follows systematic methods of observing, describing, predicting and explaining its subject matter. Wilhelm Wundt, considered as the father of modern psychology, was the first who attempted to measure mental processes. In December 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt conducted an experiment measuring the time lag between the instant an auditory stimulus is presented, and the moment the research participant presses the telegraph key to confirm hearing. The central concept of this experiment is the idea that mental processes can be quantified by measuring the time it took for the mind to translate information presented to the body. 

Summary: Psychology became an empirical science when Wilhelm Wundt (who formed the first laboratory of psychological research at the University of Leipzig, Germany ) conducted the first experiment that measured mental processes and behaviors. The act of measuring in the form of empirical methods and observation separated this new form of science from philosophy and marked psychology as an independent field of study.

The emergence of structuralism in the late 1950’s in disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology, & psychology

Russell Van Edsinga

Professor Gilliland

Philosophy 408: Phenomenology and Existentialism

Presentation #2

Before I cover structuralisms impact on the late 1950’s in the disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology, and psychology, Ill first go over the definitional aspect, in case some of you aren’t as familiar with this theory.

-Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm (in the philosophy of science, a generally accepted model of how ideas relate to one another, forming a conceptual framework within which scientific research is carried out) that emphasizes that elements of culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. The philosopher by the name of Simon Blackburn- a British academic philosopher known for his work in quasi-realism- summarized structuralism as: "the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture".        

Structuralism rejects the concept of human freedom and choice and focused instead on the way that human experience and thus, behavior, is determined by various structures. It argued that human culture may be understood by means of a structure-—modeled on language -that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and the organization of ideas and imagination

The structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied in a diverse range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, economics and architecture.

            Structuralism originated in the early 1900s, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow  and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. In the late 1950s and early '60s, when structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, an array of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields of study. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in Structuralism.                               

The most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include Lévi-Strauss, linguist Roman Jakobson, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. As an intellectual movement, structuralism was initially presumed the heir apparent to existentialism.    

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism, such as that asserted by Jean-Paul Sartre, was the dominant European intellectual movement. Structuralism rose to prominence in France in the wake of existentialism, particularly in the 1960s. The initial popularity of structuralism in France led to its spread across the globe.      

By the early 1960s structuralism as a movement was coming into its own and some believed that it offered a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines. Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on how structuralism could be applied to literature.

However, by the late 1960s, many of Structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from a new wave of predominantly French intellectuals such as the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the philosopher and social commentator Jacques Derrida, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the literary critic Roland Barthes  Though elements of their work necessarily relate to structuralism and are informed by it, these theorists have generally been referred to as post-structuralists.

Structuralism is less popular today than other approaches, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction.

In the 1980s, deconstruction—and its emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of language rather than its crystalline logical structure—became popular. By the end of the century structuralism was seen as a historically important school of thought, but the movements that it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, commanded attention

Structuralism is less popular today than other approaches, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. Structuralism has often been criticized for being ahistorical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of people to act. The precise nature of the revision of structuralism differs with each post-structuralist author, though common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures. This theory proposed that there are certain theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy, which human logic has given to text. Such binary pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, symbolic/imaginary. Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the hierarchy, choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant term on its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems that produce the illusion of singular meaning. This « deconstruction can explain how male can become female, how speech can become writing, and how rational can become emotional

Put briefly-

Structuralism was an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s that studied the underlying structures in cultural products (such as texts) and used analytical concepts from linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to interpret those structures. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results.

Post-structuralism offers a way of studying how knowledge is produced and critiques structuralism premises. It argues that because history and culture condition the study of underlying structures, both are subject to biases and misinterpretations. A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.

As for its impact on psychology-

 Structuralism in psychology refers to the theory founded by Edward B. Titchener, who was a student of (Vil-heim Vunt) Wilhelm Wundt. Titchener said that only observable events constituted science and that any speculation concerning unobservable events has no place in society. he wrote- “It is true, nevertheless, that observation is the single and proprietary method of science, and that experiment, regarded as scientific method, is nothing else than observation safeguarded and assisted.” which basically means that the complex perceptions can be raised through basic sensory information.

 

Existentialist themes in Simone de Beauvoir’s literary works

Russell Van Edsinga

Professor Gilliland

Philosophy 408

Existentialist themes in Simone de Beauvoir’s literary works

January/09/1908 – April/14/1986

Was a French writer, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist, however Beauvoir identified herself as an author rather than a philosopher

It’s already been mentioned in the presentations before, that Sartre and Beauvoir we ‘life partners’, it was noted in multiple sources that Sartre and de Beauvoir always read one another's work. Debates rage on about the extent to which they influenced each other in their existentialist works, such as Sartre's Being and Nothingness and de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay. However, recent studies of de Beauvoir's work focus on influences other than Sartre, including Hegel and Leibniz

As for her connection with existentialism and the topics we have been covering-

The Second Sex, published in French, sets out a feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, Beauvoir believed that existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Her analysis focuses on the Hegelian concept of the “Other.” It is the (social) construction of Woman as the quintessential “Other” that Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression. The “Other” has also become a critical concept in many theories that analyze the situation of marginalized people. The Second Sex was an event. It opened the way for the consciousness-raising that characterized second wave feminism; it validated women's experiences of injustice; and it provided a program for liberation. From the existential-phenomenological perspective, The Second Sex was a detailed analysis of the lived body, and an ethical and political indictment of the ways in which patriarchy alienated women from their embodied capacities; from the feminist perspective, it was also an appeal—an analysis (both concrete and theoretical) that called on women to take up the cause of their liberation.

In 1944 Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion of an existentialist ethics. She continued her exploration of existentialism through her second essay, The Ethics of Ambiguity, (1947) is perhaps the most accessible entry into French existentialism. Its simplicity keeps it understandable, in contrast to the abstruse character of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (which we should be blatantly obvious to each one of us by now). In the essay Beauvoir clears up some inconsistencies that many, Sartre included, have found in major existentialist works such as Being and Nothingness. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir confronts the existentialist dilemma of absolute freedom vs. the constraints of circumstance.

Just to reiterate, Beauvoir considers herself as an existentialist and identifies existentialism as the philosophy of our (her) times because it is the only philosophy that takes the question of evil seriously. It is the only philosophy prepared to counter Dostoevsky's claim that without God everything is permissible. That we are alone in the world and that we exist without guarantees, however, Beauvoir asserted that they are not the only truths of the human condition. There is also the truth of our freedom and this truth, as detailed in The Ethics of Ambiguity, entails a logic of reciprocity and responsibility that contests the terrors of a world ruled only by the authority of power.

Beauvoir's argument for ethical freedom begins by noting a fundamental fact of the human condition. That: we begin our lives as children who are dependent on others and embedded in a world already endowed with meaning. We are born into the condition which Beauvoir calls the “serious world.” This is a world of ready-made values and established authorities. This is a world where obedience is demanded. For children, this world is neither alienating nor stifling; at that age we are not yet ready for the responsibilities of freedom. As children who create imaginary worlds, we are in effect learning the lessons of freedom — that we are creators of the meaning and value of the world.

All of us pass through the age of adolescence; but not all of us take up its ethical demands. The fact of our initial dependency has moral implications, for it predisposes us to the temptations of bad faith, strategies by which we deny our existential freedom and our moral responsibility, and it sets our desire in the direction of nostalgia for those lost tranquil days free from disturbance or care. Looking to return to the security of that metaphysically privileged time, some of us evade the responsibilities of freedom by choosing to remain children, that is, to submit to the authority of others.

Beauvoir does not object to the mystification of childhood. She acknowledges that parental authority is necessary for the child's survival. To treat other adults as children, however, is immoral and evil. To choose to remain a child is an act of bad faith. Whether or not we live a moral life depends on the material conditions of our situation and on our response to the ambiguities and failures of intentionality. If we are exploited and terrorized, we cannot be accused of refusing to be free — of bad faith. In all other cases, according to Beauvoir, we are accountable for our response to the experience of freedom. We cannot use the anxieties of freedom as an excuse for either our active participation in or our passive acceptance of the exploitation of others. Hiding behind the authority of others, or establishing ourselves as authorities over others, however, are culpable offenses.

(As previously stated in a past lecture) Beauvoir portrays the complexity of the ways in which we either avoid or accept the responsibilities of freedom in the imaginary and (sometimes) historical figures of the sub-man, the serious man, the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate man, the critical thinker and the artist-writer (or “the creator” which is the term we given) we didn’t really have enough time to fully go over the significance of these figures, so I figured I would briefly touch upon their importance and relevance.

These figures are a way of distinguishing between two types of unethical positions. One type, portrayed in the portraits of the sub-man and the serious man, refuses to recognize the experience of freedom. The other type, which is depicted in the pictures of the nihilist, the adventurer, and the maniacally passionate man, misreads the meanings of freedom. The ethical man is also driven by passion. Unlike the egoistic, maniacal passion of the tyrant, ethical passion is defined by its generosity — specifically the generosity of recognizing the other's difference and protecting the other in his difference from becoming an object of another's will. This passion is both the ground of the ethical life and the source of the distinct ethical position of the artist-writer. In describing the different ways in which freedom is evaded or misused, Beauvoir establishes the difference between ontological and ethical freedom. She shows us that acknowledging our freedom is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for ethical action. To meet the conditions of the ethical, freedom must be used properly.

The Ethics of Ambiguity provides an analysis of our existential-ethical situation that joins a hard-headed realism (violence is an unavoidable fact of our condition) with demanding requirements

 

 

 

Paris 1968 Student Movement

Amanda Schneider

Philosophy 408/Gilliland

28 November 2012

Paris 1968 Student Movement

            Riots broke out in France in May of 1968 because the French Communist Party was suspected of plotting against the Republic (Frost).  The movement began as various strikes by students at high schools and colleges.  The protests at the University of Paris at Nanterre became so bad that the University closed on May 2^nd, 1968.  Along with political changes, the French were rebelling for cultural changes, too (such as education, sexual freedom, and free love). 

            The Paris 1968 student movement relates to the poststructuralists because emotions and drives motivated the movement.  Emotions were important during the Movement because the hierarchies in society made students very angry.  To communicate to the students of that time, it was effective to appeal to their emotions because their reaction demanded change in society by demonstrating their anger.  The students rebelled against the imposed limitations by rioting and not giving in to the patriarchal hierarchy.  Sexual freedom and free love appealed to both the students’ emotions and drives.  The hierarchy in society told the students that there were distinct roles in society for each gender.  Women who wanted sexual freedom went against the “normal” roles and pursued what she really wanted to (such as a career), even if it was traditionally a “man’s job.”  Also, with the spread of birth control and contraceptives, women were able to ensure their future by being able to have sex without getting pregnant.  Also, sex was no longer only for making babies; a couple could have sex solely for pleasure. 

Derrida’s notion of deconstruction applies because the students identified and challenged the political and social hierarchies.  Such challenges consisted of not being a wage slave to one’s employer.  The quote, “the bosses need you, you don’t need them,” demonstrates external reading because it is disrupting the boss-employer hierarchy by arguing that the dominant term is also dependent on the marginalized one (Frost).  Also, women fought for jobs equal to men.  Due to birth control, a woman could be hired by a company and ensure that the company would not lose profit because she was at less risk of getting pregnant; therefore she would not have to take time off or leave due to pregnancy.

Another popular slogan of 1968 was, “read less, live more.”  This quote encouraged students to live life and realize that life was not found in a book, rather from experience.  Poststructuralists embraced chaos, and life is often chaotic.  Life was especially chaotic in 1968 because of the riots and protests.  Students involved with the protests had an especially exciting life because they did not know what the future held for them or their cause.  Reading books was not going to fix the problems in France, nor does it build effective leaders.  Only learning from life’s experiences will prepare one for future hardships in life. 

Aporetic logic applies to the 1968 student movement because it characterized the paradoxical and unstable relationship between the universal and singular.  The government and imposed status quo “norms” were the universal, and the students were the singular.  Without the singular, changing the universal would be impossible because if no one is there to challenge who/what already has power, those who have power want to keep power and will not be lowered unless the singular challenges them.  The employers lowered their boss’s power and women lowered the amount of power a man had over them. 

            Derrida’s concepts of deconstruction and aporetic logic applied to the Paris 1968 Student Movement.  The students, women, and workers recognized the social and political hierarchies in society which they no longer wanted to follow.  Riots and protests were conducted against the government to disrupt inequality by demanding equal pay, free love, and education reform.  

Works Cited

Frost, Martin, “French Riots May 1968”, 2012

http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/paris_1968.html

Sowing the Seeds of Artificial Intelligence.

Before the cognitive revolution the dominant school of thought in psychology was behaviorism. Following from the scientific method of observation psychologists believed that they could learn all they needed to know from behavioral observation. More extreme behaviorists, B.F. Skinner among them, denied the existence of minds in effect disregarding the possibility of mental processes. More moderates entertained the possibility of internal stimuli to explain behavior. But at the end of the day, behaviorists relied on behavior as the only path through which we learn.

          In contrast to behaviorism, cognitive psychology seeks to study of how people perceive, remember, think, and solve problems. More sophisticated studies of memory such as that of episodic memory dealing with our memories of events, semantic memory dealing with the  power of speech, and procedural memory which are the things we do repeatedly, like drive home or sign our names. These are all areas that are explored by cognitive psychologists.

          Ulrich Neisser first coined the term in his 1967 book entitled, Cognitive Psychology. In it he defines the field as he conceived it, and describes people as information processors, as opposed to the aforementioned behaviorists who measured only what they could observe in behavior.

          The “Cognitive Revolution” was an intellectual movement in the 1950s conceived within the context of interdisciplinary communication between psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. One of more revolutionary ideas borne out of this revolution is that of AI, the thinking behind it was that by creating Artificial Intelligence in computer science, scientists could, by way of reverse engineering make inferences of analogous mental processes in humans.

          In his book Blank Slate, prominent modern linguist Steven Pinker stated, “The first bridge between biology and culture is the science of mind , cognitive science. The second bridge between mind and matter is neuroscience, and the third bridge between the biological and the mental is behavioral genetics, the study of how genes affect behavior”.

          The point of these examples is to demonstrate the dramatic shift in thinking regarding the way in which the sciences looked at, and tried to make sense of human behavior. Where the focus was to look from outside, now it is completely reverse. Even behavior is explained with genetics which is part of our biological makeup. 

The Father of Existentialism

I am reposting this first presentation because it was originally poated as a comment, and it took me this long to figure out what I was doing wrong.

Soren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1813 and he died in 1855. He never married, although he was presumably in love once with a woman with whom he broke off their engagement. He was not only a philosopher and considered by many to be the father of existentialism, but he was also a theologian. In fact, some of his best works, in my opinion, are those that deal with prominent biblical figures.

Although Kierkegaard seems somewhat out of place being categorized with atheists like Nietzsche and Sartre, and certainly with a Catholic like Miguel de Unamuno, he nonetheless earned his place as their precursor in being one of the earliest thinkers to contemplate the nature of the individual and her place in the world. Before there was psychology, or the study of the individual psyche there was existentialism. The existentialists were the first philosophers to take the method of deep objective analysis from the abstract and apply it to the human condition in focusing on the individual existent. Although I cannot personally claim to have any knowledge of Kierkegaard overtly protesting the academic establishment like Nietzsche, and although he did not disavow religion, he did distinguish himself as an individualist in not following the proverbial herd when he spoke on subjects of religion like condoning, if not outright, advocating doubt as an essential part of faith. He also spoke against the notion of “Original Sin” in pointing out that the Biblical Adam could not have known that he was doing wrong in eating the forbidden fruit, since eating the forbidden fruit was supposed to be the source of knowledge of good and evil. So, as Kierkegaard pointed out before eating of the tree of knowledge Adam could not have had the knowledge, that eating from the tree was supposed to give. To assert that he did wrong or evil by eating of the tree presupposes that he already knew something that he could not know yet. I can only surmise that this and other rational analysis of church dogma could not have endeared him to the religious establishment.

His philosophical works always focused on the concrete existence of the individual, making him the first existentialist. In the Seducer’s Diary he focused primarily on the inner thinking of a fictional character that plans and carries out an elaborate plan to steal a woman’s heart, detailing a more complete seduction than one of pure lust, in Fear and Trembling he deals with the existentialist implication of Abraham and his almost sacrifice of his own son.

A reoccurring theme throughout much of his work is that of dread. Kierkegaard mentions dread as that feature in the spirit, that is, the union of the body and the soul, becoming aware of itself as a free entity. Themes of dread and anxiety in the individual’s recognition and use of her freedom is central to Kierkegaard’s narrations. The concept of dread as utilized by Kierkegaard is not something I am fully competent to speak of, however, an example that clarifies it to some extent for me, is that of Adam in the garden of eden. Kierkegaard uses this story to illustrate what Adam felt as he proceeded in ignorance of his misdeed, towards knowledge in the face of his freedom.

Although I have no direct knowledge of Kierkegaard ever speaking on issues of authenticity and absurdity, at least not as Sartre and Camus did, he certainly did not shy away from the question of an absurdity of sorts with respect to religion. For Kierkegaard, a figure like Abraham who heard a voice telling him to go kill his son, and for Abraham to obey and attempt to carry out that order, in this world Kierkegaard agrees would make the person a lunatic, however in the case of the biblical Abraham he is considered the father of monotheism, being equally revered in Christianity and Islam as well as Judaism. Kierkegaard did concede, at least implicitly, if not explicitly in some material I am unfamiliar with, that religious faith was irrational. However, like Pascal’s wager, and Unamuno’s assertion that philosophy offers no comfort from the certain knowledge that we are going to die, he famously stated that we ought to take a leap of faith. I compare his “leap of faith” with the admonishments to faith by both Pascal and Unamuno, because in each case, the case for faith does not have the same level of depth and rigor, that each of the thinkers is known for. It’s like a justification for carrying a rabbit’s foot, it seems to come down to the less harmful wrong. The point here is that Kierkegaard like most, if not all, of the existentialists readily acknowledged and even embraced the notion that reason and logic had their limitations, especially with regards to the human condition.

As I have understood them, existentialists have always been iconoclasts of sorts, breaking from traditional mores be they religious in practice, philosophical in focus, so it is difficult to set them apart in any distinct way because what brings them together is their opposition. Most if not all of the existentialists seem to make their mark by their shared hostility to academic or institutional philosophy, particularly the sort focused on the abstract, and their shared interest in the human condition vis-à-vis the individual. Seeing as the thread that holds this group together is so tenuous, I find it difficult to set them apart from each other in any systematically coherent way. Religiously they could not be more diverse, some are catholic, Kierkegaard is often referred to as a “Protestant’s protestant”, and some are atheist or antitheist. So any differences with respect to their existentialism would be minimal considering the fact that the essential details that link them together are the only thing that they share in common to begin with.

Alexandra Hill's 2nd Presentation

Presentation #2: The experience of meaninglessness and relentless change in the aftermath of WWI and its expression in various art movements.

"Dada/Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century. It began in Zurich, Switzerland in 1916, spreading to Berlin."

"In the wake of World War I, many artists (who referred themselves as Dadaists) were overcome with nihilism: the view that traditional values (including notions of beauty and goodness) and life in general are meaningless and absurd. They expressed this view in the form of meaningless and/or absurd art, such as poems composed of randomly selected words, collages and sculptures made with everyday objects (including junk), and readymades (in which an already-existing object is simply designated as “art”). The rationale behind a “readymade” is that once someone has proclaimed an object to be a work of art, people think about that object in a different way; thus, the proclamation serves as a creative choice that changes the object (in terms of human perception)."

"Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction."

"According to Hans Richter, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art."Everything for which art stood, Dada represented the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics, the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics."
The extentialist sense of authenticity is something that is transformed along with the circumstances. According to Heidegger, authenticity involves revealing the situation in a more originality way. It also concerns developing yourself into something meaningful for your life.

Also, unlike other philosophers such as Hussrerl, Sarte, and Beauvoir, the self and the world are coextensive. Meaning is generated by making sense of the world, by unifying its fragmented elements, requiring creativity. Modifying examples and past experiences alter elements for benefits of future events.
"Heidegger began with a question of the 'primal intention of life', the 'principle of principles' to guide his students. ... This is provocation in a dadaist taste, ... the everyday experience becomes something mysterious and adventurous. Some dadaists, like Heidegger, engaged in the quest for miraculous" (99-100).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada
http://www.essential-humanities.net/western-art/western-painting/modern-painting/#raquo_Postwar_Modern_Painting

Avant-Garde Presentation

Cassandra Cuddy

Philosophy 408

Dr. Rex Gilliland

Presentation #2

26 November 2012

Avant-Garde Presentation

“Avant-garde” comes from the French word, "advance guard" or "vanguard."  The term avant-garde was originally used to describe the foremost part of an army advancing into battle (also known as the vanguard, or the advance guard), but now is applied to innovative artists ahead of the majority.  Avant-garde was an art movement that pushed the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm.  It was based on the belief that the power of the arts is the most immediate and fastest way to social, political, and economic reform.

Avant-garde literature was one part of this art movement, and stylistically moves between augmentation (abundance, immersion, getting more in) and subtraction (minimalism, reduction, lessness) (James 2).  Augmentation in avant-garde takes the form of an intensification of the sentence rather than intensification of the things that many people habitually associate with the novel—plots, characters, objects.  A characteristic of the avant-garde novel is the presence of long, breathing, unstopped sentences which are meant to reproduce the tiniest qualifications, hesitations, affirmations, and negations of being alive.  These sentences could be as long as an entire chapter, presented without paragraph breaks.  Avant-garde writers could be called realists, of a kind.  However, they are interested in the reality to the point of madness

Dadaism was an art movement associated with avant-garde.  Dadaism was a part of European avant-garde in the early twentieth century.  It was born out of negative reactions to the horrors of World War I.  The movement concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.  It was also anti-bourgeois.  This movement influenced avant-garde, surrealism, and Nouveau realism. 

The New Novel movement was also associated with avant-garde, and began in France during the 1950’s.  This movement was made of a group of writers that rejected literary traditions of plot, action, and narrative.  These writers wanted to instead present an objective record of objects.

Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French New Novel writer.  He quickly became popular throughout the literary world, became the an extremely famous writer and spokesperson for the new Novel movement.

Grillet’s writing style has been described as "realist" or "phenomenological" (in the Heideggerian sense).  Writing method was extremely methodical, geometric, and often what characterized by repetitive descriptions of objects replace (though often reveal) the psychology and interiority of the character.  Often, readers must slowly piece together his stories because of his writing method.  His stories are characterized by repetitive descriptions, attention to odd details, and with breaks in repetitions; this method resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained.  His stories are also difficult to read because they contain fractured timelines and plots.  His writing is ultimately characterized by its ability to mean many things to many different people.

Grillet’s novel, The Erasers, is a detective story about a man mysteriously dying, after a series of other politically influenced murders.  The local law enforcement, having made no progress in their investigations, is deemed incapable, so a detective is sent in to solve the case. This is the simple plot.  However, the mystery is anything but simple.  The latest dead man, Albert or Daniel Dupont (his identity is at first unclear), may not really be dead, and the detective sent to solve his murder, Monsieur Wallas, may in fact be the killer. But the central figure in this mystery, the prime suspect, is neither of these men: it is the narrative.

In The Erasers, the device of narrative repetition is central.  The narrative itself reflects on the necessary physical efforts of a mind attempting to construct reality.  Moreover, the prose is a maze, made up of various perspectives and retellings of the same events.  In addition, the mystery is solved only through the proper dissection of the small differences in each perspective’s details, which then leads to the knowledge of what exactly is fact in the story and what is fiction.  Repetition is a primary focus of most of Robbe-Grillet's work, repetition mixed with at times monotonous detail concerning ordinary things. An example:

“Several façades, rows of small, dark-red bricks, solid, monotonous, patient: a penny profit made by the “Resinous Wood Corporation”, a penny earned by “Louis Schwod, Wood Exporter”, by “Mark and Lengler” or by the “Borex Corporation”. Wood export, resinous wood, industrial wood, wood for export, export of resinous wood, the neighbourhood is completely devoted to this commerce; thousands of acres of pine trees, piled brick by brick, to shelter the big ledgers. All the houses are built the same way: five steps lead to a varnished door, recessed with black plaques on each side showing the firm's name in gold letters; two windows to the left, one to the right, and four storeys of similar windows above. Perhaps there are flats among all these offices? They cannot be discerned, in any case, by any outer sign. The employees, still not wide awake, who will be filling the street in an hour, will have a good deal of difficulty despite being used to it, recognizing their doors; or else maybe they enter the first one they come to, to export at random the wood of Louis Schwob or of Mark and Lengler? The main thing is that they do their work carefully, so that the little bricks go on piling up like figures in the big ledgers, preparing still another storey of pennies for the building; a few hundred tons more of totals and exact business letters: “Gentlemen, in answer to yours of the...” paid cash, one pine tree for five bricks.”

This example employs repetitive imagery: the streets are indistinguishable from one another, so the reader can get easily lost.

Claude Simone is another avant-garde author.  One of his novels, The Flanders Road, is representative of the French avant-garde movement.  This novel is about the death of one aristocratic and thoroughly idiosyncratic World War II cavalry captain named de Reixach.  The story looks to piece together an account of the mysterious captain through the shared and personal memories of his war-time subordinates.  Simone’s writing style is characterized by muddled accounts and interpretations of various acquaintances of the dead captain.  These accounts are filtered through the impressions of those who served under him, from the emotional and poetic Georges (a member of de Reixach’s company and a distant cousin), to a former jockey in his employment.  Simone mixes memories and stories, entering into and leaving the thought patterns of characters, and playing with punctuation in a way that makes the novel incredibly difficult to follow.  For example:

“He was holding a letter in his hand, he raised his eyes looked at me then the letter again then once more at me, behind him I could see the red mahogany ochre blurs of the horses being led to the watering trough, the mud was so deep you sank into it up to your ankles but I remember that during the night it had frozen suddenly and Wack came into the bedroom with the coffee saying The dogs ate up the mud, I had never heard the expression, I could almost see the dogs, some kind of infernal, legendary creatures their mouths pink-rimmed their wolf fangs cold and white chewing up the black mud In the night’s gloom, perhaps a recollection, the devouring dogs cleaning, clearing away: now the mud was grey and we twisted our ankles running, late as usual for morning call, almost tripping in the deep tracks left by the hoofs and frozen hard as stone, and a moment later he said Your mother’s written me.”

Claude’s storytelling seems to contain several locations and memories.  Moreover, he is known for garbling time frames; this quote encapsulates what Simone looks to do with the idea of the thought process, of memory and recollection, and of storytelling.  Stylistically, there is an uncertainty with who is speaking, thinking, and whose memories belong to who.  Simone also is known for switching from first person to narrative without warning, which could be very confusing and disorienting for the reader.

Andre Breton was a French avant-garde writer and poet, known best as the founder of surrealism.  He wrote a play called If You Please (S'il Vous Plaît), which also categorized as dada-surrealist.  Breton co-wrote this play with the novelist, Phillipe Soupault.  The play is in four acts; each act begins a new and unrelated story.  Act I follows two lovers, Paul and Valentine, and Valentine's husband.  The play contains many avant-garde qualities, such as the confusion and disorientation in the dialogue.  For example, in Act  I, the two lovers share a very confusing dialogue with one another.  Paul says, "I love you."  The two lovers then share a "long kiss."  Valentine then replies, "A cloud of milk in a cup of tea."  This act ends with murder at the hands of a jilted lover, but turned on its head, "Paul slowly draws a revolver from his pocket, barely taking aim. Valentine falls without a sound."  Act II  is a detective story.  In the beginning, its protagonist, Létoile, apparently a private detective, sits in his office with investigator storylines, which quickly become absurd and are as quickly abandoned.  In Scene 4, when a man tries to hire Létoile's to recover the man's wife's stolen ring, Létoile, instead of pursuing the case, simply explains, "Matters such as this concern the police," and the man "rises, bows, and leaves," ending the scene and the storyline.  In a subsequent scene a woman enters his office and explains that her husband "feels an honest and upright love for another woman" and that she wants to give him a divorce to "grant him his independence."  Létoile presents reasons why she shouldn't get a divorce but forcefully insists on executing the divorce for her.  Act II features an encounter between Mixime, a thirty-year-old man, and Gilda, a prostitute, who meet in a café.  They exchange seemingly incoherent dialogue:

MAXIME: The kingdom of the skies is peopled with assassins. Higher up there's a swing which waits for you. Don't lift your head again.
GILDA: The photographer said: Let's not move.
MAXIME: I don't want to die.
GILDA: Someone has dared to sadden you?
MAXIME: I don't think so; I've only just come in.
GILDA: Are your eyes really that color?

The act ends with Maxime asking to go with Gilda to her flat. "Don't insist, sweetheart," she says.  "You'll regret it. I've got the syph."  Maxime replies simply, "Who cares," and they exit together.  This act is followed by "a long intermission."  In the text of the play, Act IV is only a note, stating "The authors of 'If You Please' do not want the fourth act printed."  This play shows how avant-garde often tries to portray real-life scenes in an absurd light.  This play shows how avant-garde writers are interested in reality to the point of madness.

 

 

Work Cited

James, Wood. "Madness and Civilization." The New Yorker. N.p., 4 July 2011. Web. 25 Nov.

2012. >http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/07/04/110704crat_atlarge_

wood>.

Kelleheller, Damian. "Alain Robbe-Grillet - The Erasers." Damian Kelleher. N.p., n.d. Web. 25

Nov. 2012. <http://www.damiankelleher.com/drupal/review/alain-robbe-grillet-erasers>.

Siegel, Kristi. "Introduction to Modern Literary Theory." Introduction to Modern Literary

Theory. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Nov. 2012. <http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory.htm>.

Woolfrey, Chris. "The Flanders Road by Claude Simon." Literateurcom RSS. N.p., 16 Mar.

2010. Web. 25 Nov. 2012. <http://literateur.com/the-flanders-road-by-claude-simon/>.