Which would be worse?

• Nothing matters• Everything matters

Existentialism--What is it?The fundamental premise, that “existence precedes essence,” is a rejection of the Platonic idea that somewhere, in a perfect existence, there is the ideal human that we should all aspire to become. Existentialism claims that we as human beings have no model, blueprint, no ideal essence, or perfect nature for humans. Rather, we must forge our own values and meaning from existing in an inherently meaningless or absurd world.

Another characteristic of Existentialism, which sets it off strikingly from Naturalism is the belief

that humans do have free will. In our existence, we are constantly faced with choices, choices from which we can not escape, since even choosing not to choose or act is a choice.

Categories of Existentialism• Godly/Religious--The

godly category acknowledges the existence of God, but views God as distant and scarcely knowable. As a result, humans live lonely lives, filled with anxiety about the choices they must face.

• Ungodly/Atheistic-- In the ungodly, or atheistic, category, there is no evidence of any loving, kind supernatural force in the universe.

Categories of Existentialism• Absurd--For many, the

lack of meaning in the universe means that our futile attempts to give meaning and value to our lives deserves ridicule.– Catch 22 and

Slaughterhouse Five are examples.

• Tragic--Such works admit the absurdity and irony of human’s search for beauty and meaning in a universe of blindly swirling atoms, but view life as tragic and man as deserving better than to suffer and to die.

• Existence Before Essence-- As Sartre said, “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.” We discover what it means to be human only by existing.

Humanistic-Existential TheoriesHumanism: The view that people are capable of free choice, self-fulfillment, and ethical behavior—and the world is a good place in which we can flourish.

Existentialism: The view that people have free will and are responsible for their own behavior—but our existence is lonely in a universe that seems to care little for what is best in us.

• Reason is impotent to deal with all aspects of life--our human minds cannot grasp all there is to reality; in fact, our minds, our intentionality, impose form upon the objective, material world, distorting reason and reality.

• The suspicion of rationality was expressed by Pascal: “The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know.”

• Alienation and Estrangement--Humankind, owing partly to the growing dependence on reason and science, has become increasingly alienated--from God, from nature, from other humans, and from our own selves. We live in a spiritual desert, barren of hope and love.

• “Fear and trembling,” or anxiety--With the loss of reliance on God and the unsureness of human reason, individuals are left with agonizing choices and personal responsibility. We are dependent upon our own wills to determine the course of our lives, which causes us great anxiety. Also, because of advances in technology, the world has become a place that could be destroyed at any time.

The encounter with nothingness--With the loss of God’s immanence, nature and the universe have been emptied of meaning , order, purpose, and love. Existentialist writers often portray a person confronting the abyss, the probable meaninglessness of the universe and their own actions within that universe. This existential crisis is often a test of a person and the courage s/he maintains.

Much of modern literature, philosophy, and art portrays the world as lonely or meaningless. Existential protagonists are often lonely, anxiety ridden characters who are trying to make sense of their lives, or who are trying to retain their courage in spite of the fact that the universe cares nothing for those things we call beautiful or good.

The Myth of SisyphusBy Albert Camus (1930-1960)

Man's futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values.

This realization does not require suicide.

It requires revolt.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

•

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward tlower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Camus on Kafkathe “glimmer of hope”

Franz Kafka• Born in 1883 into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish

family in Prague• Studied law• Developed an inferiority complex partly due to his difficult,

neurotic relationship with his tyrannical father• Had very little time to devote to his writing• Contracted tuberculosis in 1917 and was supported by his sister

and parents• Feared being perceived as both physically and mentally

repulsive • Suffered from clinical depression, social anxiety, and several

other illnesses triggered by stress• Died in 1924 from starvation when his tuberculosis worsened

Kafka’s Alienation• Felt he was an outsider

– Jewish in Catholic Prague– Sickly– Lonely

• Perceived human beings as

being trapped by authority in

a hopeless world• Became frustrated at having

to support his family• Had to work in a meaningless

bureaucratic job where he was

just another pencil pusher– Took time away from his writing

Modern Alienation: Fragmentation

• The city– Dehumanization

• Modern means of production—division of labor– Sense of worthlessness

• Acceleration of life and travel– Mechanization

• Class stratification

• Kafka’s writings often deal with loneliness, isolation, and alienation, all of which are aggravated by the social and economic systems that structure human relations.

• His style is stark – in spite of the strange subject matter in many of his works, there is no poetic or metaphoric language.

• The Metamorphosis (written in 1912, published in 1915) is probably his most famous work.

Parable: The Complexity of Life

• The meaning of most parables is not so obvious, or at least it shouldn't be.

• Most parables contain some element that is strange or unusual.

• Parables do not define things precisely but, rather, use comparisons.– Takes the familiar and applies it to the unfamiliar– Makes the unfamiliar more comprehensible

• The protagonist of the story is Gregor Samsa, who is the son of middle-class parents in Prague.

• Gregor’s father lost most of his money about five years earlier, causing Gregor to take a job with one of his father's creditors as a travelling salesman.

• Gregor provides the sole support for his family (father, mother, and sister), and also found them their current lodgings in Prague.

• When the story begins, Gregor is spending a night at home before embarking upon another business trip. And then. . .

• “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect” (958).

• “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen” (Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four 1).

Both sentences make their points through defamiliarization:

• They initially describe normal, everyday, almost boring events, only to disrupt this sense of normalcy at the very end.

• The disruption of readerly expectation is sometimes called a defamiliarization effect – in German, Verfremdungseffekt, which translates as “alienation effect.”

Central Symbol of the Beetle/Vermin

• A subjective fantasy that best describes Gregor’s self-loathing:– Worthlessness– Uselessness – Meaninglessness – Awkwardness– Ugliness

Difficulties in Reading Kafka: Paradox and Ambiguity

• Not a systematic philosopher or religious man• Is so convincing in his matter-of-factness and

use of details to the point of negating the absurdity of a situation

• Does not use metaphors yet his stories are parables

• Uses distortion to reveal truths• Suggests various levels of meanings• Is quirky