November 17

Today begins our foray into existentialism. This 20th-century, (primarily) Franco-German school of philosophy brings us from China's Warring States period to the eve of Hitler's Third Reich. We'll explore this school's theory of the good life through the work of one of its founders: Simone de Beauvoir. Other members, proto-members, and post-facto members include: Franz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Tran Duc Thao, Blaise Pascal, Friedrich Nietzche, and Soren Kierkegaard.

But in order to get the inception of existentialism in clear view, we have to rewind. Today's class begins by charting a path to existentialism through the tradition of European philosophy: from Plato to the 19th-century school of phenomenology. Phenomenology gives us our slogan for today: "To the things themselves!" Developed most famously by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, phenomenology challenges one of the most basic foundations of European philosophy: the distinction between "what is" and "what appears to be." From Plato on, European philosophy sought to get under the illusory appearance of reality and develop true, certain knowledge about its abstract, objective, static atoms: about the essence of goodness, of pleasure, of my self, of society. But phenomenology insists that this moves our focus from reality––which is comprised of particular, concrete, dynamic things that appear before us, are inaccessible beyond those appearances, and unfold through time––to a make-believe, abstract world of unchanging essences. Instead, we should refocus on reality: on the things themselves, as they appear before me and you right now, right here. Existentialism simply develops when phenomenologists began to turn their focus towards human existence: human beings, too (they argued), cannot be abstracted from their real, particular existences in favor of some essence of "human nature" or "the meaning of human life".

So, as we shall see, existentialism begins to challenge the very foundations of this class: that we can identify any point, purpose, fundamental meaning, or essence in human life; that this essence tells us what makes human life (a concept abstracting from the actual lives that you, and you, and you, and I, and all of us live) good or bad; and even that philosophy is the route to true and certain knowledge! Diving into Beauvoir will show us a different view: that philosophy is a way of coming-to-accept the strange, unmanageable, and incomprehensible dimension of human existence; that that existence is not meaningless, but lacks any meaning besides those we create in our actual concrete lives; and that, since meaning is something we create, there is no metric we could use to objectively ascertain if a life is good or bad (meaningful or meaningless).

From these new foundations, Beauvoir begins to build a theory of good living (as opposed to the good life): as a) something that happens in real, concrete lives rather than "human life"; b) an assumption rather than evasion of the inescapable ambiguities that structure our real, concrete lives (ambiguities that, she contends, other theories of the good life attempt to erase); and c) a "genuine" freedom. Today, we'll begin to lay this view on the table.