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Science Forum Index » Philosophy Forum » Anxiety, Nothingness, the Absurd...
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| turtoni... |
 Posted: Sat May 10, 2008 9:59 pm |
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"As a predicate of existence, the concept of freedom is not initially
established on the basis of arguments against determinism; nor is it, in
Kantian fashion, taken simply as a given of practical self-consciousness.
Rather, it is located in the breakdown of direct practical activity. The
"evidence" of freedom is a matter neither of theoretical nor of practical
consciousness but arises from the self-understanding that accompanies a
certain mood into which I may fall, namely, anxiety (Angst, angoisse). Both
Heidegger and Sartre believe that phenomenological analysis of the kind of
intentionality that belongs to moods does not merely register a passing
modification of the psyche but reveals fundamental aspects of the self.
Fear, for instance, reveals some region of the world as threatening, some
element in it as a threat, and myself as vulnerable. In anxiety, as in fear,
I grasp myself as threatened or as vulnerable; but unlike fear, anxiety has
no direct object, there is nothing in the world that is threatening. This is
because anxiety pulls me altogether out of the circuit of those projects
thanks to which things are there for me in meaningful ways; I can no longer
"gear into" the world. And with this collapse of my practical immersion in
roles and projects, I also lose the basic sense of who I am that is provided
by these roles. In thus robbing me of the possibility of practical
self-identification, anxiety teaches me that I do not coincide with anything
that I factically am. Further, since the identity bound up with such roles
and practices is always typical and public, the collapse of this identity
reveals an ultimately first-personal aspect of myself that is irreducible to
das Man. As Heidegger puts it, anxiety testifies to a kind of "existential
solipsism." It is this reluctant, because disorienting and dispossessing,
retreat into myself in anxiety that yields the existential figure of the
outsider, the isolated one who "sees through" the phoniness of those who,
unaware of what the breakdown of anxiety portends, live their lives
complacently identifying with their roles as though these roles thoroughly
defined them. While this sort of stance may be easy to ridicule as
adolescent self-absorption, it is also solidly supported by the
phenomenology (or moral psychology) of first-person experience.
The experience of anxiety also yields the existential theme of the absurd, a
version of what was previously introduced as alienation from the world (see
Section 2.2 above). So long as I am gearing into the world practically, in a
seamless and absorbed way, things present themselves as meaningfully
co-ordinated with the projects in which I am engaged; they show me the face
that is relevant to what I am doing. But the connection between these
meanings and my projects is not itself something that I experience. Rather,
the hammer's usefulness, its value as a hammer, appears simply to belong to
it in the same way that its weight or color does. So long as I am
practically engaged, in short, all things appear to have reasons for being,
and I, correlatively, experience myself as fully at home in the world. The
world has an order that is largely transparent to me (even its mysteries are
grasped simply as something for which there are reasons that are there "for
others," for "experts," merely beyond my limited horizon). In the mood of
anxiety, however, it is just this character that fades from the world.
Because I am no longer practically engaged, the meaning that had previously
inhabited the thing as the density of its being now stares back at me as a
mere name, as something I "know" but which no longer claims me. As when one
repeats a word until it loses meaning, anxiety undermines the
taken-for-granted sense of things. They become absurd. Things do not
disappear, but all that remains of them is the blank recognition that they
are - an experience that informs a central scene in Sartre's novel Nausea.
As Roquentin sits in a park, the root of a tree loses its character of
familiarity until he is overcome by nausea at its utterly alien character,
its being en soi. While such an experience is no more genuine than my
practical, engaged experience of a world of meaning, it is no less genuine
either. An existential account of meaning and value must recognize both
possibilities (and their intermediaries). To do so is to acknowledge a
certain absurdity to existence: though reason and value have a foothold in
the world (they are not, after all, my arbitrary invention), they
nevertheless lack any ultimate foundation. Values are not intrinsic to
being, and at some point reasons give out.[15]
Another term for the groundlessness of the world of meaning is
"nothingness." Heidegger introduced this term to indicate the kind of self-
and world-understanding that emerges in anxiety: because my practical
identity is constituted by the practices I engage in, when these collapse I
"am" not anything. In a manner of speaking I am thus brought face-to-face
with my own finitude, my "death" as the possibility in which I am no longer
able to be anything. This experience of my own death, or "nothingness," in
anxiety can act as a spur to authenticity: I come to see that I "am" not
anything but must "make myself be" through my choice. In commiting myself in
the face of death - that is, aware of the nothingness of my identity if not
supported by me right up to the end - the roles that I have hitherto
thoughtlessly engaged in as one does now become something that I myself own
up to, become responsible for. Heidegger termed this mode of
self-awareness - awareness of the ultimate nothingness of my practical
identity - "freedom," and Sartre developed this existential concept of
freedom in rich detail. This is not to say that Heidegger's and Sartre's
views on freedom are identical. Heidegger, for instance, will emphasize that
freedom is always "thrown" into an historical situation from which it draws
its possibilities, while Sartre (who is equally aware of the "facticity" of
our choices) will emphasize that such "possibilities" nevertheless
underdetermine choice. But the theory of radical freedom that Sartre
develops is nevertheless directly rooted in Heidegger's account of the
nothingness of my practical identity.
Sartre (1992:70) argues that anxiety provides a lucid experience of that
freedom which, though often concealed, characterizes human existence as
such. For him, freedom is the dislocation of consciousness from its object,
the fundamental "nihilation" or negation by means of which consciousness can
grasp its object without losing itself in it: to be conscious of something
is to be conscious of not being it, a "not" that arises in the very
structure of consciousness as being for-itself. Because "nothingness" (or
nihilation) is just what consciousness is, there can be no objects in
consciousness, but only objects for consciousness.[16] This means that
consciousness is radically free, since its structure precludes that it
either contain or be acted on by things. For instance, because it is not
thing-like, consciousness is free with regard to its own prior states.
Motives, instincts, psychic forces, and the like cannot be understood as
inhabitants of consciousness that might infect freedom from within, inducing
one to act in ways for which one is not responsible; rather, they can exist
only for consciousness as matters of choice. I must either reject their
claims or avow them. For Sartre, the ontological freedom of existence
entails that determinism is an excuse before it is a theory: though through
its structure of nihilation consciousness escapes that which would define
it - including its own past choices and behavior - there are times when I
may wish to deny my freedom. Thus I may attempt to constitute these aspects
of my being as objective "forces" which hold sway over me in the manner of
relations between things. This is to adopt the third-person stance on
myself, in which what is originally structured in terms of freedom appears
as a causal property of myself. I can try to look upon myself as the Other
does, but as an excuse this flight from freedom is shown to fail, according
to Sartre, in the experience of anguish.
For instance, Sartre writes of a gambler who, after losing all and fearing
for himself and his family, retreats to the reflective behavior of resolving
never to gamble again. This motive thus enters into his facticity as a
choice he has made; and, as long as he retains his fear, his living sense of
himself as being threatened, it may appear to him that this resolve actually
has causal force in keeping him from gambling. However, one evening he
confronts the gaming tables and is overcome with anguish at the recognition
that his resolve, while still "there," retains none of its power: it is an
object for consciousness but is not (and never could have been) something in
consciousness that was determining his actions. In order for it to influence
his behavior he has to avow it afresh, but this is just what he cannot do;
indeed, just this is what he hoped the original resolve would spare him from
having to do. He will have to "remake" the self who was in the original
situation of fear and threat. At this point, perhaps, he will try to relieve
himself of freedom by giving in to the urge to gamble and chalking it up to
"deeper" motives that overcame the initial resolve, problems from his
childhood perhaps. But anguish can recur with regard to this strategy as
well - for instance, if he needs a loan to continue gambling and must
convince someone that he is "as good as his word." The possibilities for
self-deception in such cases are endless.
As Sartre points out in great detail, anguish, as the consciousness of
freedom, is not something that human beings welcome; rather, we seek
stability, identity, and adopt the language of freedom only when it suits
us: those acts are considered by me to be my free acts which exactly match
the self I want others to take me to be. We are "condemned to be free,"
which means that we can never simply be who we are but are separated from
ourselves by the nothingness of having perpetually to re-choose, or
re-commit, ourselves to what we do. Characteristic of the existentialist
outlook is the idea that we spend much of lives devising strategies for
denying or evading the anguish of freedom. One of these strategies is "bad
faith." Another is the appeal to values."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/ |
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