Existentialism

What is a meaningful life

The question of meaningfulness

  • “Meaningfulness” is a very vague concept

  • One might ask: why does it even matter?

  • Possible answers to this question:

    • Gives purpose to our efforts in life

    • Helps us make sense of otherwise unbearable suffering

  • Religion has always been one mode of addressing this question, and has tended to address it in two possible ways:

    • By providing an answer the question “What is life’s purpose?”

    • By helping us make peace with having no answer to the question of life’s purpose

Existentialism vs. Ethical views on Life

  • Kantian and utilitarian ethics focuses on the universal

  • Philosophical ethics takes rationality to be the basis for knowledge and action

  • Kant and many other philosophers see freedom as consisting in freedom from slavery to passions

  • Existentialism focuses on the individual

  • Existentialism takes our passions to be the basis for knowledge and action

  • Kierkegaard and other philosophers see freedom as consisting in a passionate commitment to a way of life

What is a Utilitarian or Kantian life like?

  • Utilitarianism, in particular, requires a demanding amount of self-sacrifice (as we saw last week with Singer)

  • Such a life may be ethical, but is it meaningful — is it a life worth living?

  • More fundamentally one might ask: is such a life responsible?

    • Both denotology and utilitarianism tell us that we should act, not from our own ideas and identities, but from general principles

    • But this means that we need not to act on or take any thought about our own deepest desires

    • But then how can we take responsibility for our deepest desires?

Inauthenticity and irresponsibility

  • Because human beings are free, we can ignore our deep desires, our true selves, though social conformity or senseless pleasures-seeking

  • Both drown out the voice of passion by distracting ourselves from it

  • Since our passions tell us who we truly are, these distractions cover and restrain our true selves — leaving us in a state of inauthenticity

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Kierkegaard: background

  • Kierkegaard (1813-1855) did not live a very happy life

  • Physically and emotionally cripples, personally burdened by feelings of guilt and inadequacy

  • Spent a year pursuing pleasure with his friend Hans Christian Anderson in Berlin, but found the experience self-defeating, shameful, and humiliating.

  • Returned to Copenhagen and spent the rest of his days in a personal philosophical and religious mission, breaking off his engagement and cutting shot his career as a Lutheran minister

Kierkegaard: Primary concerns and methods

  • Who am I — not as a species or form, but as an individual?

  • How do I live honestly with myself?

  • How do I take my responsibilities seriously?

  • Kierkegaard rejects the argumentative methods of other philosophers

  • He does not believe that either oneself or God can be discovered through reason.

  • Instead of presenting arguments, he presents stories or thought experiments, by which he asks us to consider what kind of life we lead and what kind of commitments we make.

  • he sometimes uses arguments to show the necessary consequences of commitment, but he does not believe that one can ever accept a way of life based on argument alone

Kierkegaard and passion

  • The passions have typically been treated with suspicion in philosophy — Plato and Aristotle, for example, emphasize the need for out passions to be ruled by reason.

  • Kierkegaard disagrees: he thinks our passions give us profound insight into who we are.

  • Paradox and difficulty provoke and reveal passion

  • Passions cannot be fully known except in a subjective sense, they can only be truly understood “from the inside.”

Inauthenticity and irresponsibility

  • What is the way out of inauthencity? To recognize one’s passions, including and especially the painful and contradictory ones, and to make a passionate commitment to an honest form of life — a form of life in which we can live with our authentic selves.

  • For Kierkegaard, this is what Christianity is.

    • Like Pascal, Kierkegaard believes that the commitment to God cannot be derived from reason

    • Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard is not trying to convince the reader to commit to God: he merely holds up the Christian form of life as a way of authentic living

Subjective truth

  • We can use language to say what is or isn’t true (objective truth)

  • We can also use language to make commitments (subjective truths)

  • Kierkegaard recognizes that there are objective truths: universal, rationally-known truths of mathematics, science, and even of morality

  • But there is another realm of truth — the realm of personal meaning and significance.

  • One can believe in objective truth without making a subjective commitment, and vice versa.

  • Ethical decisions are also, for Kierkegaard, subjective

  • This does not mean that there can’t be an objective science of ethics, that tells us form reason what is right and what is wrong.

    • Utilitarinaism is one such “science.” Tries to prove that there are moral obligations to help people and prevent their harm.

    • Kantianism also proves principles like the principle of humanity form reason alone

  • But to be a good person — that is a subjective choice

The aesthetic mode

  • The aesthetic mode is a life of pleasure, desire, and satisfaction

  • One can live in the aesthetic mode in multiple ways

    • Don Juan

    • Mozart

  • Some (utilitarians) would not classify the aesthetic mode as a choice, but merely as human nature.

  • But Kierkegaard says that one can choose to live for something other than pleasure and happiness - happiness is merely one option on the table.

  • Kierkegaard himself, after trying a life of pleasure in berline, ended up rejecting it as unsatisfying

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