📚 David E. Cooper. Existentialism: A Reconstruction

Есть большая разница между философскими книгами и книгами о философии. Философскую книгу бесполезно “читать”, она не для этого нужна. Нужна она для того, чтобы присоединиться к автору и суметь проследовать за мыслью — т.е. заниматься философией — что совсем непросто, требует навыка и подготовки. Книги о философии можно просто читать, но они бывают разные. Есть книги, которые совсем не понимают этой разницы между философским текстом и рассказом о философии, и делают вид, что это одно и то же. И написана там совсем уж какая-то ерунда: автор исходную мысль совсем не уловил, остались в лучшем случае только смутные ее следы. Есть другие, там пересказ вроде и похож на мысль, но это больше чучело: мысль замерла и никуда больше не идет. А есть еще жанр, рассказывать про философов по фамилиям, пересказывать кто что говорил, выглядит это как экскурсия в зоопарк диковинных зверей и загадочных речей. С таблчиками: “Сартр”, пожалуйста, вот “Хайдеггер”, “Морис Мерло-Понти”, вслух не думать, руками не трогать.

Вот книга Купера это рассказ о философии, но рассказ хороший, даже и в мысли поучаствовать можно, хоть и косвенно. Экзистенциализм течение в философии когда-то модное, популярное, выплеснувшееся в более широкую культуру. И темы какие волнующие, ничего себе!: Angst, смерть, абсурд, свобода! Экзистенциалистские тексты при этом сложные, поэтому о том, что там написано сказано много, но часто совсем бестолково. Купер, вместо того, чтобы пересказывать философов по фамилиям, реконструирует (“a reconstruction”, написано в подзаголовке книги) темы, вопросы, повторяющиеся мотивы “экзистенциалистов”, по которым вообще можно объединить в одно течение таких разных авторов как Сартр, Хайдеггер, Бубер, Ясперс и тд. Понравилось как сформулирована объединяющая, основная тема зистенциальной философии — о(т)странение , и ее задача — преодоление отстранения. В начальной главе разобраны, мне кажется, все основные варианты “околомыслия” (Мамардашвили) о самом течении, и о темах, о которых экзистенциальное течение волнуется.

Помимо философов, которых Купер упоминает, и к которым обращается, в книге присутствует некто Экзистенциалист, и это не просто собирательный образ из разных авторов, но персонаж, который призван быть воплощением экзистенциалистской мудрости вообще. И иногда на поднимаемые вопросы приводятся не только слова конкретных авторов, которые спорят друг с другом, но и что бы на это сказал Экзистенциалист. И живая мысль в этом есть, или хотя бы ее хвост.

(В этот раз в силу обстоятельств проскочил слишком быстро, недостаточно вдумчиво, буду перечитывать)

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Цитаты:

[In ‘pure’, Husserlian phenomenology] there is a further epoché which is perhaps more radical. In this further epoché, 'there exists no “I”… the natural human ego, specifically my own, is reduced to the transcendental ego.' […]

Whether thought of as embodied or as an immaterial Cartesian substance, a person or self is typically conceived of as something which retains identity over the course of time, possessed of a certain character and psyche. A person is a contingently existing individual and the subject of empirical, psychological investigation. Like any contingent, empirical entity, therefore, the person must be bracketed for purposes of 'essential intuition'. […] Something, of course, must remain after the human or empirical ego is bracketed — namely, the consciousness which is engaged in the bracketing exercise. This is what Husserl calls 'the transcendental ego', the pure consciousness before which the distilled essences are to be paraded. The word 'I', Husserl notes, is ambiguous, referring sometimes to an empirical self and sometimes to the pure consciousness for which that self is an object of investigation. From the point of view of this second, 'pure I’, it is irrelevant whether the first really exists. If everything I believed about myself qua empirical ego my past, my character, my body, etc. is mistaken, that takes nothing away from the essence which would have been instantiated had those beliefs been true.

[…]

[…] the Existentialist's judgement is that Husserl betrayed his own best insights. Sartre understates his criticism when he writes that 'Husserl has not always been faithful to his first intuition[s].’ More bluntly, Husserl was someone who did not know where to stop. The importance of the attack upon 'naturalism', for example, is to return our attention to the Lebenswelt, whereas Husserl saw it as the prelude to a global epoché in which the Lebenswelt itself would be bracketed. Again, the real import of the rejection of the Cartesian cogito is that human existence is not to be modelled upon that of things or substances. Husserl, unable to leave well alone, concludes that the self, in the shape of the transcendental ego, must therefore exist somehow outside of the empirical world. Worst of all, perhaps, Husserl betrays his own doctrine of intentionality. The doctrine's true message, that no sense can be made of consciousness except in terms of its engagement with the world, is contradicted by the phenomenological reduction which reduces experience to the 'immanent' contents of consciousness. The result of this reduction, as Sartre puts it, is that conscious acts become like so many 'flies bumping their noses on the window without being able to clear the glass'.»

The Existentialist shares Husserl's ambition to provide a description of the world that is both fundamental and phenomenological. […] And it must describe the world as it is 'for us' as a phenomenon, in the sense of what is manifest to us. It will not be a trivial matter to find an account which fills both bills: one which is both fundamental and phenomenological.

In delineating our manifest understanding of the world, the Existentialist is not aiming to produce an account on which everyone will readily agree. Indeed the understanding in question does not, in his view, have the shape of an account or a theory at all. We should, in fact, be suspicious of people's responses to questions about how the world is, since these are liable to encapsulate a 'folk' version of the bad metaphysics and 'scientism' which have dominated thinking for too long. Moreover, the very fact that the responses will, to a degree, be reflective should make one wary of them. This is because the understanding we seek to describe is not that of reflectors, but of people actively engaged in everyday dealings with the world. Such an understanding is not at all apparent to people: it needs to be 'uncovered', made manifest, and the results may be surprising.

It is precisely the reflective, disengaged stance which the Existentialist holds responsible for the 'standard' account of the world against which his own is pitted. On the standard view, the world is essentially a collection of substances of more or less enduring, discrete physical objects. These are identified and distinguished through their intrinsic properties, such as size, colour and density. These substances stand in various relations to one another, pre-eminently spatial and causal ones. They arc, however, logically independent of each other, and indeed of anything else. (This is the feature captured by the term 'substance' in its traditional philosophical usage.)[…] To be sure, the world contains things hardly describable as physical objects events, dispositions, shadows, etc. but the assumption is that these can be handled as modifications of, or relations between, objects. […]

Sophisticates will no doubt want to offer an account of the world different in some respects from the 'naïve' one outlined. Scientifically educated, they will ascribe various complicated structural properties to things, and they may want to banish some familiar properties from the world colour and smell, say because they are too dependent on the perceiver's own make-up. But such moves represent a sophistication, not an abandonment, of the standard, spectatorial account. The scientist is a spectator with more than the naked eye to rely upon.

The Existentialist does not hold that the standard account is false or useless. What he rejects is its pretension to being fundamental and phenomenologically adequate. This account, he argues, is necessarily parasitic on a more basic kind: and the entities it describes are not ones we experience or encounter at all, except during special moments and for special purposes. What the standard account ignores is the degree to which the world is a human one, whose structure, articulation and very existence are functions of human agency. To speak with Sartre, the world is more 'the image of what I am' than I am the mirror of it.’

The best place to start is with a view of self-estrangement which is very definitely not the Existentialist's. Elsewhere I have criticized what I dubbed the 'Polonian' account of self-estrangement and inauthenticity. Polonius, recall, told his son, 'To thine own self be true.' Perhaps he had no particular philosophy of the self in mind, but such words can conjure up a familiar image. A person is composed, in this image, of a number of selves a 'real', 'true' or 'inner' self, plus other 'false', 'illusory' or 'superficial' selves which can and often do silt over the first one. A person is self-estranged or inauthentic when his life accords with the dictates of one of these 'false' selves, instead of the 'true' one which has yet to be excavated.

One might also refer to this view as the 'Californian' one. To judge from the success of various gurus and cults which trade in this imagery, it is one for which the inhabitants of that state appear to have a peculiar predilection. Until recently, at least, slogans like 'Get into yourself’ or 'Be your real self’ were the currency of those on the journey to 'self-discovery'.

This image of the 'true', 'inner' self from which a person can become estranged has, unfortunately, been associated in the popular imagination with existentialism. No doubt the 'jargon of authenticity', as Adorno called it, which accompanied the image did belong to the vernacular of those blackclad, café existentialists from whom Simone de Beauvoir was so keen to dissociate herself and Sartre. But did not Nietzsche write, 'Be yourself: you are not at all what you now do, think or desire'? He did, but this seemingly Californian pronouncement is immediately followed by the words, 'Your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be.’ The true self, for Nietzsche, is not an inner self somehow occluded by a false, superficial one, but a self you should strive to become. The self-estranged person is not distanced from a self he actually possesses, but from a goal which he should be pursuing.

The 'sincere' [in Sartre's sense of the term] person believes he has a true, fixed essence, in accordance with which he must try to live. Such a person 'puts himself out of reach: it is an escape'. That 'self- recovery' of his being, in need of which the self-estranged person stands, is in fact 'corrupted' by the 'sincere' attitude. For one thing, the 'sincere' man takes it that, deep down, he has a nature or character which determines in advance how he should be. This misunderstanding of his existence as a human being is compounded by dissociating himself, his 'real' self, from his 'external' behaviour. Since a person is nothing else but the sum of his actions, this dissociation is a form of bad faith, an attempt to escape judgement for what one does. Sartre's point here recalls Nietzsche's derision of the manner in which the 'botched and the bungled' bolster their self-esteem by pretending that their actions are no reflection of what, au fond, they are really like.

The source of such quintessentially human experiences is what Sartre calls 'the Look' (le regard). It is this which 'has revealed to us the indubitable existence of the Other for whom we are'. He illustrates 'the Look' with his usual dramatic flair. I am kneeling by a door, peeping through a keyhole: 'But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me... I am suddenly affected in my being...and essential modifications appear in my structure.' The crucial modification is that 'I now exist as myself,' for I have been made into 'an object for the Other'. 'The Look' at once reifies and individuates me. 'Behold now I am somebody.’

Sartre's example can mislead if it suggests that I only become aware of others and of myself in embarrassing and unedifying situations. (Though it might be a truth of child psychology that the child first becomes fully aware of its distinct existence through the disapproving stares of its parents.) 'The Look' is at work whenever I am made aware of myself as an object for the attention of others: creatures who can 'transfix' me in the way I 'transfix' objects about me.

Becoming apprised of 'the Look' is, for Sartre, only the beginning of one's sense of distinctive selfhood. This sense, once born, becomes 'reinforced' in roughly the ways described by Hegel in his famous dialectic of the master/slave relationship. The rough idea is that being subject to 'the Look' is a disturbing experience because, being a free, spontaneous For-itself, I cannot be the mere object — the squatting voyeur at the keyhole to which 'the Look' threatens to reduce me. Hence, by way of self-defence, I engage in 'a refusal of the Other'; and in the ensuing battle, during which I reaffirm my subjectivity against the other, 'I... obtain an explicit self-consciousness [through] a negation of the Other.’ This is the key to Sartre's unromantic account of sexual relationships as an almost Hobbesian 'war of everyman against everyman', in which each partner struggles to retain the sense of freedom threatened by 'the Look' or the embrace of the other one.

The central proposition of existential phenomenology is that we exist in a 'human world' whose contents are articulated in terms of the significance they have through the intentional projects in which we engage. Our relation to this world is not that of substances causally interacting with others, but what Heidegger calls 'care'. This is a relation to things in so far as they matter to us for the 'issue' that each of us is to himself. This central proposition serves as a premise for freedom in two related ways. Because the 'human world' is constituted by situations, 'signs', négatités and other intentional items, it cannot be an outside agency causally dictating our attitudes and actions. I am not free, as the Stoic would have it, because I am an inner citadel protected against outside incursion by impregnable walls. Rather, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, 'nothing determines me from the outside... because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.' This is the doctrine of intentionality, as revised by the Existentialist. The 'human world' is not 'outside' us nor, of course, 'inside us', if by that is meant that the 'external world' is really a projection of the imagination. The mode in which I am 'there', outside in the world, is intentional and not natural, as with a bird in its habitat. My situation is not an environment with which I interact. It is, in Ortega's metaphor, something I carry like the vagabond his bundle. The vagabond cannot survive or begin his journey without a bundle: but how he carries it, and where to, are his responsibility.