The Search-Freedom to Choose and to Act

The search for authentic meaning in life is dependent upon the individual’s freedom to choose and to act and to do so responsibly.  While this sounds simple, it is not. 

Sartre and Heidegger had very different theories of the degree of freedom individuals have to choose and to act Sartre argued that individuals have great freedom while Heidegger thought individuals are significantly constrained by their culture.  Sartre claimed that existence preceded “essence” while most philosophers state the reverse is true.  Most philosophers theorize that one is born with an “essence” i.e., a fundamental set of properties that define the nature of the individual.  Sartre believed that you create your own essence through the choices you make and the consequent actions you take. He held since “being” has no preordained meaning existence is a stage on which the individual is totally free to create meaning.  Sartre believed that if the individual does not acknowledge and exercise this responsibility she / he lives in “bad faith.”

Most people will believe and insist that their choices are free even though they do not accept the facts of existence.  Many people have the need for a compliant attachment to an authoritarian figure or ideology and thus they have only an illusion of freedom.  This subject will be discussed in the next blog post.

The Rule-of-Thumb should be to assume Sartre’s theory is correct so your search will be motivated by optimism.  By boldly claiming great freedom of action you are likely to realize more even if you occasionally miss the mark.

The Search-death and its effect

To take part in the “search” Binx talked about in Percy Walker’s “The Moviegoer” an individual must be attuned to her / his own death.  Ideas from the film “The Seventh Seal,” Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” show, not only, how difficult this attunement is, but how it might be understood and appreciated as well.

The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. It is set in Denmark during the Black Death of the Middle Ages it tells of the journey of a medieval knight, Antonius Block, and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death who has come to tell Block he is about to die.  It is a fait accompli that Death will out so after a brief interlude Block perishes. There is no bargaining with Death.

Heidegger’s being-toward-death is a way of being in the world by which the individual recognizes she / he has to face the Nothing, i.e., and to die on its own.  Death is inevitable and undeniable. Individuals may attempt to deny the “Nothingness” of death by creating the fantasy of an eternal afterlife.  These fantasies are obstacles to living a life with authentic meaning.  Only when the full responsibility for one’s own death is taken will the individual be free to live. 

Hans Castorp, the 23 year old protagonist of Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain” utters these words: 

"For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts." 

This statement is more eloquent than Heidegger’s technically stated being-toward-death, but they are both expressing the same idea.  Accept the facts of existence, including death, and do not let the omnipresence of death diminish the fullness of living.  Let death not be the sovereign in your life.  The moment will come soon enough and the words of Emily Dickinson capture this, “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me / The Carriage held but just Ourselves / And Immortality.”

"The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy

Binx Bolling, the protagonist of Walker Percy’s the “Moviegoer,” introduces the reader to the “the search.”  He says, “What is the nature of the search?  You ask.  Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me, so simple that it is easily overlooked.  The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. . . . To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”  The allusion to “despair” is from Soren Kierkegaard’s "The Sickness Unto Death" and it is presented as the following epigraph to the novel: “. . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”

It would be a fool’s errand for me to attempt to explain Kierkegaard’s philosophy.  Binx says a few more words about the “great Danish philosopher” in the Epilogue to the novel.  Binx in the end says, “As for my search, I have not the inclination to say much on the subject.” However, regardless of his inclination it seems he has been on a search for authentic meaning in life. And Kate, Binx’s wife, seems to suffer despair though she is unaware of it.

Kierkegaard is called “the father of existentialism.” He is also a Christian existentialist, which in my view is an oxymoron.  Twentieth-century existential philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, articulates the factual limits of being in his book “Being and Nothingness.”  Sartre is more in harmony with the actuality of existence.

Demanding Relationships

When I first knew Erle Fitz, in 1964, he was the Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the College of Osteopathic Medicine (now Des Moines University).  His staff included two psychologists Bill Eckhardt and Charlie Palmgren.  Erle and his associates provided counseling to many patients. Relationship matters were the concern in many of these counseling sessions. Patients would often describe the relationship in question as a “close” relationship meaning that it was an emotionally intimate relationship.  During the session, more often than not, it would become clear that it was not in fact a close relationship.  They found again and again that the relationship was not “close” but “closed.” The demands they made of each other, to change a behavior or attitude, identified the relationship as a closed.

Today this kind of relationship is all too familiar, the persons spend too much time together, they no longer see old friends, they no longer taking part in activities they had found satisfying---they in effect depend on each other for everything. This kind of relationship will eventually fail or, be unbearable, if it continues as is.

 Erle and his staff recognized how the demands each person put on the other to change defined the relationship as “closed” and not “close.”  They came to know that the “d” in “closed” was the demand each made of the other to change in some way.  So a slogan was born: the “d” in “closed” stands for demand.  We look to relationships to provide meaning in life.  Many times when a person cannot find the meaning expected in a relationship it will be the cause of great anxiety.  We need to find relationships satisfying.

 

Hospitality or Hostility

In this time in which the Trump administration is greeting persons seeking asylum at our borders with savage cruelty one might call attention to:

                                       Proverbs 31:8-9

                     Open your mouth for the mute,

                           for the rights of all who are destitute.

                            

   Open your mouth, judge righteously,

                           defend the rights of the poor.  

With children being separated from their parents at the border it is time to invoke the wisdom of Solomon.  The loving mother is the foundation of any civilization. The words “hostility” and “hospitality” have the same root. We have a duty of hospitality to every human being.  So many times the duty of hospitality for immigrants is mocked in favor of action that is hostile towards them. The Trump administration seems to delight in doing mean things to people who have no power and who are “destitute” and who are “poor.”

 

 

 

 

 

Politically Correct

It is politically correct to pay your taxes.  It is politically correct to do your jury duty. It is politically correct to vote on Election Day. However, you probably have not heard the term “politically correct” used in those ways.  A Wikipedia article states, “The contemporary usage of the term emerged from conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 20th century. The phrase was widely used in the debate about Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind and gained further currency in response to Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990), and conservative author Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 book Illiberal Education, in which he condemned what he saw as liberal efforts to advance self-victimization and multiculturalism through language, affirmative action and changes to the content of school and university curricula.”

Even though the term has gained general usage it is used primarily by Conservatives to disparage groups that formerly were on the margin but have gained the same individual rights as others. Many times Conservatives apply the term in an officious manner or even resort to scurrilous diatribes in their discussion.  It is a bogus term that is practically always used for  mischief.  Be wary of PC.                    

    

“A Clean Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway

“A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” by Ernest Hemingway is about a lonely old man in a café late at night trying to drink his despair away.  About is the operative word.  The old man himself utters few words and these are with the waiters to order and pay for the brandy he drinks.  

Much of the narrative is the dialogue between the two waiters, which is mostly about the old man. It is disclosed that the old man, in despair, attempted to hang himself last week, but that his niece cut him down out fear for his soul.  The younger waiter wants to go home and go to bed where his wife is waiting. The older waiter is reluctant to close because someone might need the café for the same reason the old man needed it.  He rejects the argument of the younger waiter that there are other bodegas and says what is at the heart of the story. "You do not understand.  This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."  By now the reader may realize that the older waiter is the protagonist of the story. He possibly understands the old man better than old man understands himself, because the older waiter is likely in that stage of life when the dimensions of existence are coming into focus.  He feels many of the same feelings as the old man and it becomes clear that his reluctance to close is because he himself needs the café.  The younger waiter goes home and the older waiter continues the conversation with himself about the importance of a clean well-lighted café for patrons.

The following quotation, the thoughts of the older waiter, near the end of the story, just after he leaves the café, explains what troubles the older waiter and the old man. 

“What did he fear? It was not fear or dread, it was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.” 

The reader is told it is not “fear or dread” and that it was “a nothing,” so what is “a nothing?” Hemingway’s use of indefinite pronouns it and that, which lack clear reference creates grammatical indefiniteness that insinuates a mysterious and incomprehensible beyond, “a nothing.” To create meaning and to find your place in in such an awe-inspiring and infinite beyond may seem out of reach. You may need to seek refuge in ordinary everyday existence,

What will tomorrow bring? For the old man when night comes he will go to that well-lighted café and repeat last night and again he will do so with dignity. And the older waiter after a sleepless night will return to make sure the café is clean, pleasant and well-lighted and he will be, “reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café."

  

The Shadow

Carl Jung’s concept of “the shadow” represents the personal characteristics an individual possesses that he or she would like to renounce or disown. Jungian analyst Aniela Jaffe says the shadow is the ‘‘sum of all personal and collective psychic elements which, because of their incompatibility with the chosen conscious attitude, are denied expression in life.’’

                                                                                                                            

Each of the characters in “Rashomon” denied these “shadow” characteristics about themselves as they told their version of the event. From each character’s belief-perspective he or she is telling the truth while in fact the narrative is being told to show the character in a more noble or honorable light than was actually the case.

In the poem “The Boy Who Had No Shadow” the boy would have seemed a little too perfect to those with a shadow.  For those with a shadow nothing is more to be loathed and ostracized than a person like the boy so as the boy says,”Sooner or later they will greet me / at the river and, judging me as peculiar, / will shove me in the river / to drown.

Those with a shadow would have used a Freudian defense mechanism called projection.  Through projection unwanted impulses or feelings are displaced onto another person, where they then seem a threat from the external world. This threat seems so real to those with a shadow that they would have taken precautions: “So, just to be sure, just to be sure / the boy had no shadow, they kept him down for days.

This exploitation of “difference” in individuals, which, if truth be known, probably always operates from the shadow and through Freudian projection. The remedy for the injustice that is inherent in this process is as elusive as a child chasing his or her shadow and expecting to catch it.

Rashomon

The frame narrative of this 1950 Japanese film, set in the 8th century, takes place at the Rashomon, the great gate of the imperial city of Kyoto, which lies in ruins. A woodcutter, a Buddhist priest and a commoner have gathered at the gate to seek shelter from torrential rain, and to pass the time they discuss the trial of a crime that took place three days before.

           

The crime:  A samurai and his wife are assaulted by Tajomaru, a bandit. Tajomaru is put on trial.  His version of the episode and the wife's version of the episode are so different that a psychic is brought in to communicate by séance with the murdered samurai so he may present his testimony. He tells yet a different version.  Finally, a woodcutter who found the samurai’s body tells that he not only found the body but that he witnessed the incident as well and he too has a different version---four witnesses and four versions of the truth—each told from the individual’s point of view.

The ego needs of each witness has determined his or her version of the truth.  None of the parties to the episode intentionally lie.  Each person narrates the event as it is in his or her mind. This is why “the Truth” is so elusive and so ephemeral.  At the end of the film, whose narration should an audience member believe, The bandit?  The wife?  The samurai?  The woodcutter? There is no way to know and that is the movie's theme--the truth is unknowable. 

Fear

Edmund Burke stated, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as Fear.” The fear of death is the most basic fear.  It through history and tradition has left us with institutions with fanciful and delusional religious ideas based on nothing but beliefs.

However, fear can be used by ruthless leaders to mobilize people to any cause—even war. Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice both appeared on Sunday morning news programs on March 16, 2003 to promote invading Iraq based on the specious claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  Iraq did not possess WMD and both Cheney and Rice should have known that and they in fact may have known. They used a visual backdrop of nuclear mushroom clouds to work Americans into frenzy. The Cheney-Rice theatrics resulted in seventy-two percent of Americans supporting the war against Iraq. President Bush’s approval rating increased to 71% after the invasion. 

While I was not privy to any specific information on Iraq I had worked in Kuwait as an investment professional and I had been a hostage in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War so I understood the culture which was not a fertile ground for a Western way of thought.

Roosevelt is famous for saying, “the only thing you have to fear is fear itself” but the current president exploits fear as his primary instrument of motivating his base, gullible as they may be.

This takes us full circle to the Edmund Burke quote and the passion fear evokes and the consequences that follow.

  

  

The Boy Who Had No Shadow

I revisited my blog post of July 18, 2005 and I found the first line of that post was, “I intend the title "Entire Dilemma" to mean the existential dilemma we each face.”  Since the title “Entire Dilemma” is the title of a Michael Burkard poetry collection I had studied I thought I had chosen the title for literary reasons and I now see the reason was both literary and existential.   The following poem “The Boy Who Had No Shadow” from Burkhard’s “Entire Dilemma” explores the need of people to exploit differences in others.

The Boy Who Had No Shadow

One thing led to another:

if I have no shadow

I will eventually be followed

By those who do have shadows.

Sooner or later they will greet me

at the river and, judging me

as peculiar, will shove me in the river

to drown.

And the boy who had no shadow was correct.

But before he was shoved into the river,

days and days before, he was asked innocent

questions by innocent bystanders

“Does your mother have a shadow?”

“Were you conceived in shadow?”

“Are you perhaps your own version

of your own shadow?”

And them were difficult questions

because he had no answer

---or, the boy who had no shadow

had no answer.

So they thought he was up to no good.

The questions became less innocent.

And because, by now, he was also judged

as not belonging to any crucial historical epoch,

he was shoved into the river

and kept beneath the surface by poles.

Not a particularly unique circumstance.

But the reason was unique and they knew that.

So, just to be sure, just to be sure

the boy had no shadow, they kept him down for days.

Lest the shadow which he had not,

which he had been murdered for,

escape in the river and flee.

The eminent Martin Heidegger had a shadow and his Jewish mentor Edmund Husserl had no shadow and in spite of the fact that Heidegger's magnum opus “Being and Time” was dedicated to Edmund Husserl Heidegger betrayed him. Heidegger was a Nazi and his concepts of “blut and boden” (blood and soil) were the quintessence of the Nazi ideology. Blood and soil cannot to parsed out of “Being and Time” they are integral to the work.  It seems astounding that a man of Martin Heidegger’s intellect considered all Jews to have no shadows, which would indicate that ideology is more visceral than intellectual.

In the Trump age the “no shadow” people are easy to identify they are everyone that is different, i.e., everyone who is not a rich white man.

This idea of the human predilection to exploit individual differences will be revisited many times in this blog.