Monday, May 25, 2020

Authenticity-the Touchstone of Existentialism

Authenticity is the Touchstone of Existentialism.  This has a number of elements: being genuine and true to oneself; accepting facts and accepting as mystery those things for which there is no evidence. There is no preordained purpose for existence. Through our choices and actions we create meaning in our lives and we do this in relationship with and among others. We do this knowing someday we will die. To be authentic we must accept that the existence of God is a Mystery. An Afterlife is the corollary to the God Mystery so this too must be accepted as a Mystery.

 Sartre believed that you create your own "essence" through the choices you make and the consequent actions you take. He argued since “being” has no preordained meaning existence is the 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.”
A character in Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" utters the words "For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts." However, man did let death have sovereignty over his thoughts by  assuaging his fear of death through the creation of religious institutions that promise an afterlife. This palliative is "bad faith" in Sartre's view.  One might think that subsequent generations would correct the inautheticity of denying a mystery, but instead tradition collaborated to assure that these religious institutions would continue from generation to generation---and they have. In the West we are born into a Christian family of some demoniation and indoctrinated into that religion, with its teaching of a transcendent meaning to life.  


 There is no evidence that supports the argument that the Bible is the Word of God. There is the magic of circular reasoning that argues that "The Bible is the Word of God because God tell us so in the Bible." The Bible is a book cobbled together by mostly old men. It reveals the tensions persons faced at that moment in history.  It is by its nature a historical book of stories spaning thousands of years, while God is ahistorical. It is not something on which judgments should be made about present day matters, e.g., Gay marriage. But beyond its errant criteria for assessing matters, its most pernicious attribute is that it gets of the way of searching for the Truth.

 the book “Search for Authenticity” by James Bugental
having an origin supported by unquestionable evidence
representing one’s true nature or beliefs; true to oneself 
entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience;

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.”
For Kierkegaard, despair is a kind of sickness of spirit, stemming from a misunderstanding of who we actually are as human beings 


The following Onetti passage captures the fundamentals of Existentialism and ironically the words are uttered by a character who is a clerical Bishop. What he calls the “laws of the game” represent the conditions of existence; “eternity is now” represents the temporal grounds for action by the individual, and, most importantly, the “strive to be himself” represents the commitment to the authentic self that is so significant and that must be in effect “at all times and against all opposition.”  His words represent how each human being should confront life and confront death.



“I will kiss the feet of he who may comprehend that eternity is now, that he himself is the only end, that he must accept and strive to be himself, simply that, without need of reasons, at all times and against all opposition . . . I applaud the courage of he who accepts each and every one of the laws of the game he did not invent and was not asked if he wanted to play (198).”

POSTED BY CPKEEGAN.BLOGSPOT.COM AT 9:26 PM 0 COMMENTS 

TUESDAY, JULY 24, 2018


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.”




POSTED BY CPKEEGAN.BLOGSPOT.COM AT 5:11 PM 0 COMMENTS 

posted by cpkeegan.blogspot.com at 8:10 PM 0 comments