Extra information- WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM?

WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM?

Existentialism, a family of philosophies devoted to an interpretation of human existence in the world that stresses its concreteness and its problematic character. As a self-conscious movement it is primarily a 20th-century phenomenon, embracing Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but its characteristic features occur earlier, especially in the 19th-century thinkers Friedrich Nietzsche and S0ren Kierkegaard. Edmund Husserl and W.F. Hegel, though not Existentialists, are major influences, the latter mainly by virtue of reaction against him.
Though often seen as an irrationalist revolt against traditional philosophy, Existentialism vis largely a coherent development within it. For several reasons it rejects epistemology and the attempt to ground human knowledge. Firstly, human beings are not solely or even primarily knowers; they also care, desire, manipulate, and, above all, choose and act. Thus Heidegger regards objects not primarily as "things" for cognition--this' is a derivative characteristic--but as tools for use; MerleauPonty holds that lived experience begins with one's experience of one's own body.
Secondly, the self or ego, required by some if not all epistemological doctrines, is not a basic feature of the prereflective experience. It emerges from one's experience of other people. The cognizing ego presupposes rather than infers or constitutes the existence of external objects.
Finally, man is not a detached observer of the world, but "in the world." He "exists" in a special sense in which entities like stones and trees do not; he is open to the world and to objects in it.Contrary to Descartes's view, however, he is open to them without any intermediary stratum of -
ideas or sensations. There is no distinct realm of consciousness, on the basis of which one might infer, project, or doubt the existence of external objects. Their rejection of Cartesian dualism is one. reason why Existentialists are concerned with being rather than knowing, and why they argue that phenomenology is also ontology.
The claim that man exists in this unique sense also means that he is open to a future which he -- .
determines by his choices and actions; he is free. Other entities--stones, trees, tigers--have a fixed nature or essence that determines what they are and what they do. In contrast, neither as a species nor as individuals do human beings have such an essence that governs their conduct. Man makes himself what he is by his choices, choices of ways of life (Kierkegaard) or of particular actions (Sartre). Even when he seems simply to be acting out a "giv~n" role or following "given" values-given, for example, by God or by society--he is in fact choosing to do so, for there are no given values that can determine, in and of themselves, rationally or causally, man's choices. It does not follow that the choices available are unlimited. His "being in the world" implies that man is "thrown" (Heidegger) into a specific situation, and not all the choices that that seems to leave open are in fact possible; but which ones are possible and which are impossible cannot be known in advance. Existentialists have inferred, controversially, that man's choices are not explicable, physically or otherwise, and have rejected scientific Materialism. They have also argued that the openness of the future and the specificity of individuals and of their situations elude rationalist philosophical systems. This is another reason for their concern with "being." Being contrasts not only with knowing, but also with abstract concepts, which cannot fully capture what is individual and specific.
Since man's choices cannot, in their view, be rationally grounded, Existentialists do not propose, except incidentally, an ethic in the sense of a set of rules or values, but rather a framework in which action and choice are to be viewed. This framework does not tell one what to choose, but it does imply that there are right and wrong ways of choosing. One can be authentic or inauthentic (Heidegger), act in bad faith or with sincerity (Sartre). To act in bad faith is, for example, to follow the herd unquestioningly, or to suppose that given values, given institutions, or one's own character curtails one's choices. It is especially in the face of "limit situations" (Jaspers) such as death, struggle, guilt, or anxiety that one becomes aware of one's responsibility as an agent, as well as of the ultimate inexplicability of the world in which one must act.
Existentialism as such entails no particular political doctrines, but it stresses on responsibility and its aversion to conformism and to whatever impairs human freedom.
Major concepts in existentialism
Existentialism differentiates itself from the modern Western rationalist tradition from Descartes to Husserl in rejecting the idea that the most certain and primary reality is rational consciousness. Descartes believed humans could doubt all existence, but could not will away or doubt the thinking consciousness, whose reality is therefore more certain than any other reality. Existentialism decisively rejects this argument, asserting instead that as conscious beings, humans always find themselves already in a world, a prior context and history tnat is given to consciousness and in which it is situated, and that humans cannot think away that world. It is inherent and indubitably linked to consciousness. In other words, the ultimate, certain, indubitable reality is not thinking consciousness but, according to Heidegger, "being in the world". This is a radicalization of the notion of intentionality that comes from Brentano and Husserl, which asserts that, even in its barest form, consciousness is always conscious of something.
On the existence of God, Sartre, unlike Kierkegaard, denies the existence of God. Sartre argues that without God, there is no higher power to define man. However, there are versions of existentialism that are religious. Theological existentialism as advocated by philosophers and theologians like Paul Tillich, Gabriel Marcel, and Martin Buber posits God's existence, as well as accepting many tenets of atheistic existentialism. Belief in God is Q personal choice made on the basis of a passion, of faith, an observation or experience. Just as atheistic existentialists can freely choose not to believe, theistic existentialists can freely choose to believe in God and could, despite one's doubt, have faith that God exists and that God is good.
MAIN AUTHORS OF EXISTENTIALISM

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, a 19th-century German philosopher and writer, was one of the most influential modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the root motives that underlie traditional
Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, c .
psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment's secularism, expressed in his observation that "God is dead," in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe's most celebrated intellectuals after his death in 1900. Although he was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his name was later invoked by Fascists to advance the very things he loathed.
NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHY.
Nietzsche's writings fall into three well-defined periods. The early works, The Birth of Tragedy and the four Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen (1873; Untimely Meditations), are dominated by a Romantic perspective influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner. The middle period, from Human, AII- TooHuman up to The Gay Science, reflects the tradition of French aphorists. It extols reason and science, experiments with literary genres, and expresses Nietzsche's emancipation from his earlier Romanticism and from Schopenhauer and Wagner. Nietzsche's mature philosophy emerged after The Gay Science.
In his mature writings Nietzsche was preoccupied by the origin and function of values in human life. If, as he believed, life neither possesses nor lacks intrinsic value and yet is always being evaluated, then such evaluations can usefully be read as symptoms of the condition of the evaluator. He was especially interested, therefore, in a probing analysis and evaluation of the fundamental cultural values of Western philosophy, religion, and morality, which he characterized as expressions of the
ascetic ideal. .
The ascetic ideal is born when suffering becomes endowed with ultimate significance. According to Nietzsche the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, made suffering tolerable by interpreting it as God's intention and as an occasion for atonement. Christianity, accordingly, owed its triumph to the flattering doctrine of personal immortality, that is, to the conceit that each individual's life and death have cosmic significance. Similarly, traditional philosophy expressed the ascetic ideal when it privileged soul over body, mind over senses, duty over desire, reality over appearance, the timeless over the temporal. While Christianity promised salvation for the sinner who repents, philosophy held out hope for salvation, albeit secular, for its sages. Common to traditional religion and philosophy was the unstated but powerful motivating assumption that existence requires explanation, justification, or expiation. Both denigrated experience in favour of some other, "true" world. Both may be read as symptoms of a declining life, or life in distress.
Nietzsche's critique of traditional morality centred on the typology of "master" and "slave" morality. By examining the etymology of the German words gut ("good"), schlecht ("bad"), and base ("evil"), Nietzsche maintained that the distinction between good and bad was originally descriptive, that is, a nonmoral reference to those who were privileged, the masters, as opposed to those who were base, the slaves. The good/evil contrast arose when slaves avenged themselves by converting attributes of mastery into vices. If the favoured, the "good," were powerful, it was said that the meek would inherit the earth. Pride became sin. Charity, humility, and obedience replaced competition, pride, and autonomy. Crucial to the triumph of slave morality was its claim to being the only true morality. This insistence on absoluteness is as essential to philosophical as to religious ethics. Although Nietzsche gave a historical genealogy of master and slave morality, he maintained that it was an ahistorical typology of traits present in everyone.
"Nihilism" was the term Nietzsche used to describe the devaluation of the highest values posited by the ascetic ideal. He thought of the age in which he lived as one of passive nihilism, that is, as an age that was not yet aware that religious and philosophical a~solutes had dissolved in the emergence of 19th-century Positivism. With the collapse of metaphysical and theological foundations and sanctions for traditional morality only a pervasive sense of purposelessness and
meaninglessness would remain. And the triumph of meaninglessness is the triumph of nihilism:"God is dead." Nietzsche thought, however, that most men could not accept the eclipse of the -
ascetic ideal and the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence but would seek supplanting absolutes to invest life with meaning. He thought the emerging nationalism of his day represented one such ominous surrogate god, in which the nation-state would be invested with transcendent value and purpose. And just as absoluteness of doctrine had found expression in philosophy and religion, absoluteness would become attached to the nation-state with missionary fervour. The slaughter of
rivals. and the conquest of the earth would proceed under banners of universal brotherhood,:
democracy, and socialism. Nietzsche's prescience here was particularly poignant, and the use later made of him especially repellent. For example, two books were standard issue for the rucksacks of German soldiers during World War I, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gospel According to Sf. John. It is difficult to say which author was more compromised by this gesture.
Nietzsche often thought of his writings as struggles with nihilism, and apart from his critiques of religion, philosophy, and morality he developed original theses that have commanded attention, especially perspectivism, will to power, eternal recurrence, and the superman.
Perspectivism is a concept which holds that knowledge is always perspectival, that there are no immaculate perceptions, and that knowledge from no point of view is as incoherent a notion as seeing from no particular vantage point. Perspectivism also denies the possibility of an all-inclusive perspective, which could contain all others and, hence, make reality available as it is in itself. The concept of such an all-inclusive perspective is as incoherent as the concept of seeing an object from every possible vantage point simultaneously.
Nietzsche's perspectivism has sometimes been mistakenly identified with relativism and skepticism. Nonetheless, it raises the question of how one is to understand Nietzsche's own theses, for example, that the dominant values of the common heritage have been underwritten by an ascetic ideal. Is this thesis true absolutely or only from a certain perspective? It may also be asked whether perspectivism can be asserted consistently without self-contradiction, .since perspectivism must presumably be true in an absolute, that is a nonperspectival sense. Concerns such as these have generated much fruitful Nietzsche commentary as well as useful work in the theory of knowledge.
Nietzsche often identified life itself with "will to power," that is, with an instinct for growth and durability. This concept provides yet another way of interpreting the ascetic ideal, since it is Nietzsche's contention "that all the supreme values of mankind lack this will--that values which are symptomatic of decline, nihilistic values, are lording it under the holiest names." Thus, traditional philosophy, religion, and morality have been so many masks a deficient will to power wears. The sustaining values of Western civilization have been sublimated products of decadence in that the ascetic ideal endorses existence as pain and suffering. Some commentators have attempted to extend Nietzsche's concept of the will to power from human life to the organic and inorganic realms, ascribing a metaphysics of will to power to him. Such interpretations, however, cannot be sustained by reference to his published works.
The doctrine of eternal recurrence, the basic conception of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, asks the question "How well disposed would a person have to become to himself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than the infinite repetition, without alteration, of each and every moment?" Presumably most men would, or should, find such a thought $.battering because they should always find it possible to prefer the eternal repetition of their lives in an edited version rather than to crave nothing more fervently than the eternal recurrence of each of its horrors. The person who could accept recurrence without self-deception or evasion would be a superhuman being (Obermensch), whose distance from the ordinary man is greater than the distance between man and ape, Nietzsche says. Commentators still disagree whether there are specific character traits that define the person who embraces eternal recurrence.
NIETZSCHE'S INFLUENCE.
Nietzsche once wrote that some men are born posthumously, and this is certainly true in his case. The history of 20th-century philosophy, theology, and psychology are unintelligible without him. The German philosophers Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger laboured in his debt, for example, as did the French philosophers Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.
Existentialism and deconstructionism, a movement in philosophy and literary criticism, owe much to him. The theologians Paul Tillich and Lev Shestov acknowledged their debt as did the "God is dead" theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer; Martin Buber, Judaism's greatest 20th-century thinker, counted Nietzsche among the three most important influences in his life and translated the first parr of Zarathustra into Polish.
Nietzsche is certainly one of the most influential philosophers who ever lived; and this is due not only to his originality but also to the fact that he was the German language's most brilliant prose writer.
S0REN AABYE KIERKEGAARD (b. May 5, 1813, Copenhagen, Den.--d. Nov. 11, 1855, Copenhagen), Danish religious philosopher and critic of rationalism, regarded as the founder. He is famous for his critique of systematic rational philosophy, particularly Hegelianism, on the grounds that actual life cannot be contained within an abstract conceptual system. With this stance, he intended to clear the ground for an adequate consideration of faith and, accordingly, of religion--specifically Christianity.
EARLY LIFE.
Kierkegaard's father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, who had a great influence on his character, had begun his own career as a poor tenant-farmers' helper in the desolate moorlands of western Jutland. One day, desperate with rage at divine indifference to his sufferings and privations, he stood on a hill and solemnly cursed God. Soon after, he was sent to Copenhagen, to an uncl~ who was a dealer in woolen articles, and from that moment he prospered, ending his life as a rich man-the owner of five houses in the capital that all miraculously escaped destruction during the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807. Moreover, having placed his entire fortune in gilt-edged securities, he was among the few who escaped ruin in the state bankruptcy of 1813, the year S0ren was born. Thus, at his death in 1838, the old man left Kierkegaard and his brother a considerable fortune that enabled Kierkegaard to spend his life writing, unhampered by financial considerations.
Kierkegaard's psychological heritage was, however, far more important than his financial legacy in its consequences for his development as a man and a writer. His father combined a strict adherence to orthodox Lutheranism with a fondness for the logic of formal argument, and yet the
austere religious and intellectual training he devised for the most brilliant of his sons was enlivened by a captivating imagination. Kierkegaard never shook off the influence of his father's overpowering personality nor of the suppressed melancholy that lay so disquietingly below the surface of his father's piety. At an early age, Kierkegaard became aware of the heavy burden of guilt that weighed his father down and later learned, in circumstances the traumatic effect of which he designated as 'The Great Earthquake," that the reasons for it lay in the boyhood curse his father had hurled at God. Appalled by the knowledge of his father's sin, he threw himself into a life of dissipation yet remained haunted by the elder Kierkegaard's conviction that God's curse lay on the family, a conviction that the deaths of Kierkegaard's mother and five of his six brothers and sisters seemed to confirm. He went to the University of Copenhagen to study theology but neglected this in favour of philosophy. .
The death of his father in 1838 had a sobering effect on Kierkegaard. He resumed his theological studies and two years later took his master's degree. There was, however, another reason for his renewal of purpose; he had fallen in love with a young girl, Regine Olsen, and become engaged to her. Almost immediately, however, he began to think he had made a mistake, though he still felt
himself deeply in love. It appears that he became increasingly aware of the gulf between the young, innocent, inexperienced girl and himself, weighed down as he was by a feeling of guilt and by his unusual consciousness of the complexities of the human mind, which he would never be able to communicate to Regine. As he wrote in his diary: "I was a thousand years too old for her."
Accordingly, he decided to break the engagemf3nt. But Regine was in love with him, and the more he tried to persuade her to let him go, the more she clung to him. In the end he had to break off their relationship himself, but, in order to preserve her reputation, he staged an elaborate show of caddishness so as to make it appear that it was she who had rejected him. This point established, he fled to Berlin, where he lived for half a year. This little romance, novelettish though it may seem
in bare outline, had a profound effect on Kierkegaard and furnished him with material for reflection ~ and comment in several of his books.
First philosophical works.
He returned from Berlin with an enormous manuscript in his trunk, Enten-Eller: et-livs fragment (1843; Either/Or: A Fragment of Life). Nearly all Kierkegaard's books were published pseudonymously, with fictitious names suited to the particular work, a peculiarity intended to persuade the reader that the ideas he proposed were not to be taken as the pronouncements of ~.n " > ::. authority but presented as various modes of life for the reader's judgment and, especially, choice.
This is, in fact, the meaning of the title Either/Or, which offers the alternatives of an aesthetic or an ethical (or ethico-religious) view of life. Kierkegaard's belief in the necessity--for each individual--of making a fully conscious, responsible choice among the alternatives that life offers has become fundamental in all existential writing and thought.
Kierkegaard's unhappy experience with Regine obviously plays a great role in Either/Or, and, indeed, the final part of the first volume recalls his own love story in many details recorded in his diary. The book can be seen as a secret communication to Regine, intended to explain and justify his attitude to her. Such secret communications run through all his works, and Kierkegaard returns
again and again to the question of his responsibility for what he did. Either/Or is a work of high artistic value; in addition, it provides an important illustration of the current literary trend when Romanticism was developing some of its later preoccupations--social realism and individual psychology--and was becoming more pessimistic and morbid in its outlook. These elements also occur in Kierkegaard's subsequent books, which appeared in rapid succession.
Among them should be mentioned Frygt og baeven (1843; Fear and Trembling) and Gjentagelsen (1843; Repetition), both of which deal with faith and with the idea of sacrifice. The starting point of Fear and Trembling is the story of Abraham and Isaac. Once more Kierkegaard examines the implications of his break with Regine, a sacrifice, like that of Abraham, performed in obedience to a higher duty, and, like Abraham's readiness to slay his son, an act that contravenes the laws of ethics. The problem is whet~er situations can be imagined in which ethics can be suspended by a higher authority--i.e., by God, when God himself must be considered the essence of everything ethical. This problem--which Kierkegaard calls "the teleological suspension of the ethical"--Ied him to the conclusion that faith is essentially paradoxical. Repetition is associated with Fear and Trembling since it provides a psychological demonstration of these ideas.
In 1844 Philosophiske smuler (Philosophical Fragments) and Begrebet angest (The Concept of Dread) appeared. The former is an attempt to present Christianity as it should be if it is to have any meaning. It aims particularly at presenting Christianity as a form of existence that~presuppose~ ~
will, without which everything becomes meaningless. This was a'n attack on the prevaiHng Hegelian philosophy, which employed grandiose historical perspectives in which the individual was sucked
up as tracelessly as a grain of dust. In fact, by this time Kierkegaard was preparing for a showdown,
with Hegelian philosophy, but, before he did so, he felt the need to extend his ideas concerning the philosophy of freedom into the sphere of psychology. The result was The Concept of Dread. Extraordinarily penetrating, it is perhaps the first work of depth psychology in existence. (see also
Index: Hegelianism) "
In this work Kierkegaard makes a clear distinction between what he calls angst, or dread--a feeling that has no definite object--and the fear and terror that derive from an objective threat (e.g., a wild animal, a gunman). How intimately Kierkegaard's ideas were intertwined with his life can be seen from an extract from his diary:
But if I had explained things to her [Regine], I would have had to initiate her into terrible things,."JJ1Y relationship with my father, his melancholy, the eternal night that broods over me, my despair, ([ysts;~;' and excesses, which perhaps in God's eyes were not so heinous; for it was dread which caused me
to go astray. .
In the last part of the sentence we have the starting point and key to The Concept of Dread. Kierkegaard perceived that freedom cannot be prov~d philosophically because any proof would imply a logical necessity, which is the opposite of freedom. The discussion of freedom does not belong to the sphere otlogic but to that of psychology, which cannot discuss freedom itself but can describe the state of mind that makes freedom possible. This state of mind is dread. Through
experiencing dread, one leaps from innocence to sin, and, if the challenge of Christianity is
accepted, from guilt to faith. Dreaq is thus sin's p,re,, ude, not its sequel, as o~~ould think at first.
In 1845 Kierkegaard ,had a new book ready, Stadier paa/ livets vei (Stages on Life's Way), a voluminous work and perhaps his most mature artistic achievement. In a way, it reiterates the ideaof Either/Or, as the two titles indicate, but there is a vital difference--now the religious stage, or sphere, is distinguished not merely from the aesthetic but also from the ethical. This development
was, in fact, a logical consequence of the ideas embodied in all his .former works, which aimed at - . exposing the inadequacy of human ethics as a way of life. Accordingly, while in Either/Or there were' .
only two spheres, the aesthetic and the ethical, in Stages on Life's Way there are three. In the third and last section of the book, "Guilty?/Not Guilty?," Kierkegaard dissects the story of his broken
/engagemeRt-fr;on:l,..,.a""J,::}ew.",aQgl~-, On the aesthetic plane, a love tragedy signifies that two lovers cannot be united because an extraneous power prevents them; the story of Romeo and Juliet provides a classic example. On the ethical plane, the obstacle consists in t~ir belonging to different spheres of existence, one interpreting love aesthetically, the other ethically. This obstacle can only be overcome by one elevating the other to his own sphere of existence, a thing that rarely happens. On the religious plane, however, the obstacle lies in the fact that one of the two is constitutionally different, for he conce.ives his destiny to be one of suffering, and only the acceptance of suffering will enable him to achieve detachment from the here and now and so prepare him for eternity. The aesthetic hero has his opposition outside himself; the religious finds it within. The aesthetic hero becomes great' by conquering; the religious hero by suffering. But suffering in the service of "the idea" is precisely the realization of the idea in the religious sphere of existence. This was the argument that Kierkegaard had not himself conceived when he wrote Either/Or and for whose sake he had to write the book over again.
It is an argument that evinces an increasingly sombre outlook on life and on humanity as a whole. A number of unpleasant experiences had contributed to his changed mood. Regine had married and thus crushed a romantic illusion about their remaining in a sort of divine marriage, raised above the terrestrial level, only waiting for God to make the impossible possible. This, in fact, was the idea underlying both Fear and Trembling and Repetition. Now it had all come to nothing, and the disillusionment emerges clearly in the first part of Stages on Life's Way, called "In Vino Veritas" or "The Banquet," which is modeled on Plato's Symposium and deals with the same. subjects--Iove, eros, sex, woman--and reflects a biting sarcasm and scathing contempt for women in general.
Attack on Hegelianism. .
Kierkegaard also had other disappointments. He quarreled with literary critics who did not see the purport of his writings or, even worse, did see it and still tried to make him a laughingstock. From these skirmishes, he emerged victorious but deeply hurt and filled with an en9rmous disgust for mankind. This bitterness manifests itself in most of what he wrote afterward. But his next book was an exception. It bears the impressive title "Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition, an Existential Contribution. By Johannes Climacus. Published by S. Kierkegaard." (1846).
It is typical of Kierkegaard's irony that his most philosophically important work figures as a postscript to a book only about a fifth its size. And by calling his book "an existential contribution," Kierkegaard gives the reader a strong hint of his own philosophical position; his aim is to settle accounts with the predominant philosophy of his time, the Hegelian philosophy, which had swept Europe. Kierkegaard attacked Hegel's attempt to systematize the whole of existence, declaring that a system of existence cannot be constructed, since existence is incomplete and constantly developing. He further drew attention to the logical error that arose from Hegel's attempt to introduce mobility into logic and so revealed the confusion arising from the mixing of categories. Hegel thought he had created the objective theory of knowledge; Kierkegaard put forward the thesis that subjectivity is truth or, to quote his own definition, "the objective uncertainty maintained in the most passionate spirit of dedication is truth, the highest truth for one existing."
These tenets, which have become the foundation stones of modern existentialism, have not only punctured "the system," as Hegel called his own philosophy, but have made all philosophical systems precarious. The system builder will never understand that it is not possible to understand
existence intellectually. Hegel equated existence and thought and thus left no room for faith. Accordingly, Christianity appeared as a mere paragraph in the system, an example of the general, and that, according to Kierkegaard, was the scandal. Kierkegaard did not feel himself called upon to - persuade people to become Christians, but he certainly did feel an obligation to let his contemporaries understand what Christianity really is. And more than that, he had a feeling that God had designated him for a special task and that he should give up writing altogether.
Showdown with the church.
Kierkegaard could not abstain from writing, and now the "mission" was beginning to crystallize. God - . had appointed him, he thought, to reveal to his contemporaries the true nature of Christianity and to . expose the scandal of the established Church of Denmark, the clergy of which had betrayed their religion by making themselves comfortable in secular society, in short, had become civil servants instead of followers of Christ: (see also Index: Evangelical Lutheran People's Church of Denmark)
It is clear that Kierkegaard was moving in the direction of even greater austerity in his religious thinking, and in the works that he now produced, particularly Kjerlighedens gjerninger (1847; Works of Love), Christelige taler (1848; Christian Discourses), Sygdommen tif d0den (1849; The Sickness unto Death), and Ind0velse i Christendom (1850; Training in Christianity), he depicted a Christianity sterner and more uncompromising than in any of his other writings. The last book was also a disguised attack on the heads of the Danish church. By 1855 he felt convinced that God had authorized him to attack the established church and its clergy ruthlessly, and he began at once with a great number of small books and pamphlets and even a periodical called The Moment, to the 10 numbers of which he was the sole contributor.
The strain of this intensely conducted campaign made grave inroads on his health. After nearly two years of it he collapsed and was brought to a hospital, where he died a month later. By that time he had exhausted his fortune. The few things of value he possessed he left to Regine, the woman he had loved and who by that time lived in the Danish West Indies, married to the governor.
Influence on modern existentialism.
It was not until several decades after Kierkegaard's death that the philosophical and artistic value of
his work began to be fully appreciated. In 1877 the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes published
the first book ever written about Kierkegaard ..and gave a brilliant analysis of his thought and life. In Germany interest in Kierkegaard became widespread, and everything of his was translated before World War I. It was not, however, until the years between the two world wars that knowledge of his work became widespread. The ttfeology of the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth also helped to escalate existentialist thinking, as did the philosophical thought of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and the Jewish religious thinker Martin Buber.
The crucial understanding of Kierkegaard's writing came in the post-World War If years, which seem to have created a more penetrating realization of such states as angst and suffering. Now the interest in Kierkegaard became universal, and by a century after his lonely death, Kierkegaard's time had finally come
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (b. June 21, 1905, Paris--d. April 15, 1980, Paris),' French novelist, playwright, and exponent of Existentialism--a philosophy acclaiming the freedom of the individual human being. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he declined it.
EARLY LIFE AND WRITINGS
Sartre lost his father at an early age and grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, Carl Schweitzer, uncle of the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer and himself professor of German at the Sorbonne. The boy, who wandered in the Luxembourg Gardens of Paris in search of playmates, was small in stature and cross-eyed. His brilliant autobiography, Les Mots (1963; Words, 1964), narrates the adventures of the mother and child in the park as they went from group to group--in the vain hope of being accepted--then finally retreated to the sixth floor of their apartment "on the heights where (the) dreams dwell." "The words" saved the child, and his interminable pages of writing were the escape from a world that had rejected him but that he would proceed to rebuild in his own fancy.
Sartre went to the Lycee Henri IV in Paris and, later on, after the remarriage of his mother, to the Iycee in La Rochelle. From there he went to the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, from which he was graduated in 1929. Sartre resisted what he called "bourgeois marriage," but while still a student he formed with Simone de Beauvoir a union that remained a settled partnership in life.
Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs, Memoires d'une jeune fille rangee (1958; Memoirs of a Dutiful
Daughter, 1959) and La Force de I'age (1960; The Prime ofUfe, 1962), provide an intimate account of Sartre's life from student years until his middle 50s. It was also at the Ecole Normale Superieure and at the Sorbonne that he met several persons who were destined to be writers of great fame; among these were Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Mounier, Jean
Hippolyte, and Claude Levi-Strauss. From 1931 until 1945 Sartre taught in the Iycees of Le Havrel-: '. Laon, and, finally, Paris. Twice this career was interrupted, once by a year of study in Berlin and the' second time when Sartre was drafted in 1939 to serve in World War II. He was made prisoner in 1940 and released a year later.
During his years of teaching in Le Havre, Sartre published La Nausee (1938; Nausea, 1949), his first claim to fame. This novel, written in the form of a diary, narrates the feeling of revulsion that a certain Roquentin undergoes when' confronted with the world of matter--not merely the world of other people but the very awareness of his own body. According to some critics, La Nausee must be viewed as a pathological case, a form of neurotic escape. Most probably it must be appreciated also as a most original, fiercely individualistic, antisocial piece of work, containing in its pages many of the philosophical themes that Sartre later developed.
Sartre took over the phenomenological method, which proposes careful, unprejudiced description rather than deduction, from the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and used it with great skill in
three successive publications: L'lmagination (1936; Imagination: A Psychological Critique, 1962), Esquisse d'une theorie des emotions (1939; Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, 1962), and
L'lmaginaire: Psychologie phenomenologique de I'imagination (1940; The Psychology of Imagination, 1950). But it was above all in L'Etre et Ie neant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956)
that Sartre revealed himself as a master of outstanding talent. Sartre places human consciousness, or no-thingness (neant), in opposition to being, or thingness (etre). Consciousness is not-matter and by the same token escapes all determinism. The message, with all the implications it contains, is a hopeful one; yet the incessant reminder that human endeavour is and remains useless makes the book tragic as well. (see also Index: nothingness) POST-WORLD WAR II WORK"
Having written his defense of individual freedom and human dignity, Sartre turned his attention to the concept of social responsibility. For many years he had shown great concern Jor the poor and the disinherited of all kinds. While a teacher, he had refused to wear a tie, as if he could shed his social class with his tie and thus come closer to the worker. Freedom itself, which at times in his previous writings appeared to be a gratuitous activity that needed no particular aim or purpose to be of value, became a tool for human struggle in his brochure L 'Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946; Existentialism and Humanism, 1948). Freedom now implied social responsibility. In his novels and plays Sartre began to bring his ethical message to the world at large: He started a fourvolume novel in 1945 under the title Les Chemins de la liberte, of which three were eventually written: CAge de raison (1945; The Age of Reason, 1947), Le Sursis (1945; The Reprieve, 1947), and La Mort dans I'ame (1949; Iron in the Soul, 1950; U.S. title, Troubled Sleep, 1950). After the publication of the third volume, Sartre changed his mind concerning the usefulness of the novel as a medium of communication and turned back to plays. (see also Index: free will)
What a writer must attempt, said Sartre, is to show man as he is. Nowhere is man more man than when he is in action, and this is exactly what drama portrays. He had already written in this medium during the war, and now one play followed another: Les Mouches (produced 1943; The Flies, 1946), Huis-clos (1944; In Camera, 1946; U.S. title, No Exit, 1946), Les Mains sales (1948; Crime passionel, 1949; U.S. title, Dirty Hands, 1949; acting version, Red Gloves), Le Diable et Ie bon dieu (1951; Lucifer and the Lord, 1953), Nekrassov(1955), and Les Sequestres d'Altona (1959; Loser Wins, 1959; U.S. title, The Condemned of Altona, 1960). All of the plays, in their emphasis upon the raw hostility of man toward man, seem to be predominantly pessimistic; yet, according to Sartre's own confession, their content does not exclude the possibility of -a morality of salvation. Other publications of the same period include a book, Baudelaire (1947), a vaguely ethical study on the French writer and poet Jean Genet entitled Saint Genet, comedien et martyr (1952; Saint Genet,
Actor and Martyr, 1963), and innumerable articles that were published in Les Temps Modernes, themonthly review that Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir founded and edited. These articles were latercollected in several volumes under the title Situations.
Political activities. After World War II, Sartre took an active interest in French political movements, and his leanings to the left became more pronounced. He became an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union, although he did not become a member of the Communist Party. In 1954 he visited the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, Africa, the United States, and Cuba. Upon the entry of Soviet tanks into
Budapest in 1956, however, Sartre's hopes for Communism were sadly crushed. He wrote in Les .'
Temps Modernes a long article, "Le Fant6me de Staline," that condemned both the Soviet intervention and the submission of the French Communist Party to the dictates of Moscow. Over the years this critical attitude opened the way to a form of "Sartrian Socialism" that would find its expression in a new major work, Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Eng. trans., of the introduction only, under the title The Problem of Method, 1963; U.S. title, Search for a Method). Sartre set out to examine critically the Marxist dialectic and discovered that it was not livable in the Soviet form. Although he still believed that Marxism was the only philosophy for the current times, he conceded that it had become ossified and that, instead of adapting itself to particular situations, it compelled the particular to fit a predetermined universal. Whatever its fundamental, general principles, Marxism must learn to recognize the existential concrete circumstances that differ from one collectivity to another and to respect the individual freedom of man. The Critique, somewhat marred by poor construction, is in fact an impressive and beautiful book, deserving of more attention than it has gained so far. A projected second volume was abandoned. Instead, Sartre prepared for publication Les Mots, for which he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature, an offer that was refused.
LAST YEARS.
From 1960 until 1971 most of Sartre's attention went into the writing of a four-volume study called Flaubert. Two volumes with a total of some 2,130 pages appeared in the spring of 1971. This huge enterprise aimed at presenting the reader with a "total biography" of Gustave Flaubert, the famous French novelist, through the use of a double tool: on the one hand, Karl Marx's concept of history and class and, on the other, Sigmund Freud's illuminations of the dark. recesses of the human soul through explorations into his childhood and family relations. Although at times Sartre's genius comes through and his fecundity is truly unbelievable, the sheer volume of the work and the minutely detailed analysis of even the slightest Flaubertian dictum hamper full enjoyment. As if he himself were saturated by the prodigal abundance of his writings, Sartre moved away from his desk during 1971 and did very little writing. Under the motto that "commitment is an act, not a word," Sartre often went into the streets to participate in rioting, in the sale of left-wing literature, and in other activities that in his opinion were the way to promote "the revolution." Paradoxically enough, this same radical Socialist published in 1972 the third volume of the work on Flaubert, L'ldiot de la famille, another book of such density that only the bourgeois intellectual can read it.
The enormous productivity of Sartre came herewith to a close. His mind, still alert and active, came through in interviews and in the writing of scripts for motion pictures. He also worked on a book of ethics. However, his was no longer the power of a genius inJull productivity. Sartre became blind and his health deteriorated. In April 1980 he died of a lung tumour. His very impressive funeral, attended by some 25,000 people, was reminiscent of the burial of Victor Hugo, but without the official recognition that his illustrious predecessor had received. Those who were there were ordinary people, those whose rights his pen had always defended.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, (b. Sept. 26, 1889, Messkirch, Schwarzwald, Ger.--d. May 26, 1976, Messkirch, W.Ger.), German philosopher, counted among the main exponents of 20th-century Existentialism. He was an original thinker, a critic of technological society, a leading ontologist of his time, and an influence on a younger g"eneration of continental European cultural personalities.
Background and youth.
The son of a Catholic sexton, Heidegger showed an early interest- in religion and, upon finishing high school, joined the Jesuits as a novice. At the University of Freiburg he studied Catholic theology and medieval Christian philosophy. In fact, his interest in philosophy had already begun
when, at secondary school, he started an intensive study of the late 19th-century Catholic ~ philosopher Franz Brentano, author of a "descriptive" psychology, as presented in Brentano's Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862; "On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle").
For the rest of his life Heidegger was to contemplate the possibility that there is a basic sense of the verb. "to be" that lies behind its variety of usages. From his early study of Brentano also stems his enthusiasm for the Greeks, especially the pre-Socratics, whose thought marks the dawning of t~e" -' penetrating reflection that transpired before the cleavage of thinking into poetry, philosophy, and. science. (see also Index: ontology)
The philosophy of Heidegger is obviously dependent upon the philosophers prior to Socrates, upon Plato and Aristotle, and upon the Gnostics. He was particularly influenced, however--positively or negatively--by several 19th- and early 20th-century philosophers: by the Danish theological thinker S0ren Kierkegaard and the Dionysian vitalist Friedrich Nietzsche, founders of Existentialism; by the historical vitalist Wilhelm Dilthey, noted for directing the attention of philosophers to the human and historical sciences; and by the founder of Phenomenology, Edmund Husser!.
While still in his 20s, Heidegger studied at Freiburg with Heinrich Rickert, later of the southwest school of axiological Kantianism, and with Husserl, who was then already famous. Husserl's Phenomenology, and especially his struggle against the intrusion of psychology into essential studies of man--which he felt should, instead, be conducted on the philosophicallevel--determined the background of the young Heidegger's doctoral dissertation (1914). Consequently, what Heidegger later said and wrote about anxiety, thinking, forgetfulness, curiosity, distress, care, or awe was not meant as psychology; and what he said about man, publicness, and otherdirectedness was not intended to be sociology, anthropology, or political science. His utterances were meant to disclose ways of Being.
His magnum opus: "Being and Time." Heidegger started teaching at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1915 and earned his habilitation through a study of the 13th-century British Franciscan philosopher Duns Scotus. In this position, as a colleague of Husserl, Heidegger was expected to carry the Phenomenological movement further along in the spirit of his former master. As a religiously inclined young man, however, he went his own way instead and in 1927 astonished the German philosophical world with Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1962)--a work that, though almost unreadable, was immediately felt to be of prime importance, whatever its relation to Husserl might be. In spite of, or perhaps partly because of, its intriguingly difficult style, this book was acclaimed as a deep and important work not only in German-speaking countries but also in Latin countries, where Phenomenology was already well known. It strongly influenced Jean-Paul Sartre in France and other Existentialists, and, despite Heidegger's protestations, he was classed, on the strength of this book, as the leading atheistic Existentialist. Its reception in the Englishspeaking world, however, was rather chilly, and its influence was negligible for several decades.
In Being and Time, Heidegger's declared purpose is to bring to light what it means for a man to be, or, more accurately, how it is to be. This leads to a more fundamental question: what it means to ask 'What is the meaning of Being?" These questions lie behind the obviousness of everyday life and, therefore, also behind the empirical questions of natural science. They are usually overlooked because they are too near to be grasped in everyday life. One might say that the whole prophetic mission of Heidegger amounts to making each man ask thatquestion with maximum involvement. Whether he will ever arrive at any definite answer or not is, in the present crisis of mankind, of secondary importance.
This crisis, according to Heidegger, stems from a deep fall (Verfall) that Western thought has undergone, owing to a one-sided technical development, a development that results in alienation (Entfremdung), or, as expressed in terms more central to Heidegger's thought, in a "highly inauthentic way of being." Fallenness, or inauthenticity, belongs to the inescapable way of human existence; i.e., it is an existential, an essential, potentiality (Moglichkeit), but epochs and individuals may be coloured by it in different degrees. This somewhat stern outlook was mitigated, however, in Heidegger's later writings, in which he suggests that there are possibilities of redemption by "thinking of Being" and, thus, again coming closer to Being--a pJocess in which, he believes, continental European rather than Eastern or other Western countries are to lead the way. (see also Index: authentic existence)
The wealth of ideas contained in Being and Time is best discussed, however, in conjunction with those developed in another, short work, Was ist Metaphysik? (1929; What Is Metaphysics?, 1949).
At the time of publishing Being and Time, Heidegger had been a professor ordinarius at Marburg for several years (since 1923). He resigned that post and, in 1928, returned to Freiburg, this time as Husserl's successor. What Is Metaphysics? was Heidegger's inaugural lecture; it elaborates one of his favourite themes, das Nichts ("nothing"); i.e., the no-thing.
As Heidegger learned from Husserl, it is the phenomenological and not the scientific method that unveils man's ways of Being. Thus, in pursuing this method, Heidegger comes into conflict with the'
dichotomy of the subject-object relation, which has traditionally implied that man, as knower, is something (some-thing) within an environment that is against him. This relation, however, must be transcended. The deepest knowing, on the contrary, is a matter of phainesthai (Greek: "to show itself' or "to be in the light"), the word from which phenomenology, as a method, is derived. Something is just "there" in the light. Thus, the distinction between subject and object is not immediate but comes only later through conceptualization, as in the sciences.
As an aid in the effort to get back to "Thinking of Being" and its redemptive effects, Heidegger employs linguistic or hermeneutical techniques. He develops his own German, his own Greek, and his own kind of etymologies. He coins, for example, about 100 new complex words ending with "being." In reading his works one must, thus, translate many of its key terms back into Greek words and then consider his free, often special (but never uninteresting), interpretations and etymologies. (see also Index: language)
Man stands out (ex-sists, not merely ex-ists) from things, says Heidegger in Being and Time, never being completely absorbed by them, but nevertheless being nothing (no-thing) apart from them. Man dwells in a world that he has been, and continues to be, thrown into until death. Being thrown into things, being-there (Da-sein), he falls away (Verfall) and is on the point of being submerged into things. He is continually a pro-ject (Ent-wurf); but periodically, or even normally, he may be submerged in things to such a degree that he is temporarily absorbed (Aufgehen in). He is then nobody in particular; and a structure that Heidegger calls das Man ("the they") is revealed, which recalls. certain Anglo-American sociological criticisms of modern industrial society that stress man's "other-directedness, II his tendency to measure himself in terms of his peers. But Heidegger's phenomenological metaphors avoid social science terms as much as possible in favour of ontological one. Characteristic of das Man are idle talk (Gerede) and curiosity (Neugier). In Gerede, talker and listener do not stand in any genuine personal relation or in any intimate relation to what is talked about; hence, it leads to shallowness. Curiosity is a form of distraction, a need for the "new," a need for something "different," without real interest or capability of wonder. (see also Index: Dasein)
But there is a mood, anxiety or dread (Angst), that functions to disclose (dis-close) authentic being, freedom (Frei-sein), as a potentiality. It manifests the freedom of man to choose himself and take hold of himself. The relevance of time, of the finiteness of human existence, is then experienced as a freedom to meet his own death (das Freisein fiir den Tod) , a preparedness for and continuous relatedness to his own death (Sein zum Tode). In anxiety, all entities (Seiendes) sink away into a "nothing and nowhere," man hovers in himself as ex-sisting, being nowhere at home (Unheimlichkeit, Un-zu-hause). He faces no-thing-ness (das Nichts); and all average, obvious everydayness disappears--and this is good, since he now faces the potentiality of authentic being. (see also Index: nothingness)
Thus, the "sober" (niichtern) anxiety and the implied confrontation with death are for Heidegger primarily of methodological importance: fundamentals are revealed. Among the structures revealed are potentialities for being joyfully active (". . . knowing joy [die wissende Heiterkei~ is a door to the eternal"). Anxiety opens man up to Being. This does not imply that Being partakes in the dark aspect of dread, however; Being is associated with "light" and with "the joyful" (das Heitere). Being "calls the tune"; "to think Being" is to arrive at one's (true) home. Though Heideggerian students are often baffled by just what Being and thinking stand for, it is clear that Heidegger opposes a cult of mankind and wishes to call attention to something greater.
Later life.
In the early 1930s there occurred an event in the thought of Heidegger that scholars call his Kehre ("turning around"), which is said by some specialists to involve a turning away from the problem of Being and Time. This was denied by Heidegger himself, who insisted that he had been asking thesame basic question since his youth, but in his later years he clearly became more reluctant to offer - -. any answer. He did not even indicate a way in which to reach an answer to the basic problem of Being and Time.
At about the time of the Kehre, there also occurred Heidegger's short but eloquent pro-Nazi participation in the cultural politics of the Third Reich, which became a matter of considerable controversy. Even before Adolf Hitler assumed power in November 1933, German universities were:
exposed to heavy pressures. They were supposed to support the "national revolution" and eliminafe Jewish scholars and doctrines (such as relativity). The anti-Nazi scientist who had been the rector at Freiburg resigned in protest, and the teaching staff unanimously elected Heidegger as his successor. (see also Index: National Socialism)
Heidegger's inauguration speech ("The German University's Self-Affirmation") was widely declared to be an affirmation of Nazism. To be sure, he divided student tasks into work service, military service, and scientific service; but this fell within the area of the authoritarian educational policy of Plato, and the speech ended not with a "Heil, Hitler!" but with a quotation from Plato's Republic: "All great things stand in peril." The speech turned against scientific specialization; it urged the asking of the question "What is it to be?"; and it warned against losing oneself in "things" (Seiendes; opposite das Sein). On other occasions, however, Heidegger gave solidly pro-Hitler speeches. "The FOhrer himself," he said, "and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law." In short, Heidegger succumbed to Hitlerism but not to Nazi cultural policy or philosophy.
Under some pressure, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and did not try to leave it. His relations to the party, however, and to the whole Nazi environment rapidly deteriorated. He resigned as rector as early as the beginning of 1934. After World War II, Heidegger characterized Hitlerism as the historical explosion of a structural sickness in mankind as a whole and expressed concern that it would take time to get rid of the poison.
In November 1944 Heidegger terminated his university lectures, and in 1945 the occupying powers forbade him to take up official lecturing again. He was "investigated"; but his support of Hitler in
1933-34 was not found to be of the serious, "active" kind, and he did not lose his professional rights. His status remained a matter of controversy, however, until he reached the age of retirement in 1959. Nevertheless, he gave influential regular lectures in the years 1951-58, and his attitude in 1933-34 did not affect his strong position within the international Phenomenological movement.
ASSESSMENT.
Perhaps the specific pretension of Heidegger's phenomenological method rests on a grandiose illusion, and perhaps the search for thinking Being is merely a disguised quest for a kind of belief in God; perhaps his abstruse terminology is only a mask covering and mystifying a more traditional approach. Such irreverent evaluations would scarcely be unsympathetic to Heidegger, if joined with the intent to verify or falsify it by genuinely following his own path through his writings. After all, he asks, or rather, provokes, us to question, not to listen to answers. It is, therefore, misleading to present Heidegger's philosophy as a set of clearly understandable results. His metaphors must remain, rather than be translated into a usual philosophical ter.!:!'inology that he rejected. ( A.D.N.)
MAJOR WORKS. "Das Realitatsproblem in der modernen Philosoph ie," Philosophisches Jahrbuch der Gorresgesellschaft, 25 (1912); Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus: Ein kritisch-positiver Beitrag zur Logik (1914); Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (1916); "Der
Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft," Zeitschrift fOr Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 161
(1916); Sein und Zeit: Erste Halfte, first as a contribution to the Jahrbuch fOr Philosophie und phanomenologische Forschung, 8 (1927), then as a separate book (1927; 11th ed., 1967; Being and Time, 1962); Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929; Eng. trans. by James Churchill, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1962); Vom Wesen des Grundes (1929; The Essence of Reasons, 1969); Was ist Metaphysik? (1929; 10th ed., 1969; 'What Is Metaphysics?" in the selective volume Existence and Being, ed. by W. Brock, 1949); Die Selbstbehauptung der
deutschen Universitat (1933); HO/derlin und das Wesen der Dichtung (lecture of 1936, printed 1937; Eng. trans. in Existence and Being); PIa tons Lehre von der Wahrheit, first as a contribution to
Geistige Oberlieferung (1942), then in book form (1947), Eng. trans. in William Barrett and H.D.Aiken (eds.), Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (1962); Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (1943,
from lectures given 1930-32; 4th ed., 1961; Eng. trans. in Existence and Being); Erlauterungen zu HO/derlins Dichtung (1944; 3rd ed., 1963); Brief Ober den "Humanism us, "first with Platons Lehre . . . (1947), then separately (1949), Eng. trans. in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century; Holzwege (1950; 4th ed., 1963); EinfOhrung in die Metaphysik (1953; 3rd ed., 1967; An Introduction to
Metaphysics, 1959); Der Feldweg (1953; 4th ed., 1969); Votrage und Aufsatze (1954; 3rd ed., 1967); Was heisst Denken? (1954; What Is Called Thinking?, 1968); Aus der Erfahrung des'
Denkens (1954); Was ist das--die Philosophie? (1956; What Is Philosophy?, 1958); Zur Seinsfrage (1956; The Question of Being, 1958); Der Satz vom Grund (1957); Identitat und Differenz (1957; Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference; 1960); Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959; On the Way to Language, 1971); Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, (1960; Eng. trans. in A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns [eds.], Philosophies of Art and Beauty, 1964); Nietzsche, 2 vol. (1961); Die Frage nach dem Ding: Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsatzen (1962; What Is a Thing?, 1967); Kants These Ober das Sein (1962).

TEACHER'S DIPLOMA COURSE

TEACHER'S DIPLOMA COURSE
WELCOME TO THE COURSE'
During this module, you will be exploring different concepts such as: learning processes/ acquisition/ education and teaching, among others. Remember, you as a participant in the course, will have to do all the thinking, discussing,
talking and working.
INTRODUCTION:
The process of education is one of the most important and complex of all human endeavors. A popular notion is that education is something carried out by one person, a teacher, standing in front of a class and transmitting information to a group of learners who are all willing and able to absorb it. This view, however, simplifies what is a highly complex process involving an intricate interplay between the learning process itself, the teacher's
intentions and actions, the individual personalities of the learners.~ thei r
culture and background, the learning environment and a host of other variables. The successful educator must be one who understands the complexities of the teaching-learning process and can draw upon this knowledge to act in ways which empower learners both within and beyond the classroom situation.
(The following is an excerpt from Psychology for Language Teachers):
IThe positivist school
Psychology as a discipline of study grew directly out of philosophy. However, many of the pioneers of this fledgling subject in the last decades of the nineteenth century saw the path to acceptance and respectability as lying with the natural sciences. Thus, in seeking to bring scientific rigor to its methods of enquiry, early psychologist abandoned their focus on the human mind in their attempts to understand and predict human behavior. Instead, they sought to find the principles of human learning by investigating the behavior of animals lower down the biological hierarchy of the animal kingdom, under rigorously defined conditions. This led to an adherence to an experimental methodology which is part of a philosophical form of enquiry known as "logical positivism". Basically, this approach begins with the premise that knowledge and facts exist within the real world and can' be discovered by setting up experi.ments in which conditions are carefully controlled and where hypotheses are set up and tested.
It led in turn to the dominance of a view of psychology which could accept only empirical data as evidence that a phenofT\enon was occurring, and which rejected anything which could not be seen and/or measured as unscientific. Thus, for many years the predominant view in Western psychology was that efforts should be concentrated upon trying to understand how organisms lower down the hierarchy learned to perform simple tasks; for example, how rats learned their way through mazes to obtain food. It was assumed that the
lessons learned from this could then be fairly easily- applied to higher-order human learning. The thoughts and feelings of humans were considered to be inaccessible to proper scientific investigation within this paradigm, and, therefore, were not investigated.