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Richard Appignanesi goes on a personal quest of Existentialism in its original state. He begins with Camus' question of suicide: 'Must life have a meaning to be lived?' Is absurdity at the heart of Existentialism? Or is Sartre right: is Existentialism 'the least scandalous, most technically austere' of all teachings? This brilliant Graphic Guide explores Existentialism in a unique comic book-style.
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Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-184831-983-7
Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd
Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd
The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights
Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A question of absurdity
Into the night and fog
Vichy water into blood
Republic of silence
Light without effulgence
Bergson’s resistance
Swimming in polluted waters
How is it with Heidegger?
For the time being …
A graveyard of words
What is the attraction of Existentialism?
A voice from the dark
The surfeit
Self-deception, bad faith and authenticity
Meaning for a “KZler”
Conscious distance from oneself
Have the “Night and Fog” truly lifted?
The natural attitude of self-preservation …
Metaphysical or “virgin” suicide
An absurd syllogism
The absurd forbids suicide
The condemned man’s reprieve
Is death necessary?
Technology is a metaphysics at its end
The anti-geneticist Kirilov
The limit-situation of meaning
What Existentialism isn’t
Is no one an Existentialist?
Convalescence of memory
The origin of Existentialism
And where is Heidegger?
A victim of Gleichschaltung
A philosophy relevant to life
The spectre of phenomenology
The looking-glass rivals
Husserl’s manifesto of a vocation
The subject-object differential
Natural and theoretical attitudes
A case-history of scepticism
Ego cogito, ergo sum
Descartes’ great error
Res cogitans: the thinking thing
The sceptical booby-trap
The existential sacrifice
Whose “crisis” is it?
Suicide by economy of thought
Cartesian meditations on epochē
The Husserlian epochē
In what sense “is” consciousness?
A parenthetical gaze
A template of suicide
A technicolour Joseph’s-coat of suicide
A sceptic skeleton in the closet
Sartre on suicide
“In-itself” and “for-itself”
Being free for death …
… a resoluteness for history
… also in 1927
Does philosophy have office hours?
Living in (im)partiality
The life problem of vocation
Entireness in parenthesis
To see originally
The problem of intentionality
Cutting the umbilical cord
Only a question of words
There is no beyond language
Abschattungen – perception in profile
Funes the Memorious
Is undivided attention possible?
Where is invariance?
Shadows in Plato’s cave
Are ideas “real”?
Husserl’s nonconformist Platonism
What is evidence?
When the walls sweat
Kierkegaard’s dramatis personae
Kierkegaard’s bogeyman, Hegel
The unrelieved conscience of being
Falling into faith
The scandal of faith
A man in dark times
A strategy of pessimism
The failure of science
The spectre of Marx
An Existentialist anti-colonialism
The Existentialism that never was
A vintage Existentialism
Heidegger on parole
The sting in the tail
Heidegger on endless parole
… is it over with Husserl?
A sordino theology
Preaching the futural
Perhaps by accident …
A return to fulfilled scepticism
The grey breath of reasoning
For reasons of history
Words of reckoning
A reduction to absolute existence
Existence need not be
Being is history
What hope of human still “being”?
Being and recession to nihilism
Salvation from the thing
A purge for nausea
Acts of nihilation
A conscious pact of freedom
A lack of being
“Existence precedes essence”
Freedom is without history
The ecstasy of time
A draught from the well
The redeeming Advent
Time talk …
The time-partials of consciousness
The retained slipping-away
The socially partial horizons
The moment of history
Heidegger’s Mein Kampf
Rassengedanke: racial thought
A prophecy from Germany
The crisis of modernity
Will to Power as art
The rising star
The poverty of repentance
A word in the heart
The right to remain silent
Existentialism without illusions
Speaking of deception
A schism in consciousness
A lie without a liar
Is there undeceived choice?
Solipsism or intersubjectivity?
Falling into “theyness”
Being among one another
The Turing Test
The new superstition
Transubstantiated performance
Because it is possible …
Notes on a nameless philosophy
Flight from meaning
Further Reading
The Authors
Index
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” So begins Albert Camus (1913-60) in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). He stiffens the dose by quoting Nietzsche: “a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example.”
IN SHORT, THE ANSWER I GIVE COULD BE MY LAST …SO, I HAD BETTER FIND A REASON FOR LIVING.
But then, Camus at once sees that “a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.” In either case, a sacrifice might be at stake. The question is – must life have a meaning to be lived? He concludes no, in view of the absurd, “it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.”
Camus has chosen an “absurdist” estimate of living at a dangerous time, in 1942, in defeated Paris under Nazi Occupation. Others, like himself, are members of the Resistance, an “army of shadows” – men and women who flit unseen in acts of sabotage – always in peril of arrest by the Gestapo, torture and death.
AT ANY STREET CORNER THE FEELING OF ABSURDITY CAN STRIKE ANY MAN IN THE FACE …
Absurdity, he says, “in its distressing nudity, in its light without effulgence …” Of course, there is a sub-text to Camus’ essay on absurdism in this time and place, one which evades the policing of Occupation censorship and is itself an act of defiant resistance.
Absurdity had the evidence of terror. In a fit of Wagnerian megalomania, Hitler issued the Nacht und Nebel Erlass – “Night and Fog Decree” – on 7 December 1941, reserved for the inhabitants of the conquered Western territories. It ordered that anyone endangering German security would be seized and made to “vanish without trace into the night and fog of the unknown in Germany.” In effect, deportation and death.
AS AN IRISH NEUTRAL, I COULD REMAIN A SAFE BYSTANDER, BUT I ALSO HAVE A CHOICE …
The dramatist Samuel Beckett (1906-89) in Paris at the time, guaranteed safety by Ireland’s neutrality, chose to imperil himself by joining the Resistance. Why? Because to forgo common sense and accept absurdity in these circumstances is rectitude.
France surrendered to the German invasion after only six weeks’ fighting. Without allies – Britain unprepared for war, America neutral, and Hitler now master of Europe – there was no option. On 21 June 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain (1856-1951) signed an armistice which divided France into two zones – one controlled by the Germans, the other “non-occupied”, governed from the spa town of Vichy, famous for its curative waters. Political compromise is one thing, quite another was the Vichy government’s policy of active collaboration with Nazi Germany.
THE VICHY COLLABORATORS SERVE AS HITLER’S HENCHMEN …BUT IT WON’T GIVE FRANCE ANY EQUAL FOOTING IN HIS EYES.
A right-wing element in France seized on the Occupation as the ideal opportunity to adopt Hitler’s “Final Solution” for its own unwelcome Jews and Communists – carried out with such zeal that it surprised even the Germans. Vichy transubstantiated the water of political compromise into Nazi blood racialism and with that fed the “shower rooms” of Hitler’s concentration camps.
FRANCE IS NOW DIVIDED BY A CHOICE – COLLABORATE OR NOT!
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) at this time remarked: “Never have we been freer than under the German Occupation … This total responsibility in total solitude, wasn’t this the revelation of our freedom?” (From the essay “La République du silence”, 1944.)
In such “dark light”, does life go on as before? Perhaps one’s eyes adjust to reality in the negative. In 1942, Picasso (1881-1973) paints his “Still Life with Skull of a Bull”, carries on his affair with Dora Maar, and deals in illegal currency. He too enjoys safe neutrality, as a Spanish national, but unlike Beckett does not join the Resistance …
COWARDICE? I CANNOT JUDGE.NOR CAN I UNDERSTAND WHY THE URBANE, AESTHETICAL DRIEU LA ROCHELLE BECAME A COLLABORATIONIST …
The novelist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (1893-1945) described Occupied Paris as a raped female: “from the central avenue of the Tuileries I can view the Obelisk of Luxor in the Place de la Concorde piercing the Arc de Triomphe …” The sexual allusion is fully conscious. Was this reason enough for him to embrace the perspiring masculinity of Nazism?
Nor can I fathom the vile anti-Semitic Collaborationism of such talented novelists as Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) and Robert Brasillach (b. 1909, executed 1945), editor of the sewer-rat fascist paper Je Suis Partout. The philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) had long foreseen “the formidable wave of anti-Semitism about to break upon the world.” Bergson arose mortally ill from his sickbed to register as a Jew in accord with Vichy government law. He refused the exemption offered him.
I AM A JEW AND WOULD RATHER PERISH AS ONE THAN CONCEAL MYSELF.
Is there an image more nauseating than to witness gendarmes of the French Republic and SS troopers “fraternally joined” in the mass deportations of Jews?
Paris “after dark” reveals every species of player. Few are actively “Resistants”; most will be attentistes, those who literally wait to see which side will prevail before choosing between Allies and Nazis. Self-preservation in war-time is indeed a doubtful business, but I can name two at least who chose Resistance – Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre – both so-called Existentialists, if they are in fact really that. They meet in the office of the underground newspaper Combat…
WE SHOOK HANDS IN 1942 – AND BY 1952 WE WERE BITTER ENEMIES …… OPPOSED ON THE ISSUES OF MARXISM, THE SOVIET UNION, AND SOON AFTER ON THE QUESTION OF ALGERIAN INDEPENDENCE.
There is an obscure sense of “betrayal” at the heart of Existentialism. Let’s consider the case of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), totemic “founder” of Existentialism who utterly disclaimed that role.
Karl Löwith (1897-1973), a former student of Heidegger and a refugee Jew in Italy, records their meeting in Rome on 2 April 1936. Heidegger had lectured there on “Hölderlin and the essential nature of poetry”. Löwith wondered: what has the Swastika in Heidegger’s buttonhole (obviously he doesn’t believe it is offensive to me) got to do with Hölderlin’s poetry? He then asked the Professor: did his support for Hitler rest on his philosophy? Heidegger agreed it did …
FRAU ELFRIEDE HEIDEGGER IS POLITE BUT COLDLY FORMAL WITH ME …I AM CONVINCED THAT NATIONAL SOCIALISM IS GERMANY’S PRE-ORDAINED PATH. IT IS JUST A QUESTION OF SEEING IT TO THE END.
… seeing it to the end? After his initial but soon disappointed enthusiasm for Nazism, Heidegger would pretend to “inner emigration”, a “flight inwards” to silence, the German equivalent of the attentiste waiting and seeing.
Heidegger cannot be held responsible for betraying a “resistant” Existentialism that he never espoused. But a question lingers. Does his philosophy withstand, no matter his allegiance? Does history matter to the deepest findings of philosophy that are absolute and universal? In reply, I do know one thing – in the Paris of Camus and Sartre, in the Germany of Heidegger, I suffocate. I cannot answer to their conditions. What would I be? Would I collaborate, resist, wait? I can only return to the present question …
WILL YOU REALLY COMMIT SUICIDE?NOT FOR THE TIME BEING …
… for the time being. What a miraculous colloquialism, unique to English. What does “time being” mean, lifted out of its everyday commonplace? It is like saying moment, but more, a “provisory expectancy”. Truly an astonishment to thinking, if I listen deeply to it.
Heidegger’s armoury is notorious for its teasing, torturing and garrotting of German expressions to arrive at their philological roots and restore primordial freshness to words. The “freshness” of words? What is that?
WORDS ARE BORN AGAIN IN MY MOUTH BY FORGETFULNESS OF THEIR ONCE HAVING BEEN IN OTHERS’ …
I am aware that to write is not only “saying anew” but commemoration. With every step I take as a writer, I proceed on others’ graves. The dictionary is a mortuary register but one which strangely inspires rebirths. Hence, precisely as a writer, I must be vigilant to avoid the temptation of literature. What do I mean by that?
Could it be that the residue popularity of Existentialism today continues from a legacy of words that still have a power to scandalize? Anguish, despair, anxiety, the absurd, authenticity, nothingness, and so on, are literary features that have almost the status of genuine “categories”. There is a risk of degrading these existential feelings to frivolity, “playing at despair” that Camus so detested. Sartre warns against this in his lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946).
FOR IN TRUTH, EXISTENTIALISM IS OF ALL TEACHINGS THE LEAST SCANDALOUS AND THE MOST AUSTERE: IT IS INTENDED STRICTLY FOR TECHNICIANS AND PHILOSOPHERS.
Literature is therefore a “scandal” impermissible to Existentialism. And yet, did not Sartre write novels and plays, also Camus, and even the redoubtable Heidegger compose verses? In consequence, Existentialism too readily defaults to literature. I am advised to consult Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett – anything but the “austere teaching for technicians”.
I would say instead that literature all too obviously appears “existentialist” in retrospective view of that name, and thereby disqualifies itself from the authentication of Existentialism. Consider the term “existential”: it is simply an adjective and a logical predicate of being. But to affirm or deny that something is (as Wittgenstein warned) is a logical proposition of fact that does not “give existence to”. Logical usage has no use for an “ism” affixed to “existential”.
BUT “EXISTENTIAL” MORE COMMONLY MEANS FOR US “THAT WHICH IS GIVEN TO US TO BE AFFECTED BY” …TO BE, OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE QUESTION …
Hamlet’s “problem of being” does not of course make him an Existentialist. Besides, he is a fiction, and his speech is Shakespeare’s ironic reminder of that. Is this not a clue to disavowing the temptation of literature?
Maybe it is not clear yet. I am told, “If you want Existentialism in the raw, go to Dostoyevsky.” Very well, I shall. (In this text I do not teach, I undergo. To seek authentication is to risk “going under”. Humiliation could well be the reward for such study.) I hear a voice like none other, like never before, calling de profundis, from the deeps of self-tormenting confession …
I AM A SICK MAN … I AM A SPITEFUL MAN. I AM AN UNATTRACTIVE MAN. I BELIEVE MY LIVER IS DISEASED. HOWEVER, I KNOW NOTHING AT ALL ABOUT MY DISEASE, AND I DO NOT KNOW FOR CERTAIN WHAT AILS ME … I REFUSE TO CONSULT A DOCTOR FROM SPITE.
Who is this man? A “retired collegiate assessor”, some lost soul from a closet in the vast apparatus of Tsarist bureaucracy. No one important. He is a fiction, of course, in Notes from the Underground (1846) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81).