Existential Essential

Existential Essential

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Contents Articles Existentialism

1

Atheist existentialism

16

Christian existentialism

18

Jewish existentialism

21

Existential nihilism

29

Existential phenomenology

30

List of existentialists

31

Authenticity (philosophy)

35

Essence

38

Existence precedes essence

41

Absurdism

43

Quietism

49

Facticity

50

Being in itself

51

Determinism

52

Other

64

Angst

69

Anxiety

71

Meaning (existential)

79

Free will

81

Otherness

108

Identity (philosophy)

108

Gaze

110

Abandonment (existentialism)

114

Existential crisis

116

Existential therapy

118

Master–slave dialectic

125

Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

128

Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

153

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

163

Intersubjectivity

172

The Symbolic

175

Metaphysics of presence

177

The saying and the said

178

Minority (philosophy)

179

Subject–object problem

180

Positivism

183

Rationalism

196

Disenchantment

200

Existentiell

202

Phenomenology (philosophy)

203

Nihilism

211

Postmodernism

222

Nous

237

Noema

255

Solipsism

257

Transcendence (philosophy)

270

Commodity fetishism

272

Jouissance

285

Pleasure principle (psychology)

287

Id, ego and super-ego

288

Thanatos

294

References Article Sources and Contributors

299

Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors

307

Article Licenses License

309

Existentialism

1

Existentialism Existentialism is the philosophical and cultural movement which holds that the starting point of philosophical thinking must be the experiences of the individual. Moral and scientific thinking together do not suffice to understand human existence, so a further set of categories, governed by "authenticity", is necessary to understand human existence.[1][2][3] ("Authenticity", in the context of existentialism, is being true to one's own personality, spirit, or character.[4]) Existentialism began in the mid-19th century as a reaction against the then-dominant systematic philosophies, such as those developed by Hegel and Kant. Søren Kierkegaard, generally considered to be the first existentialist philosopher,[3][5][6] posited that it is the individual who is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and for living life passionately and sincerely ("authentically").[7][8] Existentialism became popular in the years following World War II and influenced a range of disciplines besides philosophy, including theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology.[9]

From left to right, top to bottom: Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre

Existentialists generally regard traditional systematic or academic philosophies, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.[10][11] Scholars generally consider the views of existentialist philosophers to be profoundly different from one another relative to those of other philosophies.[3][12][13] Criticisms of existentialist philosophers include the assertions that they confuse their use of terminology and contradict themselves.[14][15][16]

Definitional issues There has never been general agreement on the definition of the term. The first prominent existentialist philosopher to adopt the term as a self-description was Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism as a term, therefore, has been applied to many philosophers in hindsight. As a result, according to philosopher Steven Crowell, defining existentialism has been relatively difficult, and he argues that it is better understood as a general approach used to reject certain systematic philosophies rather than as a systematic philosophy in itself.[3]

Concepts Existence precedes essence A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for the individual is the fact that he or she is an individual—an independently acting and responsible conscious being ("existence")—rather than what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, or other preconceived categories the individual fits ("essence"). The actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called his or her "true essence" instead of there being an arbitrarily attributed essence used by others to define him or her. Thus, human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life.[17] Although it was Sartre who explicitly coined the phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Heidegger.

Existentialism It is often claimed in this context that a person defines himself or herself, which is often perceived as stating that they can wish to be something—anything, a bird, for instance—and then be it. According to most existentialist philosophers, however, this would constitute an inauthentic existence. Instead, the phrase should be taken to say that the person is (1) defined only insofar as he or she acts and (2) that he or she is responsible for his or her actions. For example, someone who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel person. Furthermore, by this action of cruelty, such persons are themselves responsible for their new identity (a cruel person). This is as opposed to their genes, or 'human nature', bearing the blame. As Sartre writes in his work Existentialism is a Humanism: "...man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards." Of course, the more positive, therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: A person can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since humans can choose to be either cruel or good, they are, in fact, neither of these things essentially.[18]

The Absurd The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world beyond what meaning we give to it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. This contrasts with "karmic" ways of thinking in which "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad person; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good" person as to a "bad" person. Because of the world's absurdity, at any point in time, anything can happen to anyone, and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the Absurd. The notion of the absurd has been prominent in literature throughout history. Many of the literary works of Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus contain descriptions of people who encounter the absurdity of the world. It is in relation to the concept of the devastating awareness of meaninglessness that Albert Camus claimed that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" in his The Myth of Sisyphus. Although "prescriptions" against the possibly deleterious consequences of these kinds of encounters vary, from Kierkegaard's religious "stage" to Camus' insistence on persevering in spite of absurdity, the concern with helping people avoid living their lives in ways that put them in the perpetual danger of having everything meaningful break down is common to most existentialist philosophers. The possibility of having everything meaningful break down poses a threat of quietism, which is inherently against the existentialist philosophy.[19] It has been said that the possibility of suicide makes all humans existentialists.[20]

Facticity Facticity is a concept defined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness as that "in-itself" of which humans are in the mode of not being. This can be more easily understood when considering it in relation to the temporal dimension of past: One's past is what one is in the sense that it co-constitutes oneself. However, to say that one is only one's past would be to ignore a large part of reality (the present and the future), while saying that one's past is only what one was would entirely detach it from them now. A denial of one's own concrete past constitutes an inauthentic lifestyle, and the same goes for all other kinds of facticity (having a body (e.g. one that doesn't allow a person to run faster than the speed of sound), identity, values, etc.). Facticity is both a limitation and a condition of freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of one's facticity consists of things one couldn't have chosen (birthplace, etc.), but a condition in the sense that one's values most likely will depend on it. However, even though one's facticity is "set in stone" (as being past, for instance), it cannot determine a person: The value ascribed to one's facticity is still ascribed to it freely by that person. As an example, consider two men, one of whom has no memory of his past and the other remembers everything. They have both committed many crimes, but the first man, knowing nothing about this, leads a rather normal life while the second man, feeling trapped by his own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for "trapping" him in this life.

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Existentialism There is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he ascribes this meaning to his past. However, to disregard one's facticity when one, in the continual process of self-making, projects oneself into the future, would be to put oneself in denial of oneself, and would thus be inauthentic. In other words, the origin of one's projection will still have to be one's facticity, although in the mode of not being it (essentially). Another aspect of facticity is that it entails angst, both in the sense that freedom "produces" angst when limited by facticity, and in the sense that the lack of the possibility of having facticity to "step in" for one to take responsibility for something one has done also produces angst. What is not implied in this account of existential freedom, however, is that one's values are immutable; a consideration of one's values may cause one to reconsider and change them. A consequence of this fact is that one is responsible for not only one's actions, but also the values one holds. This entails that a reference to common values doesn't excuse the individual's actions: Even though these are the values of the society of which the individual is part, they are also her/his own in the sense that she/he could choose them to be different at any time. Thus, the focus on freedom in existentialism is related to the limits of the responsibility one bears as a result of one's freedom: the relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency, and a clarification of freedom also clarifies that for which one is responsible. The existentialist concept of freedom is often misunderstood as meaning that anything is possible and where values are inconsequential to choice and action. This interpretation of the concept is often related to the insistence on the absurdity of the world and the assumption that there exist no relevant or absolutely good or bad morals. However, that there is no external power exerting forced moral action in the world in-itself does not mean that there are no good/evil morals; for the only force rewarding, considering, and following logic, reason, and counter-degenerateism are existentialists themselves... for arbitrary values serve no purpose to follow.

Authenticity The theme of authentic existence is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is often taken to mean that one has to "find oneself" and then live in accordance with this self. What is meant by authenticity is that in acting, one should act as oneself, not as One acts or as one's genes or any other essence requires. The authentic act is one that is in accordance with one's freedom. Of course, as a condition of freedom is facticity, this includes one's facticity, but not to the degree that this facticity can in any way determine one's choices (in the sense that one could then blame one's background for making the choice one made). The role of facticity in relation to authenticity involves letting one's actual values come into play when one makes a choice (instead of, like Kierkegaard's Aesthete, "choosing" randomly), so that one also takes responsibility for the act instead of choosing either-or without allowing the options to have different values. In contrast to this, the inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one's freedom. This can take many forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, through convincing oneself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of "mimicry" where one acts as "One should." How "One" should act is often determined by an image one has of how one such as oneself (say, a bank manager, lion tamer, prostitute, etc.) acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm, but this does not mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is inauthentic: The main point is the attitude one takes to one's own freedom and responsibility, and the extent to which one acts in accordance with this freedom.

The Other and the Look The Other (when written with a capital "o") is a concept more properly belonging to phenomenology and its account of intersubjectivity. However, the concept has seen widespread use in existentialist writings, and the conclusions drawn from it differ slightly from the phenomenological accounts. The experience of the Other is the experience of another free subject who inhabits the same world as a person does. In its most basic form, it is this experience of the Other that constitutes intersubjectivity and objectivity. To clarify, when one experiences someone else, and this

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Existentialism Other person experiences the world (the same world that a person experiences), only from "over there", the world itself is constituted as objective in that it is something that is "there" as identical for both of the subjects; a person experiences the other person as experiencing the same as he or she does. This experience of the Other's look is what is termed the Look (sometimes the Gaze). While this experience, in its basic phenomenological sense, constitutes the world as objective, and oneself as objectively existing subjectivity (one experiences oneself as seen in the Other's Look in precisely the same way that one experiences the Other as seen by him, as subjectivity), in existentialism, it also acts as a kind of limitation of one's freedom. This is because the Look tends to objectify what it sees. As such, when one experiences oneself in the Look, one doesn't experience oneself as nothing (no thing), but as something. Sartre's own example of a man peeping at someone through a keyhole can help clarify this: at first, this man is entirely caught up in the situation he is in; he is in a pre-reflexive state where his entire consciousness is directed at what goes on in the room. Suddenly, he hears a creaking floorboard behind him, and he becomes aware of himself as seen by the Other. He is thus filled with shame for he perceives himself as he would perceive someone else doing what he was doing, as a Peeping Tom. The Look is then co-constitutive of one's facticity. Another characteristic feature of the Look is that no Other really needs to have been there: It is quite possible that the creaking floorboard was nothing but the movement of an old house; the Look isn't some kind of mystical telepathic experience of the actual way the other sees one (there may also have been someone there, but he could have not noticed that the person was there). It is only one's perception of the way another might perceive him. The concept of the 'Other' has been most comprehensively used by feminist existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. She used this concept in great detail in her feminist book "The Second Sex" to show how, despite women's sincere efforts at proving themselves as human beings firmly established in their own rights, men continue to relegate to them a status of a lower, inferior "other". It is in this context that this feminist-existential term has to be understood.

Angst "Existential angst", sometimes called dread, anxiety or even anguish, is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility. The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one's own freedom. It can also be seen in relation to the previous point how angst is before nothing, and this is what sets it apart from fear that has an object. While in the case of fear, one can take definitive measures to remove the object of fear, in the case of angst, no such "constructive" measures are possible. The use of the word "nothing" in this context relates both to the inherent insecurity about the consequences of one's actions, and to the fact that, in experiencing one's freedom as angst, one also realizes that one will be fully responsible for these consequences; there is no thing in a person (his or her genes, for instance) that acts in her or his stead, and that he or she can "blame" if something goes wrong. Not every choice is perceived as having dreadful possible consequences (and, it can be claimed, human lives would be unbearable if every choice facilitated dread), but that doesn't change the fact that freedom remains a condition of every action. One of the most extensive treatments of the existentialist notion of Angst is found in Søren Kierkegaard's monumental work Begrebet Angest.

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Despair Commonly defined as a loss of hope.[21] Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to the reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one's self or identity. If a person is invested in being a particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding citizen, and then finds his being-thing compromised, he would normally be found in state of despair—a hopeless state. For example, a singer who loses her ability to sing may despair if she has nothing else to fall back on, nothing on which to rely for her identity. She finds herself unable to be what defined her being. What sets the existentialist notion of despair apart from the conventional definition is that existentialist despair is a state one is in even when he isn't overtly in despair. So long as a person's identity depends on qualities that can crumble, he is considered to be in perpetual despair. And as there is, in Sartrean terms, no human essence found in conventional reality on which to constitute the individual's sense of identity, despair is a universal human condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in Either/Or: "Let each one learn what he can; both of us can learn that a person’s unhappiness never lies in his lack of control over external conditions, since this would only make him completely unhappy."[22] In Works of Love, he said: When the God-forsaken worldliness of earthly life shuts itself in complacency, the confined air develops poison, the moment gets stuck and stands still, the prospect is lost, a need is felt for a refreshing, enlivening breeze to cleanse the air and dispel the poisonous vapors lest we suffocate in worldliness. ... Lovingly to hope all things is the opposite of despairingly to hope nothing at all. Love hopes all things – yet is never put to shame. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope. To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. By the decision to choose hope one decides infinitely more than it seems, because it is an eternal decision. p. 246-250

Opposition to positivism and rationalism Existentialists oppose definitions of human beings as primarily rational, and, therefore, oppose positivism and rationalism. Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them rather than rationally. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard advocated rationality as means to interact with the objective world (e.g. in the natural sciences), but when it comes to existential problems, reason is insufficient: "Human reason has boundaries".[23] Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena — "the Other" — that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom. To try to suppress their feelings of anxiety and dread, people confine themselves within everyday experience, Sartre asserts, thereby relinquishing their freedom and acquiescing to being possessed in one form or another by "the Look" of "the Other" (i.e. possessed by another person — or at least one's idea of that other person).

Existentialism and religion An existentialist reading of the Bible would demand that the reader recognize that he is an existing subject studying the words more as a recollection of events. This is in contrast to looking at a collection of "truths" that are outside and unrelated to the reader, but may develop a sense of reality/God.[24] Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing them upon him, but as though they are inside him and guiding him from inside. This is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life-or the learner who should put it to use?"[25]

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Existentialism and nihilism Although nihilism and existentialism are distinct philosophies, they are often confused with one another. A primary cause of confusion is that Friedrich Nietzsche is an important philosopher in both fields, but also the existentialist insistence on the inherent meaninglessness of the world. Existentialist philosophers often stress the importance of Angst as signifying the absolute lack of any objective ground for action, a move that is often reduced to a moral or an existential nihilism. A pervasive theme in the works of existentialist philosophy, however, is to persist through encounters with the absurd, as seen in Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus ("One must imagine Sisyphus happy"),[26] and it is only very rarely that existentialist philosophers dismiss morality or one's self-created meaning: Kierkegaard regained a sort of morality in the religious (although he wouldn't himself agree that it was ethical; the religious suspends the ethical), and Sartre's final words in Being and Nothingness are "All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory (or impure) reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work."[27]

Etymology The term "existentialism" was coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s.[28][29][30] It was adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre who, on October 29, 1945, discussed his own existentialist position in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris. The lecture was published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), a short book that did much to popularize existentialist thought.[31] Some scholars argue that the term should be used only to refer to the cultural movement in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s associated with the works of the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus.[3] Other scholars extend the term to Kierkegaard, and yet others extend it as far back as Socrates.[32] However, the term is often identified with the philosophical views of Jean-Paul Sartre.[3]

History 19th century Kierkegaard and Nietzsche Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term "existentialism" and it is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They focused on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience. Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom. Unlike Pascal, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also considered the role of making free choices, particularly regarding fundamental values and beliefs, and how such choices change the nature and identity of the chooser.[33] Kierkegaard's knight of faith and Nietzsche's Übermensch are representative of people who exhibit Freedom, in that they define the nature of their own existence. Nietzsche's idealized individual invents his or her own values and creates the very terms they excel under. By contrast, Kierkegaard, opposed to the level of abstraction in Hegel, and not nearly as hostile (actually welcoming) to Christianity as Nietzsche, argues through a pseudonym that the objective certainty of religious truths (specifically Christian) is not only impossible, but even founded on logical paradoxes. Yet he continues to imply that a leap of faith is a possible means for an individual to reach a higher stage of existence that transcends and contains both an aesthetic and ethical value of life. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also precursors to other intellectual movements, including postmodernism, and various strands of psychology. However, Kierkegaard believed that an individual should live in accordance with his or her thinking. This point of view is forced upon religious individuals much more often than upon philosophers, psychologists, or scientists.

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Existentialism Dostoyevsky The first important literary author also important to existentialism was the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky.[34] Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground portrays a man unable to fit into society and unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a Humanism, quoted Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis. Sartre attributes Ivan Karamazov's claim, "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"[35] to Dostoyevsky himself. Other Dostoyevsky novels covered issues raised in existentialist philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an existential crisis and then moves toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by Dostoyevsky himself.

Early 20th century In the first decades of the 20th century, a number of philosophers and writers explored existentialist ideas. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, in his 1913 book The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, emphasized the life of "flesh and bone" as opposed to that of abstract rationalism. Unamuno rejected systematic philosophy in favor of the individual's quest for faith. He retained a sense of the tragic, even absurd nature of the quest, symbolized by his enduring interest in Cervantes' fictional character Don Quixote. A novelist, poet and dramatist as well as philosophy professor at the University of Salamanca, Unamuno wrote a short story about a priest's crisis of faith, Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr, which has been collected in anthologies of existentialist fiction. Another Spanish thinker, Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1914, held that human existence must always be defined as the individual person combined with the concrete circumstances of his life: "Yo soy yo y mis circunstancias" ("I am myself and my circumstances"). Sartre likewise believed that human existence is not an abstract matter, but is always situated, also many thought his plays were absurd ("en situación"). Although Martin Buber wrote his major philosophical works in German, and studied and taught at the Universities of Berlin and Frankfurt, he stands apart from the mainstream of German philosophy. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1878, he was also a scholar of Jewish culture and involved at various times in Zionism and Hasidism. In 1938, he moved permanently to Jerusalem. His best-known philosophical work was the short book I and Thou, published in 1922. For Buber, the fundamental fact of human existence, too readily overlooked by scientific rationalism and abstract philosophical thought, is "man with man", a dialogue that takes place in the so-called "sphere of between" ("das Zwischenmenschliche").[36] Two Ukrainian/Russian thinkers, Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev, became well known as existentialist thinkers during their post-Revolutionary exiles in Paris. Shestov, born into a Ukrainian-Jewish family in Kiev, had launched an attack on rationalism and systematization in philosophy as early as 1905 in his book of aphorisms All Things Are Possible. Berdyaev, also from Kiev but with a background in the Eastern Orthodox Church, drew a radical distinction between the world of spirit and the everyday world of objects. Human freedom, for Berdyaev, is rooted in the realm of spirit, a realm independent of scientific notions of causation. To the extent the individual human being lives in the objective world, he is estranged from authentic spiritual freedom. "Man" is not to be interpreted naturalistically, but as a being created in God's image, an originator of free, creative acts.[37] He published a major work on these themes, The Destiny of Man, in 1931. Gabriel Marcel, long before coining the term "existentialism", introduced important existentialist themes to a French audience in his early essay "Existence and Objectivity" (1925) and in his Metaphysical Journal (1927).[38] A dramatist as well as a philosopher, Marcel found his philosophical starting point in a condition of metaphysical alienation: the human individual searching for harmony in a transient life. Harmony, for Marcel, was to be sought through "secondary reflection", a "dialogical" rather than "dialectical" approach to the world, characterized by "wonder and astonishment" and open to the "presence" of other people and of God rather than merely to "information" about them. For Marcel, such presence implied more than simply being there (as one thing might be in

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the presence of another thing); it connoted "extravagant" availability, and the willingness to put oneself at the disposal of the other.[39] Marcel contrasted secondary reflection with abstract, scientific-technical primary reflection, which he associated with the activity of the abstract Cartesian ego. For Marcel, philosophy was a concrete activity undertaken by a sensing, feeling human being incarnate — embodied — in a concrete world.[38][40] Although Jean-Paul Sartre adopted the term "existentialism" for his own philosophy in the 1940s, Marcel's thought has been described as "almost diametrically opposed" to that of Sartre.[38] Unlike Sartre, Marcel was a Christian, and became a Catholic convert in 1929. In Germany, the psychologist and philosopher Karl Jaspers — who later described existentialism as a "phantom" created by the public [41] — called his own thought, heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Existenzphilosophie. For Jaspers, "Existenz-philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself...This way of thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker."[42] Jaspers, a professor at the University of Heidelberg, was acquainted with Martin Heidegger, who held a professorship at Marburg before acceding to Husserl's chair at Freiburg in 1928. They held many philosophical discussions, but later became estranged over Heidegger's support of National Socialism. They shared an admiration for Kierkegaard,[43] and in the 1930s, Heidegger lectured extensively on Nietzsche. Nevertheless, the extent to which Heidegger should be considered an existentialist is debatable. In Being and Time he presented a method of rooting philosophical explanations in human existence (Dasein) to be analysed in terms of existential categories (existentiale); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the existentialist movement.

After the Second World War Following the Second World War, existentialism became a well-known and significant philosophical and cultural movement, mainly through the public prominence of two French writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who wrote best-selling novels, plays and widely read journalism as well as theoretical texts. These years also saw the growing reputation of Heidegger's book Being and Time outside of Germany.

French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Sartre dealt with existentialist themes in his 1938 novel Nausea and the short stories in his 1939 collection The Wall, and had published his treatise on existentialism, Being and Nothingness, in 1943, but it was in the two years following the liberation of Paris from the German occupying forces that he and his close associates — Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others — became internationally famous as the leading figures of a movement known as existentialism.[44] In a very short space of time, Camus and Sartre in particular became the leading public intellectuals of post-war France, achieving by the end of 1945 "a fame that reached across all audiences."[45] Camus was an editor of the most popular leftist (former French Resistance) newspaper Combat; Sartre launched his journal of leftist thought, Les Temps Modernes, and two weeks later gave the widely reported lecture on existentialism and secular humanism to a packed meeting of the Club Maintenant. Beauvoir wrote that "not a week passed without the newspapers discussing us";[46] existentialism became "the first media craze of the postwar era."[47]

By the end of 1947, Camus' earlier fiction and plays had been reprinted, his new play Caligula had been performed and his novel The Plague published; the first two novels of Sartre's The Roads to Freedom trilogy had appeared, as had Beauvoir's novel The Blood of Others. Works by Camus and Sartre were already appearing in foreign editions. The Paris-based existentialists had become famous.[44]

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Sartre had traveled to Germany in 1930 to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger,[48] and he included critical comments on their work in his major treatise Being and Nothingness. Heidegger's thought had also become known in French philosophical circles through its use by Alexandre Kojève in explicating Hegel in a series of lectures given in Paris in the 1930s.[49] The lectures were highly influential; members of the audience included not only Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Louis Althusser, André Breton, and Jacques Lacan.[50] A selection from Heidegger's Being and Time was published in French in 1938, and his essays began to appear in French philosophy journals. Heidegger read Sartre's work and was initially impressed, commenting: "Here for the first time I encountered an independent thinker who, from the foundations up, has experienced the area out of which I think. Your work shows such an immediate comprehension of my philosophy as I have never before encountered."[51] Later, however, in response to a question posed by his French follower Jean Beaufret,[52] Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre's position and existentialism in general in his Letter on Humanism.[53] Heidegger's reputation continued to grow in France during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s, Sartre attempted to reconcile existentialism and Marxism in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason. A major theme throughout his writings was freedom and responsibility.

French-Algerian philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus

Camus was a friend of Sartre, until their falling-out, and wrote several works with existential themes including The Rebel, The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and Summer in Algiers. Camus, like many others, rejected the existentialist label, and considered his works to be concerned with facing the absurd. In the titular book, Camus uses the analogy of the Greek myth of Sisyphus to demonstrate the futility of existence. In the myth, Sisyphus is condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, but when he reaches the summit, the rock will roll to the bottom again. Camus believes that this existence is pointless but that Sisyphus ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his task, simply by continually applying himself to it. The first half of the book contains an extended rebuttal of what Camus took to be existentialist philosophy in the works of Kierkegaard, Shestov, Heidegger, and Jaspers. Simone de Beauvoir, an important existentialist who spent much of her life as Sartre's partner, wrote about feminist and existentialist ethics in her works, including The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity. Although often overlooked due to her relationship with Sartre, de Beauvoir integrated existentialism with other forms of thinking such as feminism, unheard of at the time, resulting in alienation from fellow writers such as Camus. Paul Tillich, an important existentialist theologian following Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, applied existentialist concepts to Christian theology, and helped introduce existential theology to the general public. His seminal work The Courage to Be follows Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and life's absurdity, but puts forward the thesis that modern humans must, via God, achieve selfhood in spite of life's absurdity. Rudolf Bultmann used Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's philosophy of existence to demythologize Christianity by interpreting Christian mythical concepts into existentialist concepts. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an existential phenomenologist, was for a time a companion of Sartre. His understanding of Husserl's phenomenology was far greater than that of Merleau-Ponty's fellow existentialists. It has been said that his work Humanism and Terror greatly influenced Sartre. However, in later years they were to disagree irreparably, dividing many existentialists such as de Beauvoir, who sided with Sartre. Colin Wilson, an English writer, published his study The Outsider in 1956, initially to critical acclaim. In this book and others (e.g. Introduction to the New Existentialism), he attempted to reinvigorate what he perceived as a pessimistic philosophy and bring it to a wider audience. He was not, however, academically trained, and his work was attacked by professional philosophers for lack of rigor and critical standards.[54]

Existentialism

Influence outside philosophy Art Film and television The French director Jean Genet's 1950 fantasy-erotic film Un chant d'amour shows two inmates in solitary cells whose only contact is through a hole in their cell wall, who are spied on by the prison warden. Reviewer James Travers calls the film a, "...visual poem evoking homosexual desire and existentialist suffering," which "... conveys the bleakness of an existence in a godless universe with painful believability"; he calls it "... probably the most effective fusion of existentialist philosophy and cinema."[55] Stanley Kubrick's 1957 anti-war film Paths of Glory "illustrates, and even illuminates...existentialism" by examining the "necessary absurdity of the human condition" and the "horror of war".[56] The film tells the story of a fictional World War I French army regiment ordered to attack an impregnable German stronghold; when the attack fails, three soldiers are chosen at random, court-martialed by a "kangaroo court", and executed by firing squad. The film examines existentialist ethics, such as the issue of whether objectivity is possible and the "problem of authenticity".[56] Neon Genesis Evangelion, commonly referred to as Evangelion or Eva, is a Japanese science-fiction animation series created by the anime studio Gainax and was both directed and written by Hideaki Anno. Existential themes of individuality, consciousness, freedom, choice, and responsibility are heavily relied upon throughout the entire series, particularly through the philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Søren Kierkegaard. Episode 16's title, "The Sickness Unto Death, And…" (死 に 至 る 病 、 そ し て Shi ni itaru yamai, soshite) is a reference to Kierkegaard's book, The Sickness Unto Death. On the lighter side, the British comedy troupe Monty Python have explored existentialist themes throughout their works, from many of the sketches in their original television show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, to their 1983 film Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.[57] Some contemporary films dealing with existentialist issues include Fight Club, I ♥ Huckabees, Waking Life, The Matrix, Ordinary People, and Life in a Day.[58] Likewise, films throughout the 20th century such as The Seventh Seal, Ikiru, Taxi Driver, High Noon, Easy Rider, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Clockwork Orange, Groundhog Day, Apocalypse Now, Badlands, and Blade Runner also have existentialist qualities.[59] The film, The Matrix, has been compared with another movie, Dark City[60] where the issues of identity and reality are raised. In Dark City, the inhabitants of the city are situated in a world controlled by demiurges, much like the prisoners in Plato's cave, in which prisoners see a world of shadows reflected onto a cave wall, rather than the world as it actually is.[61] Notable directors known for their existentialist films include Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, Terrence Malick, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Hideaki Anno, Wes Anderson, and Woody Allen.[62] Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York focuses on the protagonist's desire to find existential meaning.[63] Similarly, in Kurosawa's Red Beard, the protagonist's experiences as an intern in a rural health clinic in Japan lead him to an existential crisis whereby he questions his reason for being. This, in turn, leads him to a better understanding of humanity. Literature Existentialist perspectives are also found in literature to varying degrees. Jean-Paul Sartre's 1938 novel Nausea[64] was "steeped in Existential ideas", and is considered an accessible way of grasping his philosophical stance.[65] Since 1970, much cultural activity in art, cinema, and literature contains postmodernist and existentialist elements. Books such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) (now republished as Blade Runner) by Philip K. Dick and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk all distort the line between reality and appearance while simultaneously espousing

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Existentialism strong existentialist themes. Ideas from such thinkers as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Michel Foucault, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Marcuse, Gilles Deleuze, and Eduard von Hartmann permeate the works of artists such as Chuck Palahniuk, David Lynch, Crispin Glover, and Charles Bukowski, and one often finds in their works a delicate balance between distastefulness and beauty. Theatre Jean-Paul Sartre wrote No Exit in 1944, an existentialist play originally published in French as Huis Clos (meaning In Camera or "behind closed doors"), which is the source of the popular quote, "Hell is other people." (In French, "L'enfer, c'est les autres"). The play begins with a Valet leading a man into a room that the audience soon realizes is in hell. Eventually he is joined by two women. After their entry, the Valet leaves and the door is shut and locked. All three expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize they are there to torture each other, which they do effectively by probing each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant memories. Existentialist themes are displayed in the Theatre of the Absurd, notably in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in which two men divert themselves while they wait expectantly for someone (or something) named Godot who never arrives. They claim Godot to be an acquaintance, but in fact hardly know him, admitting they would not recognize him if they saw him. Samuel Beckett, once asked who or what Godot is, replied, "If I knew, I would have said so in the play." To occupy themselves, the men eat, sleep, talk, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide—anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay".[66] The play "exploits several archetypal forms and situations, all of which lend themselves to both comedy and pathos."[67] The play also illustrates an attitude toward human experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can be reconciled only in the mind and art of the absurdist. The play examines questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in human existence. Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist tragicomedy first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966.[68] The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Comparisons have also been drawn to Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, for the presence of two central characters who almost appear to be two halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass time by playing Questions, impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other or remaining silent for long periods of time. The two characters are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world that is beyond their understanding. They stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the implications, and muse on the irrationality and randomness of the world. Jean Anouilh's Antigone also presents arguments founded on existentialist ideas.[69] It is a tragedy inspired by Greek mythology and the play of the same name (Antigone, by Sophocles) from the 5th century B.C. In English, it is often distinguished from its antecedent by being pronounced in its original French form, approximately "Ante-GŌN." The play was first performed in Paris on 6 February 1944, during the Nazi occupation of France. Produced under Nazi censorship, the play is purposefully ambiguous with regards to the rejection of authority (represented by Antigone) and the acceptance of it (represented by Creon). The parallels to the French Resistance and the Nazi occupation have been drawn. Antigone rejects life as desperately meaningless but without affirmatively choosing a noble death. The crux of the play is the lengthy dialogue concerning the nature of power, fate, and choice, during which Antigone says that she is, "... disgusted with [the]...promise of a humdrum happiness." She states that she would rather die than live a mediocre existence. Critic Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd pointed out how many contemporary playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov wove into their plays the existentialist belief that we are absurd beings loose in a universe empty of real meaning. Esslin noted that many of these playwrights demonstrated the philosophy better than did the plays by Sartre and Camus. Though most of such playwrights, subsequently labeled "Absurdist" (based on Esslin's book), denied affiliations with existentialism and were often staunchly anti-philosophical (for example Ionesco often claimed he identified more with 'Pataphysics or with

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Existentialism Surrealism than with existentialism), the playwrights are often linked to existentialism based on Esslin's observation.[70]

Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy A major offshoot of existentialism as a philosophy is existentialist psychology and psychoanalysis, which first crystallized in the work of Otto Rank, Freud's closest associate for 20 years. Without awareness of the writings of Rank, Ludwig Binswanger was influenced by Freud, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. A later figure was Viktor Frankl, who briefly met Freud and studied with Jung as a young man.[71] His logotherapy can be regarded as a form of existentialist therapy. The existentialists would also influence social psychology, antipositivist micro-sociology, symbolic interactionism, and post-structuralism, with the work of thinkers such as Georg Simmel[72] and Michel Foucault. Foucault was a great reader of Kierkegaard even though he almost never refers this author, who nonetheless had for him an importance as secret as it was decisive.[73] An early contributor to existentialist psychology in the United States was Rollo May, who was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard and Otto Rank. One of the most prolific writers on techniques and theory of existentialist psychology in the USA is Irvin D. Yalom. Yalom states that Aside from their reaction against Freud's mechanistic, deterministic model of the mind and their assumption of a phenomenological approach in therapy, the existentialist analysts have little in common and have never been regarded as a cohesive ideological school. These thinkers - who include Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Eugène Minkowski, V.E. Gebsattel, Roland Kuhn, G. Caruso, F.T. Buytendijk, G. Bally and Victor Frankl - were almost entirely unknown to the American psychotherapeutic community until Rollo May's highly influential 1985 book Existence - and especially his introductory essay - introduced their work into this country.[74] A more recent contributor to the development of a European version of existentialist psychotherapy is the British-based Emmy van Deurzen. Anxiety's importance in existentialism makes it a popular topic in psychotherapy. Therapists often offer existentialist philosophy as an explanation for anxiety. The assertion is that anxiety is manifested of an individual's complete freedom to decide, and complete responsibility for the outcome of such decisions. Psychotherapists using an existentialist approach believe that a patient can harness his anxiety and use it constructively. Instead of suppressing anxiety, patients are advised to use it as grounds for change. By embracing anxiety as inevitable, a person can use it to achieve his full potential in life. Humanistic psychology also had major impetus from existentialist psychology and shares many of the fundamental tenets. Terror management theory, based on the writings of Ernest Becker and Otto Rank, is a developing area of study within the academic study of psychology. It looks at what researchers claim to be the implicit emotional reactions of people confronted with the knowledge that they will eventually die.

Criticisms General criticisms Logical positivists, such as Carnap and Ayer, assert that existentialists are often confused about the verb "to be" in their analyses of "being".[14] Specifically, they argue that the verb is transitive and pre-fixed to a predicate (e.g., an apple is red) (without a predicate, the word is meaningless), and that existentialists frequently misuse the term in this manner.

Sartre's philosophy Many critics argue Sartre's philosophy is contradictory. Specifically, they argue that Sartre makes metaphysical arguments despite his claiming that his philosophical views ignore metaphysics. Herbert Marcuse criticized Being and Nothingness (1943) by Jean-Paul Sartre for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence

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Existentialism itself: "Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory".[15] In Letter on Humanism, Heidegger criticized Sartre's existentialism: Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.[75]

Notes [1] Mullarkey, John, and Beth Lord (eds.). The Continuum Companion to Continental Philosophy. London, 2009, p. 309. [2] Stewart, Jon. Kierkegaard and Existentialism. Farnham, England, 2010, p. ix. [3] Crowell, Steven (October 2010). "Existentialism" (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ existentialism/ ). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . Retrieved 2012-04-12. [4] Merriam Webster entry for "authentic" (http:/ / www. merriam-webster. com/ dictionary/ authentic). . [5] Marino, Gordon. Basic Writings of Existentialism (Modern Library, 2004, p. ix, 3). [6] McDonald, William. "Søren Kierkegaard" (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ archives/ sum2009/ entries/ kierkegaard/ ). In Edward N. Zalta. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition). . [7] Watts, Michael. Kierkegaard (Oneworld, 2003, pp.4-6). [8] Lowrie, Walter. Kierkegaard's attack upon "Christendom" (Princeton, 1969, pp. 37-40). [9] Guignon and Pereboom, Derk, Charles B. (2001). Existentialism: basic writings (http:/ / books. google. ca/ books?id=NSvRzPye-gEC& printsec=frontcover& source=gbs_ge_summary_r& cad=0#v=onepage& q=psychoanalysis& f=false). Hackett Publishing. p. xiii. . [10] Ernst Breisach, Introduction to Modern Existentialism, New York (1962), p. 5. [11] Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism: From Dostoyevesky to Sartre, New York (1956) p. 12. [12] John Macquarrie, Existentialism, New York (1972), pp. 14–21. [13] Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich, New York (1995), p. 259. [14] Carnap, Rudolf, Uberwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache [Overcoming Metaphysics by the Logical Analysis of Speech], Erkenntnis (1932), pp.219–241. Carnap's critique of Heidegger's "What is Metaphysics". [15] Marcuse, Herbert. "Sartre's Existentialism". Printed in Studies in Critical Philosophy. Translated by Joris De Bres. London: NLB, 1972. p. 161 [16] Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism", in Basic Writings: Nine Key Essays, plus the Introduction to Being and Time , trans. David Farrell Krell (London, Routledge; 1978), 208. GoogleBooks (http:/ / books. google. ca/ books?id=kVc9AAAAIAAJ& lpg=PA208& ots=Wd-UQTTzCG& dq=reversal+ metaphysical+ metaphysics+ oblivion+ truth+ Being. & pg=PA208& redir_esc=y#v=onepage& q=metaphysical oblivion& f=false) [17] (French) (Dictionary) "L'existencialisme" - see "l'identité de la personne" [18] Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-158591-6. [19] Jean-Paul Sartre. "Existentialism is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre 1946" (http:/ / www. marxists. org/ reference/ archive/ sartre/ works/ exist/ sartre. htm). Marxists.org. . Retrieved 2010-03-08. [20] E Keen (1973). Suicide and Self-Deception (http:/ / www. pep-web. org/ document. php?id=PSAR. 060. 0575A). Psychoanalytic Review. [21] "despair - definition of despair by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia" (http:/ / www. tfd. com/ despair). Tfd.com. . Retrieved 2010-03-08. [22] Either/Or Part II p. 188 Hong [23] Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers Vol 5, p. 5 [24] Hong, Howard V. "Historical Introduction" to Fear and Trembling. Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey. 1983. p. x [25] Kierkegaard, Soren. Works of Love. Harper & Row, Publishers. New York, N.Y. 1962. p. 62 [26] Camus, Albert. "The Myth of Sisyphus". NYU.edu (http:/ / www. nyu. edu/ classes/ keefer/ hell/ camus. html) [27] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Routledge Classics (2003). [28] D.E. Cooper Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Basil Blackwell, 1990, page 1) [29] Thomas R. Flynn, Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006, page 89 [30] Christine Daigle, Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics (McGill-Queen's press, 2006, page 5) [31] L'Existentialisme est un Humanisme (Editions Nagel, 1946); English Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (Eyre Methuen, 1948) [32] Crowell, Steven. The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, Cambridge, 2011, p. 316. [33] Luper, Steven. "Existing". Mayfield Publishing, 2000, p.4–5 and 11 [34] Hubben, William. Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kafka, Jabber-wacky, Scribner, 1997.

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Existentialism [35] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism http:/ / www. marxists. org/ reference/ archive/ sartre/ works/ exist/ sartre. htm ; Retrieved 2012-04-01. [36] Maurice S. Friedman, Martin Buber. The Life of Dialogue (University of Chicago press, 1955, page 85) [37] Ernst Breisach, Introduction to Modern Existentialism, New York (1962), pages 173–176 [38] Samuel M. Keen, "Gabriel Marcel" in Paul Edwards (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Macmillan Publishing Co, 1967) [39] John Macquarrie, Existentialism (Pelican, 1973, page 110) [40] John Macquarrie, Existentialism (Pelican, 1973, page 96) [41] Karl Jaspers, "Philosophical Autobiography" in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers IX (Tudor Publishing Company, 1957, page 75/11) [42] Karl Jaspers, "Philosophical Autobiography" in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers IX (Tudor Publishing Company, 1957, page 40) [43] Karl Jaspers, "Philosophical Autobiography" in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers IX (Tudor Publishing Company, 1957, page 75/2 and following) [44] Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2004, chapter 3 passim) [45] Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2004, page 44) [46] Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, quoted in Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2004, page 48) [47] Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre (University of Chicago Press, 2004, page 48) [48] Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidgger — Between Good and Evil (Harvard University Press, 1998, page 343 [49] Entry on Kojève in Martin Cohen (editor), The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics(Hodder Arnold, 2006, page 158); see also Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (Cornell University Press, 1980) [50] Entry on Kojève in Martin Cohen (editor), The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics(Hodder Arnold, 2006, page 158) [51] Martin Hediegger, letter, quoted in Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidgger — Between Good and Evil (Harvard University Press, 1998, page 349) [52] Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger — Between Good and Evil (Harvard University Press, 1998, page 356) [53] William J. Richardson, Martin Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought (Martjinus Nijhoff,1967, page 351) [54] K. Gunnar Bergström, An Odyssey to Freedom University of Uppsala, 1983, page 92;Colin Stanley, Colin Wilson, a Celebration: Essays and Recollections Cecil Woolf, 1988, page 43) [55] © James Travers 2005 google search (http:/ / 72. 14. 205. 104/ search?q=cache:iPYJjAhhAuMJ:filmsdefrance. com/ FDF_Un_chant_d_amour_rev. html) [56] Holt, Jason. "Existential Ethics: Where do the Paths of Glory Lead?". In The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick. By Jerold J. Abrams. Published 2007. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2445-X [57] "Amazon.com's Films with an Existential Theme" (http:/ / www. amazon. com/ Films-with-an-Existential-Theme/ lm/ 2XUY93GON1RKW). . Retrieved 2009-02-02. [58] "Existential & Psychological Movie Recommendations" (http:/ / www. existential-therapy. com/ Arts/ Movies. htm). Existential-therapy.com. . Retrieved 2010-03-08. [59] "Existentialism in Film" (http:/ / uhaweb. hartford. edu/ BEAUCHEMI/ ). Uhaweb.hartford.edu. . Retrieved 2010-03-08. [60] http:/ / www. weirdpro. com/ ?page_id=656 [61] http:/ / jaysanalysis. com/ tag/ demiurge/ [62] "Existentialist Adaptations - Harvard Film Archive" (http:/ / hcl. harvard. edu/ hfa/ films/ 2005winter/ existential. html). Hcl.harvard.edu. . Retrieved 2010-03-08. [63] Chocano, Carina (2008-10-24). "Review: 'Synecdoche, New York'" (http:/ / www. latimes. com/ entertainment/ news/ movies/ la-et-synecdoche24-2008oct24,0,5252277. story). Los Angeles Times. . Retrieved 2008-11-17. [64] Sartre, Jean-Paul; (Translated by Robert Baldick) (2000. First published 1938). Nausea. London: Penguin [65] Earnshaw, Steven (2006). Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum. p. 75. ISBN 0-8264-8530-8 [66] The Times, 31 December 1964. Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p 57 [67] Cronin, A., Samuel Beckett The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997), p 391 [68] Michael H. Hutchins (14 August 2006). "A Tom Stoppard Bibliography: Chronology" (http:/ / www. sondheimguide. com/ Stoppard/ chronology. html). The Stephen Sondheim Reference Guide. . Retrieved 2008-06-23. [69] Wren, Celia (12 December 2007). "From Forum, an Earnest and Painstaking 'Antigone'" (http:/ / www. washingtonpost. com/ wp-dyn/ content/ article/ 2007/ 12/ 11/ AR2007121102254. html). Washington Post. . Retrieved 2008-04-07. [70] Kernan, Alvin B. The Modern American Theater: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967. [71] Logotherapie-international.eu (http:/ / www. logotherapie-international. eu/ Frankl-Jung. English summary. pdf?2f569316a8c0d70a23e25e57788725a0=877b85765d9546f605211252412792ec) [72] Stewart, Jon. Kierkegaard and Existentialism. p.38 [73] Flynn, Thomas R. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, p. 323. [74] Yalom, Irvin D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. New York: BasicBooks (Subsidiary of Perseus Books, L.L.C.. p. 17. ISBN 0-465-02147-6 Note: The copyright year has not changed, but the book remains in print. [75] Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism", in Basic Writings: Nine Key Essays, plus the Introduction to Being and Time , trans. David Farrell Krell (London, Routledge; 1978), 208. Google Books (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=kVc9AAAAIAAJ& lpg=PA208&

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Existentialism ots=Wd-UQTTzCG& dq=But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being. & pg=PA208#v=onepage& q=But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being. & f=false)

References • Razavi, Mehdi Amin (1997). Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination. Routledge. ISBN 0-7007-0412-4 • Albert Camus Lyrical and Critical essays. Edited by Philip Thody (interviev with Jeanie Delpech, in Les Nouvelles litteraires, November 15, 1945). pg 345

Further reading • Appignanesi, Richard; and Oscar Zarate (2001). Introducing Existentialism. Cambridge, UK: Icon. ISBN 1-84046-266-3. • Appignanesi, Richard (2006). Introducing Existentialism (3rd ed.). Thriplow, Cambridge: Icon Books (UK), Totem Books (USA). ISBN 1-84046-717-7. • Cooper, David E. (1999). Existentialism: A Reconstruction (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-21322-8. • Deurzen, Emmy van (2010). Everyday Mysteries: a Handbook of Existential Psychotherapy (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-37643-3. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1855). Attack Upon Christendom. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1843). The Concept of Anxiety. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1846). Concluding Unscientific Postscript. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1843). Either/Or. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1843). Fear and Trembling. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1849). The Sickness Unto Death. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1847). Works of Love. • Luper, Steven (ed.) (2000). Existing: An Introduction to Existential Thought. Mountain View, California: Mayfield. ISBN 0-7674-0587-0. • Marino, Gordon (ed.) (2004). Basic Writings of Existentialism. New York: Modern Library. ISBN 0-375-75989-1. • Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. • Rose, Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) (1994). Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age (http://www. columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/nihilism.html). Saint Herman Press (1 September 1994). ISBN 0-938635-15-8. • Sartre, Jean-Paul (1943). Being and Nothingness. • Sartre, Jean-Paul (1945). Existentialism and Humanism. • Stewart, Jon (ed.) (2011). Kierkegaard and Existentialism. Farnham, England: Ashgate. ISBN 978-1-4094-2641-7. • Solomon, Robert C. (ed.) (2005). Existentialism (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517463-1. • Wartenberg, Thomas E.. Existentialism: A Beginner's Guide.

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Existentialism

External links Introductions • Existentialism (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547h8) on In Our Time at the BBC. ( listen now (http:/ /www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00547h8/In_Our_Time_Existentialism)) • Friesian interpretation of Existentialism (http://www.friesian.com/existent.htm) • Existentialism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism) entry by Steven Crowell in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy • "Existentialism is a Humanism", a lecture given by Jean-Paul Sartre (http://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm) • The Existential Primer (http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/) • Buddhists, Existentialists and Situationists: Waking up in Waking Life (http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/ waking_essay.htm) Journals and articles • Stirrings Still (http://www.stirrings-still.org): The International Journal of Existential Literature • Existential Analysis (http://www.existentialanalysis.co.uk) published by The Society for Existential Analysis Existential psychotherapy • International Society for Existential Therapy (http://www.existentialpsychotherapy.net) • HPSY.RU — Existential & humanistic psychology (http://hpsy.ru/eng/) History of existential psychology's development in former Soviet nations Videos • Existential Theory of Quality Teaching and Learning (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7HVfxq4l-8)

Atheist existentialism Atheist existentialism or atheistic existentialism is a kind of existentialism which strongly diverged from the Christian works of Søren Kierkegaard and has developed within the context of an atheistic worldview.[1] The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard provided existentialism's theoretical foundation in the 19th century. Atheist existentialism began to be recognized after the 1943 publication of Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sartre later explicitly alluded to it in Existentialism is a Humanism in 1946. Sartre had previously written in the spirit of atheistic existentialism, (e.g. the novel Nausea (1938) and the short stories in his 1939 collection The Wall). Simone de Beauvoir likewise wrote from an atheist existentialist perspective.

Thought The term atheistic existentialism refers to the exclusion of any transcendental, metaphysical, or religious beliefs from philosophical existentialist thought. Atheistic existentialism can nevertheless share elements (e.g. anguish or rebellion in light of human finitude and limitations) with religious existentialism, or with metaphysical existentialism (e.g. through phenomenology and Heidegger's works). Atheistic existentialism confronts death anxiety without appealing to a hope of somehow being saved by a God (and often without any appeal to supernatural salvations like reincarnation). For some thinkers, existential malaise is mostly theoretical (as it is with Jean-Paul Sartre) while others are quite affected by an existentialistic anguish (an example being Albert Camus and his discussion of the Absurd). Sartre once said "existence precedes essence". What he meant was that, first of all, man exists (e.g. appears on the scene) and only afterwards defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at

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Atheist existentialism first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.

Major works Sartre The novel Nausea is, in some ways, a manifesto of atheistic existentialism. Sartre deals with a dejected researcher (Antoine Roquentin) in an anonymous French town, where Roquentin becomes conscious of the fact that nature, as well as every inanimate object, are indifferent towards him and his tormented existence. Furthermore, they show themselves to be totally extraneous to any human meaning, and no human can see anything significant in them.

Camus Camus writes of dualisms, between happiness and sadness, as well as life and death. In Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), such dualism becomes paradoxical, because humans greatly value their existence while at the same time being aware of their mortality. Camus believes it is human nature to have difficulty reconciling these paradoxes, and indeed, he believed humankind must accept what he called "the Absurd". On the other hand, Camus is not strictly an existential atheist because the acceptance of the Absurd implies neither the existence of a god nor the nonexistence of a god.

Despair, Optimism, and Rebellion In his essay “Despair, Optimism, and Rebellion”, Evan Fales submits three atheist existential stances towards life (which are not mutually incompatible). He argues that a certain dignity, and commitment to truth, is captured by Bertrand Russel when he says that “…only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built”. Fales believes that despair is only one possible reaction, or else component, of the atheist existentialist attitude.[2] Fales proposes that another attitude is the Optimism of Secular Humanists: their moral systems are objective, man-made, and grounded to some extent in naturalistic facts; they derive meaning in their lives by defending those morals, and other aspects of a good life (beauty, pleasure, mastery, etc.). Fales adds that atheist optimists must be careful to avoid fatalism (not to be confused with determinism) when faced with the grimmer sides of human nature, especially in the absence of divine retribution - a task he says secular humanists realize by seeing their short life and great challenges as serving to deepen their moral obligations to make at least a small contribution. Fales also describes what he calls the optimists’ “negative thesis” when he writes “The infantilization of humankind in relation to God is one of the most disturbing features of Christian religious sensibility, especially in the context of moral judgment.” The path of optimism, to Fales, thus means affirming man-made morality, but also challenging ideologies that say morality could be anything else.[2] Since Rebellion is practiced against something, Fales warns that the atheist is not rebelling against the God they reject, so much as an indifferent universe. Fales continues: ”But, if there is a God, and that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus, then I affirm that there is one stance that is legitimate and justified. It is rebellion.”[2]

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Atheist existentialism

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Notes [1] (http:/ / atheism. about. com/ od/ typesofexistentialism/ a/ christian. htm) [2] Evan Fales' essay "Despair, Optimism, and Rebellion" (2007), at Infidels.org (http:/ / www. infidels. org/ library/ modern/ evan_fales/ despair. html)

External links • Enc. Britannica, art. "Atheistic Existentialism" (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/40658/ atheistic-Existentialism) • About Atheistic Existentialism (http://atheism.about.com/od/typesofexistentialism/a/atheistic.htm) • Atheistic existentialism (http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/existentialism-theory-faq.htm) • The absurd in atheistic existentialism (http://www.thecry.com/existentialism/)

Christian existentialism Christian existentialism is a theo-philosophical movement which takes an existentialist approach to Christian theology. The school of thought is often traced back to the work of the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), who is considered the father of existentialism.[1]

Kierkegaardian themes Christian existentialism relies on Kierkegaard's understanding of Christianity. Kierkegaard argued that the universe is fundamentally paradoxical, and that its greatest paradox is the transcendent union of God and man in the person of Jesus Christ. He also posited having a personal relationship with God that supersedes all prescribed moralities, social structures and communal norms,[2] since he asserted that following social conventions is essentially a personal aesthetic choice made by individuals.

Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard proposed that each person must make independent choices, which then constitute his or her existence. Each person suffers from the anguish of indecision (whether knowingly or unknowingly) until he or she commits to a particular choice about the way to live. Kierkegaard also proposed three rubrics with which to understand the conditions that issue from distinct life choices: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

Major premises One of the major premises of Christian existentialism entails calling the masses back to a more genuine form of Christianity. This form is often identified with some notion of Early Christianity, which mostly existed during the first three centuries after the Christ's crucifixion. Beginning with the Edict of Milan, which was issued by Roman Emperor Constantine I in AD 313, Christianity enjoyed a level of popularity among Romans and later among other Europeans. And yet Kierkegaard asserted that by the 19th century, the ultimate meaning of New Testament Christianity (love, cf. agape, mercy and loving-kindness) had become perverted, and Christianity had deviated considerably from its original threefold message of grace, humility, and love.

Christian existentialism Another major premise of Christian existentialism involves Kierkegaard's conception of God and Love. For the most part, Kierkegaard equates God with Love.[3] Thus, when a person engages in the act of loving, he is in effect achieving an aspect of the divine. Kierkegaard also viewed the individual as a necessary synthesis of both finite and infinite elements. Therefore, when an individual does not come to a full realization of his infinite side, he is said to be in despair. For many contemporary Christian theologians, the notion of despair can be viewed as sin. However, to Kierkegaard, a man sinned when he was exposed to this idea of despair and chose a path other than one in accordance with God's will. A final major premise of Christian existentialism entails the systematic undoing of evil acts. Kierkegaard asserted that once an action had been completed, it should be evaluated in the face of God, for holding oneself up to divine scrutiny was the only way to judge one's actions. Because actions constitute the manner in which something is deemed good or bad, one must be constantly conscious of the potential consequences of his actions. Kierkegaard believed that the choice for goodness ultimately came down to each individual. Yet Kierkegaard also foresaw the potential limiting of choices for individuals who fell into despair.[4]

The Bible Christian Existentialism often refers to what it calls the indirect style of Christ's teachings, which it considers to be a distinctive and important aspect of his ministry. Christ's point, it says, is often left unsaid in any particular parable or saying, to permit each individual to confront the truth on their own.[5] This is particularly evident in (but is certainly not limited to) his parables. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew (18:21-35 [6]), Jesus tells a story about a man who is heavily in debt (the parable of the unforgiving servant). The debtor and his family are about to be sold into slavery, but he pleads for their lives. His master accordingly cancels the debt and sets them free. Later the man who was in debt abuses some people who owe him money, and he has them thrown in jail. Upon being informed of what this man has done, the master brings him in and says, "Why are you doing this? Weren't your debts canceled?" Then the debtor is thrown into jail until the debt is paid. Jesus ends his story by saying, "This is how it will be for you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart." Often Christ's parables are a response to a question he is asked. After he tells the parable, he returns the question to the individual who originally asked it. Often we see a person asking a speculative question involving one's duty before God, and Christ's response is more or less the same question—but as God would ask that individual. For example, in the Gospel of Luke (10:25 [7]), a teacher of the law asks Jesus what it means to love one's neighbor as oneself. Jesus replies by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. In the story a man is beaten by thieves. A priest and a Levite pass him by, but a Samaritan takes pity on him and generously sets him up at an inn—paying his tab in advance. Then Jesus returns the question, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?". Jesus does not answer the question because he requires the individual to answer it, and thus to understand existence in the Bible, one must recognize who that passage is speaking to in particular. To Kierkegaard, it is the individual hearing the passage. A good example of indirect communication in the Old Testament is the story of David and Nathan in Samuel 2 12:1-14. David had committed adultery with a woman, Bathsheba, which resulted in her pregnancy. He then ordered her husband, Uriah, to come home from a war front so that he might sleep with his wife, thus making it appear as if Uriah had in fact conceived with Bathsheba. Instead, Uriah would not break faith with his fellow soldiers still on the battlefield and refused to sleep with her. David then ordered him back out to the battlefront where he would surely die, thus making Bathsheba a widow and available for marriage, which David soon arranged. David initially thought he had gotten away with murder, until Nathan arrived to tell him a story about two men, one rich and the other poor. The poor man was a shepherd with only one lamb, which he raised with his family. The lamb ate at his table and slept in his arms. One day a traveler came to visit the rich man; instead of taking one of his own sheep, the rich man seized the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for his guest. When Nathan finished his story, David burned with anger and said (among other things): "As surely as the Lord lives, the man who

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Christian existentialism did this deserves to die!". Nathan responded by saying "You are the man!". Realizing his guilt, David becomes filled with terror and remorse, tearfully repenting of his evil deed. An existential reading of the Bible demands that the reader recognize that he is an existing subject, studying the words that God communicates to him personally. This is in contrast to looking at a collection of "truths" which are outside and unrelated to the reader.[8] Such a reader is not obligated to follow the commandments as if an external agent is forcing them upon him, but as though they are inside him and guiding him internally. This is the task Kierkegaard takes up when he asks: "Who has the more difficult task: the teacher who lectures on earnest things a meteor's distance from everyday life, or the learner who should put it to use?"[9] Existentially speaking, the Bible doesn't become an authority in a person's life until they authorize the Bible to be their personal authority.

Notable Christian existentialists Christian existentialists include German Protestant theologians Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann, British Anglican theologian John Macquarrie, American theologians Craig J. N. de Paulo and Lincoln Swain,[10] American philosopher Clifford Williams, European philosophers Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Emmanuel Mounier, Miguel de Unamuno and Pierre Boutang, and Russian philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov. Karl Barth added to Kierkegaard's ideas the notion that existential despair leads an individual to an awareness of God's infinite nature. Some ideas in the works of Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky could arguably be placed within the tradition of Christian existentialism. The roots of existentialism have been traced back as far as St Augustine.[11][12][13] Some of the most striking passages in Pascal's Pensées, including the famous section on the Wager, deal with existentialist themes.[14][15][16][17] Jacques Maritain, in Existence and the Existent: An Essay on Christian Existentialism, finds the core of true existentialism in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.[18]

References [1] Eliade, M.J., & Adams, C.J. (1987). Encyclopedia of Religion (v.5). Macmillan Publishing Company. [2] Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Authored pseudonymously as Johannes Climacus. [3] Søren Kierkegaard (1849). The Sickness Unto Death Trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 14. [4] Søren Kierkegaard (1849). The Sickness Unto Death Trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 24. [5] Palmer, Donald D. (1996). Kierkegaard For Beginners. London, England: Writers And Readers Limited. p. 25. [6] http:/ / www. biblegateway. com/ passage/ ?search=Matthew%2018:21-35;& version=31; [7] http:/ / www. biblegateway. com/ passage/ ?search=Luke%2010:25;& version=31; [8] Hong, Howard V. (1983). "Historical Introduction" to Fear and Trembling. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p. x. [9] Kierkegaard, Soren (1847). Works of Love. Harper & Row, Publishers. New York, N.Y. 1962. p. 62. [10] Swain, Lincoln (2005). Five Articles (http:/ / www. somareview. com/ contributors. cfm?authorID=75), Soma: A Review of Religion and Culture. [11] Lewis, Gordon R. (Winter 1965). "Augustine and Existentialism" (http:/ / www. biblicalstudies. org. uk/ pdf/ bets/ vol08/ 8-1_lewis. pdf). Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 8,1, pp. 13–22. [12] Michial Farmer (6 July 2010). "A Primer on Religious Existentialism, Pt. 4: Augustine" (http:/ / www. christianhumanist. org/ chb/ a-primer-on-religious-existentialism-pt-4-augustine/ ). christianhumanist.org [13] The Influence of Augustine on Heidegger: The Emergence of An Augustinian Phenomenology, ed. Craig J. N. de Paulo. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. [14] Clarke, Desmond (2011). "Blaise Pascal" (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ pascal/ ), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [15] Clifford Williams (July 3, 2005). "Pascal" (http:/ / www. cliffordwilliams. net/ pascal). cliffordwilliams.net [16] Michial Farmer (20 July 2010). "A Primer on Religious Existentialism, Pt. 5: Blaise Pascal" (http:/ / www. christianhumanist. org/ chb/ a-primer-on-religious-existentialism-pt-5-blaise-pascal/ ). christianhumanist.org [17] Michial Farmer (27 July 2010). "A Primer on Religious Existentialism, Pt. 6: Apologetics" (http:/ / www. christianhumanist. org/ chb/ a-primer-on-religious-existentialism-pt-6-apologetics/ ). christianhumanist.org [18] Maritain, Jacques (1947). Existence and the Existent: An Essay on Christian Existentialism (Court traité de l'existence et de l'existent), translated by Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1948.

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Christian existentialism

External links • A website that explores the existential teachings of Jesus, with references to Kierkegaard and Tillich (http:// www.existentialchristianity.net/)

Jewish existentialism Jewish existentialism is a category of work by Jewish authors dealing with existentialist themes and concepts (e.g. debate about the existence of God and the meaning of human existence), and intended to answer theological questions that are important in Judaism. The existential angst of Job is an example from the Hebrew Bible of the existentialist theme. Theodicy and post-Holocaust theology make up a large part of 20th century Jewish existentialism. Examples of Jewish thinkers and philosophers whose works include existentialist themes are Martin Buber, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Lev Shestov, Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Emil Fackenheim.

Precursors Jewish existentialism finds its roots in both the traditional philosophical school of existentialism and the peculiarities of Jewish theology, Biblical commentary, and European Jewish culture. Existentialism as a philosophical system grew as a result of the works of such non-Jewish thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger. The Books of Ecclesiastes and Job, found in the Hebrew Bible and often cited as examples wisdom literature in the Hebrew Biblical tradition, both include existentialist themes. The Book of Job tells the story of Job, who is beset by both God and satan by many hardships intended to test his faith. He ultimately keeps his faith and receives redemption and rewards from God. The Book of Job includes many discussions between Job and his friends, as well as between Job and God concerning the nature, origin, and purpose of evil and suffering in the world. The Book of Ecclesiastes is broader in scope and includes many meditations on the meaning of life and God’s purpose for human beings on Earth. Passages in Ecclesiastes describe human existence in such terms as “all is futile”[1] and “futile and pursuit of wind.”[2] Much Biblical scholarship and Talmud exegesis has been devoted to exploring the apparent contradiction between the affirmation of an all-powerful God’s existence and the futility, meaningless, and/or difficulty of human life. Judaism’s treatment of theodicy makes heavy use of the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes. Some of the trends in the modern philosophy of existentialism come from concepts important to early rabbinic and pre-rabbinic Judaism. William Barret’s Irrational Man, which traces the history of existentialist thought in the Western world, explains how the competing worldviews of Greco-Roman culture and Hebrew/Jewish culture have helped shape modern existentialism. Barrett says that the Hebraic concept of the “man of faith” is one “who is passionately committed to his own being.”[3] The Hebrew “man of faith,” Barrett says, trusts in a God who can only know through “experience” and not “reasoning.”[4] Juxtaposed with the believing Hebrew is the skeptical Greek “man of reason” who seeks to attain God through “rational abstraction.”[5] The Greek invention of logic[6] and the tradition of rational philosophical inquiry contributed to Existentialism. The Greeks invented philosophy as an academic discipline and as a way to approach the problems of existence, eventually resulting in the philosophical works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard and other existentialists. Hebraic thought trends had much more of an influence on the important concepts of existentialism. Much of modern existentialism may be seen as more Jewish than Greek. Several core concepts found in the ancient Hebrew tradition that are often cited as the most important concepts explored by existentialism, for example, the “uneasiness” “deep within Biblical man,” also his “sinfulness” and “feebleness and finiteness.”[7] While “the whole impulse of philosophy for Plato arises from an ardent search for

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Jewish existentialism escape from the evils of the world and the curse of time,”[8] Biblical Judaism recognizes the impossibility of trying to transcend the world entirely via intellectualism, lofty thoughts, and ideals. As the late Jewish existentialist Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (b. 1903-1993) articulates for a popular audience of secular Jews, “the idea of holiness according to halakhic [Jewish law] world view does not signify a transcendent realm completely separate and removed from reality…of the supreme good…the halakhic conception of holiness…[is] the holiness of the concrete.”[9] In the words of Barret, “right conduct is the ultimate concern of the Hebrew,”[10] and indeed for the observant Jew, according to R. Soloveitchik. Therefore, the Jewish tradition is differentiated from the Greek system of thought, which emphasizes correct knowledge, thinking, and consciousness as the passports to transcendence of the physical world. Some traditions of ancient Gnosticism, like the neo-Platonist desert cults, also subscribed to an idea similar to the Platonist ideal of “true knowledge of the Good” being a gateway to transcending one’s ordinary, physical existence.

Foundational gentile existentialism and its connection to Jewish existentialism The philosophical school known as existentialism is generally regarded to have begun with the writings of the Danish Søren Kierkegaard (b.1813 – d. 1855). Other important thinkers include the German Friedrich Nietzsche (b. 1844 – d. 1900), the French Jean-Paul Sartre (b.1905 – d. 1980), and the German Martin Heidegger (b. 1889-1976). Various Jewish existentialists found influence in the secular philosophy of existentialism and have made various critiques and commentaries of the above-mentioned writers' works. Both Judaism and existentialism deny the ability of human beings to permanently transcend the physical world and one’s own normal existence. Theistic Judaism insists on a transcendent realm of existence beyond normal human reality, that is, the realm of God. As a way of connecting to God, Judaism directs its adherents towards the strict observance of laws, both ritual and ethical, in order to add meaning to the adherents’ lives (see Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man for a further discussion of the concept of the Jew making meaning in his own life by observing the Halakha). Modern existentialist philosophy often denies the existence of a higher power, leading some to classify it as an agnostic or atheistic thought structure. Martin Heidegger’s concept of man’s thrownness into existence in the world[11] causing him to be ill at ease/uncomfortable due to his very existence is similar to Hebraic man’s “uneasiness” due to his inherently sinful nature. Both senses of being ill at ease in one’s own skin are too inherent to the human condition to eliminate, according to Barret.[10] Traditional Jewish thinkers and existentialist thinkers (both Semitic and gentile) have different solutions to this intrinsic uneasiness, also called existential anxiety or existential angst. Jean-Paul Sartre’s book, Anti-Semite and Jew (1948), is a direct connection between secular existentialist thought as philosophy and Jewish existentialism as an expression of a religious mode of thinking. Sartre’s humanistic argument against antisemitism is that, “If reason exists, there is no French or German truth…or Jewish truth. There is only one Truth, and he is best who wins it. In the face of universal and eternal laws, man himself is universal. There are no more Poles or Jews; there are men who live in Poland, others who are designated as 'of the Jewish faith' or their family papers…”[12] Even out of the ashes of the Holocaust, Sartre insists on the supremacy and ultimate victory of rationalism over tribalism and hatred. The anti-Semite’s hatred is just a misguided attempt to rid one’s society of evil, which is itself a noble aim.[9] Sartre ties his existentialist, universal humanism to Judaism by denying the difference between Jews and others. By denying Jews’ “Chosenness” and explaining the Holocaust as a particularly nasty episode of utopianism gone wrong, Sartre offers hope to Jews worldwide. He insists that tribalism and pure hatred of the Jew as an aberrant outsider are not sources of anti-Semitism. He claims that “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”[13] Anti-Semitism is much more a reflection of the basic psychological need for a foreign object of hatred common in many people, according to Sartre. In many cases, this object of hatred for gentiles has been the

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Jewish existentialism Jewish people, who have functioned as the "scapegoat" of Europe for many centuries.

20th Century (Pre-WWII) boom Martin Buber Perhaps the preeminent Jewish existentialist is the Austrian theologian/philosopher Martin Buber Buber wrote extensively on a variety of topics, including Biblical translation, Zionism, Hassidic culture, folklore and his concept of “a philosophy of dialogue”.[14] He made a major contribution to Jewish existentialism with his popular 1923 book I and Thou (from the German, Ich and Du). The book is concerned with the dual concepts of the “I and You (Thou)” and “I and It” relationship, which is Buber’s attempt to answer several age-old existential questions about the meaning of human existence. Buber says that human beings find meaning in their relationships with other entities in the world, whether these are inanimate objects, other people, or even a spiritual force like God. This Begegnung ("meeting")[15] between human and object is what gives life meaning for each individual human. Buber goes on to show how human beings define themselves in relation to the other, either the "You" or the "I." He says that one’s whole being is made by the relation one has to "The Other," using the elegant phraseology, “When one says You, the I of the word pair I-You is said, too…Being I and saying I are the same.”[16] And also, “The world as experience belongs to the basic word I-It. The basic word I-You establishes the world of relation.”[17] The latter parts of Buber’s I and Thou are concerned with the possibility for unity of all being. Buber takes a leaf from the book of Judeo-Christian mysticism and Buddhism and explores the concept of the unity of all beings in the universe. Buber admits that as a practicality, and for purposes of life in the real world, “In lived actuality there is not unity of being.”[18] Because of Buber’s concept of the human being having his existence justified by each new interaction with an ‘I’ or ‘Thou’ object, his preferred brand of theology can be seen “not as pantheism, but as panentheism: not that everything is God, but that God may be in everything…”[19] Buber wrote on a wide variety of topics. He wrote commentary on the socialist Zionist movement, classic gentile existentialist writers such as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche, and Hassidic folklore and culture, among many other topics from a variety of disciplines.[20] In addition to all this, his concepts of the “I and Thou” dialectic and his “philosophy of dialogue” have become standard reading in the realm of positivist existentialist philosophy that seeks to bring meaning to human life. Ronald Gregor Smith writes, “The authentic Jewish note of existential ‘realization’ is never hard to detect.”[21] Buber had an ultimately optimistic view of people's ability to find meaning in life through the Jewish religion.

Franz Rosenzweig Franz Rosenzweig was a contemporary, colleague, and close friend of Martin Buber.[22] The two co-wrote a variety of works, including a translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Hebrew. Rosenzweig’s best-known individual work is the epic The Star of Redemption, a book of modern theology critical of modern philosophical idealism (embodied in Hegel’s systematization of human life and thought structure[23]) which has had a massive influence on modern Jewish theology and philosophy since its publication in the early 20th century. Rosenzweig proposes an alternative to modern philosophy’s systematization of human existence in a paradigm shift from a sterile, removed modern philosophy of idealism and logic to a more Jewish, theistic system, emphasizing the primacy of the relationships between the world, Man (as human being),[24] and God,[25] which can also serve as a pathway for the redemption of the Jewish people as a nation.

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Jewish existentialism

Hans Jonas Hans Jonas was a Jewish scholar of religion and philosophy best known for his definitive work on ancient Gnosticism. His books and papers on Gnosticism and “philosophical biology” are considered an important part of early 20th century scholarship on these subjects.

Theodicy and post-Holocaust theology The next phase of Jewish existentialism includes a variety of works addressing the horrors of the Holocaust, the term used to denote the German Nazi party’s state-engineered genocide of approximately 6 million European Jews and approximately 1 million other ‘undesirables’ (including homosexuals, Romani, the mentally and physically disabled, and Slavic peoples) during World War II. The paradox of theodicy has been of interest to theologians and philosophers (Jewish and gentile) for centuries. Theodicy, or the problem of evil, is a branch of theology/philosophy which explores the logical contradiction of the existence of evil in the world with an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful (omniscient and omnipotent) God. Talmudists and mystics in the rabbinic tradition explained evil as an absence or distance from God, rather than the opposite of God’s all-powerful goodness. Examples include Job complaining to his friends about God causing him suffering, Maimonides’ explanation of evil and suffering being the result of man’s actions against God rather than God’s actions or ill-will towards man,[26] and Spinoza’s emphasis on the impersonal nature of the universe and the efficacy of human reason in avoiding evil and suffering.[27] Generations of pre-Holocaust Jewish scholars were able to come up with satisfactory explanations for the existence of both evil and an all-powerful, all-good, and infallible God in the universe. These convenient logical arguments could not provide sufficient solace for a Jewish people emerging from the horrors of the Holocaust. Many scholars contend that the enormous tragedy of the Holocaust represents an entirely new category of evil that one could not explain with traditional Jewish theology.[28] The preeminent survivor-novelist Elie Wiesel (b. 1928) raises a variety of unanswerable questions about the Holocaust in his novels, such as the best-selling Night (1958). Many Jews, whether they were survivors or not, experienced a loss of faith in the Jewish concept of God and even in the power of human goodness. Wiesel often repeats the sentiment that “God died in Auschwitz,”[29] which may be an allusion to Nietzsche’s famous contention that "God is dead," and is representative of the theme of loss of meaning in life for a generation of Jews who experienced and witnessed the Holocaust. However, some Jewish theologians have come up with responses to the Holocaust without denying the existence of God entirely.

Emil Fackenheim Emil L. Fackenheim was a Reform-movement Rabbi and well-known Jewish theologian who wrote on post-Holocaust theology and coined the term "the 614th commandment." For Fackenheim, Judaism “attempts to supersede the Holocaust”[30] by founding the State of Israel. The creation of the State of Israel by Jews committed to the renewal of Judaism and the welfare of their fellow Jews and ‘the Jewish nation’ represents for Fackenheim the emergence of a “muscular Judaism"[31] not present in other generations of Jews. Fackenheim’s best-known work is To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Theology (1982). In it, he coined the term “the 614 commandment” (which he also called the “commanding Voice of Auschwitz”), “forbidding the post-Holocaust Jew to give Hitler post-humous victories.”[32] Fackenheim encountered some criticism for his contention that it is worthwhile to maintain one’s Jewish identity solely for the purpose of making sure that Hitler’s genocidal plans are not fulfilled after Germany’s defeat in World War II.

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Jewish existentialism

Richard Rubenstein Richard Rubenstein is a Jewish theologian whose work on Holocaust theology is considered foundational to the subject. His basic thesis in his most famous work, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism (1966) is that the Jewish conception of God must change in the post-Holocaust era. According to Rubenstein, Jews can no longer believe in an all-powerful, all-good, and omnipotent God; the contradiction inherent in such a God allowing the Holocaust to occur is too great. Rubenstein writes about “God’s guilt”[33] for allowing the Holocaust to happen. He affirms God’s all-powerful nature, but suggests the possibility that God is not the all-good force of love that rabbinic Judaism has made him out to be. Rather, God may be an all-powerful enemy of the Jewish people, who has damned them to an eternal "Chosenness" of suffering. Rubenstein also discusses in After Auschwitz the significant role that Christianity and various Christian churches (for example, the massive and politically powerful institution of the German Catholic church) had in allowing the Holocaust to occur. Rubenstein makes the point that it was not just the political and social trends of Nazism that allowed the Holocaust to occur; German Christians endorsed Hitler’s aims both passively and actively.[29]

Traditional Jewish responses Along with the work of secular, agnostic theologians concerned with the national destiny of the Jewish people, there has been a resurgence of religious Jewish thought since the 1950s. Some of the work of observant Jewish scholars is concerned with existentialist themes.

Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote extensively on Jewish existentialist themes. Among his many works on Jewish theology are the books The Sabbath (1951) and Who is Man? (1965). The best-selling The Sabbath explores the concept of the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbat) and its significance as a period of heightened connection between God and his creation of Man. Heschel’s The Sabbath is also well known for the concept of the Shabbat as a “cathedral in time” (rather than in space, as cathedrals are in the Christian tradition). For Heschel, “The Sabbath arrives in the world… [and] eternity utters a day.”[34] In Who is Man?, Heschel explicates his thesis that Man is a being whose ultimate purpose and task in life is to wonder about existence, to ponder and pine for his Creator. In his words, “Man is a being in search of significant being, of ultimate meaning of existence.”[35] In Who Is Man?, Heschel also constructs a famous dichotomy between “biblical man” and “ontological man.” Heschel’s concept of the “ontological man” is an explicit response to Heidegger’s ideas about Dasein,[36] which for Heschel is a human who merely exists passively, rather than lives actively as human in the world. A further difference between "biblical" and "ontological" man is that "ontological" man is stuck on basic questions of ontology (the study of the nature of being and existence) and only “seeks to relate the human being to transcendence called being”[37] whereas the "biblical man" “realizing that human being is more than being…seeks to relate man to a divine living, to a transcendence called the living God.” Heschel critiques Heidegger’s stance toward seeking an understanding of Being as the ultimate reality without reaching out to a higher power while at the same time living actively in the real world (as “biblical man” does), saying, “…simply to ‘surrender to being,’ as Heidegger calls upon us to do, he would…reduce his living to being. To be is both passive and intransitive. In living, man relates himself actively to the world…The decisive form of human being is human living…to bring into being, to come into meaning. We transcend being by bringing into being---thoughts, things, offspring, deeds.”[38] Heschel’s work deals with man’s relation to God and man’s ability to make meaning in his own life through the sanctification of certain traditions, ideas, and time periods. Heschel’s books (especially Who Is Man?) are primarily concerned with the existential question of the purpose and meaning of human life, which is one of the foundational questions of theology concerning the relationship between human beings and God.

25

Jewish existentialism Heschel is also reacting to Nietzsche’s secular existentialism in Who Is Man? In reaction to Nietzsche’s assertion that man must make meaning for himself by his “will to power”[39] in an indifferent universe, Heschel cites human being’s obsession with finding meaning outside of themselves as evidence of the existence of a higher being. He says, “To be overtaken with awe of God is not to entertain a feeling but to share in a spirit that permeates all being.”[40] For Heschel, man’s proclivity to be in awe of God is an important part of the make-up of all humans. He can be said to be an "experiential Jew" concerned with the interior experience of God as the primary mode of popular religious experience. Rabbi Soloveitchik (see above) would call Heschel an “homo religiosus.” Heschel is also reacting to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s secular existentialism in Who Is Man? Heschel can be said to be an "experiential Jew" or a “homo religious”[41] ("religious man") “totally devoted and given over to a cosmos that is filled with divine secrets and eternal mysteries.”[42]

Joseph Soloveitchik In Halakhic Man, Joseph Soloveitchik responds to Kierkegaard and Heschel’s emphasis on the interiority of religious experience. Both Heschel (an extremely knowledgeable scholar of Judaism who was a rabbi in the mystical Hassidic tradition) and Kierkegaard (who wrote extensively on the internal struggle to know God as the primary mode of religious experience[43]) would be considered examples of "religious man" for Soloveitchik. In Halakhic Man, Soloveitchik seeks to shift the paradigm of religion from one of "religious experience," consciousness, and interiority (i.e. profound meditations of the nature of the soul, the self, and God) to a more worldly "Lawfulness." According to Soloveitchik, Halakha (the Jewish code of law) is a better expression of religious identity and passion than the unthinking mysticism and piety of the religious or spiritual human. After all, Halakhic (lawful) man is motivated by a “passionate love of the truth”[44] and all his actions are intended to bring him closer to God and God closer to the world. This more worldly approach to Judaism not only allows the human being to approach God, but also brings God closer to the world. This is because following the mitzvoth contained within the halakha is a positive moral action which improves the world and the person obeying the mitzvoth.[45] Throughout the book, Soloveitchik often returns to his three-part construction of the “cognitive man,” the “religious man,” and the “Halakhic man.”[46] “Cognitive man” is a modern, scientifically-minded rational human who seeks to rationalize everything and explain occurrences in terms of rule-following natural phenomena.[47] “Religious man” is a mystical believer in divine mysteries and internal ecstatic religious experience.[48] “Halakhic man” takes the analytic, rational nature of “scientific man” and combines it with the love of the divine central to religious man’s character. Halakhic man is also committed to living under God’s law. Kierkegaard says that to love one’s neighbor perfectly as Jesus did is “the fulfilling of the law.”[49] However, R. Soloveitchik would say in response that “living under the law” requires much more than "loving the neighbor" and points to a much larger body of law (Jewish Halakha) that gives the Jew the ability to connect to God in a much more concrete way. In general, Christianity de-emphasizes law and the Torah’s commandments, emphasizing faith in God and general morality. Judaism emphasizes law and the Commandments. Soloveitchik’s purpose in writing Halakhic Man is to explain to the secular Jew and other lay-readers the benefits of Orthodox Judaism’s focus on externalized law over internalized faith as a way for humans to add meaning to their own lives and transcend their base humanity. For the Halakhic man, being religious and spiritual is not about correct mindfulness alone (though this may have its part in the religious experience) but is rather about right action.[50] Right moral action is part and parcel in following God’s Halakha, given to the Jews as part of the Torah at Sinai.[51] A classic example from the book of Halakhic Man using the law to add meaning to his own life is Soloveitchik’s explanation of the religious Jew’s reaction to a beautiful sunrise or sunset: “When halakhic man looks to see the western horizon and sees the fading rays of the setting sun or to the eastern horizon and sees the first light of dawn…he knows that this sunset or sunrise imposes upon him anew obligations and commandments. Dawn and sunrise obligate him to fulfill those commandments that are performed during the day: the recitation of the morning Shema, tzitzit, tefillin, the morning prayer...It is not

26

Jewish existentialism anything transcendent that creates holiness but rather the visible reality…”[52] Instead of simply wondering at the beauty and mystery of God’s creation as the mystic “religious man” (like Kierkegaard or Heschel), Soloveitchik’s “Halakhic man” has rigorous laws to follow for every new natural phenomena and life cycle event he encounters, thereby sanctifying his life and the existence of the universe with each day. The Halakha is Soloveitchik’s answer to the question of how to make a human being’s life meaningful.

References [1] Ecclesiastes, 1: 2 [2] Ecclesiastes, 2: 26 [3] Barret, William. Irrational Man: a Study in Existential Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1990. 76-77. [4] Ibid, 79. [5] Ibid, 76. [6] Ibid, 78. [7] Ibid, 71. [8] Ibid, 78. [9] Soloveitchik, Joseph B. Halakhic Man. Lanham: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1984. 45-46. [10] Barret, 71. [11] Heidegger, Being and Time. [12] Sarte, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1948. 111. [13] p. 13. [14] Herberg, Will, ed. Four Existentialist Theologians: A Reader from the Works of Jaques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin.155. [15] Buber, Martin. I And Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970. 46 [16] Buber, 54. [17] Ibid, 56 [18] Ibid, 137 [19] Smith, Ronald Gregor. Martin Buber (Makers of contemporary theology). New York: John Knox P, 1975. , 17 [20] Ibid, 157-158. [21] Ibid, 158. [22] Glatzer, Nahum M. Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. 3rd ed. Schocken Books, 1970. 149-153. [23] Rosenzweig, Franz. Star of Redemption. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame P, 1985. 130-142. [24] Ibid, 135-137. [25] Ibid, 268-270, 320-322 [26] Leaman, Oliver. Evil and Suffering in Jewish Theology (Cambridge Studies In Religious Traditions). Cambridge UP, 1997. 80-85. [27] Ibid, 120-130. [28] Ibid, 185-187. [29] Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam, 1982. [30] Ibid, 189. [31] Ibid, 189. [32] Fackenheim, Emil L. To Mend the World: Foundations of Future Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. 299 [33] Leaman, 186 [34] Ibid, 67 [35] Heschel, Abraham J. Who Is Man? 1st ed. Stanford UP, 1965. 63 [36] Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Ed. David F. Krell. Harper San Francisco. 48-57 [37] Hechel, Who is Man?, 69 [38] Ibid, 94-95. [39] Nietzsche, 159-161 [40] Heschel, Who Is Man?, 116 [41] Soloveitchik, 1-10 [42] Ibid, 9 [43] Søren Kierkegaard,Fear and Trembling [44] Soloveitchik, 79 [45] Ibid, 32-45 [46] [47] [48] [49]

Ibid, 1 Ibid, 5 Ibid, 1-10 Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. New York: Harper Perennial, 1964. 103

27

Jewish existentialism [50] Soloveitchik, 105-115 [51] Ibid, 19 [52] Ibid, 20-21

Further reading • • • • • • • • •

Aschheim, Steven E. The Nietzsche legacy in Germany, 1890-1990. Berkeley: University of California P, 1994. Barret, William. Irrational Man: a Study in Existential Philosophy. New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1990. Buber, Martin. I And Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970. Davis, Colin. Levinas: An Introduction. Polity P, 1996. Fackenheim, Emil L. To mend the world foundations of future Jewish thought. New York: Schocken Books, 1982. Glatzer, Nahum M. Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought. 3rd ed. Schocken Books, 1970. Glatzer, Nahum N. Modern Jewish Thought. New York: Schocken, 1987. Gluttmann, Julius. Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy From Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig. Trans. David W. Silverman. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1973. Herberg, Will, ed. Four Existentialist Theologians: A Reader from the Works of Jaques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.

• Heschel, Abraham J. Who Is Man? 1st ed. Stanford UP, 1965. • Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005. • Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964). Ed. David F. Krell. Harper San Francisco. • History of Jewish Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1997. • Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. New York: Harper Perennial, 1964. • Leaman, Oliver. Evil and Suffering in Jewish Theology (Cambridge Studies In Religious Traditions). Cambridge UP, 1997. • Martin, Bernard, ed. Great Twentieth Century Jewish Philosophers: Shestov, Rosenzweig, Buber (With Selections from Their Writings). 1st ed. The Macmillan Company, 1970. • Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York: Vintage, 1989. • Rosenzweig, Franz. Star of Redemption. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame P, 1985. • Rubenstein, Richard L. After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism. 2nd ed. The Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. • Sarte, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1948. • Smith, Ronald Gregor. Martin Buber (Makers of contemporary theology). New York: John Knox P, 1975. • Soloveitchik, Joseph B. Halakhic Man. Lanham: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1984. • Soloveitchik, Joseph Dov. The Lonely Man of Faith. New York: Doubleday, 1992. • Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam, 1982.

External links • http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ • http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/rambi/

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Existential nihilism

Existential nihilism Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. With respect to the universe, existential nihilism posits that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant, without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence. According to the theory, each individual is an isolated being "thrown" into the universe, barred from knowing "why", yet compelled to invent meaning.[1] The inherent meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism, where one can potentially create his or her own subjective "meaning" or "purpose". Of all types of nihilism, existential nihilism gets the most literary and philosophical attention.[2]

Meaning of life The idea that meaning and values are without foundation is a form of nihilism, and the existential response to that idea is noting that meaning is not "a matter of contemplative theory", but instead, "a consequence of engagement and commitment". Jean-Paul Sartre, author of Being and Nothingness, wrote in his essay Existentialism is a Humanism, "What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself." Here it is made clear what is meant by Existentialists when they say meaning is "a consequence of engagement and commitment". The theory purports to describe the human situation to create a life outlook and create meaning, which has been summarized as, "Strut, fret, and delude ourselves as we may, our lives are of no significance, and it is futile to seek or to affirm meaning where none can be found."[3] Existential nihilists claim that, to be honest, one must face the absurdity of existence, that he/she will eventually die, and that both religion and metaphysics are simply results of the fear of death.[2] According to Donald A. Crosby, "There is no justification for life, but also no reason not to live. Those who claim to find meaning in their lives are either dishonest or deluded. In either case, they fail to face up to the harsh reality of the human situation".[3]

History Existential nihilism has been a part of the Western intellectual tradition since the Cyrenaics, such as Hegesias of Cyrene. During the Renaissance, William Shakespeare eloquently summarized the existential nihilist's perspective through Macbeth's mindset in the end of the play. Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche further expanded on these ideas, and Nietzsche, particularly, has become a major figure in existential nihilism. The atheistic existentialist movement spread in 1940s France. Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus discussed the topic. Camus wrote further works, such as The Stranger, Caligula, The Plague, The Fall and The Rebel.[1] Other recent figures include Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. In addition, Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize winning life's work "The Denial of Death", ironically published posthumously, is a collection of thoughts on existential nihilism. The common thread in the literature of the existentialists is coping with the emotional anguish arising from our confrontation with nothingness, and they expended great energy responding to the question of whether surviving it was possible. Their answer was a qualified "Yes," advocating a formula of passionate commitment and impassive stoicism. —Alan Pratt[1]

29

Existential nihilism

References [1] Alan Pratt (April 23, 2001). "Nihilism" (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ nihilism/ #H3). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Embry-Riddle University. . Retrieved February 4, 2012. [2] David Storey (2011). "Nihilism, Nature, and the Collapse of the Cosmos" (http:/ / cosmosandhistory. org/ index. php/ journal/ article/ view/ 257/ 379). Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. . Retrieved February 4, 2012. [3] Donald A. Crosby (July 1, 1988). "The Specter of the Absurd: Sources and Criticisms of Modern Nihilism" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?hl=en& lr=& id=9VnPgFiW0CIC& oi). State University of New York Press. . Retrieved January 29, 2012.

Existential phenomenology Existential phenomenology is a philosophical current inspired by Martin Heidegger's 1927 work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) and influenced by the existential work of Søren Kierkegaard and the phenomenological work of Edmund Husserl. In contrast with his former mentor Husserl, Heidegger put ontology before epistemology and thought that phenomenology would have to be based on an observation and analysis of Dasein ("being-there"), human being, investigating the fundamental ontology of the Lebenswelt (Lifeworld - Husserl's term) underlying all so-called regional ontologies of the special sciences. In contrast with the philosopher Kierkegaard, Heidegger wanted to explore the problem of Dasein existentially (existenzial), rather than existentielly (existenziell) because Heidegger argued Kierkegaard had already described the latter with "penetrating fashion".

Development of existential phenomenology Besides Heidegger, other existential phenomenologists were Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Samuel Todes.

Other disciplines Existential phenomenology extends also to other disciplines. For example, Leo Steinberg's essay "The Philosophical Brothel" describes Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in a perspective that is existential-phenomenological.

30

List of existentialists

31

List of existentialists Existentialism is a movement within Continental philosophy that developed in the late-19th and 20th centuries. As a loose philosophical school, some persons associated with Existentialism explicitly rejected the label (e.g. Martin Heidegger), and others are not remembered primarily as philosophers, but as writers (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) or theologians (Paul Tillich). It is related to several movements within Continental philosophy including Phenomenology, Nihilism, and Post-modernism.

Many of the founding figures of Existentialism represent its diverse background (clockwise from top left): Dane Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a theologian, German Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) an anti-establishment wandering academic, Czech Franz Kafka (1883–1924) a short story writer and factory manager, and Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) a novelist.

Name

Lived

Nationality

Occupation

Notes

Nicola Abbagnano

July 15, 1901 – September 9, 1990

Italy

Philosopher

Also associated with Neopositivism

Hannah [1] Arendt

October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975

Germany

Philosopher

Also associated with Phenomenology, associate of Heidegger

Abdel Rahman Badawi

February 17, 1917 – Egypt July 25, 2002

Philosopher

Hazel Barnes

December 16, 1915 – March 18, 2008

United States

Philosopher, author

Translated Sartre into English

Karl Barth

May 10, 1886 – December 10, 1968

Switzerland

Theologian

Founder of Neo-Orthodoxy

Nikolai Berdyaev

March 18, 1874 – March 25, 1948

Russia

Theologian, philosopher

Christian Existentialist

Steve Biko

December 18, 1946 – September 12, 1977

South Africa

Activist

Martin Buber

February 8, 1878 – June 13, 1965

Germany

Theologian

Rudolf Bultmann

August 20, 1884 – July 30, 1976

Germany

Theologian

Worked with Rosenzweig

List of existentialists

32

Dino Buzzati

October 16, 1906 – January 28, 1972

Italy

Author

Also associated with magical realism

Albert Camus

November 27, 1913 – January 4, 1960

France

Philosopher, author

Founded Les Temps modernes with de Beauvoir and Sartre

Jane Welsh Carlyle

July 14, 1801 – April 21, 1866

United Kingdom

Essayist

Wife of Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle

December 4, 1795 – United Kingdom February 5, 1881

Author, historian

Husband of Jane Welsh Carlyle

Emil Cioran

April 8, 1911 – June 20, 1995

Romania

Philosopher, essayist Also associated with Pessimism

Simone de Beauvoir

January 9, 1908 – April 14, 1986

France

Philosopher, anthropologist

Founded Les Temps modernes with de Beauvoir and Sartre, carried on long-term collaboration with the latter

Walter A. Davis

November 9, 1942 –

United States

Philosopher, playwright, cultural critic

Author of Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

November 11, 1821 – February 9, 1881

Russia

Novelist

Foundational figure of Existentialism

William A. Earle

1919 – October 16, 1988

United States

Philosopher

Also associated with Phenomenology, co-founded the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy with Wild and James M. Edie

United States

Novelist

Wrote Invisible Man, associate of Wright

[2] May 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994

Ralph Ellison Frantz Fanon

July 20, 1925 – December 6, 1961

France (Martinique), Algeria

Philosopher, anthropologist, psychiatrist

Also associated with Marxism

Vilém Flusser

May 12, 1920 – November 17, 1991

Czechoslovakia

Philosopher

Also associated with Phenomenology

Benjamin Fondane

November 14, Romania 1898 – October 2 or 3, 1944

Author, poet, film director

James Anthony Froude

April 23, 1818 – October 20, 1894

United Kingdom

Historian

Juozas Girnius

1915–1994

Lithuania

Philosopher

Christian Existentialist

Lewis Gordon

1962–present

United States

Philosopher

Also associated with Africana philosophy, Black Existentialism, and Phenomenology

Martin Heidegger

September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976

Germany

Philosopher

Also associated with Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, associate of Arendt, rejected the label of "Existentialist"

Edmund Husserl April 8, 1859 – April 26, 1938

Austria, Germany

Philosopher

Founder of Phenomenology

Nae Ionescu

June 16, 1890 – March 15, 1940

Romania

Philosopher, mathematician

William [1] James

January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910

United States

Philosopher, psychologist

Foundational figure of Pragmatism

Karl Jaspers

February 23, 1883 – Germany February 26, 1969

Philosopher

Also associated with Neo-Kantianism

List of existentialists

33

Franz Kafka

July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924

Austria–Hungary

Novelist

Foundational figure of Existentialism

Walter Kaufmann

July 1, 1921 – September 4, 1980

United States

Philosopher

Translated Buber and Nietzsche into English

Søren Kierkegaard

May 5, 1813 – November 11, 1855

Denmark

Theologian, philosopher, author

Foundational figure of Existentialism, Christian Existentialist

Ladislav Klíma

August 8, 1878 – April 19, 1928

Czechoslovakia

Philosopher, novelist Also associated with Subjective idealism

Emmanuel Levinas

January 12, 1906 – December 25, 1995

France

Philosopher, theologian

James Leonard Park

1941–present

United States

Philosopher

John Macquarrie June 27, 1919 – May 28, 2007

United Kingdom

Theologian

Vytautas Mačernis

June 5, 1921 – October 7, 1944

Lithuania

Poet

Gabriel Marcel

December 7, 1889 – France October 8, 1973

Theologian, philosopher

Christian Existentialist

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

March 14, 1908 – May 3, 1961

France

Philosopher

Also associated with Phenomenology, associate of de Beauvoir and Sartre

Friedrich Nietzsche

October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900

Germany

Philosopher

Foundational figure of Existentialism, also associated with Nihilism

José Ortega y Gasset

May 9, 1883 – October 18, 1955

Spain

Philosopher

Also associated with Perspectivism, Pragmatism, Vitalism, and Historicism

Viktor Petrov

1894–1969

Ukraine

Novelist, anthropologist

Franz Rosenzweig

December 26, 1887 – December 10, 1929

Germany

Theologian, philosopher

Worked with Buber

Jean-Paul Sartre

June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980

France

Philosopher, novelist, activist

Also associated with Marxism, co-founded Les Temps modernes with de Beauvoir and Camus

Aous Shakra

April 22, 1908 – April 1, 1992

Palestine

Politician, philosopher

Lev Shestov

January 31, 1866 – November 19, 1938

Russia, France

Philosopher

Joseph B. Soloveitchik

1903–1993

United States

Rabbi

Paul Tillich

August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965

United States, Germany

Theologian, philosopher

Christian Existentialist

Rick Turner

1942–1978

South Africa

Philosopher

Also associated with Marxism, studied with Sartre

Miguel de Unamuno

September 29, 1864 – December 31, 1936

Spain

Novelist, essayist, dramatist, philosopher

John Daniel Wild

April 10, 1902 – October 23, 1972

United States

Philosopher

Studied with Heidegger and Husserl

Christian Existentialist

Also associated with Irrationalism

Originally associated with Empiricism, Realism, and Pragmatism; later associated with Phenomenology; co-founded the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy with Earle and James M. Edie

List of existentialists

34

Colin Wilson

June 26, 1931 – present

United Kingdom

Author

Wrote The Outsider

Richard Wright

September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960

United States

Author

Associated with Black Existentialism, associate of Ellison

Peter Wessel Zapffe

December 18, 1899 – October 12, 1990

Norway

Philosopher

Founded biosophy

Pre-Existentialist philosophers Several thinkers who lived prior to the rise of Existentialism have been retroactively considered proto-Existentialists for their approach to philosophy and lifestyle. Name

Lived

Nationality

Occupation

Notes

Augustine of [1][3] Hippo

November 13, 354 – August 28, 430

Algeria

Theologian

At various times associated with Neoplatonism, Doctor of the Church

Mulla Sadra

1571–1636

Persia

Philosopher

Islamic philosopher associated with Illuminationism and transcendent theosophy

[3] Blaise Pascal

June 19, 1623 – August 19, France 1662

Philosopher, theologian

Jean-Jacques [1] Rousseau

June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778

Switzerland

Philosopher

Foundational figure of Liberalism and social contract theory

469–399 BC

Greece

Philosopher

Foundational figure of Western philosophy

Stoics

fl. 3 century BC – AD 529

Greece

–

Philosophical school influenced by Socrates through Plato

Henry David [1] Thoreau

July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862

United States

Author, poet

Foundational figure of Transcendentalism

[1]

Socrates

[1]

References [1] Murchland, Bernard (2008) (in English) (Paperback), The Arrow That Flies by Night (1st ed.), United States: University Press of America, ISBN 0-7618-4031-1 [2] Marino, Gordon (April 13, 2004) (in English) (Paperback), Basic Writings of Existentialism, Modern Library Classics (1st ed.), United States: Modern Library, ISBN 0-375-75989-1 [3] Earnshaw, Seven (2006) (in English) (Paperback), Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Guides for the Perplexed (First ed.), Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 2, ISBN 0-8264-8530-8

Authenticity (philosophy)

Authenticity (philosophy) Further information: Bad faith Authenticity is a technical term used in psychology as well as existentialist philosophy and aesthetics. In existentialism, authenticity is the degree to which one is true to one's own personality, spirit, or character, despite external pressures; the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces, pressures and influences which are very different from, and other than, itself. A lack of authenticity is considered in existentialism to be bad faith.

Theories of authenticity Existentialism Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre viewed jazz One of the greatest problems facing such abstract approaches is that the drives as a representation of freedom and people call the "needs of one's inner being" are diffuse, subjective and often authenticity. (Pictured is Johnny culture bound. For this reason among others, authenticity is often "at the Hodges.) limits" of language; it is described as the negative space around inauthenticity, with reference to examples of inauthentic living.[1] Sartre's novels are perhaps the easiest access to this mode of describing authenticity: they often contain characters and antiheroes who base their actions on external pressures—the pressure to appear to be a certain kind of person, the pressure to adopt a particular mode of living, the pressure to ignore one's own moral and aesthetic objections in order to have a more comfortable existence. His work also includes characters who do not understand their own reasons for acting, or who ignore crucial facts about their own lives in order to avoid uncomfortable truths; this connects his work with the philosophical tradition.

Sartre is concerned also with the "vertiginous" experience of absolute freedom. In Sartre's view, this experience, necessary for the state of authenticity, can be so unpleasant that it leads people to inauthentic ways of living. Typically, authenticity is seen as a very general concept, not attached to any particular political or aesthetic ideology. This is a necessary aspect of authenticity: because it concerns a person's relation with the world, it cannot be arrived at by simply repeating a set of actions or taking up a set of positions. In this manner, authenticity is connected with creativity: the impetus to action must arise from the person in question, and not be externally imposed. Heidegger takes this notion to the extreme, by speaking in very abstract terms about modes of living (his terminology was adopted and simplified by Sartre in his philosophical works). Kierkegaard's work (e.g. "Panegyric Upon Abraham" from Fear and Trembling) often focuses on biblical stories which are not directly imitable. Sartre, as has been noted above, focused on inauthentic existence as a way to avoid the paradoxical problem of appearing to provide prescriptions for a mode of living that rejects external dictation.[2]

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Authenticity (philosophy) Criticisms Philosopher Jacob Golomb argues that the existentialist notion of authenticity is incompatible with a morality which values all persons.[3]

Erich Fromm A very different definition of authenticity was proposed by Erich Fromm in the mid-1900s. He considered behavior of any kind, even that wholly in accord with societal mores, to be authentic if it results from personal understanding and approval of its drives and origins, rather than merely from conformity with the received wisdom of the society. Thus a Frommean authentic may behave consistently in a manner that accords with cultural norms, for the reason that those norms appear on consideration to be appropriate, rather than simply in the interest of conforming with current norms. Fromm thus considers authenticity to be a positive outcome of enlightened and informed motivation rather than a negative outcome of rejection of the expectations of others. He described the latter condition – the drive primarily to escape external restraints typified by the "absolute freedom" of Sartre – as "the illusion of individuality", as opposed to the genuine individuality that results from authentic living.

Other perspectives Those who advocate social reform value the study of authenticity since it can provide a radical manifesto and an overview of the shortcomings of social structures. Michael Kernis and Brian Goldman defined authenticity as "the unimpeded operation of one's true or core self in one's daily enterprise."[4] Writers tend to agree that authenticity is something to be pursued as a goal intrinsic to "the good life." And yet it is often described as an intrinsically difficult state to achieve, due in part to social pressures to live inauthentically, and in part due to a person's own character. It is also described as a revelatory state, where one perceives oneself, other people, and sometimes even things, in a radically new way. Some writers argue that authenticity also requires self-knowledge, and that it alters a person's relationships with other people. Authenticity also carries with it its own set of moral obligations, which often exist regardless of race, gender and class. The notion of authenticity also fits into utopian ideology, which requires authenticity among its citizens to exist, or which claims that such a condition would remove physical and economic barriers to pursuing authenticity.

History Secular and religious notions of authenticity have coexisted for centuries under different guises; perhaps the earliest account of authenticity that remains popular is Socrates' admonition that "the unexamined life is not worth living". In aesthetics, "authenticity" describes the perception of art as faithful to the artist's self, rather than conforming to external values such as historical tradition, or commercial worth. A common definition of "authenticity" in psychology refers to the attempt to live one's life according to the needs of one's inner being, rather than the demands of society or one's early conditioning.[5][6][7] In the twentieth century, Anglo-American discussions of authenticity often center around the writings of a few key figures associated with existentialist philosophy, where the term originated; because most of these writers wrote in languages other than English, the process of translating and anthologizing has had a strong impact on the debate. Walter Kaufmann might be credited with creating a "canon" of existentialist writers which include Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. For these writers, the conscious self is seen as coming to terms with being in a material world and with encountering external forces and influences which are very different from itself; authenticity is one way in which the self acts and changes in response to these pressures.

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Authenticity (philosophy)

Cultural activities Due to the differences in experiences in their history, views of authenticity vary widely and often differ between groups and individuals.[8] For Sartre, jazz music was a representation of freedom; this may have been in part because jazz was associated with African American culture, and was thus in opposition to Western culture generally, which Sartre considered hopelessly inauthentic. Theodor Adorno, however, another writer and philosopher concerned with the notion of authenticity, despised jazz music because he saw it as a false representation that could give the appearance of authenticity but that was as much bound up in concerns with appearance and audience as many other forms of art. Heidegger in his later life associated authenticity with non-technological modes of existence, seeing technology as distorting a more "authentic" relationship with the natural world. Most writers on inauthenticity in the twentieth century considered the predominant cultural norms to be inauthentic; not only because they were seen as forced on people, but also because, in themselves, they required people to behave inauthentically towards their own desires, obscuring true reasons for acting. Advertising, in as much as it attempted to give people a reason for doing something that they did not already possess, was a "textbook" example of how Western culture distorted the individual for external reasons. Race relations are seen as another limit on authenticity, as they demand that the self engage with others on the basis of external attributes. An early example of the connection between inauthenticity and capitalism was made by Karl Marx, whose notion of "alienation" can be linked to the later discourse on the nature of inauthenticity. Individuals concerned with living authentically have often led unusual lives that opposed cultural norms; the rise of the counter-culture in the 1960s in Europe and America was seen by many as a new opportunity to live an authentic existence. Many, however, have pointed out that anti-authoritarianism and eccentricity does not necessarily constitute an authentic state of being. The connection of the violation of cultural norms to authenticity, however, is strong and real, and continues today: among artists who explicitly violate the conventions of their profession, for example. The connection of inauthenticity to capitalism is contained in the notion of "selling out," used to describe an artist whose work has become inauthentic after achieving commercial success and thus becoming to an extent integrated into an inauthentic system. The concept of authenticity is often raised in the punk rock and heavy metal musical subcultures, in which people or bands are criticized for their purported lack of authenticity by being labeled with the epithet "poseur".[9] In the metal and hardcore punk subcultures, a band that began from a working class milieu that later signs to a major record label for a lucrative recording contract may be deemed to have "sold out" and lost their authenticity.

References [1] Golomb, Jacob (1995). In Search of Authenticity. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11946-4. [2] Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-158591-6. [3] Golomb, Jacob (1995). In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus. London: Routledge. [4] Wright, Karen (May 01, 2008). "Dare to be yourself" (http:/ / www. psychologytoday. com/ articles/ 200804/ dare-be-yourself). Psychology Today. [5] Wood, A. M., Linley, P. A., Maltby, J., Baliousis, M., Joseph, S. (2008) The authentic personality: "A theoretical and empirical conceptualization, and the development of the Authenticity Scale" (http:/ / personalpages. manchester. ac. uk/ staff/ alex. wood/ Authenticity Scale. pdf). Journal of Counseling Psychology 55 (3): 385–399. doi:10.1037/0022-0167.55.3.385 [6] Authentic life (http:/ / psych. athabascau. ca/ html/ Glossary/ demo_glossary. cgi?mode=history& term_id=1196). Psychology Centre Athabasca University. [7] "Existential Psychology" (http:/ / castle. eiu. edu/ ~psych/ spencer/ Existential. html). Eastern Illinois University. [8] AJ Giannini (2010). "Semiotic and semantic implications of "authenticity"". Psychological Reports 106 (2): 611–612. [9] Homeward Bound. Towards a Post-Gendered Pop Music: Television Personalities’ My Dark Places (http:/ / web. archive. org/ 20081201085441/ http:/ / www. indiecult. com/ 2006-04/ television-personalities-my-dark-places) at the Wayback Machine (archived December 1, 2008) My Dark Places April 10th, 2006 by Godfre Leung (Domino, 2006).

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Authenticity (philosophy)

Further reading • • • • •

Erich Fromm. The Fear of Freedom; Routledge & Kegan Paul 1942 Lionel Trilling. Sincerity and Authenticity; ISBN 0-19-281166-5; Harvard UP 1974 Charles Taylor.The Ethics of Authenticity; ISBN 0-674-26863-6; Harvard UP 1992 Alessandro Ferrara.Reflective Authenticity; ISBN 0-415-13062-X; Routledge 1998 James Leonard Park. Becoming More Authentic: The Positive Side of Existentialism; ISBN 978-0-89231-105-7; Existential Books 2007—5th edition

Essence In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an entity or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the entity or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity. The concept originates with Aristotle, who used the Greek expression to ti ên einai, literally 'the what it was to be', or sometimes the shorter phrase to ti esti, literally 'the what it is,' for the same idea. This phrase presented such difficulties for his Latin translators that they coined the word essentia (English "essence") to represent the whole expression. For Aristotle and his scholastic followers the notion of essence is closely linked to that of definition (horismos).[1] In the history of western thought, essence has often served as a vehicle for doctrines that tend to individuate different forms of existence as well as different identity conditions for objects and properties; in this eminently logical meaning, the concept has given a strong theoretical and common-sense basis to the whole family of logical theories based on the "possible worlds" analogy set up by Leibniz and developed in the intensional logic from Carnap to Kripke, which was later challenged by "extensionalist" philosophers such as Quine.

Ontological status In his dialogues Plato suggests that concrete beings acquire their essence through their relations to "Forms"—abstract universals logically or ontologically separate from the objects of sense perception. These Forms are often put forth as the models or paradigms of which sensible things are "copies". When used in this sense, the word form is often capitalized.[2] Sensible bodies are in constant flux and imperfect and hence, by Plato's reckoning, less real than the Forms which are eternal, unchanging and complete. Typical examples of Forms given by Plato are largeness, smallness, equality, unity, goodness, beauty and justice. Aristotle moves the Forms of Plato to the nucleus of the individual thing, which is called ousía or substance. Essence is the tí of the thing, the to tí en einai. Essence corresponds to the ousia's definition; essence is a real and physical aspect of the ousia (Aristotle, Metaphysics, I). According to nominalists (Roscelin of Compiègne, William of Ockham, Bernard of Chartres), universals aren't concrete entities, just voice's sounds; there are only individuals: "nam cum habeat eorum sententia nihil esse praeter individuum [...]" (Roscelin, De gener. et spec., 524). Universals are words that can to call several individuals; for example the word "homo". Therefore a universal is reduced to a sound's emission (Roscelin, De generibus et speciebus). According to Edmund Husserl essence is ideal. However, ideal means that essence is the intentional object of the conscience. Essence is interpreted as sense (E. Husserl, Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, paragraphs 3 and 4).

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Essence

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Existentialism Existentialism was coined by Jean-Paul Sartre's statement that for human beings "existence precedes essence." In as much as "essence" is a cornerstone of all metaphysical philosophy and of Rationalism, Sartre's statement was a repudiation of the philosophical system that had come before him (and, in particular, that of Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger). Instead of "is-ness" generating "actuality," he argued that existence and actuality come first, and the essence is derived afterward. For Kierkegaard, it is the individual person who is the supreme moral entity, and the personal, subjective aspects of human life that are the most important; also, for Kierkegaard all of this had religious implications.[3]

In metaphysics "Essence," in metaphysics, is often synonymous with the soul, and some existentialists argue that individuals gain their souls and spirits after they exist, that they develop their souls and spirits during their lifetimes. For Kierkegaard, however, the emphasis was upon essence as "nature." For him, there is no such thing as "human nature" that determines how a human will behave or what a human will be. First, he or she exists, and then comes attribute. Jean-Paul Sartre's more materialist and skeptical existentialism furthered this existentialist tenet by flatly refuting any metaphysical essence, any soul, and arguing instead that there is merely existence, with attributes as essence. Thus, in existentialist discourse, essence can refer to physical aspect or attribute to the ongoing being of a person (the character or internally determined goals), or to the infinite inbound within the human (which can be lost, can atrophy, or can be developed into an equal part with the finite), depending upon the type of existentialist discourse.

Marxism's essentialism Karl Marx was a follower of Hegel's thought, and he, too, developed a philosophy in reaction to his master. In his early work, Marx used Aristotelian style teleology and derived a concept of humanity's essential nature. Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 describe a theory of alienation based on human existence being completely different from human essence. Marx said human nature was social, and that humanity had the distinct essence of free activity and conscious thought. Some scholars, such as Philip Kain, have argued that Marx abandoned the idea of a human essence, but many other scholars point to Marx's continued discussion of these ideas despite the decline of terms such as essence and alienation in his later work.

Buddhism Within the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism, Candrakirti identifies the self as: an essence of things that does not depend on others; it is an intrinsic nature. The non-existence of that is selflessness. — Bodhisattvayogacaryācatuḥśatakaṭikā 256.1.7[4] Buddhapālita adds, while commenting on Nagārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, What is the reality of things just as it is? It is the absence of essence. Unskilled persons whose eye of intelligence is obscured by the darkness of delusion conceive of an essence of things and then generate attachment and hostility with regard to them. —Buddhapālita-mula-madhyamaka-vrtti P5242,73.5.6-74.1.2[4] For the Madhyamaka Buddhists, 'Emptiness' (also known as Anatta or Anatman) is the strong assertion that all phenomena are empty of any essence, and that anti-essentialism lies at the root of Buddhist praxis and it is the innate belief in essence that is considered to be an afflictive obscuration which serves as the root of all suffering. However, the Madhyamaka also rejects the tenets of Idealism, Materialism or Nihilism; instead, the ideas of truth or

Essence existence, along with any assertions that depend upon them are limited to their function within the contexts and conventions that assert them, possibly somewhat akin to Relativism or Pragmatism. For the Madhyamaka, replacement paradoxes such as Ship of Theseus are answered by stating that the Ship of Thesesus remains so (within the conventions that assert it) until it ceases to function as the Ship of Theseus. Among the many canonical Buddhist sources articulating a philosophical "god of love," stands Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Chapter I examines the Conditions of Existence, while Chapter XV examines Essence in itself, difference, the eternalist's view and nihilist's view of essence and non-essence.

Hinduism In understanding any individual personality, a distinction is made between one's Swadharma (essence) and Swabhava (mental habits and conditionings of ego personality). Svabhava is the nature of a person, which is a result of his or her samskaras (impressions created in the mind due to one's interaction with the external world). These samskaras create habits and mental models and those become our nature. While there is another kind of svabhava that is a pure internal quality - smarana - we are here focusing only on the svabhava that was created due to samskaras (because to discover the pure, internal svabhava and smarana, one should become aware of one's samskaras and take control over them). Dharma is derived from the root Dhr - to hold. It is that which holds an entity together. That is, Dharma is that which gives integrity to an entity and holds the core quality and identity (essence), form and function of that entity. Dharma is also defined as righteousness and duty. To do one's dharma is to be righteous, to do one's dharma is to do one's duty (express one's essence).[5]

Related Concepts • Self Actualization by Maslow

Notes and references [1] S. Marc Cohen, "Aristotle's Metaphysics" (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ aristotle-metaphysics/ ), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 20 April 2008. [2] "Chapter 28: Form" of The Great Ideas: A Synopticon of Great Books of the Western World (Vol. II). Encyclopaedia Britannica (1952), p. 526-542. This source states that Form or Idea get capitalized according to this convention when they refer "to that which is separate from the characteristics of material things and from the ideas in our mind." [3] The Story of Philosophy, Bryan Magee, Dorling Kindersley Lond. 1998, ISBN 0-7513-0590-1 [4] Translations from "The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path of Enlightenment", Vol. 3 by Tsong-Kha-Pa, Snow Lion Publications ISBN 1-55939-166-9 [5] Prasadkaipa.com (http:/ / www. prasadkaipa. com/ blog/ archives/ 2005/ 07/ svabhava_and_sv. php)

External links • Maurice De Wulf: "Nominalism, Realism, Conceptualism." (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11090c.htm), in: The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Company 1911. • Laboratory for Rational Decision Making (http://www.human.cornell.edu/hd/reyna/publications.cfm)

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Existence precedes essence

Existence precedes essence The proposition that existence precedes essence (French: l'existence précède l'essence) is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence or nature of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence.[1] To existentialists, human beings—through their consciousness—create their own values and determine a meaning for their life because, in the beginning, the human being does not possess any inherent identity or value. By posing the acts that constitute him or her, he or she makes his or her existence more significant.[2][3] The idea can be found in the works of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in the 19th century, but was explicitly formulated by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century.[4] His close confidant, Simone de Beauvoir also uses this concept in her feminist existentialism to develop the idea that "one is not born a woman, but becomes one". In western philosophy Sartre flips this around arguing that for humans, existence precedes essence. The three-word formula originates with Sartre in his 1946 lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism"[5] (though antecedent notions can be found in Heidegger's Being and Time),[6] and was notably flipped back to its original formulation by the playwright and then Czechoslovakian President Václav Havel in a memorable speech[7] to a joint session of Congress circa the end of the Cold War in February 1990.[8]

Sartre's view The Sartrean claim is best understood in contrast to an established principle of metaphysics that essence precedes existence, i.e. that there is such a thing as human nature, determined by the cosmic order (or a god), laid down by religious tradition, or legislated by political or social authority. A typical claim for this traditional thesis would be that man is essentially selfish, or that he is a rational being. To Sartre, the idea that "existence precedes essence" means that a personality is not built over a previously designed model or a precise purpose, because it is the human being who chooses to engage in such enterprise. While not denying the constraining conditions of human existence, he answers to Spinoza who affirmed that man is determined by what surrounds him. Therefore, to Sartre an oppressive situation is not intolerable in itself, but once regarded as such by those who feel oppressed the situation becomes intolerable. So by projecting my intentions onto my present condition, “It is I who freely transform it into action”. When he said that “the world is a mirror of my freedom”, he meant that the world obliged me to react, to overtake myself. It is this overtaking of a present constraining situation by a project to come that Sartre names transcendence. He added that “we are condemned to be free”.[9] When it is said that man defines himself, it is often perceived as stating that man can "wish" to be something anything, a bird, for instance - and then be it. According to Sartre's account, however, this would be a kind of bad faith. What is meant by the statement is that man is (1) defined only insofar as he acts and (2) that he is responsible for his actions. To clarify, it can be said that a man who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel man and in that same instance, he (as opposed to his genes, for instance) is defined as being responsible for being this cruel man. Of course, the more positive therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: You can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since man can choose to be either cruel or good, he is, in fact, neither of these things essentially.[10] To claim that existence precedes essence is to assert that there is no such predetermined essence to be found in humans, and that an individual's essence is defined by him or her through how he or she creates and lives his or her life. As Sartre puts it in his Existentialism is a Humanism: "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards." [11] Existentialism tends to focus on the question of human existence and the conditions of this existence. What is meant by existence is the concrete life of each individual, and his concrete ways of being in the world. Even though this concrete individual existence must be the primary source of information in the study of man, certain conditions are

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Existence precedes essence commonly held to be "endemic" to human existence. These conditions are usually in some way related to the inherent meaninglessness or absurdity of the earth and its apparent contrast with our pre-reflexive lived lives which normally present themselves to us as meaningful. A central theme is that since the world "in-itself" is absurd, that is, not "fair," then a meaningful life can at any point suddenly lose all its meaning. The reasons why this happens are many, ranging from a tragedy that "tears a person's world apart," to the results of an honest inquiry into one's own existence. Such an encounter can make a person mentally unstable, and avoiding such instability by making people aware of their condition and ready to handle it is one of the central themes of existentialism. Albert Camus, for instance, famously claimed that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide."[12] Aside from these "psychological" issues, it is also claimed that these encounters with the absurd are where we are most in touch with our condition as humans. Such an encounter cannot be without philosophical significance, and existentialist philosophers derive many metaphysical theories from these encounters. These are often related to the self, consciousness and freedom as well as the nature of meaning.

Havel's view In his speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Václav Havel, in speaking of life under a Communist type of totalitarian system, proclaimed that "The specific experience I'm talking about has given me one great certainty: Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim," thus showing the philosophical and spiritual importance of a political issue, arguing that the communist totalitarianism as such ran contrary to any and all intuitions of the general population, who held steadfast to their beliefs, customs and traditions, even in secret, despite the measures taken against them. Who in effect continued to identify themselves as indigenous Slavic populations, and not as communists. Thus Havel argues that, indeed, essence (consciousness) precedes existence (being), and not the other way around, since human nature as such, i.e. the conscious act of self-reflection and -identification, embedded in, conditioned and cultivated by a traditional foundation will always remain present; even after having been "liberated" from such "superstition".[13]

Notes [1] Plato, Timaeus; Aristotle, Metaphysics; St Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Pars 3:1, Summa Theologiae, Pars 1:1, etc. Analysis of "existence before essence" in Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Introduction. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

(French) (Dictionary) "L'existencialisme" - see "l'identité de la personne" (French) Encyclopédie de la jeunesse, 1979, p.567

Kierkegaard, Søren. Philosophical Fragments, 1844. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Sartre, in Being and Nothingness (1943), credits a slightly longer version of the claim to Heidegger: "Now freedom has no essence. It is not subject to any logical necessity; we must say of it what Heidegger said of the Dasein in general: 'In it existence precedes and commands essence.'" However, Sartre gives no page reference for this citation. In Being and Time, Heidegger writes: "The 'essence' of human-being lies in its existence." ("Das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz", Sein und Zeit, p. 42.) [7] http:/ / www. cipe. org/ blog/ ?p=4405 [8] http:/ / old. hrad. cz/ president/ Havel/ speeches/ 1990/ 2102_uk. html [9] (French) Philagora.net -Notions de philosophie, L'existencialisme: Jean-Paul Sartre (http:/ / www. philagora. net/ philo-bac/ anthro10. htm) (Notions of Philosophy, Existentialism) [10] Catalano p. 81 [11] Sartre, Existentialism is a humanism [12] Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus [13] http:/ / www. crosscurrents. org/ capps. htm

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References • Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1948. • Corbin, Henry (1993 (original French 1964)). History of Islamic Philosophy, Translated by Liadain Sherrard, Philip Sherrard. London; Kegan Paul International in association with Islamic Publications for The Institute of Ismaili Studies. ISBN 0-7103-0416-1. • Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, University of Chicago Press 1985. • Leaman, Oliver; Peter S. Groff (2007). Islamic Philosophy A-Z. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-7486-2089-3. • Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme) 1946 Lecture • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article Existentialism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/ #2) • Razavi, Mehdi Amin (1997). Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination. Routledge. ISBN 0-7007-0412-4 • Wilhelmsen, Frederick (1970). The Paradoxical Structure of Existence. Irving, Tex.; University of Dallas Press.

External links • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/#ExiPreEss

Absurdism In philosophy, "the Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any. In this context absurd does not mean "logically impossible," but rather "humanly impossible."[1] The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously. Absurdism, therefore, is a philosophical school of thought stating that the efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail (and hence are absurd) because the sheer amount of information as well as the vast realm of the unknown make certainty impossible. And yet, some absurdists state that one should embrace the absurd condition of humankind while conversely continuing to explore and search for meaning.[2] As a philosophy, absurdism thus also explores the fundamental nature of the Absurd and how individuals, once becoming conscious of the Absurd, should respond to it. Absurdism is very closely related to existentialism and nihilism and has its origins in the 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who chose to confront the crisis humans faced with the Absurd by developing existentialist philosophy.[3] Absurdism as a belief system was born of the European existentialist movement that ensued, specifically when the French Algerian philosopher and writer Albert Camus rejected certain aspects from that philosophical line of thought[4] and published his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The aftermath of World War II provided the social environment that stimulated absurdist views and allowed for their popular development, especially in the devastated country of France.

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Overview "... in spite of or in defiance of the whole of existence he wills to be himself with it, to take it along, almost defying his torment. For to hope in the possibility of help, not to speak of help by virtue of the absurd, that for God all things are possible – no, that he will not do. And as for seeking help from any other – no, that he will not do for all the world; rather than seek help he would prefer to be himself – with all the tortures of hell, if so it must be." [5]

Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

In absurdist philosophy, the Absurd arises out of the fundamental disharmony between the individual's search for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. As beings looking for meaning in a meaningless world, humans have three ways of resolving the dilemma. Kierkegaard and Camus describe the solutions in their works, The Sickness Unto Death (1849) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): • Suicide (or, "escaping existence"): a solution in which a person ends one's own life. Both Kierkegaard and Camus dismiss the viability of this option. Camus states that it does not counter the Absurd, but only becomes more absurd, to end one's own existence. • Religious, spiritual, or abstract belief in a transcendent realm, being, or idea: a solution in which one believes in the existence of a reality that is beyond the Absurd, and, as such, has meaning. Kierkegaard stated that a belief in anything beyond the Absurd requires a non-rational but perhaps necessary religious acceptance in such an intangible and empirically unprovable thing (now commonly referred to as a "leap of faith"). However, Camus regarded this solution, and others, as "philosophical suicide". • Acceptance of the Absurd: a solution in which one accepts the Absurd and continues to live in spite of it. Camus endorsed this solution, believing that by accepting the Absurd, one can achieve absolute freedom, and that by recognizing no religious or other moral constraints and by revolting against the Absurd while simultaneously accepting it as unstoppable, one could possibly be content from the personal meaning constructed in the process. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, regarded this solution as "demoniac madness": "He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery from him!"[6]

Relationship with existentialism and nihilism Basic relationships between existentialism, absurdism and nihilism Atheistic existentialism Monotheistic existentialism 1. There is such a thing as meaning or value:

Yes.

2. There is inherent No. meaning in the universe:

3. The pursuit of meaning may have meaning in itself:

Nihilism

Yes.

Maybe.

No.

Maybe, but the individual must have faith in God to believe that, yes, there is.

Maybe, but humans can never know it.

No.

Yes (but not for certain).

No.

Yes, though it must be personal and face the Absurd; moreover, there is no way to verify whether one's constructed meaning conforms to any inherent meaning.

No, because there is no meaning to create.

Maybe the creation of one's own meaning, but not with regard to the inherent meaning of the universe (if one exists).

No.

No, meaning can only be Yes. individually constructed, not pursued.

4. The individual's Yes, thus the goal of construction of any type existentialism. of meaning is possible:

Absurdism

Yes, thus the goal of existentialism, though this meaning must incorporate God.

5. There is resolution to Yes, the creation of one's Yes, the creation of one's the individual's desire to own meaning. own meaning involving seek meaning: God.

Absurdism

45

Related works by Søren Kierkegaard A century before Camus, the 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote extensively on the absurdity of the world. In his journals, Kierkegaard writes about the absurd: What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection.[8] — Kierkegaard, Søren, Journals, 1849 Here is another example of the absurd from his writings: What, then, is the absurd? The absurd is that the eternal truth has come into existence in time, that God has come into existence, Kierkegaard designed the relationship framework has been born, has grown up. etc., has come into existence based (in part) on how a person reacts to despair. Absurdist philosophy fits into the 'despair of exactly as an individual human being, indistinguishable from any [7] defiance' rubric. other human being, inasmuch as all immediate recognizability is pre-Socratic paganism and from the Jewish point of view is idolatry. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hong 1992, p. 210 How can this absurdity be held or believed? Kierkegaard says: I gladly undertake, by way of brief repetition, to emphasize what other pseudonyms have emphasized. The absurd is not the absurd or absurdities without any distinction (wherefore Johannes de Silentio: "How many of our age understand what the absurd is?"). The absurd is a category, and the most developed thought is required to define the Christian absurd accurately and with conceptual correctness. The absurd is a category, the negative criterion, of the divine or of the relationship to the divine. When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd — faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd — if not, then faith is not faith in the strictest sense, but a kind of knowledge. The absurd terminates negatively before the sphere of faith, which is a sphere by itself. To a third person the believer relates himself by virtue of the absurd; so must a third person judge, for a third person does not have the passion of faith. Johannes de Silentio has never claimed to be a believer; just the opposite, he has explained that he is not a believer—in order to illuminate faith negatively. Journals of Soren Kierkegaard X6B 79[9] Kierkegaard provides an example in one of his works, Fear and Trembling. In the story of Abraham in the Book of Genesis, Abraham is told by God to kill his son Isaac. Just as Abraham is about to kill Isaac, an angel stops Abraham from doing so. Kierkegaard believes that through virtue of the absurd, Abraham, defying all reason and ethical duties ("you cannot act"), got back his son and reaffirmed his faith ("where I have to act").[10] However, it should be noted that in this particular case, the work was signed with the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. Another instance of absurdist themes in Kierkegaard's work appears in The Sickness Unto Death, which Kierkegaard signed with pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Exploring the forms of despair, Kierkegaard examines the type of despair known as defiance.[11] In the opening quotation reproduced at the beginning of the article, Kierkegaard describes how such a man would endure such a defiance and identifies the three major traits of the Absurd Man, later

Absurdism discussed by Albert Camus: a rejection of escaping existence (suicide), a rejection of help from a higher power and acceptance of his absurd (and despairing) condition. According to Kierkegaard in his autobiography The Point of View of My Work as an Author, most of his pseudonymous writings are not necessarily reflective of his own opinions. Nevertheless, his work anticipated many absurdist themes and provided its theoretical background.

Albert Camus Though the notion of the 'absurd' pervades all Albert Camus's writing, The Myth of Sisyphus is his chief work on the subject. In it, Camus considers absurdity as a confrontation, an opposition, a conflict or a "divorce" between two ideals. Specifically, he defines the human condition as absurd, as the confrontation between man's desire for significance, meaning and clarity on the one hand – and the silent, cold universe on the other. He continues that there are specific human experiences evoking notions of absurdity. Such a realization or encounter with the absurd leaves the individual with a choice: suicide, a leap of faith, or recognition. He concludes that recognition is the only defensible option.[2] For Camus, suicide is a "confession" that life is not worth living; it is a choice that implicitly declares that life is "too much." Suicide offers the most basic "way out" of absurdity: the immediate termination of the self and its place in the universe. The absurd encounter can also arouse a "leap of faith," a term derived from one of Kierkegaard's early pseudonyms, Johannes de Silentio (although the term was not used by Kierkegaard himself),[12] where one believes that there is more than the rational life (aesthetic or ethical). To take a "leap of faith," one must act with the "virtue of the absurd" (as Johannes de Silentio put it), where a suspension of the ethical may need to exist. This faith has no expectations, but is a flexible power initiated by a recognition of the absurd. (Although at some point, one recognizes or encounters the existence of the Absurd and, in response, actively ignores it.) However, Camus states that because the leap of faith escapes rationality and defers to abstraction over personal experience, the leap of faith is not absurd. Camus considers the leap of faith as "philosophical suicide," rejecting both this and physical suicide.[12][13] Lastly, a person can choose to embrace their own absurd condition. According to Camus, one's freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the recognition of absurdity. If the absurd experience is truly the realization that the universe is fundamentally devoid of absolutes, then we as individuals are truly free. "To live without appeal,"[14] as he puts it, is a philosophical move to define absolutes and universals subjectively, rather than objectively. The freedom of humans is thus established in a human's natural ability and opportunity to create his own meaning and purpose; to decide (or think) for him- or herself. The individual becomes the most precious unit of existence, representing a set of unique ideals that can be characterized as an entire universe in its own right. In acknowledging the absurdity of seeking any inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one can be happy, gradually developing meaning from the search alone. Camus states in The Myth of Sisyphus: "Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death, and I refuse suicide."[15] "Revolt" here refers to the refusal of suicide and search for meaning despite the revelation of the Absurd; "Freedom" refers to the lack of imprisonment by religious devotion or others' moral codes; "Passion" refers to the most wholehearted experiencing of life, since hope has been rejected, and so he concludes that every moment must be lived fully.

46

Absurdism

The meaning of life According to absurdism, humans historically attempt to find meaning in their lives. Traditionally, this search results in one of two conclusions: either that life is meaningless, or life contains within it a purpose set forth by a higher power—a belief in God, or adherence to some religion or other abstract concept.

Elusion Camus perceives filling the void with some invented belief or meaning as a mere "act of eluding"—that is, avoiding or escaping rather than acknowledging and embracing the Absurd. To Camus, elusion is a fundamental flaw in religion, existentialism, and various other schools of thought. If the individual eludes the Absurd, then he or she can never confront it.

God Even with a spiritual power as the answer to meaning, another question arises: What is the purpose of God? Kierkegaard believed that there is no human-comprehensible purpose of God, making faith in God absurd itself. Camus on the other hand states that to believe in God is to "deny one of the terms of the contradiction" between humanity and the universe (and therefore not absurd), but is what he calls "philosophical suicide". Camus (as well as Kierkegaard), though, suggests that while absurdity does not lead to belief in God, neither does it lead to the denial of God. Camus notes, "I did not say 'excludes God', which would still amount to asserting".[16]

Personal meaning For Camus, the beauty people encounter in life makes it worth living. People may create meaning in their own lives, which may not be the objective meaning of life (if there is one), but can still provide something to strive for. However, he insisted that one must always maintain an ironic distance between this invented meaning and the knowledge of the absurd, lest the fictitious meaning take the place of the absurd.

Freedom Freedom cannot be achieved beyond what the absurdity of existence permits; however, the closest one can come to being absolutely free is through acceptance of the Absurd. Camus introduced the idea of "acceptance without resignation" as a way of dealing with the recognition of absurdity, asking whether or not man can "live without appeal", while defining a "conscious revolt" against the avoidance of absurdity of the world. In a world devoid of higher meaning or judicial afterlife, the human being becomes as close to absolutely free as is humanly possible.

Hope The rejection of hope, in absurdism, denotes the refusal to believe in anything more than what this absurd life provides. Hope, Camus emphasizes, however, has nothing to do with despair (meaning that the two terms are not opposites). One can still live fully while rejecting hope, and, in fact, can only do so without hope. Hope is perceived by the absurdist as another fraudulent method of evading the Absurd, and by not having hope, one is motivated to live every fleeting moment to the fullest.

47

Absurdism

Integrity The absurdist is not guided by morality, but rather, by their own integrity. The absurdist is, in fact, amoral (though not necessarily immoral). Morality implies an unwavering sense of definite right and wrong at all times, while integrity implies honesty with one's self and consistency in the motivations of one's actions and decisions.

References [1] [2] [3] [4]

Silentio, Johannes de, Fear and Trembling, Penguin Classics, p. 17 Camus, Albert (1991). Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-73373-6. Stewart, Jon (2011). Kierkegaard and Existentialism. Farnham, England: Ashgate. ISBN 978-1-4094-2641-7. p. 76-78. Solomon, Robert C. (2001). From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth Century Backgrounds. Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 245. ISBN 0-7425-1241-X. [5] Kierkegaard, Søren (1941). The Sickness Unto Death. Princeton University Press. [6] Kierkegaard, Søren (1941). The Sickness Unto Death. Princeton University Press., Part I, Ch. 3. [7] Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard wrote about all four viewpoints in his works at one time or another, but the majority of his work leaned towards what would later become absurdist and theistic existentialist views. [8] Dru, Alexander. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, Oxford University Press, 1938. [9] The link to the Journal entries: http:/ / www. naturalthinker. net/ trl/ texts/ Kierkegaard,Soren/ JournPapers/ X_6_B. html [10] Silentio, Johannes de. Fear and Trembling, Denmark, 1843 [11] Sickness Unto Death, Ch.3, part B, sec. 2 [12] [13] [14] [15] [16]

"The Kierkegaardian Leap" in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. Ibid. p.41 Ibid. p.55 Ibid. p.64 Myth of Sisyphus, p. 40, note 7

Further reading • OBERIU, edited by Eugene Ostashevsky. Northwestern 2005 ISBN 0-8101-2293-6 • Thomas Nagel: Mortal Questions, 1991. ISBN 0-521-40676-5

External links • • • •

Fiction of the Absurd (http://alangullette.com/lit/absurd/) Absurdist Monthly Review Magazine (http://amr.obook.org/) Gone Lawn Excavation Project : active absurdist and related authors (http://gonelawn.net/) The New Absurdist (http://www.absurdist.cc/)

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Quietism

49

Quietism Quietism in philosophy is an approach to the subject that sees the role of philosophy as broadly therapeutic or remedial. Quietist philosophers believe that philosophy has no positive thesis to contribute, but rather that its value is in defusing confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects, including non-quietist philosophy. By re-formulating supposed problems in a way that makes the misguided reasoning from which they arise apparent, the quietist hopes to put an end to man's confusion, and help return to a state of intellectual quietude.

Quietist philosophers Quietism is by its very nature not a philosophical school in the traditional sense of a body of doctrines, but can still be identified by its methodology, which is to focus on language and the use of words, and its objective, which is to show that most philosophical problems are only pseudo-problems.

Philosophical quietists want to release man from deep perplexity that philosophical contemplation often causes.

The genesis of the approach can be traced back to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work greatly influenced the Ordinary Language philosophers. One of the early Ordinary Language works was Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, an attempt to demonstrate that dualism arises from a failure to appreciate that mental vocabulary and physical vocabulary are simply different ways of describing one and the same thing, namely human behaviour. J L Austin's Sense and Sensibilia took a similar approach to the problems of scepticism and the reliability of sense perception, arguing that they arise only by misconstruing ordinary language, not because there is anything genuinely wrong with our empirical knowledge. Norman Malcolm, a friend of Wittgenstein's, took a quietist approach to sceptical problems in the philosophy of mind. More recently, two other philosophers to take an explicitly quietist position are John McDowell and Richard Rorty.

References • • • •

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd Rev Edn, Blackwell, 2002. ISBN 0-631-23127-7 Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson, 1949. ISBN 0-14-012482-9 Austin, J L. Sense and Sensibilia. OUP, 1962. ISBN 0-19-881083-0 Macarthur, David. “Pragmatism, Metaphysical Quietism and the Problem of Normativity,” Philosophical Topics. Vol.36 No.1, 2009. • Malcolm, Norman. Dreaming (Studies in Philosophical Psychology). Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959. ISBN 0-7100-3836-4 • McDowell, John and Evans, Gareth. Truth and Meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. ISBN 0-19-824517-3 • McDowell, John. Mind and World. New Ed, Harvard, 1996. ISBN 0-674-57610-1

Facticity

Facticity Facticity (French: facticité, German: Faktizität) has a multiplicity of meanings from "factuality" and "contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence. The term is first used by Fichte and has a variety of meanings. It can refer to facts and factuality, as in nineteenth-century positivism, but comes to mean that which resists explanation and interpretation in Dilthey and Neo-Kantianism. The Neo-Kantians contrasted facticity with ideality, as does Jürgen Habermas in Between Facts and Norms (Faktizität und Geltung). It is a term that takes on a more specialized meaning in 20th century continental philosophy, especially in phenomenology and existentialism, including Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Recent philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and François Raffoul have taken up the notion of facticity in new ways. Facticity plays a key part in Quentin Meillassoux's philosophical project to challenge the thought-world relationship of correlationism. It is defined by him as “the absence of reason for any reality; in other words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the existence of any being.”[1]

Heidegger Heidegger discusses facticity as the thrownness (Geworfenheit) of individual existence, which is to say we are "thrown into the world." By this, he is not only referring to a brute fact, or the factuality of a concrete historical situation, e.g., "born in the '80s." Facticity is something that already informs and has been taken up in existence, even if it is unnoticed or left unattended. As such, facticity is not something we come across and directly behold. In moods, for example, facticity has an enigmatic appearance, which involves both turning toward and away from it. For Heidegger, moods are conditions of thinking and willing to which they must in some way respond. The thrownness of human existence (or Dasein) is accordingly disclosed through moods.

Sartre and de Beauvoir In the works of Sartre and de Beauvoir, facticity signifies all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited. For example, these may include the time and place of birth, a language, an environment, an individual's previous choices, as well as the inevitable prospect of their death. For example: currently, the situation of a person who is born without legs precludes their freedom to walk on the beach; if future medicine were to develop a method of growing new legs for that person, their facticity might no longer exclude this activity.

References [1] Meillassoux, Quentin. "Time Without Becoming" (http:/ / speculativeheresy. files. wordpress. com/ . . . / 3729-time_without_becoming. pdf). Time Without Becoming. . Retrieved 24 May 2011.

Further reading • • • • •

J. Van Buren (Trans.), Martin Heidegger. Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Heidegger, Martin. Being And Time. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Essays in Existentialism. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism Is A Humanism. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness.

• Raffoul, François and Eric Sean Nelson (eds.). Rethinking Facticity. • Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency.

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Being in itself

Being in itself Being-in-itself is the self-contained and fully realized Being of objects. It is a term used in early 20th century continental philosophy, especially in the works of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the existentialists.

Being-in-itself for Heidegger In the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Being-in-itself is contrasted with the being of persons, which he terms Dasein. (Heidegger 1962, p. H.27) "Dasein means: care of the Being of beings as such that is ecstatically disclosed in care, not only of human Being...Dasein is itself by virtue of its essential relation to Being in general." (Heidegger 2000, p. H.31) Fortunately, Heidegger recognized the dangers inherent to talking about Being in general and particular beings, and thus devoted space in Being and Time and the Introduction to Metaphysics to an explication of the differences; often noted by translators who distinguish Being (Sein), from a being (das Seiende). His attention to the complication is helpful for those who are looking for detailed explanation, but rarely clears the air of confusions. Dasein is Being that is aware of, and interested in, its own Being. Dasein is, by its nature, invested in social interaction and society. This is because in Heidegger's metaphysical system, one of the most fundamental ways to understand Being is through relationships. All things stand in a relation to all other things — and by virtue of his stress on Dasein's ontological distinction, things may also stand in relation to Dasein. (Heidegger 1962, p. H.78) The argument for this claim draws heavily on Hegel's great work, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Essentially, Being in itself is one of Heidegger's main concerns throughout his authorship. Despite Heidegger's interest in it, he returns — more often than not indirectly — to the subject by interrogating other concepts that simply invoke Being without explicitly acknowledging it. In other words, whereas Heidegger calls the being of persons 'Dasein', he determines 'Being in itself' to be at the same time the most vague and general concept possible to contemplate, but also the topic of greatest interest to him as a philosopher.

Being-in-itself for Sartre In Sartrean existentialism, being-in-itself (être-en-soi) is also contrasted with the being of persons, which he describes as a combination of, or vacillation or tension between, being-for-itself (être-pour-soi) and being-for-others (I'être-pour-autrui). Being-in-itself refers to objects in the external world — a mode of existence that simply is. It is not conscious so it is neither active nor passive and harbors no potentiality for transcendence. This mode of being is relevant to inanimate objects, but not to humans, whom Sartre says must always make a choice.[1] One of the problems of human existence for Sartre is the desire to attain being-in-itself, which he describes as the desire to be God — this is a longing for full control over one's destiny and for absolute identity, only attainable by achieving full control over the destiny of all existence. The desire to be God is one of the ways people fall into bad faith. Sartre's famous depiction of a man in a café who has applied himself to a portrayal of his role as a waiter illustrates this. The waiter thinks of himself as being a waiter (as in being-in-itself), which Sartre says is impossible since he cannot be a waiter in the sense that an inkwell is an inkwell. He is primarily a man (being-for-itself), just one who happens to be functioning as a waiter – with no fixed nature or essence, who is constantly recreating himself. He is guilty of focusing on himself as being-in-itself and not being-for-itself. Sartre would say that as a human, a being-for-itself by nature, the waiter is "a being that is not what it is and it is what it is not." Therefore, the waiter who acts as if he is at his very core a waiter "is not what [he] is"- which is to say, he is not solely a waiter- and "is what [he] is not"- meaning that he is many things other than a waiter. In simply playing the part of a waiter, the man in this example is reducing himself to a "being-in-itself" and is therefore in bad faith.

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Being in itself

Notes [1] "Existentialism Is a Humanism", Lecture by J.P. Sartre, 1946. (http:/ / www. marxists. org/ reference/ archive/ sartre/ works/ exist/ sartre. htm)

References • Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and Time, The Camelot Press. • Heidegger, Martin (2000), Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-08328-9

Further reading • Essays in Existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre • Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre • The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir

Determinism Determinism is a philosophy stating that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given those conditions, nothing else could happen. Different versions of this theory depend upon various alleged connections, and interdependencies of things and events, asserting that these hold without exception. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have sprung from diverse motives and considerations, some of which overlap. They can be understood in relation to their historical significance and alternative theories. Some forms of determinism can be tested empirically with ideas stemming from physics and the philosophy of physics. The opposite of determinism is some kind of indeterminism (otherwise called nondeterminism). Determinism is often contrasted with free will. Determinism is often taken to mean simply causal determinism: an idea known in physics as cause-and-effect. It is the concept that events within a given paradigm are bound by causality in such a way that any state (of an object or event) is completely determined by prior states. This can be distinguished from other varieties of determinism mentioned below. Other debates often concern the scope of determined systems, with some maintaining that the entire universe (or multiverse) is a single determinate system and others identifying other more limited determinate systems. Within numerous historical debates, many varieties and philosophical positions on the subject of determinism exist. This includes debates concerning human action and free will, where opinions might be sorted as compatibilistic and incompatibilistic. Determinism should not be confused with self-determination of human actions by reasons, motives, and desires. Determinism rarely requires that perfect prediction be practically possible – only prediction in theory.

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Determinism

53

Varieties Below are some of the more common viewpoints meant by, or confused with "Determinism". Causal (or Nomological) determinism[1] and related Predeterminism propose that there is an unbroken chain of prior occurrences stretching back to the origin of the universe. The relation between events may not be specified, nor the origin of that universe. Causal determinists believe that there is nothing uncaused or self-caused. Quantum mechanics poses a serious challenge to this view. Causal determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. Historical determinism (a sort of path dependence) can also be synonymous with causal determinism. Necessitarianism is very related to the causal determinism described above. It is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be. Leucippus claimed there were no uncaused events, and that everything occurs for a reason and by necessity.[2]

Many philosophical theories of determinism frame themselves with the idea that reality follows a sort of predetermined path

Fatalism is normally distinguished from "determinism".[3] Fatalism is the idea that everything is fated to happen, so that humans have no control over their future. Notice that fate has arbitrary power. Fate also need not follow any causal or otherwise deterministic laws.[1] Types of Fatalism include Theological determinism and the idea of predestination, where there is a God who determines all that humans will do. This may be accomplished either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience[4] or by decreeing their actions in advance.[5] Logical determinism or Determinateness is the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present, or future, are either true or false. Note that one can support Causal Determinism without necessarily supporting Logical Determinism and vice versa (depending on one's views on the nature of time, but also randomness). The problem of free will is especially salient now with Logical Determinism: how can choices be free, given that propositions about the future already have a truth value in the present (i.e. it is already determined as either true or false)? This is referred to as the problem of future contingents. Often synonymous with Logical Determinism are the ideas behind Spatio-temporal Determinism or Eternalism: the view of special relativity. J. J. C. Smart, a proponent of this view, uses the term "tenselessness" to describe the simultaneous existence of past, present, and future. In physics, the "block universe" of Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein assumes that time is a fourth dimension (like the three spatial dimensions). In other words, all the other parts of time are real, like the city blocks up and down a street, although the order in which they appear depends on the driver (see Rietdijk–Putnam argument). Adequate determinism focuses on the

Adequate determinism is the idea that quantum indeterminacy can be ignored fact that, even without a full for most macroscopic events. This is because of quantum decoherence. Random understanding of microscopic physics, we can predict the distribution of 1000 quantum events "average out" in the limit of large numbers of particles (where coin tosses the laws of quantum mechanics asymptotically approach the laws of classical mechanics).[6] Stephen Hawking explains a similar idea: he says that the microscopic world of quantum mechanics is one of determined probabilities. That is, quantum effects rarely alter the predictions of classical mechanics, which are quite accurate (albeit still not perfectly certain) at larger scales.[7] Something as large as an animal cell, then, would be "adequately determined" (even in light of quantum indeterminacy).

Determinism

54

Determined by nature or nurture Although some of the above forms of determinism concern human behaviors and cognition, others frame themselves as an answer to the Nature or Nurture debate. They will suggest that one factor will entirely determine behavior. As scientific understanding has grown, however, the strongest versions of these theories have been widely rejected as a single cause fallacy.[8] In other words, the modern deterministic theories attempt to explain how the interaction of both nature and nurture is entirely predictable. The concept of heritability has been helpful to make this distinction. Biological determinism, sometimes called Genetic determinism, is the idea that each of our behaviors, beliefs, and desires are fixed by our genetic nature. Nature and nurture interact in humans. A scientist looking at a sculpture after some time does not ask whether we are seeing the effects of the starting materials OR environmental influences.

Behaviorism is the idea that all behavior can be traced to specific causes—either environmental or reflexive. This Nurture-focused determinism was developed by John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Cultural determinism or social determinism is the nurture-focused theory that it is the culture in which we are raised that determines who we are.

Environmental determinism is also known as climatic or geographical determinism. It holds the view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. Supporters often also support Behavioral determinism. Key proponents of this notion have included Ellen Churchill Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, Thomas Griffith Taylor and possibly Jared Diamond, although his status as an environmental determinist is debated.[9]

Factor priority Other 'deterministic' theories actually seek only to highlight the importance of a particular factor in predicting the future. These theories often use the factor as a sort of guide or constraint on the future. They need not suppose that complete knowledge of that one factor would allow us to make perfect predictions. Psychological determinism can mean that humans must act according to reason, but it can also be synonymous with some sort of Psychological egoism. The latter is the view that humans will always act according to their perceived best interest. Linguistic determinism claims that our language determines (at least limits) the things we can think and say and thus know. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis argues that individuals experience the world based on the grammatical structures they habitually use. Economic determinism is the theory which attributes primacy to the economic structure over politics in the development of human history. It is associated with the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx.

A technological determinist might suggest that technology like the mobile phone is the greatest factor shaping human civilization.

Technological determinism is a reductionist theory that presumes that a society's technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values. Media determinism, a subset of technological determinism, is a philosophical and sociological position which posits the power of the media to impact society. Two leading media determinists are the Canadian scholars Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.

Determinism

55

Free will and determinism Philosophers have argued that either Determinism is true or Indeterminism is true, but also that Free Will either exists or it does not. This creates four possible positions. Compatibilism refers to the view that free will is, in some sense, compatible with Determinism. The three Incompatibilist positions, on the other hand, deny this possibility. They instead suggest there is a dichotomy between determinism and free will (only one can be true). To the Incompatibilists, one must choose either free will or Determinism, and maybe even reject both. The result is one of three positions:

A table showing the different positions related to free will and determinism

• Metaphysical Libertarianism (free will, and no determinism) a position not to be confused with the more commonly cited Political Libertarianism. • Hard Determinism (Determinism, and no free will). • Hard Indeterminism (No Determinism, and no free will either). Thus, although many Determinists are Compatibilists, calling someone a 'Determinist' is often done to denote the 'Hard Determinist' position. The Standard argument against free will, according to philosopher J. J. C. Smart focuses on the implications of Determinism for 'free will'.[10] He suggests that, if determinism is true, all our actions are predicted and we are not free; if determinism is false, our actions are random and still we do not seem free. In his book, The Moral Landscape, author and neuroscientist Sam Harris mentions some ways that determinism and modern scientific understanding might challenge the idea of a contra-causal free will. He offers one thought experiment where a mad scientist represents determinism. In Harris' example, the mad scientist uses a machine to control all the desires, and thus all the behaviour, of a particular human. Harris believes that it is no longer as tempting, in this case, to say the victim has "free will". Harris says nothing changes if the machine controls desires at random - the victim still seems to lack free will. Harris then argues that we are also the victims of such unpredictable desires (but due to the unconscious machinations of our brain, rather than those of a mad scientist). This implicitly assumes a philosophy of materialism, which could be disputed along with Harris's hard determinism. Based on this introspection, he writes "This discloses the real mystery of free will: if our experience is compatible with its utter absence, how can we say that we see any evidence for it in the first place?"[11] adding that "Whether they are predictable or not, we do not cause our causes."[12] That is, he believes there is compelling evidence of absence of free will. Research has found that reducing a person's belief in free will can make them less helpful and more aggressive.[13] This could occur because the individual's sense of Self-efficacy suffers.

Determinism

Determinism and mind Some determinists argue that materialism does not present a complete understanding of the universe, because while it can describe determinate interactions among material things, it ignores the minds or souls of conscious beings. A number of positions can be delineated: 1. Immaterial souls are all that exist (Idealism). 2. Immaterial souls exist and exert a non-deterministic causal influence on bodies. (Traditional free-will, interactionist dualism).[14][15] 3. Immaterial souls exist, but are part of deterministic framework. 4. Immaterial souls exist, but exert no causal influence, free or determined (epiphenomenalism, occasionalism) 5. Immaterial souls do not exist — there is no mind-body dichotomy, and there is a Materialistic explanation for intuitions to the contrary. Another topic of debate is the implication that Determinism has on morality. Hard determinism (a belief in determinism, and not free will) is particularly criticized for seeming to make traditional moral judgments impossible. Some philosophers, however, find this an acceptable conclusion. Philosopher and incompatibilist Peter van Inwagen introduces this thesis as such: Argument that Free Will is Required for Moral Judgments 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The moral judgment that you shouldn't have done X implies that you should have done something else instead That you should have done something else instead implies that there was something else for you to do That there was something else for you to do implies that you could have done something else That you could have done something else implies that you have free will If you don't have free will to have done other than X we cannot make the moral judgment that you shouldn't have done X.[16]

History Some of the main philosophers who have dealt with this issue are Marcus Aurelius, Omar Khayyám, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, Baron d'Holbach (Paul Heinrich Dietrich), Pierre-Simon Laplace, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Ralph Waldo Emerson and, more recently, John Searle, Ted Honderich, and Daniel Dennett. Mecca Chiesa notes that the probabilistic or selectionistic determinism of B.F. Skinner comprised a wholly separate conception of determinism that was not mechanistic at all. Mechanistic determinism assumes that every event has an unbroken chain of prior occurrences, but a selectionistic or probabilistic model does not.[17][18]

Eastern tradition The idea that the entire universe is a deterministic system has been articulated in both Eastern and non-Eastern religion, philosophy, and literature. In I Ching and Philosophical Taoism, the ebb and flow of favorable and unfavorable conditions suggests the path of least resistance is effortless (see wu wei). In the philosophical schools of India, the concept of precise and continual effect of laws of Karma on the existence of all sentient beings is analogous to western deterministic concept. Karma is the concept of "action" or "deed" in Indian religions. It is understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect (i.e., the cycle called saṃsāra) originating in ancient India and treated in Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Buddhist philosophies. Karma is considered predetermined and deterministic in the universe, with the exception of a human, who through free will can influence the future. See Karma in Hinduism.

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Western tradition In the West, some elements of determinism seem to have been expressed by the Presocratics Heraclitus[19] and Leucippus.[20] The first full-fledged notion of determinism appears to originate with the Stoics, as part of their theory of universal causal determinism.[21] The resulting philosophical debates, which involved the confluence of elements of Aristotelian Ethics with Stoic psychology, led in the 1st-3rd cents. CE in the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias to the first recorded Western debate over determinism and freedom,[22] an issue that is known in theology as the paradox of free will. The writings of Epictetus as well as Middle Platonist and early Christian thought were instrumental in this development.[23] The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides said of the deterministic implications of an omniscient god:[24] "Does God know or does He not know that a certain individual will be good or bad? If thou sayest 'He knows', then it necessarily follows that [that] man is compelled to act as God knew beforehand he would act, otherwise God's knowledge would be imperfect.…"[25] Determinism in the West is often associated with Newtonian physics, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws. The "billiard ball" hypothesis, a product of Newtonian physics, argues that once the initial conditions of the universe have been established, the rest of the history of the universe follows inevitably. If it were actually possible to have complete knowledge of physical matter and all of the laws governing that matter at any one time, then it would be theoretically possible to compute the time and place of every event that will ever occur (Laplace's demon). In this sense, the basic particles of the universe operate in the same fashion as the rolling balls on a billiard table, moving and striking each other in predictable ways to produce predictable results. Whether or not it is all-encompassing in so doing, Newtonian mechanics deals only with caused events, e.g.: If an object begins in a known position and is hit dead on by an object with some known velocity, then it will be pushed straight toward another predictable point. If it goes somewhere else, the Newtonians argue, one must question one's measurements of the original position of the object, the exact direction of the striking object, gravitational or other fields that were inadvertently ignored, etc. Then, they maintain, repeated experiments and improvements in accuracy will always bring one's observations closer to the theoretically predicted results. When dealing with situations on an ordinary human scale, Newtonian physics has been so enormously successful that it has no competition. But it fails spectacularly as velocities become some substantial fraction of the speed of light and when interactions at the atomic scale are studied. Before the discovery of quantum effects and other challenges to Newtonian physics, "uncertainty" was always a term that applied to the accuracy of human knowledge about causes and effects, and not to the causes and effects themselves. Newtonian mechanics as well as any following physical theories are results of observations and experiments, and so they describe "how it all works" within a tolerance. However, old western scientists believed if there are any logical connections found between an observed cause and effect, there must be also some absolute natural laws behind. Belief in perfect natural laws driving everything, instead of just describing what we should expect, led to searching for a set of universal simple laws that rule the world. This movement significantly encouraged deterministic views in western philosophy,[26] as well as the related theological views of Classical Pantheism.

Modern perspectives Cause and effect Since the early twentieth century when astronomer Edwin Hubble first hypothesized that redshift shows the universe is expanding, prevailing scientific opinion has been that the current state of the universe is the result of a process described by the Big Bang. Many theists and deists claim that it therefore has a finite age, pointing out that something cannot come from nothing. The big bang does not describe from where the compressed universe came; instead it leaves the question open. Different astrophysicists hold different views about precisely how the universe originated (Cosmogony).

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Generative processes Although it was once thought by scientists that any indeterminism in quantum mechanics occurred at too small a scale to influence biological or neurological systems, there is indication that nervous systems are influenced by quantum indeterminism due to chaos theory. It is unclear what implications this has for free will given various possible reactions to the standard problem in the first place.[27] Not all biologists grant determinism: Christof Koch argues against it, and in favour of libertarian free will, by making arguments based on generative processes (emergence).[28] Other proponents of emergentist or generative philosophy, cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, argue that determinism is true.[29][30][31][32] They suggest instead that an illusion of free will is experienced due to the generation of infinite behaviour from the interaction of finite-deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behaviour from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity does not exist.[29][30][31][32] Certain experiments looking at the neuroscience of free will can be said to support this possibility. As an illustration, the strategy board-games chess and Go have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face-values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice-rolling) happen within the game. Yet, chess and especially Go with its extremely simple deterministic rules, can still have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By this analogy, it is suggested, the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic In Conway's Game of Life, the parameters that generate nearly infinite and practically unpredictable behaviourial interaction of just four simple responses. In theory, if all these events could be accounted for, and there were a rules creates patterns that seem known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behaviour would somehow "alive". become predictable.[29][30][31][32] Another hands-on example of generative processes is John Horton Conway's playable Game of Life.[33] Nassim Taleb is wary of such models, and coined the term "ludic fallacy".

Mathematical models Many mathematical models of physical systems are deterministic. This is true of most models involving differential equations (notably, those measuring rate of change over time). Mathematical models that are not deterministic because they involve randomness are called stochastic. Because of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, some deterministic models may appear to behave non-deterministically; in such cases, a deterministic interpretation of the model may not be useful due to numerical instability and a finite amount of precision in measurement. Such considerations can motivate the consideration of a stochastic model even though the underlying system is governed by deterministic equations.[34][35][36]

Quantum mechanics and classical physics Day-to-day physics Further information: Macroscopic quantum phenomena Since the beginning of the 20th century, quantum mechanics—the physics of the extremely small—has revealed previously concealed aspects of events. Before that, Newtonian physics—the physics of everyday life—dominated. Taken in isolation (rather than as an approximation to quantum mechanics), Newtonian physics depicts a universe in which objects move in perfectly determined ways. At the scale where humans exist and interact with the universe, Newtonian mechanics remain useful, and make relatively accurate predictions (e.g. calculating the trajectory of a bullet). But whereas in theory, absolute knowledge of the forces accelerating a bullet would produce an absolutely accurate prediction of its path, modern quantum mechanics, casts reasonable doubt on this main thesis of determinism.

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Determinism Relevant is the fact that certainty is never absolute in practice (and not just because of David Hume's problem of induction). The equations of Newtonian mechanics can exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This is an example of the butterfly effect, which is one of the subjects of chaos theory. The idea is that something even as small as a butterfly could cause a chain reaction leading to a hurricane years later. Consequently, even a very small error in knowledge of initial conditions can result in arbitrarily large deviations from predicted behavior. Chaos theory thus explains why it may be practically impossible to predict real life, whether determinism is true or false. On the other hand, the issue may not be so much about human abilities to predict or attain certainty as much as it is the nature of reality itself. For that, a closer, scientific look at nature is necessary. Quantum realm Quantum physics works differently in many ways from Newtonian physics. Physicist Aaron D. O'Connell explains that understanding our universe, at such small scales as atoms, requires a different logic than day to day life. O'Connell does not deny that it is all interconnected: the scale of human existence ultimately does emerge from the quantum scale. O'Connell argues that we must simply use different models and constructs when dealing with the quantum world.[37] Quantum mechanics is the product of a careful application of the scientific method, logic and empiricism. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is frequently confused with the observer effect. The uncertainty principle actually describes how precisely we may measure the position and momentum of a particle at the same time — if we increase the accuracy in measuring one quantity, we are forced to lose accuracy in measuring the other. "These uncertainty relations give us that measure of freedom from the limitations of classical concepts which is necessary for a consistent description of atomic processes."[38]

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This is where statistical mechanics come into play, and where physicists begin to require rather unintuitive mental models: A particle's path simply cannot be exactly specified in its full quantum description. "Path" is a classical, practical attribute in our every day life, but one which quantum particles do not meaningfully possess. The probabilities discovered in quantum mechanics do nevertheless arise from measurement (of the perceived path of the particle). As Stephen Hawking explains, the result is not traditional determinism, but rather determined probabilities.[39] In some cases, a quantum particle may indeed trace an exact path, and the probability of finding the particles in that path is one. In fact, as far as prediction goes, the quantum development is at least as predictable as the classical motion, but the key is that it describes wave functions that cannot be easily expressed in ordinary language. As far as the thesis of determinism is concerned, these probabilities, at least, are quite determined. These findings from quantum mechanics have found many applications, and allow us to build transistors and lasers. Put another way: personal computers, Blu-ray players and the internet all work because humankind discovered the determined probabilities of the quantum world.[40] None of that should be taken to imply that other aspects of quantum mechanics are not still up for debate. On the topic of predictable probabilities, the double-slit experiments are a popular example. Photons are fired one-by-one through a double-slit apparatus at a distant screen. Curiously, they do not arrive at any single point, nor even the two points lined up with the slits (the way you might expect of bullets fired by a fixed gun at a Although it is not possible to distant target). Instead, the light arrives in varying concentrations at widely predict the trajectory of any one separated points, and the distribution of its collisions with the target can be particle, they all obey determined calculated reliably. In that sense the behavior of light in this apparatus is probabilities which do permit deterministic, but there is no way to predict where in the resulting interference some prediction. pattern any individual photon will make its contribution (although, there may be ways to use weak measurement to acquire more information without violating the Uncertainty principle). Some (including Albert Einstein) argue that our inability to predict any more than probabilities is simply due to ignorance.[41] The idea is that, beyond the conditions and laws we can observe or deduce, there are also hidden factors or "hidden variables" that determine absolutely in which order photons reach the detector screen. They argue that the course of the universe is absolutely determined, but that humans are screened from knowledge of the determinative factors. So, they say, it only appears that things proceed in a merely probabilistically determinative way. In actuality, they proceed in an absolutely deterministic way. These matters continue to be subject to some dispute. A critical finding was that quantum mechanics can make statistical predictions which would be violated if local hidden variables really existed. There have been a number of experiments to verify such predictions, and so far they do not appear to be violated. This would suggest there are no hidden variables, although many physicists believe better experiments are needed to conclusively settle the issue (see also Bell test experiments). Furthermore, it is possible to augment quantum mechanics with non-local hidden variables to achieve a deterministic theory that is in agreement with experiment. An example is the Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics. This debate is relevant because it is easy to imagine specific situations in which the arrival of an electron at a screen at a certain point and time would trigger one event, whereas its arrival at another point would trigger an entirely different event (e.g. see Schrödinger's cat - a thought experiment used as part of a deeper debate). Thus, quantum physics casts reasonable doubt on the traditional determinism of classical, Newtonian physics in so far as reality does not seem to be absolutely determined. This was the subject of the famous Bohr–Einstein debates between Einstein and Niels Bohr and there is still no consensus.

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Determinism Adequate determinism (see Varieties, above) is the reason that Stephen Hawking calls Libertarian free will "just an illusion".[39] Compatibilistic free will (which is deterministic) may be the only kind of "free will" that can exist. However, Daniel Dennett, in his book Elbow Room, says that this means we have the only kind of free will "worth wanting". For even more discussion, see Free will. Other matters of quantum determinism All uranium found on earth is thought to have been synthesized during a supernova explosion that occurred roughly 5 billion years ago. Even before the laws of quantum mechanics were developed to their present level, the radioactivity of such elements has posed a challenge to determinism due to its unpredictability. One gram of uranium-238, a commonly occurring radioactive substance, contains some 2.5 x 1021 atoms. Each of these atoms are identical and indistinguishable according to all tests known to modern science. Yet about 12600 times a second, one of the atoms in that gram will Chaotic radioactivity is the next decay, giving off an alpha particle. The challenge for determinism is to explanatory challenge for physicists explain why and when decay occurs, since it does not seem to depend on supporting determinism external stimulus. Indeed, no extant theory of physics makes testable predictions of exactly when any given atom will decay. At best scientists can discover determined probabilities in the form of the element's half life. The time dependent Schrödinger equation gives the first time derivative of the quantum state. That is, it explicitly and uniquely predicts the development of the wave function with time.

So if the wave function itself is reality (rather than probability of classical coordinates), quantum mechanics can be said to be deterministic. According to some, quantum mechanics is more strongly ordered than Classical Mechanics, because while Classical Mechanics is chaotic, quantum mechanics is not. For example, the classical problem of three bodies under a force such as gravity is not integrable, while the quantum mechanical three body problem is tractable and integrable, using the Faddeev Equations. This does not mean that quantum mechanics describes the world as more deterministic, unless one already considers the wave function to be the true reality. Even so, this does not get rid of the probabilities, because we can't do anything without using classical descriptions, but it assigns the probabilities to the classical approximation, rather than to the quantum reality. Asserting that quantum mechanics is deterministic by treating the wave function itself as reality implies a single wave function for the entire universe, starting at the origin of the universe. Such a "wave function of everything" would carry the probabilities of not just the world we know, but every other possible world that could have evolved. For example, large voids in the distributions of galaxies are believed by many cosmologists to have originated in quantum fluctuations during the big bang. (See cosmic inflation, primordial fluctuations and large-scale structure of the cosmos.)

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Notes [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Arguments for Incompatibilism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ incompatibilism-arguments/ ) Leucippus, Fragment 569 - from Fr. 2 Actius I, 25, 4 SEP, Causal Determinism (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ determinism-causal/ ) Fischer, John Martin (1989) God, Foreknowledge and Freedom. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 1-55786-857-3 Watt, Montgomery (1948) Free-Will and Predestination in Early Islam. London:Luzac & Co. The Information Philosopher website (http:/ / www. informationphilosopher. com/ freedom/ adequate_determinism. html), "Adequate Determinism", from the site: "We are happy to agree with scientists and philosophers who feel that quantum effects are for the most part negligible in the macroscopic world. We particularly agree that they are negligible when considering the causally determined will and the causally determined actions set in motion by decisions of that will." [7] Grand Design (2010), page 32: "the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.", and page 72: "Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty." (emphasis in original, discussing a Many worlds interpretation) [8] de Melo-Martín I (2005). "Firing up the nature/nurture controversy: bioethics and genetic determinism". J Med Ethics 31 (9): 526–30. doi:10.1136/jme.2004.008417. PMC 1734214. PMID 16131554. [9] Andrew, Sluyter. "Neo-Environmental Determinism, Intellectual Damage Control, and Nature/Society Science". Antipode 4 (35). [10] J. J. C. Smart, "Free-Will, Praise and Blame,"Mind, July 1961, p.293-4. [11] Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (2010), pg.216, note102 [12] Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape (2010), pg.217, note109 [13] Baumeister RF, Masicampo EJ, Dewall CN. (2009). Prosocial benefits of feeling free: disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 35(2):260-8. PMID 19141628 doi:10.1177/0146167208327217 [14] By 'soul' in the context of (1) is meant an autonomous immaterial agent that has the power to control the body but not to be controlled by the body (this theory of determinism thus conceives of conscious agents in dualistic terms). Therefore the soul stands to the activities of the individual agent's body as does the creator of the universe to the universe. The creator of the universe put in motion a deterministic system of material entities that would, if left to themselves, carry out the chain of events determined by ordinary causation. But the creator also provided for souls that could exert a causal force analogous to the primordial causal force and alter outcomes in the physical universe via the acts of their bodies. Thus, it emerges that no events in the physical universe are uncaused. Some are caused entirely by the original creative act and the way it plays itself out through time, and some are caused by the acts of created souls. But those created souls were not created by means of physical processes involving ordinary causation. They are another order of being entirely, gifted with the power to modify the original creation. However, determinism is not necessarily limited to matter; it can encompass energy as well. The question of how these immaterial entities can act upon material entities is deeply involved in what is generally known as the mind-body problem. It is a significant problem which philosophers have not reached agreement about [15] Free Will (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ freewill/ ) [16] van Inwagen, Peter (2009). The Powers of Rational Beings: Freedom of the Will. Oxford. [17] Chiesa, Mecca (2004) Radical Behaviorism: The Philosophy & The Science. [18] Ringen, J. D. (1993). Adaptation, teleology, and selection by consequences. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 60,3–15. (http:/ / www. pubmedcentral. nih. gov/ articlerender. fcgi?artid=1322142) [19] Stobaeus Eclogae I 5 (Heraclitus) [20] Stobaeus Eclogae I 4 (Leucippus) [21] Susanne Bobzien Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford 1998) chapter 1. [22] Susanne Bobzien The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem (Phronesis 43, 1998). [23] Michael Frede A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (Berkeley 2011). [24] Though Moses Maimonides was not arguing against the existence of God, but rather for the incompatibility between the full exercise by God of his omniscience and genuine human free will, his argument is considered by some as affected by Modal Fallacy. See, in particular, the article by Prof. Norman Swartz for Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Foreknowledge and Free Will (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ f/ foreknow. htm) and specifically Section 6: The Modal Fallacy (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ f/ foreknow. htm#section6) [25] The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics (Semonah Perakhim), edited, annotated, and translated with an Introduction by Joseph I. Gorfinkle, pp. 99–100. (New York: AMS Press), 1966. [26] Swartz, Norman (2003) The Concept of Physical Law / Chapter 10: Free Will and Determinism ( http:/ / www. sfu. ca/ philosophy/ physical-law/ ) [27] Lewis, E.R.; MacGregor, R.J. (2006). "On Indeterminism, Chaos, and Small Number Particle Systems in the Brain" (http:/ / www. eecs. berkeley. edu/ ~lewis/ LewisMacGregor. pdf). Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 5 (2): 223–247. doi:10.1142/S0219635206001112. . [28] Koch, Christof (September 2009). "Free Will, Physics, Biology and the Brain". In Murphy, Nancy; Ellis, George; O'Connor, Timothy. Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will. New York, USA: Springer. ISBN 978-3-642-03204-2. [29] Kenrick, D. T., Li, N. P., & Butner, J. (2003) "Dynamical evolutionary psychology: Individual decision rules and emergent social norms," Psychological Review 110: 3–28.

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Determinism [30] Nowak A., Vallacher R.R., Tesser A., Borkowski W., (2000) "Society of Self: The emergence of collective properties in self-structure," Psychological Review 107. [31] Epstein J.M. and Axtell R. (1996) Growing Artificial Societies - Social Science from the Bottom. Cambridge MA, MIT Press. [32] Epstein J.M. (1999) Agent Based Models and Generative Social Science. Complexity, IV (5) [33] John Conway's Game of Life (http:/ / www. bitstorm. org/ gameoflife/ ) [34] Werndl, Charlotte (2009). Are Deterministic Descriptions and Indeterministic Descriptions Observationally Equivalent? (http:/ / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1016/ j. shpsb. 2009. 06. 004). Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 40, 232-242. [35] Werndl, Charlotte (2009). Deterministic Versus Indeterministic Descriptions: Not That Different After All? (http:/ / philsci-archive. pitt. edu/ archive/ 00004775/ ). In: A. Hieke and H. Leitgeb (eds), Reduction, Abstraction, Analysis, Proceedings of the 31st International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium. Ontos, 63-78. [36] J. Glimm, D. Sharp, Stochastic Differential Equations: Selected Applications in Continuum Physics, in: R.A. Carmona, B. Rozovskii (ed.) Stochastic Partial Differential Equations: Six Perspectives, American Mathematical Society (October 1998) (ISBN 0-8218-0806-0). [37] "Struggling with quantum logic: Q&A with Aaron O'Connell (http:/ / blog. ted. com/ 2011/ 06/ 02/ struggling-with-quantum-logic-qa-with-aaron-oconnell/ ?utm_content=awesm-bookmarklet& utm_medium=on. ted. com-static& utm_source=facebook. com) [38] Heisenberg, Werner (1930 (1949)). Physikalische Prinzipien der Quantentheorie [Physical Principles of Quantum Theory] (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=NzMBh4ZxKJsC& pg=PA4). Leipzig: Hirzel/University of Chicago Press. p. 4. . [39] Grand Design (2010), page 32: "the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets...so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion", and page 72: "Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty." (discussing a Many worlds interpretation) [40] Scientific American, "What is Quantum Mechanics Good For?" (http:/ / www. scientificamerican. com/ article. cfm?id=everyday-quantum-physics) [41] Albert Einstein insisted that, "I am convinced God does not play dice" in a private letter to Max Born, 4 December 1926, Albert Einstein Archives (http:/ / www. alberteinstein. info/ db/ ViewDetails. do?DocumentID=38009) reel 8, item 180

References and bibliography • Daniel Dennett (2003) Freedom Evolves. Viking Penguin. • John Earman (2007) "Aspects of Determinism in Modern Physics" in Butterfield, J., and Earman, J., eds., Philosophy of Physics, Part B. North Holland: 1369-1434. • George Ellis (2005) "Physics and the Real World," Physics Today. • Epstein J.M. (1999) "Agent Based Models and Generative Social Science," Complexity IV (5). • -------- and Axtell R. (1996) Growing Artificial Societies — Social Science from the Bottom. MIT Press. • Kenrick, D. T., Li, N. P., & Butner, J. (2003) "Dynamical evolutionary psychology: Individual decision rules and emergent social norms," Psychological Review 110: 3–28. • Albert Messiah, Quantum Mechanics, English translation by G. M. Temmer of Mécanique Quantique, 1966, John Wiley and Sons, vol. I, chapter IV, section III. • Nowak A., Vallacher R.R., Tesser A., Borkowski W., (2000) "Society of Self: The emergence of collective properties in self-structure," Psychological Review 107. • Schimbera, Jürgen / Schimbera, Peter: Determination des Indeterminierten. Kritische Anmerkungen zur Determinismus- und Freiheitskontroverse. Verlag Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8300-5099-5.

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External links • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Causal Determinism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ determinism-causal/) • Determinism in History (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-02) from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas • Philosopher Ted Honderich's Determinism web resource (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm) • Determinism on Information Philosopher (http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/determinism. html) • An Introduction to Free Will and Determinism (http://www.galilean-library.org/int13.html) by Paul Newall, aimed at beginners. • The Society of Natural Science (http://www.determinism.com) • Determinism and Free Will in Judaism (http://www.chabad.org/article.asp?AID=3017) • Snooker, Pool, and Determinism (http://www.jottings.ca/john/cogitations.html)

Other The Other or Constitutive Other (also the verb othering) is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is other than the initial concept being considered. The Constitutive Other often denotes a person Other than one's self; hence, the Other is identified as "different"; thus the spelling is often capitalized.

The idea of the Other A person's definition of the 'Other' is part of what defines or even constitutes the self (in both a psychological and philosophical sense) and other phenomena and cultural units. It has been used in social science to understand the processes by which societies and groups exclude 'Others' whom they want to subordinate or who do not fit into their society. The concept of 'otherness' is also integral to the comprehending of a person, as people construct roles for themselves in relation to an 'other' as part of a process of reaction that is not necessarily related to stigmatization or condemnation. Othering is imperative to national identities, where practices of admittance and segregation can form and sustain boundaries and national character. Othering helps distinguish between home and away, the uncertain or certain. It often involves the demonization and dehumanization of groups, which further justifies attempts to civilize and exploit these 'inferior' others. The idea of the other was first philosophically conceived by Emmanuel Levinas, and later made popular by Edward Said in his well-known book Orientalism. Despite originally being a philosophical concept, othering has political, economic, social and psychological connotations and implications.

History of the idea The concept that the self requires the Other to define itself is an old one and has been expressed by many writers: Hegel was among the first to introduce the idea of the other as constituent in self-consciousness. He wrote of pre-selfconscious Man: "Each consciousness pursues the death of the other", meaning that in seeing a separateness between you and another, a feeling of alienation is created, which you try to resolve by synthesis. The resolution is depicted in Hegel's famous parable of the master-slave dialectic. For a direct antecedent, see Fichte. Husserl used the idea as a basis for intersubjectivity. Sartre also made use of such a dialectic in Being and Nothingness, when describing how the world is altered at the appearance of another person, how the world now appears to orient itself around this other person. At the level Sartre presented it, however, it was without any

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life-threatening need for resolution, but as a feeling or phenomenon and not as a radical threat. De Beauvoir made use of otherness — in similar fashion to Sartre (though it is likely he took the idea from her) — in The Second Sex. In fact, De Beauvoir refers to Hegel's master-slave dialectic as analogous, in many respects, to the relationship of man and woman. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas were instrumental in coining contemporary usage of "the Other," as radically other. Lacan associated the Other with the symbolic order and language. Levinas connected it with the scriptural and traditional God, in The Infinite Other. Ethically, for Levinas, the "Other" is superior or prior to the self; the mere presence of the Other makes demands before one can respond by helping them or ignoring them. This idea and that of the face-to-face encounter were re-written later, taking on Derrida's points made about the impossibility of a pure presence of the Other (the Other could be other than this pure alterity first encountered), and so issues of language and representation arose. This "re-write" was accomplished in part with Levinas' analysis of the distinction between "the saying and the said" but still maintaining a priority of ethics over metaphysics. Levinas talks of the Other in terms of 'insomnia' and 'wakefulness'. It is an ecstasy, or exteriority toward the Other that forever remains beyond any attempt at full capture, this otherness is interminable (or infinite); even in murdering another, the otherness remains, it has not been negated or controlled. This "infiniteness" of the Other will allow Levinas to derive other aspects of philosophy and science as secondary to this ethic. Levinas writes: The others that obsess me in the other do not affect me as examples of the same genus united with my neighbor by resemblance or common nature, individuations of the human race, or chips off the old block... The others concern me from the first. Here fraternity precedes the commonness of a genus. My relationship with the Other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others.[1] The "Other", as a general term in philosophy, can also be used to mean the unconscious, silence, insanity, the other of language (i.e., what it refers to and what is unsaid), etc. There may also arise a tendency towards relativism if the Other, as pure alterity, leads to a notion that ignores the commonality of truth. Likewise, issues may arise around non-ethical uses of the term, and related terms, that reinforce divisions.

Othering and Imperialism Before the modern world system where the politics and economy of nation-states are relatively interdependent, there existed what is classified as the "system of world empires" up until the 1500s. In this world system political and economic affairs of different empires were fragmented and empires "provided for most of their own needs... [spreading] their influence solely through conquest or the threat of conquest..."[2] The Dictionary of Human Geography defines imperialism as "The creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination."[3] The maintenance of this unequal relationship wholly depends on the subordination of an "other" group or peoples, from which resources can be taken and land can be exploited. Other, then, describes the process of justifying the domination of individuals or groups in the periphery to facilitate subordination. The creation of the other is done by highlighting their weakness, thus extenuating the moral responsibility of the stronger self to educate, convert, or civilize depending on the identity of the other. Indeed, as defined by Martin Jones et al., othering is "A term, advocated by Edward Said, which refers to the act of emphasizing the perceived weaknesses of marginalized groups as a way of stressing the alleged strength of those in positions of power." Othering can be done with any racial, ethnic, religious, or geographically-defined category of people. In keeping with the example of imperial Britain, the discussion of empire building through othering unfolds in a global context. Empire building stands in fundamental opposition to global community; instead of understanding groups of people, and consequentially their intellectual, economic, and political capability as vital and contributory

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to the global community, othering renders all but one culture's ideology and systems worthless. Emmanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory is a more modern criticism of othering and the doctrine of discrimination and racism in society, economics, and all other fronts. Imperial Britain saw the values or good qualities of other cultures or powers as a threat to its own power—this was the case even with other economic and industrial powers such as Germany.

Relationship between othering and knowledge Scholars such as Michel Foucault, the Frankfurt School and other postmodernists have argued that the process of othering has everything to do with knowledge, and power acting through knowledge to achieve a particular political agenda in its goal of domination.[4] Edward Said quotes the following from Nietzsche,[5] saying what is the truth of language but ...a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.[6] The knowledge of this sheds much light on historiographies of other cultures created by the dominant culture, and by the discourses, whether academic or otherwise, that surround these written and oral histories. The cultures that a supposed superior ethnic group deems important to study, and the different aspects of that culture that are either ignored or considered valuable knowledge, relies on the judgment of the ethnic group in power. In the case of historiographies of the Middle East, and the Oriental discipline, another dynamic adds depth this issue. Prior to the late nineteenth century, western (specifically European) empires studied what was said to be high culture of the Middle East, being literature, language, and philology; however, a reciprocal program and curriculum of study did not exist in the Orient which looked at European lands.[7] Distortions in the writing of history have carried over to the post-modern era in the writing of news. As mentioned before under examples of intranational othering, political parties in developing countries sometimes create facts on the ground, report threats that are nonexistent, and extenuate the faults of opposing political parties which are made up of opposing ethnic groups in the majority of cases.[8] Othering via ideas of ethnocentricity—the belief that one's own ethnic group is superior to all others and the tendency to evaluate and assign meaning to other ethnicities using yours as a standard[9] —is additionally achieved through processes as mundane as cartography. The drawing of maps has historically emphasized and bolstered specific lands and their associated national identities. Cartographers in early centuries commonly distorted actual locations and distances when depicting them on maps; British cartographers for example centered Britain on their maps, and drew it proportionally larger than it should be. Polar perspectives of the Northern Hemisphere drawn by recent American cartographers uses spatial relations between the United States and Russia to emphasize superiority.[10] Thus we see that agendas of domination and subordination are not only supported by the soft sciences like language, popular culture, and literature, but also through the hard and exact sciences like mathematics and geography.

The Other in gender studies Simone De Beauvoir changed the Hegelian notion of the Other, for use in her description of male-dominated culture. This treats woman as the Other in relation to man. The Other has thus become an important concept for studies of the sex-gender system. Michael Warner argues that: the modern system of sex and gender would not be possible without a disposition to interpret the difference between genders as the difference between self and Other ... having a sexual object of the opposite gender is taken to be the normal and paradigmatic form of an interest in the Other or, more generally, others.

Other Thus, according to Warner, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis hold the heterosexist view that if one is attracted to people of the same gender as one's self, one fails to distinguish self and other, identification and desire. This is a "regressive" or an "arrested" function. He further argues that heteronormativity covers its own narcissistic investments by projecting or displacing them on queerness. De Beauvoir calls the Other the minority, the least favored one and often a woman, when compared to a man, "for a man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity" (McCann, 33). Betty Friedan supported this thought when she interviewed women and the majority of them identified themselves in their role in the private sphere, rather than addressing their own personal achievements. They automatically identified as the Other without knowing. Although the Other may be influenced by a socially constructed society, one can argue that society has the power to change this creation (Haslanger). In an effort to dismantle the notion of the Other, Cheshire Calhoun proposed a deconstruction of the word "woman" from a subordinate association and to reconstruct it by proving women do not need to be rationalized by male dominance.[11] This would contribute to the idea of the Other and minimize the hierarchal connotation this word implies. Sarojini Sahoo, an Indian feminist writer, agrees with De Beauvoir that women can only free themselves by "thinking, taking action, working, creating, on the same terms as men; instead of seeking to disparage them, she declares herself their equal." She disagrees, however, that though women have the same status to men as human beings, they have their own identity and they are different from men. They are "others" in real definition, but this is not in context with Hegelian definition of "others". It is not always due to man's "active" and "subjective" demands. They are the others, unknowingly accepting the subjugation as a part of "subjectivity".[12] Sahoo, however contends that whilst the woman identity is certainly constitutionally different from that of man, men and women still share a basic human equality. Thus the harmful asymmetric sex/gender "Othering" arises accidentally and ‘passively' from natural, unavoidable intersubjectivity.[13]

Other quotations • The poet Arthur Rimbaud may be the earliest to express the idea: "Je est un autre" (I is another). • Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, phrased it thus: "You are always a different person." • Ferdinand de Saussure described language as, in Calvin Thomas' words, a "differential system without positive terms". • Jacques Lacan argued that ego-formation occurs through mirror-stage misrecognition, and his theories were applied to politics by Althusser. As the later Lacan said: "The I is always in the field of the Other." • Jean-Paul Sartre's character Garcin, in the play Huis clos (No Exit), states that "Hell is others," or, alternatively, "Hell is other people." ("L'enfer, c'est les Autres.")

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The Other of sexual difference • • • •

Sarojini Sahoo Julia Kristeva Judith Butler Luce Irigaray

Bibliography • Levinas, Emmanuel (1974). Autrement qu'être ou au-delà de l'essence. (Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence). • Levinas, Emmanuel (1972). Humanism de l'autre homme. Fata Morgana. • Lacan, Jacques (1966). Ecrits. London: Tavistock, 1977. • Lacan, Jacques (1964). The Four Fondamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. London: Hogarth Press, 1977. • Foucault, Michel (1990). The History of Sexuality vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. • Derrida, Jacques (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Ill.: Northwestern University Press. • Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. • Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. • Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge. • Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2006), "'Etymythological Othering' and the Power of 'Lexical Engineering' in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. A Socio-Philo(sopho)logical Perspective", Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, edited by Tope Omoniyi and Joshua A. Fishman, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 237–258.

Sources • Thomas, Calvin, ed. (2000). "Introduction: Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation", Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06813-0. • Cahoone, Lawrence (1996). From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. • Colwill, Elizabeth. (2005). Reader—Wmnst 590: Feminist Thought. KB Books. • Haslanger, Sally. Feminism and Metaphysics: Unmasking Hidden Ontologies. [14]. 28 November 2005. • McCann, Carole. Kim, Seung-Kyung. (2003). Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. Routledge. New York, NY. • Rimbaud, Arthur (1966). "Letter to Georges Izambard", Complete Works and Selected Letters. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. • Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974). The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. • Saussure, Ferdinand de (1986). Course in General Linguistics. Eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court. • Lacan, Jacques (1977). Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. • Althusser, Louis (1973). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. • Warner, Michael (1990). "Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality", Engendering Men, p. 191. Eds. Boone and Cadden, London UK: Routledge. • Tuttle, Howard (1996). The Crowd is Untruth, Peter Lang Publishing, ISBN 0-8204-2866-3

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References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, p.159 Gelvin, James L. The Modern Middle East: A History. 2nd ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 39-40. Print. Johnston, R.J., et al. The Dictionary of Human Geography. 4th Ed. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. 375. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. xviii. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. "On Truth and lie in an extra-moral sense." The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press, 1954. 46-7. [6] Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. 202. Print. [7] Humphreys, Steven R. "The Historiography of the Modern Middle East: Transforming a Field of Study." Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century. Ed. Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer, and Y. Hakam Erdem. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. 19-21. Print. [8] Sehgal, Meera. "Manufacturing a Feminized Siege Mentality." Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36.2 (2007): 173. Print. [9] Fellmann, Jerome D., et al. Human Geography: Landscapes of Human Activities. 10th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 179. [10] Fellmann, Jerome D., et al. Human Geography: Landscapes of Human Activities. 10th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. 10. [11] McCann, 339 [12] "http:/ / sarojinisahoo. blogspot. com" [13] Jemmer, Patrick: The O(the)r (O)the(r), Engage Newcastle Volume 1 (ISSN: 2045-0567; ISBN 978-1-907926-00-6) August 2010, published Newcastle UK: NewPhilSoc Publishing, Page 7, also see at "http:/ / books. google. co. in/ books?hl=en& lr=& id=YlN_kz8th4cC& oi=fnd& pg=PA5& dq=Sarojini+ Sahoo& ots=EFtjSxyA3q& sig=qa7R" [14] http:/ / www. mit. edu/ ~shaslang/ papers/ fmnews/ UHO. html

External links • Definitions of Other/Othering (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/rww03/othering.htm) • The Centre for Studies in Otherness (http://otherness.dk)

Angst Angst means fear or anxiety (anguish is its Latinate equivalent, and anxious, anxiety are of similar origin). The word angst was introduced into English from Danish angst via existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. It is used in English to describe an intense feeling of apprehension, anxiety or inner turmoil. The term Angst distinguishes itself from the word Furcht (German for "fear") in that Furcht is a negative anticipation regarding a concrete threat, while Angst is a (possibly nondirectional) emotion, though the terms are colloquially sometimes used synonymously. In other languages having the meaning of the Latin word pavor, the derived words differ in meaning, e.g. as in the French anxiété and peur. The word Angst has existed since the 8th century, from the Proto-Indo-European root *anghu-, "restraint" from which Old High German angust developed. It is pre-cognate with the Latin angustia, "tensity, tightness" and angor, "choking, clogging"; compare to the Greek "άγχος" (ankhos): stress.

Existentialism

Edvard Munch tried to represent "an infinite scream passing through nature" in The Scream (1893)

Angst Existentialist philosophers use the term "angst" with a different connotation. The use of the term was first attributed to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). In The Concept of Anxiety (also known as The Concept of Dread, depending on the translation), Kierkegaard used the word Angest (in common Danish, angst, meaning "dread" or "anxiety") to describe a profound and deep-seated spiritual condition of insecurity and fear in the free human being. Where the animal is a slave to its instincts but always conscious in its own actions, Kierkegaard believed that the freedom given to people leaves the human in a constant fear of failing his/her responsibilities to God. Kierkegaard's concept of angst is considered to be an important stepping stone for 20th-century existentialism. While Kierkegaard's feeling of angst is fear of actual responsibility to God, in modern use, angst was broadened by the later existentialists to include general frustration associated with the conflict between actual responsibilities to self, one's principles, and others (possibly including God). Martin Heidegger used the term in a slightly different way.

Classical music Angst in serious musical composition has been a reflection of the times. Musical composition embodying angst as a primary theme have primarily come from European Jewish composers such as Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg, written during the period of great persecution of the Jewish people shortly before and during the period of Nazi activity in Europe. A notable exception is the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose symphonies use the theme of angst in post-World Ludger Gerdes, Angst, 1989 War II compositions depicting Russian strife during the war. However, it is the Jewish artists, Gustav Mahler and Franz Kafka in music and literature that have embraced the theme of angst so highly in their work that they have become synonymous with the term to the point of popular joking and cartoons today. Angst appears to be absent from important French music. Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie and Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, composed before World War II, reflect melancholy sentiment without angst in soft, quiet compositions. The effect of angst is achieved by Shostakovich, Mahler and Berg in compositions of wide dynamic range, at times seemingly spinning out of control (Mahler), and atonal music using the twelve-tone row method of composition (Berg, Schoenberg and others) to create an angst ridden atmosphere of grotesque sound. The theme of angst is portrayed in Mahler's Symphony No. 6 ("The Tragic") and in Alban Berg's poignant Violin Concerto dedicated, "To the memory of an angel".

In popular music Angst, in contemporary connotative use, most often describes the intense frustration and other emotions of teenagers and the mood of the music and art with which they identify in accordance with adult stereotype. Heavy metal, punk rock, grunge, nu metal, emo, and virtually any alternative rock dramatically combining elements of discord, melancholy and excitement may be said to express angst. Angst was probably first discussed in relation to popular music in the mid- to late 1950s that was popular amongst the nuclear disarmament and antiwar protester subculture. Folk rock songs like Bob Dylan's 1963 Masters of War and A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall articulated the dread caused by the threat of nuclear war. A key text is Jeff Nuttall's book Bomb Culture (1968), which traced this pervasive theme in popular culture back to Hiroshima.

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Anxiety Anxiety

A marble bust of the Roman Emperor Decius from the Capitoline Museum. This portrait "conveys an impression of anxiety and weariness, as of a [1] man shouldering heavy [state] responsibilities." MeSH

D001007

[2]

Anxiety (also called angst or worry) is a psychological and physiological state characterized by somatic, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral components.[3] It is the displeasing feeling of fear and concern.[4] The root meaning of the word anxiety is 'to vex or trouble'; in either presence or absence of psychological stress, anxiety can create feelings of fear, worry, uneasiness, and dread.[5] However, anxiety should not be confused with fear, it is more of a dreaded feeling about something which appears intimidating and can overcome an individual.[6] Anxiety is considered to be a normal reaction to a stressor. It may help an individual to deal with a demanding situation by prompting them to cope with it. However, when anxiety becomes overwhelming, it may fall under the classification of an anxiety disorder.[7]

Signs and symptoms Anxiety is a generalized mood that can occur without an identifiable triggering stimulus. As such, it is distinguished from fear, which is an appropriate cognitive and emotional response to a perceived threat. Additionally, fear is related to the specific behaviors of escape and avoidance, whereas anxiety is related to situations perceived as uncontrollable or unavoidable.[8] Another view defines anxiety as "a future-oriented mood state in which one is ready or prepared to attempt to cope with upcoming negative events,"[9] suggesting that it is a distinction between future and present dangers which divides anxiety and fear. In a 2011 review of the literature,[10] fear and anxiety were said to be differentiated in four domains: (1) duration of emotional A job applicant with a worried facial expression

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experience, (2) temporal focus, (3) specificity of the threat, and (4) motivated direction. Fear is defined as short lived, present focused, geared towards a specific threat, and facilitating escape from threat; while anxiety is defined as long acting, future focused, broadly focused towards a diffuse threat, and promoting caution while approaching a potential threat. While most everyone has an experience with anxiety at some point in their lives, as it is a common reaction to real or perceived threats of all kinds, most do not develop long-term problems with anxiety. When someone does develop chronic or severe problems with anxiety, such problems are usually classified as being one or more of the specific types of Anxiety Disorders. Anxiety takes several forms: phobia, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, and post-traumatic stress.[11] The physical effects of anxiety may include heart palpitations, tachycardia, muscle weakness and tension, fatigue, nausea, chest pain, shortness of breath, headache, stomach aches, or tension headaches. As the body prepares to deal with a threat, blood pressure, heart rate, perspiration, blood flow to the major muscle groups are increased, while immune and digestive functions are inhibited (the fight or flight response). External signs of anxiety may include pallor, sweating, trembling, and pupillary dilation. For someone who suffers anxiety this can lead to a panic attack. Although panic attacks are not experienced by every person who suffers from anxiety, they are a common symptom. Panic attacks usually come without warning and although the fear is generally irrational, the subjective perception of danger is very real. A person experiencing a panic attack will often feel as if he or she is about to die or lose consciousness. Between panic attacks, people with panic disorder tend to suffer from anticipated anxiety- a fear of having a panic attack may lead to the development of phobias.[12] Anxiety is the most common mental illness in America as approximately 40 million adults are affected by it.[11] The emotional effects of anxiety may include "feelings of apprehension or dread, trouble concentrating, feeling tense or jumpy, anticipating the worst, irritability, restlessness, watching (and waiting) for signs (and occurrences) of danger, and, feeling like your mind's gone blank"[13] as well as "nightmares/bad dreams, obsessions about sensations, deja vu, a trapped in your mind feeling, and feeling like everything is scary."[14] The cognitive effects of anxiety may include thoughts about suspected dangers, such as fear of dying. "You may... fear that the chest pains are a deadly heart attack or that the shooting pains in your head are the result of a tumor or aneurysm. You feel an intense fear when you think of dying, or you may think of it more often than normal, or can’t get it out of your mind."[15] The behavioral effects of anxiety may include withdrawal from situations which have provoked anxiety in the past.[16] Anxiety can also be experienced in ways which include changes in sleeping patterns, nervous habits, and increased motor tension like foot tapping.[16] The symptoms of anxiety include excessive and ongoing worry and tension, an unrealistic view of problems, restlessness or a feeling of being "edgy", irritability, muscle tension, headaches,sweating, difficulty concentrating, nausea, the need to go to the bathroom frequently, tiredness, trouble falling or staying asleep, trembling, and being easily startled.[17]

Nervous habits such as biting fingernails

Anxiety

Causes An evolutionary psychology explanation is that increased anxiety serves the purpose of increased vigilance regarding potential threats in the environment as well as increased tendency to take proactive actions regarding such possible threats. This may cause false positive reactions but an individual suffering from anxiety may also avoid real threats. This may explain why anxious people are less likely to die due to accidents.[18] The psychologist David H. Barlow of Boston University conducted a study that showed three common characteristics of people suffering from chronic anxiety, which he characterized as "a generalized biological vulnerability," "a generalized psychological vulnerability," and "a specific psychological vulnerability."[19] While chemical issues in the brain that result in anxiety (especially resulting from genetics) are well documented, this study highlights an additional environmental factor that may result from being raised by parents suffering from chronic anxiety. Research upon adolescents who as infants had been highly apprehensive, vigilant, and fearful finds that their nucleus accumbens is more sensitive than that in other people when deciding to make an action that determined whether they received a reward.[20] This suggests a link between circuits responsible for fear and also reward in anxious people. As researchers note, "a sense of ‘responsibility,’ or self agency, in a context of uncertainty (probabilistic outcomes) drives the neural system underlying appetitive motivation (i.e., nucleus accumbens) more strongly in temperamentally inhibited than noninhibited adolescents."[20] Anxiety is also linked and perpetuated by the person's own pessimistic outcome expectancy and how they cope with feedback negativity [21] Neural circuitry involving the amygdala and hippocampus is thought to underlie anxiety.[22] When people are confronted with unpleasant and potentially harmful stimuli such as foul odors or tastes, PET-scans show increased bloodflow in the amygdala.[23][24] In these studies, the participants also reported moderate anxiety. This might indicate that anxiety is a protective mechanism designed to prevent the organism from engaging in potentially harmful behaviors. Although single genes have little effect on complex traits and interact heavily both between themselves and with the external factors, research is underway to unravel possible molecular mechanisms underlying anxiety and comorbid conditions. One candidate gene with polymorphisms that influence anxiety is PLXNA2.[25] Caffeine may cause or exacerbate anxiety disorders.[26][27] A number of clinical studies have shown a positive association between caffeine and anxiogenic effects and/or panic disorder.[28][29][30] Anxiety sufferers can have high caffeine sensitivity.[31][32][33][34][35] For some people, anxiety can be very much reduced by coming off caffeine.[36] Anxiety can temporarily increase during caffeine withdrawal.[37][38][39]

Varieties In medicine Anxiety can be a symptom of an underlying health issue such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), heart failure, or heart arrythmia.[40] Abnormal and pathological anxiety or fear may itself be a medical condition falling under the blanket term "anxiety disorder". Such conditions came under the aegis of psychiatry at the end of the 19th century[41] and current psychiatric diagnostic criteria recognize several specific forms of the disorder. Recent surveys have found that as many as 18% of Americans may be affected by one or more of them.[42] Standardized screening tools such as Zung Self-Rating Anxiety Scale, Beck Anxiety Inventory, Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and HAM-A (Hamilton Anxiety Scale) can be used to detect anxiety symptoms and suggest the need for a formal diagnostic assessment of anxiety disorder.[43] The HAM-A (Hamilton Anxiety Scale) measures the severity of a patient's anxiety, based on 14 parameters, including anxious mood, tension, fears, insomnia, somatic complaints and behavior at the interview.[44]

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Anxiety

Existential anxiety Further information: Angst, Existential crisis, and Nihilism The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, in The Concept of Anxiety, described anxiety or dread associated with the "dizziness of freedom" and suggested the possibility for positive resolution of anxiety through the self-conscious exercise of responsibility and choosing. In Art and Artist (1932), the psychologist Otto Rank wrote that the psychological trauma of birth was the pre-eminent human symbol of existential anxiety and encompasses the creative person's simultaneous fear of – and desire for – separation, individuation and differentiation. The theologian Paul Tillich characterized existential anxiety[45] as "the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing" and he listed three categories for the nonbeing and resulting anxiety: ontic (fate and death), moral (guilt and condemnation), and spiritual (emptiness and meaninglessness). According to Tillich, the last of these three types of existential anxiety, i.e. spiritual anxiety, is predominant in modern times while the others were predominant in earlier periods. Tillich argues that this anxiety can be accepted as part of the human condition or it can be resisted but with negative consequences. In its pathological form, spiritual anxiety may tend to "drive the person toward the creation of certitude in systems of meaning which are supported by tradition and authority" even though such "undoubted certitude is not built on the rock of reality". According to Viktor Frankl, the author of Man's Search for Meaning, when a person is faced with extreme mortal dangers, the most basic of all human wishes is to find a meaning of life to combat the "trauma of nonbeing" as death is near.

Test and performance anxiety According to Yerkes-Dodson law, an optimal level of arousal is necessary to best complete a task such as an exam, performance, or competitive event. However, when the anxiety or level of arousal exceeds that optimum, the result is a decline in performance. Test anxiety is the uneasiness, apprehension, or nervousness felt by students who had a fear of failing an exam. Students who have test anxiety may experience any of the following: the association of grades with personal worth; fear of embarrassment by a teacher; fear of alienation from parents or friends; time pressures; or feeling a loss of control. Sweating, dizziness, headaches, racing heartbeats, nausea, fidgeting, and drumming on a desk are all common. Because test anxiety hinges on fear of negative evaluation, debate exists as to whether test anxiety is itself a unique anxiety disorder or whether it is a specific type of social phobia. While the term "test anxiety" refers specifically to students, many workers share the same experience with regard to their career or profession. The fear of failing at a task and being negatively evaluated for failure can have a similarly negative effect on the adult.

Stranger and social anxiety Humans are, naturally, a social species who generally require social acceptance. Therefore, because of the importance of being accepted among society and conforming to its rules and norms, humans dread the disapproval of others. It is this apprehension of being judged by others that is the basic cause of the anxiety one may feel in a social environment.[46] Anxiety when meeting or interacting with unknown people is a common stage of development in young people. For others, it may persist into adulthood and become social anxiety or social phobia. "Stranger anxiety" in small children is not considered a phobia. In adults, an excessive fear of other people is not a developmentally common stage; it is called social anxiety. According to Cutting,[47] social phobics do not fear the crowd but the fact that they may be judged negatively. Social anxiety varies in degree and severity. Whilst for some people it is characterized by experiencing discomfort or awkwardness during physical social contact (e.g. embracing, shaking hands, etc.), while in other cases it can lead to

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a fear of interacting with unfamiliar people altogether. There can be a tendency among those suffering from this condition to restrict their lifestyles to accommodate the anxiety, minimizing social interaction whenever possible. Social anxiety also forms a core aspect of certain personality disorders, including Avoidant Personality Disorder.

Generalized anxiety Further information: Generalized anxiety disorder and Cognitive behavioral therapy Overwhelming anxiety, if not treated early, can consequently become a generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), which can be identified by symptoms of exaggerated and excessive worry, chronic anxiety, and constant, irrational thoughts. The anxious thoughts and feelings felt while suffering from GAD are difficult to control and can cause serious mental anguish that interferes with normal, daily functioning.[48] The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) includes specific criteria for diagnosing generalized anxiety disorder. The DSM-IV states that a patient must experience chronic anxiety and excessive worry, almost daily, for at least 6 months due to a number of stressors (such as work or school) and experience three or more defined symptoms, including, “restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge, being easily fatigued, difficulty concentrating or mind going blank, irritability, muscle tension, sleep disturbance (difficulty falling or staying asleep, or restless unsatisfying sleep).”[49] If symptoms of chronic anxiety are not addressed and treated in adolescence then the risk of developing an anxiety disorder in adulthood increases significantly.[50] “Clinical worry is also associated with risk of comorbidity with other anxiety disorders and depression” which is why immediate treatment is so important.[50] Generalized anxiety disorder can be treated through specialized therapies aimed at changing thinking patterns and in turn reducing anxiety-producing behaviors. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (STPP) can be used to successfully treat GAD with positive effects lasting 12 months after treatment.[51] There are also other treatment plans that should be discussed with a knowledgeable health care practitioner, which can be used in conjunction with behavioral therapy to greatly reduce the disabling symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder.

Trait anxiety Anxiety can be either a short term 'state' or a long term "trait." Trait anxiety reflects a stable tendency to respond with state anxiety in the anticipation of threatening situations.[52] It is closely related to the personality trait of neuroticism. Such anxiety may be conscious or unconscious.[53]

Choice or decision anxiety Anxiety induced by the need to choose between similar options is increasingly being recognized as a problem for individuals and for organizations:[54][55] "Today we’re all faced with greater choice, more competition and less time to consider our options or seek out the right advice."[56] In a decision context, unpredictability or uncertainty may trigger emotional responses in anxious individuals that systematically alter decision-making.[57] There are primarily two forms of this anxiety type. The first form refers to a choice in which there are multiple potential outcomes with known or calculable probabilities. The second form refers to the uncertainty and ambiguity related to a decision context in which there are multiple possible outcomes with unknown probabilities.[57]

Anxiety

Paradoxical anxiety Paradoxical anxiety is anxiety arising from use of methods or techniques which are normally used to reduce anxiety. This includes relaxation or meditation techniques[58] as well as use of certain medications.[59] In some Buddhist meditation literature, this effect is described as something which arises naturally and should be turned toward and mindfully explored in order to gain insight into the nature of emotion, and more profoundly, the nature of self.[60]

Positive psychology In Positive psychology, anxiety is described as the mental state that results from a difficult challenge for which the subject has insufficient coping skills.[61]

Treatments There are a many ways to treat anxiety.

CBT The most notable treatment for anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).[62] Cognitive behavioral therapy involves the changing of one's thought by the therapist. Patients are asked to explain their feelings towards certain things or incidents that cause their anxious behavior.[63]

Parental Anxiety Management Studies show that there are parental variables involved in most cases of anxiety so Parental Anxiety Management(PAM) is also a viable treatment option.[62]

Hypnotherapy treatments In 1990, hypnotherapy was used to help relieve patients of anxiety, which also proved useful in generalized anxiety, phobias, and posttraumatic stress disorders.[64]

Herbal treatments There are also many traditional herbal remedies for anxiety that have been used for centuries in many parts of the world. Some of the better-known herbs for anxiety include Kava, Magnolia bark, Phellodendron bark, St. John's Wort, and Passionflower; with the exception of Kava, new research has called the effectiveness of many of these herbs into question.[65]

Caffeine elimination For some people, anxiety can be very much reduced by coming off caffeine.[36] Anxiety can temporarily increase during caffeine withdrawal.[37][38][39]

Combined treatments A combination of CBT and Parental Anxiety Management has been proven by psychologists and psychiatrists alike to be more effective than administering these treatments separately.[62]

References [1] Chris Scarre, Chronicle of the Roman Emperors, Thames & Hudson, 1995. pp.168-169. [2] http:/ / www. nlm. nih. gov/ cgi/ mesh/ 2009/ MB_cgi?field=uid& term=D001007 [3] Seligman, M.E.P., Walker, E.F. & Rosenhan, D.L..Abnormal psychology, (4th ed.) New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. [4] Davison, Gerald C. (2008). Abnormal Psychology. Toronto: Veronica Visentin. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-470-84072-6.

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Anxiety [5] Bouras, n. and Holt, G. (2007). Psychiatric and Behavioural Disorders in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press: UK. [6] Robin Marantz Henig, "ANXIETY!" (http:/ / go. galegroup. com. myaccess. library. utoronto. ca/ ps/ i. do?id=GALE|A208933596& v=2. 1& u=utoronto_main& it=r& p=AONE& sw=w,), "The New York Times Magazine", August 20, 2012 [7] National Institute of Mental Health (http:/ / www. nimh. nih. gov/ health/ topics/ anxiety-disorders/ index. shtml) Retrieved September 3, 2008. [8] Ohman, A. (2000). Fear and anxiety: Evolutionary, cognitive, and clinical perspectives. In M. Lewis & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.). Handbook of emotions. (pp.573-593). New York: The Guilford Press. [9] Barlow, David H. (November 2002). "Unraveling the mysteries of anxiety and its disorders from the perspective of emotion theory" (http:/ / psycnet. apa. org/ journals/ amp/ 55/ 11/ 1247. pdf). American Psychologist 55 (11): 1247–63. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.11.1247. PMID 11280938. . [10] Sylvers, Patrick; Jamie Laprarie and Scott Lilienfeld (February 2011). "Differences between trait fear and trait anxiety: Implications for psychopathology". Clinical Psychology Review 31 (1): 122–137. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2010.08.004. PMID 20817337. [11] Robin Henig "ANXIETY!" (http:/ / query. library. utoronto. ca/ index. php/ search/ q?kw=Anxiety& facet[0]=addFacetValueFilters(ContentType,Journal+ Article),), The New York Times Magazine 4 Oct. 2009: 1(L) [12] Neil R.Carlson, C.Donald Heth "Psychology the Science of Behaviour". Pearson Canada Inc.,Toronto, Ontario, 2010, p.558. [13] Smith, Melinda (2008, June). Anxiety attacks and disorders: Guide to the signs, symptoms, and treatment options. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from Helpguide Web site: http:/ / www. helpguide. org/ mental/ anxiety_types_symptoms_treatment. htm [14] (1987-2008). Anxiety Symptoms, Anxiety Attack Symptoms (Panic Attack Symptoms), Symptoms of Anxiety. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from Anxiety Centre Web site: http:/ / www. anxietycentre. com/ anxiety-symptoms. shtml [15] (1987-2008). Anxiety symptoms - Fear of dying. Retrieved March 3, 2009, from Anxiety Centre Web site: http:/ / www. anxietycentre. com/ anxiety-symptoms/ fear-of-dying. shtml [16] Barker, P. (2003) Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing: The Craft of Care. Edward Arnold, London. [17] "anxiety" (http:/ / www. medicinenet. com/ anxiety/ article). . Retrieved 12 April 2012. [18] Andrews, P. W.; Thomson, J. A. (2009). "The bright side of being blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems". Psychological Review 116 (3): 620–654. doi:10.1037/a0016242. PMC 2734449. PMID 19618990. [19] Barlow, David H.; Durand, Vincent (2008). Abnormal Psychology: An Integrative Approach. Cengage Learning. p. 125. ISBN 0-534-58156-0. [20] Bar-Haim Y, Fox NA, Benson B, Guyer AE, Williams A, Nelson EE, Perez-Edgar K, Pine DS, Ernst M. (2009). Neural correlates of reward processing in adolescents with a history of inhibited temperament. Psychol Sci. 20(8):1009-18. PMID 19594857 [21] Gu, R.,Huang, Y., Luo., Y. Anxiety and Feedback negativity.(2010).Psychophysiology, 47, 961–967. [22] Rosen JB, Schulkin J (1998). "From normal fear to pathological anxiety". Psychol Rev 105 (2): 325–50. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.105.2.325. PMID 9577241. [23] Zald, D.H.; Pardo, JV (1997). "Emotion, olfaction, and the human amygdala: amygdala activation during aversive olfactory stimulation". Proc Nat'l Acad Sci (USA) 94 (8): 4119–24. doi:10.1073/pnas.94.8.4119. PMC 20578. PMID 9108115. [24] Zald, D.H.; Hagen, M.C.; & Pardo, J.V (1 February 2002). "Neural correlates of tasting concentrated quinine and sugar solutions" (http:/ / jn. physiology. org/ cgi/ content/ full/ 87/ 2/ 1068). J. Neurophysiol 87 (2): 1068–75. PMID 11826070. . [25] Wray NR, James MR, Mah SP, Nelson M, Andrews G, Sullivan PF, Montgomery GW, Birley AJ, Braun A, Martin NG (March 2007). "Anxiety and comorbid measures associated with PLXNA2" (http:/ / archpsyc. ama-assn. org/ cgi/ pmidlookup?view=long& pmid=17339520). Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 64 (3): 318–26. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.64.3.318. PMID 17339520. . [26] Scott, Trudy (2011). The Antianxiety Food Solution: How the Foods You Eat Can Help You Calm Your Anxious Mind, Improve Your Mood, and End Cravings (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=WTpZzTruKMgC& pg=PA59& lpg=PA59& dq=Caffeine+ can+ cause+ anxiety& source=bl& ots=rSRMgQ6XvR& sig=Rx8MRUaVg0rYLLo0wYirzyjesHM& hl=en& sa=X& ei=7oVzUISSCear2AXTrIHgBQ& ved=0CFoQ6AEwBg#v=onepage& q=Caffeine can cause anxiety& f=false). New Harbinger Publications. p. 59. ISBN 1572249269. . Retrieved October 7, 2012. [27] Winston AP (2005). "Neuropsychiatric effects of caffeine". Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 11 (6): 432–439. doi:10.1192/apt.11.6.432. [28] Hughes RN (June 1996). "Drugs Which Induce Anxiety: Caffeine" (http:/ / www. psychology. org. nz/ cms_show_download. php?id=766). New Zealand Journal of Psychology 25 (1): 36–42. doi:10.1016/S0278-6915(02)00096-0. PMID 12204388. . [29] Vilarim MM, Rocha Araujo DM, Nardi AE (August 2011). "Caffeine challenge test and panic disorder: a systematic literature review". Expert Rev Neurother 11 (8): 1185–95. doi:10.1586/ern.11.83. PMID 21797659. [30] . doi:10.1586/ern.11.83. PMID 21797659. [31] . doi:10.1016/0165-1781(85)90078-2. http:/ / www. sciencedirect. com/ science/ article/ pii/ 0165178185900782. [32] . http:/ / ajp. psychiatryonline. org/ article. aspx?Volume=145& page=632& journalID=13. [33] . http:/ / archpsyc. jamanetwork. com/ article. aspx?articleid=495937. [34] . doi:10.1016/j.comppsych.2006.12.001. PMID 17445520. [35] . 35. http:/ / www. nature. com/ npp/ journal/ v35/ n9/ pdf/ npp201071a. pdf. [36] . http:/ / journals. cambridge. org/ action/ displayAbstract?fromPage=online& aid=4996824. [37] Prasad, Chandan (2005). Nutritional Neuroscience (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=mUCx9kec_3sC& pg=PA351& lpg=PA351& dq=Anxiety+ increases+ caffeine+ withdrawal& source=bl& ots=IOFZOl8pFF& sig=Gn6iHuNLfRcGXQjAtbCm1sJvd4E& hl=en& sa=X&

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Anxiety ei=pH5zUNzOGIrcrAGLpIDABg& ved=0CD4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage& q=Anxiety increases caffeine withdrawal& f=false). CRC Press. p. 351. ISBN 0415315999. . Retrieved October 7, 2012. [38] Nehlig, Astrid (2004). Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, and the Brain (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=r_XsYYsmF68C& pg=PA136& lpg=PA136& dq=Anxiety+ increases+ caffeine+ withdrawal& source=bl& ots=2DILdRxQKb& sig=EjY5EGc7Svqwcfi9xocQeTEOHzU& hl=en& sa=X& ei=pH5zUNzOGIrcrAGLpIDABg& ved=0CHIQ6AEwCA#v=onepage& q=Anxiety increases caffeine withdrawal& f=false). CRC Press. p. 136. ISBN 0415306914. . Retrieved October 7, 2012. [39] Juliano LM, Griffiths RR (2004). "A critical review of caffeine withdrawal: empirical validation of symptoms and signs, incidence, severity, and associated features" (http:/ / neuroscience. jhu. edu/ griffiths papers/ CaffwdReview. 2004. pdf). Psychopharmacology (Berl.) 176 (1): 1–29. doi:10.1007/s00213-004-2000-x. PMID 15448977. . [40] NPS Prescribing Practice Review 48: Anxiety disorders (http:/ / www. nps. org. au/ health_professionals/ publications/ prescribing_practice_review/ current/ prescribing_practice_review_48), National Prescribing Service (Australia) [41] Berrios GE (1999). "Anxiety Disorders: a conceptual history". J Affect Disord 56 (2–3): 83–94. doi:10.1016/S0165-0327(99)00036-1. PMID 10701465. [42] Kessler RC, Chiu WT, Demler O, Merikangas KR, Walters EE (June 2005). "Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication" (http:/ / archpsyc. ama-assn. org/ cgi/ content/ full/ 62/ 6/ 617). Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 62 (6): 617–27. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.62.6.617. PMC 2847357. PMID 15939839. . [43] Zung WWK. A rating instrument for anxiety disorders. Psychosomatics. 1971; 12: 371-379 PMID 5172928 [44] Psychiatric Times. Clinically Useful Psychiatric Scales: HAM-A (Hamilton Anxiety Scale) (http:/ / www. psychiatrictimes. com/ clinical-scales/ anxiety/ ). Accessed on March 6, 2009. [45] Tillich, Paul, (1952). The Courage To Be, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-08471-4 [46] Stefan G. Hofmann, Patricia M. DiBartolo, Social Anxiety (Second Edition), Academic Press, San Diego, 2010, Pages xix-xxvi, ISBN 9780123750969, 10.1016/B978-0-12-375096-9.00028-6. July 2012. (http:/ / www. sciencedirect. com/ science/ article/ pii/ B9780123750969000286) (http:/ / www. sciencedirect. com/ science/ article/ pii/ B9780123750969000286) [47] Cutting, P., Hardy, S. and Thomas, B. 1997 Mental Health Nursing: Principles and Practice Mosby, London. [48] Generalized anxiety disorder: People who worry about everything--and nothing in particular--have several treatment options. (2011). Harvard Mental Health Letter, 27(12), 1-3. Retrieved from EBSCOhost. [49] Andrews, G., Hobbs, M. J., Borkovec, T. D., Beesdo, K., Craske, M. G., Heimberg, R. G., & ... Stanley, M. A. (2010). Generalized worry disorder: a review of DSM-IV generalized anxiety disorder and options for DSM-V. Depression & Anxiety (1091-4269), 27(2), 134-147. doi:10.1002/da.20658 [50] Ellis D, Hudson J. The Metacognitive Model of Generalized Anxiety Disorder in Children and Adolescents. Clinical Child & Family Psychology Review [serial online]. June 2010;13(2):151-163. Available from: Academic Search Premier, Ipswich, MA. Accessed September 29, 2011. [51] Salzer, S., Winkelbach, C., Leweke, F., Leibing, E., & Leichsenring, F. (2011). Long-Term Effects of Short-Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy in Generalized Anxiety Disorder: 12-Month Follow-Up. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 56(8), 503-508. Retrieved from EBSCOhost. [52] Schwarzer, R. (December 1997). "Anxiety" (http:/ / web. archive. org/ web/ 20070920115547/ http:/ / www. macses. ucsf. edu/ Research/ Psychosocial/ notebook/ anxiety. html). Archived from the original (http:/ / www. macses. ucsf. edu/ Research/ Psychosocial/ notebook/ anxiety. html) on 2007-09-20. . Retrieved 2008-01-12. [53] Giddey, M. and Wright, H. Mental Health Nursing: From first principles to professional practice Stanley Thornes Ltd. UK. [54] Downey, Jonathan (April 27, 2008). "Premium choice anxiety" (http:/ / women. timesonline. co. uk/ tol/ life_and_style/ women/ the_way_we_live/ article3778818. ece). The Times (London). . Retrieved April 25, 2010. [55] Gates, Kathy. Reduce Anxiety About Decision Making (http:/ / www. selfgrowth. com/ articles/ Gates26. html), Selfgrowth.com [56] Is choice anxiety costing british 'blue chip' business? (http:/ / www. uk. capgemini. com/ news-centre/ news/ pr1487/ ), Capgemini, Aug 16, 2004 [57] Hartley, Catherine A.; Elizabeth A. Phelps (2012). "Anxiety and Decision-Making". Biological Psychiatry 72 (2): 113–118. doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.12.027. [58] Bourne, Edmund J. (2005). The anxiety & phobia workbook (4th ed.). New Harbinger Publications. p. 369. ISBN 1-57224-413-5. [59] Heide, Frederick J.; Borkovec, T. D. (1983). "Relaxation-Induced Anxiety: Paradoxical Anxiety Enhancement Due to Relaxation Training". Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 51 (2): 171–82. doi:10.1037/0022-006X.51.2.171. PMID 6341426. [60] Gunaratana, Henepola. "Mindfullness in Plain English - The threefold Guidance" (http:/ / www. urbandharma. org/ udharma4/ mpe9. html). . [61] Csikszentmihalyi, M., Finding Flow, 1997 [62] Lippincott, Williams. "Anxiety." Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics 31.8 (2010): 92. Print. [63] "cognitive-Behavioral therapy" CareNotes. Truven Health Analytics Inc. (2012) [64] Smith, W. H., "Hypnosis in the Treatment of Anxiety", Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, Vol 54, 209-16 (http:/ / go. galegroup. com. myaccess. library. utoronto. ca/ ps/ i. do?id=GALE|A229529967& v=2. 1& u=utoronto_main& it=r& p=ITOF& sw=w,) [65] Saaed, Bloch, Antonacci. "Herbal and dietary supplements for treatment of anxiety disorders." American Family Physician (2007): 547-56 "Abstract:Herbal and dietary supplements for treatment of anxiety disorders." (http:/ / www. ncbi. nlm. nih. gov/ pubmed/ 17853630). . Retrieved 14 August 2012.

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External links • Anxiety (http://www.dmoz.org/Health/Mental_Health/Disorders/Anxiety/Support_Groups/) at the Open Directory Project • Social Anxiety (http://www.dmoz.org/Health/Mental_Health/Disorders/Anxiety/Social_Anxiety/) at the Open Directory Project

Meaning (existential) In existentialism, meaning is understood as the worth of life. Meaning in existentialism is unlike typical conceptions of "the meaning of life", because it is descriptive. Due to the method of existentialism, prescriptive or declarative statements about meaning are unjustified. Meaning is only something that is for an individual, it only has a home in one person. Thus it is 'subjective' or should be understood to have an 'anti-system' or 'anti-answer' sensibility.[1]

Kierkegaard What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. (...) I certainly do not deny that I still accept an imperative of knowledge and that through it men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all. For Kierkegaard, meaning does not equal knowledge, although both are important. Meaning, for Kierkegaard, is a lived experience. A quest to find one's values, beliefs, and purpose in a meaningless world. As a Christian, Kierkegaard finds his meaning in the Word of God, but for those who are not Christian, Kierkegaard wishes them well in their search.[2]

Sartre "Existence precedes essence" means that a human exists first before they have meaning in life. Meaning is not given, and must be achieved. With objects—say a knife for example, there is some creator who conceives of an idea or purpose of an object, and then creates it with the essence of the object already present. The essence of what the knife will be exists before the actual knife itself. Sartre, who was an atheist, believed that if there is no God to have conceived of our essence or nature, then we must come into existence first, and then create our own essence out of interaction with our surroundings and ourselves. With this come serious implications of self-responsibility over who we are and what our lives mean. For this reason, meaning is something without representation or bearing in anything or anyone else. It is something truly unique to each person – separate, independent.[3]

Meaning (existential)

Frankl Logotherapy is a type of psychological analysis that focuses on a will to meaning as opposed to a Nietzschean /Adlerian doctrine of "will to power" or Freud's "will to pleasure."[4] Frankl also noted the barriers to humanity's quest for meaning in life. He warns against "...affluence, hedonism, [and] materialism..." in the search for meaning.[5] The following list of tenets represents Frankl's basic principles of Logotherapy: • Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones. • Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life. • We have inalienable freedom to find meaning. We can find meaning in life in three different ways: 1. by creating a work or doing a deed; 2. by experiencing something or encountering someone; 3. by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. Logotherapy was developed by psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.

References [1] [2] [3] [4]

(http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ existentialism/ #5) Kierkegard, S. The Essential Kierkegaard, Eds. Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton, 2000. P. 10. Existentialism is a humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre, (L'existentialisme est un humanisme) 1946 Lecture Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009) "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology" (http:/ / docs. google. com/ gview?a=v& q=cache:FrKYAo88ckkJ:www. materdei. ie/ media/ conferences/ a-secular-age-parallel-sessions-timetable. pdf+ "Stan+ Seidner"& hl=en& gl=us). Mater Dei Institute. p 5. [5] "Tenets" (http:/ / www. logotherapyinstitute. org/ tenets. html). Logotherapy Institute.

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Free will Free will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long been debated in philosophy. Historically, the constraint of dominant concern has been nomological determinism, the notion that the present dictates the future entirely and necessarily, that every occurrence results inevitably from prior events. Many hold that nomological determinism must be false in order for free will to be possible, and then debate whether it is true or false and thus whether free will is possible or not. The two main positions within that debate are metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that nomological determinism is false, so free will is at least possible; and hard determinism, the claim that nomological determinism is true, so free will does not exist.

A domino's movement is determined completely by laws of physics. Incompatibilists say that this threatens free will, but compatibilists argue that, even if we are similar to dominoes, we can have a form of free will.

Both of these positions, which agree A simplified taxonomy of the most important philosophical positions regarding free will. that nomological determination is the relevant factor in the question of free will, are classed as incompatibilist. Positions that deny that nomological determinism is relevant, saying that we could have free will either way, are classified as compatibilist, and offer various alternative explanations of what constraints are relevant, such as physical constraints (e.g. chains or imprisonment), social constraints (e.g. threat of punishment or censure), or psychological constraints (e.g. compulsions or phobias). Such compatibilists thus consider the debate between libertarianism and hard determinism a false dilemma.[1] Some compatibilists assert that determinism is not just compatible with free will, but actually necessary for it;[2] that the randomness of indeterminism is a greater obstacle to free will. Hard incompatibilism, while still holding that determinism is an obstacle to free will, either agrees with the aforementioned compatibilists that indeterminism is likewise an obstacle to free will, or argues that indeterminism does not necessitate free will, and concludes that free will is thus impossible in either case. The principle of free will has religious, ethical, and scientific implications. For example, in the religious realm, free will implies that individual will and choices can coexist with an omnipotent divinity. In ethics, it may hold implications for whether individuals can be held morally accountable for their actions. In science, neuroscientific findings regarding free will may suggest different ways of predicting human behavior.

Free will

In Western philosophy Incompatibilism Incompatibilism is the position that free will and determinism are logically incompatible, and that the major question regarding whether or not people have free will is thus whether or not their actions are determined. "Hard determinists", such as Martin Luther and d'Holbach, are those incompatibilists who accept determinism and reject free will. "Metaphysical libertarians", such as Thomas Reid, Peter van Inwagen, and Robert Kane, are those incompatibilists who accept free will and deny determinism, holding the view that some form of indeterminism is true.[3] Another view is that of hard incompatibilists, which state that free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism.[4] Martin Luther was a hard Traditional arguments for incompatibilism are based on an "intuition pump": if a determinist. person is like other mechanical things that are determined in their behavior such as a wind-up toy, a billiard ball, a puppet, or a robot, then people must not have free will.[3][5] This argument has been rejected by compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett on the grounds that, even if humans have something in common with these things, it remains possible and plausible that we are different from such objects in important ways.[6]

Another argument for incompatibilism is that of the "causal chain." Incompatibilism is key to the idealist theory of free will. Most incompatibilists reject the idea that freedom of action consists simply in "voluntary" behavior. They insist, rather, that free will means that man must be the "ultimate" or "originating" cause of his actions. He must be causa sui, in the traditional phrase. Being responsible for one's choices is the first cause of those choices, where first cause means that there is no antecedent cause of that cause. The argument, then, is that if man has free will, then man is the ultimate cause of his actions. If determinism is true, then all of man's choices are caused by events and facts outside his control. So, if everything man does is caused by events and facts outside his control, then he cannot be the ultimate cause of his actions. Therefore, he cannot have free will.[7][8][9] This argument has also been challenged by various compatibilist philosophers.[10][11] A third argument for incompatibilism was formulated by Carl Ginet in the 1960s and has received much attention in the modern literature. The simplified argument runs along these lines: if determinism is true, then we have no control over the events of the past that determined our present state and no control over the laws of nature. Since we can have no control over these matters, we also can have no control over the consequences of them. Since our present choices and acts, under determinism, are the necessary consequences of the past and the laws of nature, then we have no control over them and, hence, no free will. This is called the consequence argument.[12][13] Peter van Inwagen remarks that C.D. Broad had a version of the consequence argument as early as the 1930s.[14] The difficulty of this argument for some compatibilists lies in the fact that it entails the impossibility that one could have chosen other than one has. For example, if Jane is a compatibilist and she has just sat down on the sofa, then she is committed to the claim that she could have remained standing, if she had so desired. But it follows from the consequence argument that, if Jane had remained standing, she would have either generated a contradiction, violated the laws of nature or changed the past. Hence, compatibilists are committed to the existence of "incredible abilities", according to Ginet and van Inwagen. One response to this argument is that it equivocates on the notions of abilities and necessities, or that the free will evoked to make any given choice is really an illusion and the choice had been made all along, oblivious to its "decider".[13] David Lewis suggests that compatibilists are only committed to the ability to do something otherwise if different circumstances had actually obtained in the past.[15] Using T, F for "true" and "false" and ? for undecided, there are exactly nine positions regarding determinism/free will that consist of any two of these three possibilities:[16]

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Galen Strawson's table [16] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Determinism D T F T F T F ? ? ? Free will FW

F T T F ? ? F T ?

Incompatibilism may occupy any of the nine positions except (5), (8) or (3), which last corresponds to soft determinism. Position (1) is hard determinism,and position (2) is libertarianism. The position (1) of hard determinism adds to the table the contention that D implies FW is untrue, and the position (2) of libertarianism adds the contention that FW implies D is untrue. Position (9) may be called hard incompatibilism if one interprets ? as meaning both concepts are of dubious value. Compatibilism itself may occupy any of the nine positions, that is, there is no logical contradiction between determinism and free will, and either or both may be true or false in principle. However, the most common meaning attached to compatibilism is that some form of determinism is true and yet we have some form of free will, position (3).[17] Below these positions are examined in more detail.[16] Hard determinism Determinism is a broad term with a variety of meanings. Corresponding to each of these different meanings, there arises a different problem of free will.[18] Hard determinism is the claim that nomological determinism is true (see causal determinism below), and that it is incompatible with free will, so free will does not exist. Forms of determinism include: • Causal determinism, which states that future events are necessitated by past and present events combined with the laws of nature. Such determinism is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon. Imagine an entity that knows all facts about the past and the present, and knows all natural laws that govern the universe. If the laws of nature were determinate, then such an entity would be able to use this knowledge to foresee the future, down to the smallest detail.[19] • Logical determinism—the notion that all propositions, whether about the past, present or future, are either true or false. The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how choices can be free, given that what one does in the future is already determined as true or false in the present.[18] • Theological determinism is the idea that God determines all that humans do, either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience[17] or by decreeing their actions in advance.[20] The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how our actions can be free if there is a being who has determined them for us in advance. • Biological determinism is the idea that all behaviors, beliefs, and desires are fixed by our genetic endowment and our biochemical makeup, the latter of which is affected by both genes and environment. • Other forms of determinism include: cultural determinism and psychological determinism.[18] Combinations and syntheses of determinist theses, e.g. bio-environmental determinism, are even more common.

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Metaphysical Libertarianism Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical view point under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires that the agent be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances. Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and physical or naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that the events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation, which requires that the world is not closed under physics. Such interactionist dualists believe that some non-physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality. As consequent of incompatibilism, metaphysical libertarian explanations [21] that do not involve dispensing with Various definitions of free will that have been proposed, for both Compatibilism, and [22] [4] Incompatibilism (Hard Determinism, Hard Incompatibilism, Libertarianism physicalism require physical [23] [24] Traditional, and Libertarianism Volition ). Red circles represent mental states; indeterminism, such as probabilistic blue circles represent physical states; arrows describe causal interaction. subatomic particle behavior – theory unknown to many of the early writers on free will. Physical determinism, under the assumption of physicalism, implies there is only one possible future and is therefore not compatible with libertarian free will. Some libertarian explanations involve invoking panpsychism, the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both animate and inanimate entities. Other approaches do not require that free will be a fundamental constituent of the universe. Ordinary randomness is appealed to as supplying the "elbow room" that libertarians believe necessary. Models of volition have been constructed in which it is seen as a particular kind of complex, high-level process with an element of physical indeterminism. An example of this approach is that of Robert Kane,[24] where he hypothesizes that, In each case, the indeterminism is functioning as a hindrance or obstacle to her realizing one of her purposes—a hindrance or obstacle in the form of resistance within her will which must be overcome by effort. Although at the time quantum mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, in his book Miracles: A preliminary study C. S. Lewis stated the logical possibility that if the physical world were proved indeterministic this would provide an entry point to describe an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality.[25] Indeterministic physical models (particularly those involving quantum indeterminacy) introduce random occurrences at an atomic or subatomic level. These events might affect brain activity, and could seemingly allow incompatibilist free will if the apparent indeterminacy of some mental processes (for instance, subjective perceptions of control in conscious volition) map to the underlying indeterminacy of the physical construct.[24] This relationship however requires a causative role over probabilities that is questionable,[26] and it is far from established that brain

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activity responsible for human action can be affected by such events. Secondarily, these incompatibilist models are dependent upon the relationship between action and conscious volition, as studied in the neuroscience of free will. It is evident that observation may disturb the outcome of the observation itself, rendering limited our ability to identify causality: "...any observation necessitates an interference with the course of the phenomena, which is of such a nature that it deprives us of the foundation underlying the causal mode of description." –Neils Bohr: The Atomic Theory and the Fundamental Principles underlying the Description of Nature[27] Niels Bohr, one of the main architects of quantum theory, suggested however that no connection could be made between indeterminism of nature and freedom of will: "For instance, it is impossible, from our standpoint, to attach an unambiguous meaning to the view sometimes expressed that the probability of the occurrence of certain atomic processes in the body might be under the direct influence of the will. In fact, according to the generalized interpretation of the psycho-physical parallelism, the freedom of the will must be considered a feature of conscious life that corresponds to functions of the organism that not only evade a causal mechanical description, but resist even a physical analysis carried to the extent required for an unambiguous application of the statistical laws of atomic mechanics. Without entering into metaphysical speculations, I may perhaps add that an analysis of the very concept of explanation would, naturally, begin and end with a renunciation as to explaining our own conscious activity." Niels Bohr Light and Life[28] Hard incompatibilism Hard incompatibilism is defended by Derk Pereboom, who identifies a variety of positions where free will is seen irrelevant to indeterminism/determinism, among them the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Determinism (D) is true, D does not imply we lack free will (F), but in fact we do lack F. D is true, D does not imply we lack F, but in fact we don't know if we have F. D is true, and we do have F. D is true, we have F, and F implies D. D is unproven, but we have F. D isn't true, we do have F, and would have F even if D were true. D isn't true, we don't have F, but F is compatible with D. Derk Pereboom, Living without Free Will[4], p. xvi.

Pereboom calls positions 3 and 4 soft determinism, position 1 a form of hard determinism, position 6 a form of classical libertarianism, and any position that includes having F as compatibilism. He largely ignores position 2.[4] John Locke denied that the phrase "free will" made any sense (compare with theological noncognitivism, a similar stance on the existence of God). He also took the view that the truth of determinism was irrelevant. He believed that the defining feature of voluntary behavior was that individuals have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect or deliberate upon the consequences of a choice: "...the will in truth, signifies nothing but a power, or ability, to prefer or choose".[29] The contemporary philosopher Galen Strawson agrees with Locke that the truth or falsity of determinism is irrelevant to the problem.[30] He argues that the notion of free will leads to an infinite regress and is therefore senseless. According to Strawson, if one is responsible for what one does in a given situation, then one must be responsible for the way one is in certain mental respects. But it is impossible for one to be responsible for the way one is in any respect. This is because to be responsible in some situation S, one must have been responsible for the way one was at S−1. To be responsible for the way one was at S−1", one must have been responsible for the way one was at "S−2, and so on. At some point in the chain, there must have been an act of origination of a new causal chain. But this is impossible. Man cannot create himself or his mental states ex nihilo. This argument entails that free will

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itself is absurd, but not that it is incompatible with determinism. Strawson calls his own view "pessimism" but it can be classified as hard incompatibilism.[30]

Compatibilism Compatibilists maintain that determinism is compatible with free will. It may, however, be more accurate to say that compatibilists define "free will" in a way that allows it to co-exist with determinism (in the same way that incompatibilists define "free will" such that it cannot). Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in a situation for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics. For instance, courts of law make judgments about whether individuals are acting under their own free will under certain circumstances without bringing in metaphysics. Similarly, political liberty is a non-metaphysical concept. Likewise, compatibilists define free will as freedom to act according to one's determined motives without hindrance from other Thomas Hobbes was a classical compatibilist. individuals. So for example Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics,[31] and the [32] Stoic Chrysippus. In contrast, the incompatibilist positions are concerned with a sort of "metaphysically free will," which compatibilists claim has never been coherently defined. Compatibilists argue that determinism does not matter; what matters is that individuals' wills are the result of their own desires and are not overridden by some external force.[21][33] To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at odds with free will.[34] Although there are various impediments to exercising one's choices, free will does not imply freedom of action. Freedom of choice (freedom to select one's will) is logically separate from freedom to implement that choice (freedom to enact one's will), although not all writers observe this distinction: "Philosophers who distinguish freedom of action and freedom of will do so because our success in carrying out our ends depends in part on factors wholly beyond our control. Furthermore, there are always external constraints on the range of options we can meaningfully try to undertake. As the presence or absence of these conditions and constraints are not (usually) our responsibility, it is plausible that the central loci of our responsibility are our choices, or “willings.”" –Timothy O'Connor, Free will[35] Nonetheless, some philosophers have defined free will as the absence of various impediments. Some "modern compatibilists", such as Harry Frankfurt and Daniel Dennett, argue free will is simply freely choosing to do what constraints allow one to do. In other words, a coerced agent's choices are still free because such coercion coincides with the agent's personal intentions and desires.[6][36] Free will as lack of physical restraint Most "classical compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, claim that a person is acting on the person's own will only when it is the desire of that person to do the act, and also possible for the person to be able to do otherwise, if the person had decided to. Hobbes sometimes attributes such compatibilist freedom to each individual and not to some abstract notion of will, asserting, for example, that "no liberty can be inferred to the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe [sic]."[33] In articulating this crucial proviso, David Hume writes, "this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains".[21]

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Free will as a psychological state Thirteenth century philosopher Thomas Aquinas viewed humans as pre-programmed (by virtue of being human) to seek certain goals, but able to choose between routes to achieve these goals. In facing these choices, humans are governed by intellect, will, and passions. The will is "the primary mover of all the powers of the soul...and it it is also the efficient cause of motion in the body."[37] Choice falls into five stages: (i) intellectual consideration of whether an objective is desirable, (ii) intellectual consideration of means of attaining the objective, (iii) will arrives at an intent to pursue the objective, (iv) will and intellect jointly decide upon choice of means (v) will elects execution.[35] Free will enters as follows: Free-will is an "appetitive power", that is, not a cognitive power of intellect (the term "appetite" from Aquinas's definition "includes all forms of internal inclination.")[38] He states that judgment "concludes and terminates counsel. Now counsel is terminated, first, by the judgment of reason; secondly, by the acceptation of the appetite [that is, the free-will]."[39] Aquinas's compatabilist view is defended thus: "Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act. But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself, as neither for one thing to be cause of another need it be the first cause. God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary. And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature." Some explanations of free will focus on the internal causality of the mind with respect to higher-order brain processing – the interaction between conscious and unconscious brain activity. For example, the idea of causality as developed in our early life may be over-simple for application to complex system behavior: "The nonconcious forms of self-regulation may follow different causal principles and do not rely on the same resources as the conscious and effortful ones." Roy F Baumeister et al., Free Willpower: A limited resource theory of volition, choice and self-regulation[40] The notion of levels of decision is presented in a different manner by Frankfurt.[36] Frankfurt argues for a version of compatibilism called the "hierarchical mesh". The idea is that an individual can have conflicting desires at a first-order level and also have a desire about the various first-order desires (a second-order desire) to the effect that one of the desires prevails over the others. A person's will is identified with their effective first-order desire, i.e., the one they act on, and this will is free if it was the desire the person wanted to act upon, i.e., the person's second-order desire was effective. So, for example, there are "wanton addicts", "unwilling addicts" and "willing addicts." All three groups may have the conflicting first-order desires to want to take the drug they are addicted to and to not want to take it. The first group, wanton addicts, have no second-order desire not to take the drug. The second group, "unwilling addicts", have a second-order desire not to take the drug, while the third group, "willing addicts", have a second-order desire to take it. According to Frankfurt, the members of the first group devoid of will and therefore no longer persons. The members of the second group freely desire not to take the drug, but their will is overcome by the addiction. Finally, the members of the third group willingly take the drug they are addicted to. Frankfurt's theory can ramify to any number of levels. Critics of the theory point out that there is no certainty that conflicts will not arise even at the higher-order levels of desire and preference.[41] Others argue that Frankfurt offers no adequate explanation of how the various levels in the hierarchy mesh together.[42] Free will as unpredictability In Elbow Room, Dennett presents an argument for a compatibilist theory of free will, which he further elaborated in the book Freedom Evolves.[43] The basic reasoning is that, if one excludes God, an infinitely powerful demon, and other such possibilities, then because of chaos and epistemic limits on the precision of our knowledge of the current state of the world, the future is ill-defined for all finite beings. The only well-defined things are "expectations". The ability to do "otherwise" only makes sense when dealing with these expectations, and not with some unknown and

Free will unknowable future. According to Dennett, because individuals have the ability to act differently from what anyone expects, free will can exist.[43] Incompatibilists claim the problem with this idea is that we may be mere "automata responding in predictable ways to stimuli in our environment". Therefore, all of our actions are controlled by forces outside ourselves, or by random chance.[44] More sophisticated analyses of compatibilist free will have been offered, as have other critiques.[34] In the philosophy of decision theory, a fundamental question is: From the standpoint of statistical outcomes, to what extent do the choices of a conscious being have the ability to influence the future? Newcomb's paradox and other philosophical problems pose questions about free will and predictable outcomes of choices.

Other views Some philosophers' views are difficult to categorize as either compatibilist or incompatibilist, hard determinist or libertarian. For example, Ted Honderich holds the view that "determinism is true, compatibilism and incompatibilism are both false" and the real problem lies elsewhere. Honderich maintains that determinism is true because quantum phenomena are not events or things that can be located in space and time, but are abstract entities. Further, even if they were micro-level events, they do not seem to have any relevance to how the world is at the macroscopic level. He maintains that incompatibilism is false because, even if indeterminism is true, incompatibilists have not provided, and cannot provide, an adequate account of origination. He rejects compatibilism because it, like incompatibilism, assumes a single, fundamental notion of freedom. There are really two notions of freedom: voluntary action and origination. Both notions are required to explain freedom of will and responsibility. Both determinism and indeterminism are threats to such freedom. To abandon these notions of freedom would be to abandon moral responsibility. On the one side, we have our intuitions; on the other, the scientific facts. The "new" problem is how to resolve this conflict.[45] Two-stage models In 1884 William James described a two-stage model of free will: in the first stage the mind develops random alternative possibilities for action, and in the second an adequately determined will selects one option. A number of other thinkers have since refined this idea, including Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, Karl Popper, Henry Margenau, Robert Kane, Alfred Mele, and Martin Heisenberg. Each of these models tries to reconcile libertarian free will with the existence of irreducible chance (today in the form of quantum indeterminacy), which threatens to make an agent's decision random, thus denying the control needed for responsibility. If a single event is caused by chance, then logically indeterminism would be "true." For centuries, philosophers have said this would undermine the very possibility of certain knowledge. Some go to the extreme of saying that real chance would make the whole state of the world totally independent of any earlier states. Some Stoics are reported to have said that a single uncaused cause could destroy the universe (cosmos), "Everything that happens is followed by something else which depends on it by causal necessity. Likewise, everything that happens is preceded by something with which it is causally connected. For nothing exists or has come into being in the cosmos without a cause. The universe will be disrupted and disintegrate into pieces and cease to be a unity functioning as a single system, if any uncaused movement is introduced into it."[46] James said most philosophers have an "antipathy to chance."[47] His contemporary John Fiske described the absurd decisions that would be made if chance were real,

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89 "If volitions arise without cause, it necessarily follows that we cannot infer from them the character of the antecedent states of feeling. .. . The mother may strangle her first-born child, the miser may cast his long-treasured gold into the sea, the sculptor may break in pieces his lately-finished statue, in the presence of no other feelings than those which before led them to cherish, to hoard, and to create."[48]

In modern times, J. J. C. Smart has described the problem of admitting indeterminism, "Indeterminism does not confer freedom on us: I would feel that my freedom was impaired if I thought that a quantum mechanical trigger in my brain might cause me to leap into the garden and eat a slug."[49] Terence McKenna would disagree with J.J.C. Smart. Terence McKenna thought biological systems were a chemical strategy of amplifying of quantum mechanical indeterminacy to such a degree that freedom, true freedom, shimmers into existence at the macrophysical level.[50] The challenge for two-stage models is to admit some indeterminism but not permit it to produce random actions, as determinists fear. And of course a model must limit determinism but not eliminate it as some libertarians think necessary. Two-stage models limit the contribution of random chance to the generation of alternative possibilities for action. But note that, in recent years, compatibilist analytic philosophers following Harry Frankfurt have denied the existence of alternative possibilities. They develop "Frankfurt-type examples" (thought experiments) in which they argue an agent is free even though no alternative possibilities exist, or the agent is prevented at the last moment by neuroscientific demons from "doing otherwise."[51][36] Free will as an illusion “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” B de Spinoza Ethics[52] David Hume discussed the possibility that the entire debate about free will is nothing more than a merely "verbal" issue. He suggested that it might be accounted for by "a false sensation or seeming experience" (a velleity), which is associated with many of our actions when we perform them. On reflection, we realize that they were necessary and determined all along.[53]

Spinoza thought that there is no free will.

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Arthur Schopenhauer put the puzzle of free will and moral responsibility in these terms: Everyone believes himself, a priori, perfectly free—even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life. ... But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns...[54] Arthur Schopenhauer claimed that

In his essay On the Freedom of the Will, Schopenhauer stated, "You can do what phenomena have no free will, but the you will, but in any given moment of your life you can will only one definite will as noumenon is free. thing and absolutely nothing other than that one thing."[55] According to Schopenhauer, phenomena do not have free will. However, will [urging, craving, striving, wanting, and desiring] as noumenon is free. Free will as "moral imagination" Rudolf Steiner, who collaborated in a complete edition of Arthur Schopenhauer's work,[56] wrote The Philosophy of Freedom, which focuses on the problem of free will. Steiner (1861–1925) initially divides this into the two aspects of freedom: freedom of thought and freedom of action. The controllable and uncontrollable aspects of decision making thereby are made logically separable, as pointed out in the introduction. This separation of will from action has a very long history, going back at least as far as Stoicism and the teachings of Chrysippus (279 – 206 BC), who separated external antecedent causes from the internal disposition receiving this cause.[57] Steiner then argues that inner freedom is achieved when we bridge the gap between our sensory impressions, which reflect the outer appearance of the world, and our thoughts, which give us access to the inner nature of the world. Acknowledging the many influences on our choice, he points to the impact of our becoming aware of just these determinants. Outer freedom is attained by permeating our deeds with moral imagination. Steiner aims to show that these two aspects of inner and outer freedom are integral to one another, and that true freedom is only achieved when they are united.[58] Free will as a pragmatically useful concept William James' views were ambivalent. While he believed in free will on "ethical grounds," he did not believe that there was evidence for it on scientific grounds, nor did his own introspections support it.[59] Moreover, he did not accept incompatibilism as formulated below; he did not believe that the indeterminism of human actions was a prerequisite of moral responsibility. In his work Pragmatism, he wrote that "instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" regardless of metaphysical theories.[60] He did believe that indeterminism is important as a "doctrine of relief"—it allows for the view that, although the world may be in many respects a bad place, it may, through individuals' actions, become a better one. Determinism, he argued, undermines meliorism—the idea that progress is a real concept leading to improvement in the world.[60]

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Free will and variations of causality Freeman introduces what he calls "circular causality" to "allow for the contribution of self-organizing dynamics", the "formation of macroscopic population dynamics that shapes the patterns of activity of the contributing individuals", applicable to "interactions between neurons and neural masses...and between the behaving animal and its environment": "Circular causality departs so strongly from the classical tenets of necessity, invariance, and precise temporal order that the only reason to call it that is to satisfy the human habitual need for causes....The very strong appeal of agency to explain events may come from the subjective experience of cause and effect that develops early in human life, before the acquisition of language...the question I raise here is whether brains share this property with other material objects in the world. " (Walter J. Freeman, Consciousness, intentionality and causality[61]) In this view, mind and neurological functions are tightly coupled in a situation where feedback between collective actions (mind) and individual subsystems (for example, neurons and their synapses) jointly decide upon the behavior of both. The adjective "circular" in "circular causality" is intended to separate this interactive causation from simple stimulus-response and to express an extension of traditional feedback theory to cases where no obvious feedback loops can be identified.[62] An analogy is drawn between mind and some emergent behavior seen in inanimate nature, such as Rayleigh–Bénard convection. Futhermore, observations suggest the possibility that "free will" and neurology inhabit different realms, and it is confusion to try to explain "free will" using a neurological approach:[63] "Epistemically, the mind is determined by mental states, which are accessible in First-Person Perspective. In contrast, the brain, as characterized by neuronal states, can be accessed in Third-Person Perspective. The Third-Person Perspective focuses on other persons and thus on the neuronal states of others' brain while excluding the own brain. In contrast, the First-Person Perspective could potentially provide epistemic access to own brain...However, the First-Person Perspective provides access only to the own mental states but not to the own brain and its neuronal states." –Georg Northoff, Philosophy of the Brain: The Brain Problem, p. 5[63]

The mind-body problem The idea of free will is one aspect of the mind-body problem, that is, consideration of the relation between mind (for example, consciousness, memory, and judgment) and body (for example, the human brain and nervous system). Philosophical models of mind are divided into physical and non-physical expositions. Cartesian dualism held that the mind is a nonphysical substance, the seat of consciousness and intelligence, and raised the question of how mind and body interact. It is suggested that although the two worlds do interact, each retains some measure of autonomy. Of course, unconscious brain activity often is caused by external events, for example, the instantaneous reaction to being burned. Under Cartesian dualism, however, it also occurs that external mind is René Descartes responsible for bodily action.[64] Cartesian dualism implies a form of physical indeterminism in which external mind controls (at least some) physical events, providing an interpretation of incompatibilist free will. Stemming from Cartesian dualism, a formulation sometimes called interactionalist dualism suggests a two-way interaction, that some physical events cause some mental acts and some mental acts cause some physical events. One modern vision of the possible separation of mind and body is the "three-world" formulation of Popper.[65] Cartesian dualism and Popper's three worlds are two forms of what is called epistemological pluralism, that is the notion that

Free will different epistemological methodologies are necessary to attain a full description of the world. Epistemological pluralism is one view in which the mind-body problem is not reducible to the concepts of the natural sciences. A contrasting approach is called cognitive naturalism,[66] in which mind is simply part of nature, perhaps merely a feature of many very complex self-programming feedback systems (for example, neural networks and cognitive robots), and so must be studied by the methods of empirical science, for example, behavioral Some areas of the human brain implicated in mental disorders that might be related to free science and the cognitive sciences like will. Area 25 refers to Brodmann's area 25, related to long-term depression. neuroscience and cognitive psychology.[64][67] Cognitive naturalism stresses the role of neurological sciences. Overall brain health, substance dependence, depression, and various personality disorders clearly influence mental activity, and their impact upon volition also is important.[40] For example, an addict may experience a conscious desire to escape addiction, but be unable to do so. The "will" is disconnected from the freedom to act. This situation is related to an abnormal production and distribution of dopamine in the brain.[68] Incompatibilism requires a distinction between the mental and the physical, being a commentary on the incompatibility of (determined) physical reality and one's presumably distinct experience of will. Although substance dualism offers such a distinction, a less extreme form of naturalism known as non-reductive physicalism may also suffice. Although one might suppose that mental states and neurological states are different in kind, that does not rule out the possibility that mental states correspond to neurological states. Under non-reductive physicalism, although physical states do cause mental states, they are not ontologically reducible to them. In one such construction, anomalous monism, mental events supervene on physical events, describing the emergence of mental properties as correspondent to physical properties - implying what is known as "causal reducibility". Non-reductive physicalism is therefore often categorised as property dualism rather than monism, yet other types of property dualism exist which do not adhere to the causal reducibility of mental states - such as epiphenomenalism.

In science Physics Early scientific thought often portrayed the universe as deterministic – for example in the thought of Democritus or the Cārvākans – and some thinkers claimed that the simple process of gathering sufficient information would allow them to predict future events with perfect accuracy. Modern science, on the other hand, is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories.[69] Quantum mechanics predicts events only in terms of probabilities, casting doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all. Current physical theories cannot resolve the question of whether determinism is true of the world, being very far from a potential Theory of Everything, and open to many different interpretations.[70][71]

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Assuming that an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, one may still object that such indeterminism is for all practical purposes confined to microscopic phenomena.[73] This is not always the case: many macroscopic phenomena are based on quantum effects. For instance, some hardware random number generators work by amplifying quantum effects into practically usable signals. A more significant question is whether the indeterminism of quantum mechanics allows for the traditional idea of free will (based on a perception of free will). If a person's action is however only result of complete quantum randomness, and mental processes as experienced have no influence on the probabilistic outcomes (e.g. volition),[24] this in itself would mean that such traditional free will does not exist (because the action was not controllable by the physical being who claims to possess the free will).[74]

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Quantum mechanics defines probabilities to predict the behavior of particles, "rather than determining the future and past with certainty". Because the human brain is composed of particles, and their behavior is governed by the laws of nature, Stephen Hawking says that free will is "just an [72] illusion".

Under the assumption of physicalism it has been argued that the laws of quantum mechanics provide a complete probabilistic account of the motion of particles, regardless of whether or not free will exists.[75] Physicist Stephen Hawking describes such ideas in his 2010 book The Grand Design. According to Hawking, these findings from quantum mechanics suggest that humans are sorts of complicated biological machines; although our behavior is impossible to predict perfectly in practice, "free will is just an illusion."[76] In other words, Hawking thinks that only compatibilistic (deterministic) free will is possible based on the data. Erwin Schrödinger, a nobel laureate in physics and one of the founders of quantum mechanics, came to a different conclusion than Hawking. Near the end of his 1944 essay titled What Is Life? he says that there is "incontrovertible direct experience" that humans have free will. He also states that the human body is wholly or at least partially determined, leading him to conclude that "...'I' -am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature." He explains this position on free will by appealing to a notion of self that is emergent from the entire collection of atoms in his body, and other convictions about conscious experience. However, he also qualifies the conclusion as "necessarily subjective" in its "philosophical implications." Contrasting the views of Hawking and Schrödinger, it is clear that even among eminent physicists there is not unanimity regarding free will.

Genetics Like physicists, biologists have frequently addressed questions related to free will. One of the most heated debates in biology is that of "nature versus nurture", concerning the relative importance of genetics and biology as compared to culture and environment in human behavior.[77] The view of many researchers is that many human behaviors can be explained in terms of humans' brains, genes, and evolutionary histories.[78][79][80] This point of view raises the fear that such attribution makes it impossible to hold others responsible for their actions. Steven Pinker's view is that fear of determinism in the context of "genetics" and "evolution" is a mistake, that it is "a confusion of explanation with exculpation". Responsibility doesn't require that behavior be uncaused, as long as behavior responds to praise and blame.[81] Moreover, it is not certain that environmental determination is any less threatening to free will than genetic determination.[82]

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Neuroscience It has become possible to study the living brain, and researchers can now watch the brain's decision-making process at work. A seminal experiment in this field was conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s, in which he asked each subject to choose a random moment to flick her wrist while he measured the associated activity in her brain; in particular, the build-up of electrical signal called the readiness potential (after German Bereitschaftspotential). Although it was well known that the readiness potential caused and preceded the physical action, Libet asked whether it could be recorded before the conscious intention to move. To determine when subjects felt the intention to move, he asked them to watch the second hand of a clock. After making a movement, the volunteer reported the time on the clock when they first felt the conscious intention to move; this became known as Libet's W time.[83] Libet found that the unconscious brain activity of the readiness potential leading up to subjects' movements began approximately half a second before the subject was aware of a conscious intention to move.[83][84] These studies of the timing between actions and the conscious decision bear upon the role of the brain in understanding free will. A subject's declaration of intention to move a finger appears after the brain has begun to implement the action, suggesting to some that unconsciously the brain has made the decision before the conscious mental act to do so. Some believe the implication is that free will was not involved in the decision and is an illusion. The first of these experiments reported the brain registered activity related to the move about 0.2 s before movement onset.[85] However, these authors also found that awareness of action was anticipatory to activity in the muscle underlying the movement; the entire process resulting in action involves more steps than just the onset of brain activity. The bearing of these results upon notions of free will appears complex.[86][87] Some argue that placing the question of free will in the context of motor control is too narrow. The objection is that the time scales involved in motor control are very short, and motor control involves a great deal of unconscious action, with much physical movement entirely unconscious. On that basis "...free will cannot be squeezed into time frames of 150–350 ms; free will is a longer term phenomenon" and free will is a higher level activity that "cannot be captured in a description of neural activity or of muscle activation..." [88] The bearing of timing experiments upon free will is still under discussion. More studies have since been conducted, including some that try to: • • • •

support Libet's original findings suggest that the cancelling or "veto" of an action may first arise subconsciously as well explain the underlying brain structures involved suggest models that explain the relationship between conscious intention and action

Neurology and psychiatry In several brain-related conditions, individuals cannot entirely control their own actions. Though the existence of such conditions does not directly refute the existence of free will, the study of such conditions, like the neuroscientific studies above, is valuable in developing models of how the brain may construct our experience of free will. For example, people with Tourette syndrome and related tic disorders make involuntary movements and utterances, called tics, despite the fact that they would prefer not to do so when it is socially inappropriate. Tics are described as semi-voluntary or "unvoluntary",[89] because they are not strictly involuntary: they may be experienced as a voluntary response to an unwanted, premonitory urge. Tics are experienced as irresistible and must eventually be expressed.[89] People with Tourette syndrome are sometimes able to suppress their tics for limited periods, but doing so often results in an explosion of tics afterward. The control exerted (from seconds to hours at a time) may merely postpone and exacerbate the ultimate expression of the tic.[90] In alien hand syndrome, the afflicted individual's limb will produce meaningful behaviors without the intention of the subject. The affected limb effectively demonstrates 'a will of its own.' The sense of agency does not emerge in

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Free will conjunction with the overt appearance of the purposeful act even though the sense of ownership in relationship to the body part is maintained. This phenomenon corresponds with an impairment in the premotor mechanism manifested temporally by the appearance of the readiness potential (see section on the Neuroscience of Free Will above) recordable on the scalp several hundred milliseconds before the overt appearance of a spontaneous willed movement. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging with specialized multivariate analyses to study the temporal dimension in the activation of the cortical network associated with voluntary movement in human subjects, an anterior-to-posterior sequential activation process beginning in the supplementary motor area on the medial surface of the frontal lobe and progressing to the primary motor cortex and then to parietal cortex has been observed.[91] The sense of agency thus appears to normally emerge in conjunction with this orderly sequential network activation incorporating premotor association cortices together with primary motor cortex. In particular, the supplementary motor complex on the medial surface of the frontal lobe appears to activate prior to primary motor cortex presumably in associated with a preparatory pre-movement process. In a recent study using functional magnetic resonance imaging, alien movements were characterized by a relatively isolated activation of the primary motor cortex contralateral to the alien hand, while voluntary movements of the same body part included the concomitant activation of motor association cortex associated with the premotor process.[92] The clinical definition requires "feeling that one limb is foreign or has a will of its own, together with observable involuntary motor activity" (emphasis in original).[93] This syndrome is often a result of damage to the corpus callosum, either when it is severed to treat intractable epilepsy or due to a stroke. The standard neurological explanation is that the felt will reported by the speaking left hemisphere does not correspond with the actions performed by the non-speaking right hemisphere, thus suggesting that the two hemispheres may have independent senses of will.[94][95] Similarly, one of the most important ("first rank") diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia is the delusion of being controlled by an external force.[96] People with schizophrenia will sometimes report that, although they are acting in the world, they did not initiate, or will, the particular actions they performed. This is sometimes likened to being a robot controlled by someone else. Although the neural mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet clear, one influential hypothesis is that there is a breakdown in brain systems that compare motor commands with the feedback received from the body (known as proprioception), leading to attendant hallucinations and delusions of control.[97]

Determinism and emergent behavior The notion of emergence refers to cooperative system-wide responses, best understood on a global basis rather than one of individual components.[98] This idea has wide application, including that to societal structures and to the brain itself.[99] There are several schools of thought regarding emergence, and these have implications for free will. The school of strong emergence takes the view that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and suggest a downward causation is possible, that is, phenomena at a larger-scale level of organization can exert causal influence on a smaller-scale level. From this stance, the mind is an emergent property of the brain that can control the brain itself, and free will is one such phenomenon. Opposite views are nominal emergence and weak emergence. Both deny the possibility of downward causation and see emergence as an expression of events that fundamentally are microscopically generated.[100] The difference between nominal and weak emergence is only in the complexity of the connection to the underlying microscopic behavior.[101] In some generative philosophies of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, free will is assumed not to exist.[102][103] However, an illusion of free will is created, within this theoretical context, due to the generation of infinite or computationally complex behavior from the interaction of a finite set of rules and parameters. Thus, the unpredictability of the emerging behavior from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity is assumed not to exist.[102][103] In this picture, even if the behavior could be computed ahead of time, no way of doing so is simpler than just observing the outcome of the brain's own computations.[104]

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As an illustration, some strategy board games have rigorous rules in which no information (such as cards' face values) is hidden from either player and no random events (such as dice rolling) occur in the game. Nevertheless, strategy games like chess and especially Go, with its simple deterministic rules, can have an extremely large number of unpredictable moves. By analogy, "emergentists" suggest that the experience of free will emerges from the interaction of finite rules and deterministic parameters that generate infinite and unpredictable behavior. Yet, if all these events were accounted for, and there were a known way to evaluate these events, the seemingly unpredictable behavior would become predictable.[105][103][106] This is already true of chess, which is completely predictable (i.e. solved by computation). Cellular automata and the generative sciences can model emergent processes of social behavior on this philosophy.[102] In their book The Grand Design[107] Hawking and Mlodinow suggest a thought experiment in which one encounters an alien that may be a robot: "... how can one tell if it is just a robot or it has a mind of its own? The behavior of a robot would be completely determined, unlike that of a being with free will. Thus one could in principle detect a robot as a being whose actions can be predicted. ... [however] ... even if the alien were a robot, it would be impossible to solve the equations and predict what it would do [because of the complexity of such a creature]. We would therefore have to say that any complex being has free will – not as a fundamental feature, but as an effective theory, an admission of our inability do the calculations that would enable us to predict its actions. (p. 178)" Today robots can be made that adapt their responses to their environment through self-programming, so-called intelligent robots. Much of the description of these machines seems parallel to human behavior, although technology has still not reached sufficient complexity to make a strong case for the similarities.[108] "Some people think that consciousness can arise only in organic, of flesh-and-blood beings. Others speculate that self-awareness might develop in any sufficiently complex network that is set up to operate like a brain...Could a conscious robot – a being created by humans and not by God – ever be said to have a soul? "[109] Is such a machine deterministic? We cannot predict the machine's exact behavior without a complete knowledge of its personal history with its environment, the reliability of its components, and its present state of programming, uncertainties in which limit us to probabilistic statements. Groups of cooperating robots also are envisioned: "The interaction of multiple behavioral robots can be regarded as a continuum between two diverse types of behavior. At one extreme, the behavior can regarded as being egoistic, where a robot is concerned purely with self directed behavior, e.g. energy conservation. At the other extreme their behavior can be regarded as being altruistic, e.g. when a group of robots need to work together to perform some common task."[110] One can conjecture that some such groups could evolve following a Darwinian scheme, not only an interest of engineers,[111] but a recurrent topic of science fiction.[112] "The marvels accomplished by evolution inspired many researchers with the long term goal of automatically designing and even manufacturing complete robotics "lifeforms" with as little human intervention as possible." (Doncieux et al., §1.4.4 p. 12[111])

Experimental psychology Experimental psychology's contributions to the free will debate have come primarily through social psychologist Daniel Wegner's work on conscious will. In his book, The Illusion of Conscious Will[113] Wegner summarizes what he believes is empirical evidence supporting the view that human perception of conscious control is an illusion. Wegner summarizes some empirical evidence that may suggest that the perception of conscious control is open to modification (or even manipulation). Wegner observes that one event is inferred to have caused a second event when two requirements are met:

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1. The first event immediately precedes the second event, and 2. The first event is consistent with having caused the second event. For example, if a person hears an explosion and sees a tree fall down that person is likely to infer that the explosion caused the tree to fall over. However, if the explosion occurs after the tree falls down (i.e., the first requirement is not met), or rather than an explosion, the person hears the ring of a telephone (i.e., the second requirement is not met), then that person is not likely to infer that either noise caused the tree to fall down. Wegner has applied this principle to the inferences people make about their own conscious will. People typically experience a thought that is consistent with a behavior, and then they observe themselves performing this behavior. As a result, people infer that their thoughts must have caused the observed behavior. However, Wegner has been able to manipulate people's thoughts and behaviors so as to conform to or violate the two requirements for causal inference.[113][114] Through such work, Wegner has been able to show that people often experience conscious will over behaviors that they have not, in fact, caused—and conversely, that people can be led to experience a lack of will over behaviors they did cause. For instance, priming subjects with information about an effect increases the probability that a person falsely believes is the cause.[115] The implication for such work is that the perception of conscious will (which he says might be more accurately labelled as 'the emotion of authorship') is not tethered to the execution of actual behaviors, but is inferred from various cues through an intricate mental process, authorship processing. Although many interpret this work as a blow against the argument for free will, both psychologists[116][117] and philosophers[118][119] have criticized Wegner's theories. Emily Pronin has argued that the subjective experience of free will is supported by the introspection illusion. This is the tendency for people to trust the reliability of their own introspections while distrusting the introspections of other people. The theory implies that people will more readily attribute free will to themselves rather than others. This prediction has been confirmed by three of Pronin and Kugler's experiments. When college students were asked about personal decisions in their own and their roommate's lives, they regarded their own choices as less predictable. Staff at a restaurant described their co-workers' lives as more determined (having fewer future possibilities) than their own lives. When weighing up the influence of different factors on behavior, students gave desires and intentions the strongest weight for their own behavior, but rated personality traits as most predictive of other people.[120] Psychologists have shown that reducing a person's belief in free will makes them less helpful and more aggressive.[121] This may occur because the subject loses a sense of Self-efficacy. Caveats have however been identified in studying a subject's awareness of mental events: "...it is important to be clear about exactly what experience one wants one's subjects to introspect. Of course, explaining to subjects exactly what the experimenter wants them to experience can bring its own problems–...instructions to attend to a particular internally generated experience can easily alter both the timing and the content of that experience and even whether or not it is consciously experienced at all." –Susan Pockett, The neuroscience of movement[122]

Believing in free will In recent years, free will belief in individuals has been analysed with respect to traits in social behaviour. In general the concept of free will researched to date in this context has been that of the incompatabilist, or more specifically, the libertarian, i.e. freedom from determinism. What people believe Whether people naturally adhere to an incompatibilist model of free will has been questioned in the research. Eddy Nahmias has found that incompatibilism is not intuitive – it was not adhered to, in that determinism does not negate belief in moral responsibility (based on an empirical study of people's responses to moral dilemmas under a deterministic model of reality).[123] Edward Cokely has found that incompatibilism is intuitive – it was naturally adhered to, in that determinism does indeed negate belief in moral responsibility in general.[124] Joshua Knobe and

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Shaun Nichols have proposed that incompatibilism may or may not be intuitive, and that it is dependent to some large degree upon the circumstances; whether or not the crime incites an emotional response – for example if it involves harming another human being.[125] They found that belief in free will is a cultural universal, and that the majority of participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism.[126] Studies indicate that peoples' belief in free will is inconsistent. Emily Pronin and Matthew Kugler found that people believe they have more free will than others.[127] Studies also reveal a correlation between someone's likelihood of accepting a deterministic model of mind, and their personality type. For example, Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely found that people of an extrovert personality type are more likely to dissociate belief in determinism from belief in moral responsibility.[128] Roy Baumeister and colleagues reviewed literature on the psychological effects of a belief (or disbelief) in free will. The first part of their analysis (which is all that we are concerned with here) was not meant to discover which types of free will actually exist. The researchers instead sought to identify what other people believe, how many people believed it, and the effects of those beliefs. Baumeister found that most people tend to believe in a sort of "naive compatibilistic free will".[129][130] The researchers also found that people consider acts more "free" when they involve a person opposing external forces, planning, or making random actions.[131] Notably, the last behaviour, "random" actions, may not be possible; when participants attempt to perform tasks in a random manner (such as generating random numbers), their behaviour betrays many patterns.[132][133] Effects of the belief itself “An alternative explanation builds on the idea that subjects tend to confuse determinism with fatalism... What happens then when agents’ self-efficacy is undermined? It is not that their basic desires and drives are defeated. It is rather, I suggest, that they become skeptical that they can control those desires; and in the face of that skepticism, they fail to apply the effort that is needed even to try. If they were tempted to behave badly, then coming to believe in fatalism makes them less likely to resist that temptation.” [134]

—Richard Holton

Baumeister and colleagues found that provoking disbelief in free will seems to cause various negative effects. The authors concluded, in their paper, that it is belief in determinism that causes those negative effects.[129] This may not be a very justified conclusion, however.[134] First of all, free will can at least refer to either libertarian (indeterministic) free will or compatibilistic (deterministic) free will. Having participants read articles that simply "disprove free will" is unlikely to increase their understanding of determinism, or the compatibilistic free will that it still permits.[134] In other words, "provoking disbelief in free will" probably causes a belief in fatalism. As discussed earlier in this article, compatibilistic free will is illustrated by statements like "my choices have causes, and an effect – so I affect my future", whereas fatalism is more like "my choices have causes, but no effect – I am powerless". Fatalism, then, may be what threatens people's sense of self-efficacy. Lay people should not confuse fatalism with determinism, and yet even professional philosophers occasionally confuse the two. It is thus likely that the negative consequences below can be accounted for by participants developing a belief in fatalism when experiments attack belief in "free will".[134] To test the effects of belief in determinism, future studies would need to provide articles that do not simply "attack free will", but instead focus on explaining determinism and compatibilism. Some studies have been conducted indicating that people react strongly to the way in which mental determinism is described, when reconciling it with moral responsibility. Eddy Nahmias has noted that when peoples actions are framed with respect to their beliefs and desires (rather than their neurological underpinnings) they are more likely to dissociate determinism from moral responsibility.[135] Various social behavioural traits have been correlated with the belief in deterministic models of mind, some of which involved the experimental subjection of individuals to libertarian and deterministic perspectives.

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After researchers provoked volunteers to disbelieve in free will, participants lied, cheated, and stole more. Kathleen Vohs has found that those whose belief in free will had been eroded were more likely to cheat.[136] In a study conducted by Roy Baumeister, after participants read an article disproving free will, they were more likely to lie about their performance on a test where they would be rewarded with cash.[137] Provoking a rejection of free will has also been associated with increased aggression and less helpful behaviour[138][139] as well as mindless conformity.[140] Disbelief in free will can even cause people to feel less guilt about transgressions against others.[141] Baumeister and colleagues also note that volunteers disbelieving in free will are less capable of counterfactual thinking.[129][142] This is worrying because counterfactual thinking ("If I had done something different...") is an important part of learning from one's choices, including those that harmed others.[143] Again, this cannot be taken to mean that belief in determinism is to blame; these are the results we would expect from increasing people's belief in fatalism.[134] Along similar lines, Tyler Stillman has found that belief in free will predicts better job performance.[144]

In Eastern philosophy In Hindu philosophy The six orthodox (astika) schools of thought in Hindu philosophy do not agree with each other entirely on the question of free will. For the Samkhya, for instance, matter is without any freedom, and soul lacks any ability to control the unfolding of matter. The only real freedom (kaivalya) consists in realizing the ultimate separateness of matter and self.[145] For the Yoga school, only Ishvara is truly free, and its freedom is also distinct from all feelings, thoughts, actions, or wills, and is thus not at all a freedom of will. The metaphysics of the Nyaya and Vaisheshika schools strongly suggest a belief in determinism, but do not seem to make explicit claims about determinism or free will.[146] A quotation from Swami Vivekananda, a Vedantist, offers a good example of the worry about free will in the Hindu tradition. Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space and causality. ... To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here.[147] However, the preceding quote has often been misinterpreted as Vivekananda implying that everything is predetermined. What Vivekananda actually meant by lack of free will was that the will was not "free" because it was heavily influenced by the law of cause and effect—"The will is not free, it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect, but there is something behind the will which is free."[147] Vivekananda never said things were absolutely determined and placed emphasis on the power of conscious choice to alter one's past karma: "It is the coward and the fool who says this is his fate. But it is the strong man who stands up and says I will make my own fate."[147]

In Buddhist philosophy Buddhism accepts both freedom and determinism (or something similar to it), but rejects the idea of an agent, and thus the idea that freedom is a free will belonging to an agent.[148] According to the Buddha, "There is free action, there is retribution, but I see no agent that passes out from one set of momentary elements into another one, except the [connection] of those elements."[148] Buddhists believe in neither absolute free will, nor determinism. It preaches a middle doctrine, named pratitya-samutpada in Sanskrit, which is often translated as "inter-dependent arising". This theory is also called "Conditioned Genesis" or "Dependent Origination". It teaches that every volition is a conditioned action as a result of ignorance. In part, it states that free will is inherently conditioned and not "free" to begin with. It is also part of the theory of karma in Buddhism. The concept of karma in Buddhism is different from the notion of karma in Hinduism. In Buddhism, the idea of karma is much less deterministic. The Buddhist notion of

Free will karma is primarily focused on the cause and effect of moral actions in this life, while in Hinduism the concept of karma is more often connected with determining one's destiny in future lives. In Buddhism it is taught that the idea of absolute freedom of choice (i.e. that any human being could be completely free to make any choice) is unwise, because it denies the reality of one's physical needs and circumstances. Equally incorrect is the idea that humans have no choice in life or that their lives are pre-determined. To deny freedom would be to deny the efforts of Buddhists to make moral progress (through our capacity to freely choose compassionate action). Pubbekatahetuvada, the belief that all happiness and suffering arise from previous actions, is considered a wrong view according to Buddhist doctrines. Because Buddhists also reject agenthood, the traditional compatibilist strategies are closed to them as well. Instead, the Buddhist philosophical strategy is to examine the metaphysics of causality. Ancient India had many heated arguments about the nature of causality with Jains, Nyayists, Samkhyists, Cārvākans, and Buddhists all taking slightly different lines. In many ways, the Buddhist position is closer to a theory of "conditionality" than a theory of "causality", especially as it is expounded by Nagarjuna in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.[148]

In other theology The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will, particularly in Reformed circles—for if God knows exactly what will happen, right down to every choice, that calls into questions the status of choices as free. If God has timelessly true knowledge about one's choices, this seems to constrain individual freedom.[149] This problem is related to the Aristotelian problem of the sea battle: tomorrow there will or will not be a sea battle. If there will be one, then it seems that it was true yesterday that there would be one. Then it would be necessary that the sea battle will occur. If there won't be one, then by similar reasoning, it is necessary that it won't occur.[150] This means that the future, whatever it is, is completely fixed by past truths—true propositions about the future. However, some philosophers follow William of Ockham in holding that necessity and possibility are defined with respect to a given point in time and a given matrix of empirical circumstances, and so something that is merely possible from the perspective of one observer may be necessary from the perspective of an omniscient.[151] Some philosophers follow Philo of Alexandria, a philosopher known for his homocentrism, in holding that free will is a feature of a human's soul, and thus that non-human animals lack free will.[152] Some views in Jewish philosophy stress that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using the word neshama (from the Hebrew root n.sh.m. or .‫מ‬.‫ש‬.‫ נ‬meaning "breath"), but the ability to make a free choice is through Yechida (from Hebrew word "yachid", ‫יחיד‬, singular), the part of the soul that is united with God, the only being that is not hindered by or dependent on cause and effect (thus, freedom of will does not belong to the realm of the physical reality, and inability of natural philosophy to account for it is expected). While there are other views of free will in Judaism, most share the same basic Kabbalah principles. In Islam the theological issue is not usually how to reconcile free will with God's foreknowledge, but with God's jabr, or divine commanding power. al-Ash'ari developed an "acquisition" or "dual-agency" form of compatibilism, in which human free will and divine jabr were both asserted, and which became a cornerstone of the dominant Ash'ari position.[153] In Shia Islam, Ash'aris understanding of a higher balance toward predestination is challenged by most theologians.[154] Free will, according to Islamic doctrine is the main factor for man's accountability in his/her actions throughout life. Actions taken by people exercising free will are counted on the Day of Judgement because they are their own, however the free will happens with the permission of God[155] . The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard claimed that divine omnipotence cannot be separated from divine goodness.[156] As a truly omnipotent and good being, God could create beings with true freedom over God. Furthermore, God would voluntarily do so because "the greatest good ... which can be done for a being, greater than anything else that one can do for it, is to be truly free."[157] Alvin Plantinga's "free will defense" is a contemporary expansion of this theme, adding how God, free will, and evil are consistent.[158]

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References [1] See, for example, Janet Richards (2001). "The root of the free will problem: kinds of non-existence" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=6KZ1NZmDGCEC& pg=PT152& lpg=PT152). Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction. Routledge. pp. 142 ff. ISBN 041521243X. . [2] Robert C Bishop (2010). "§28.2: Compatibilism and incompatibilism" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=BhcpiZN2MOIC& pg=PA603& lpg=PA603). In Raymond Y. Chiao, Marvin L. Cohen, Anthony J. Leggett, William D. Phillips, Charles L. Harper, Jr.. Visions of Discovery: New Light on Physics, Cosmology, and Consciousness. Cambridge University Press. p. 603. ISBN 0521882397. . [3] van Invagen, P. (1983) An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-824924-1 [4] Pereboom, D. (2003). Living without Free Will (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=9sKZ1rAO2BwC& printsec=frontcover). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521791987. . [5] Fischer, J.M. (1983). "Incompatibilism". Philosophical Studies 43: 121–37. doi:10.1007/BF01112527. [6] Dennett, D., (1984) Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Bradford Books. ISBN 0-262-54042-8 [7] Kane, R. (1996) The Significance of Free Will, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512656-4 [8] Campbell, C.A. (1957) On Selfhood and Godhood, London: George Allen and Unwin. ISBN 0-415-29624-2 [9] Sartre, J.P. (1943) Being and Nothingness, reprint 1993. New York: Washington Square Press. Sartre also provides a psychological version of the argument by claiming that if man's actions are not his own, he would be in bad faith. [10] Fischer, R.M. (1994) The Metaphysics of Free Will, Oxford:Blackwell [11] Bok, H. (1998) Freedom and Responsibility, Princeton:Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01566-X [12] Ginet, C. (1966) "Might We Have No Choice?" In Lehrer, 1966: 87–104. [13] Van Inwagen, P. and Zimmerman, D. (1998) Metaphysics: The Big Questions. Oxford:Blackwell [14] Inwagen, P. (n.d.) "How to think about free will" (http:/ / philosophy. nd. edu/ people/ all/ profiles/ van-inwagen-peter/ documents/ HowThinkFW. doc), p. 15. [15] Lewis, D. (2008). "Are We Free to Break the Laws?". Theoria 47 (3): 113–21. doi:10.1111/j.1755-2567.1981.tb00473.x. [16] Strawson, Galen (2010). Freedom and belief (http:/ / www. amazon. com/ Freedom-Belief-Galen-Strawson/ dp/ 0199247501/ ref=sr_1_1?s=books& ie=UTF8& qid=1347204067& sr=1-1& keywords=0199247501#reader_0199247501) (Revised ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 6. ISBN 0199247501. . [17] Fischer, John Martin (2009). "Chapter 2: Compatibilism" (http:/ / www. amazon. com/ Four-Views-Great-Debates-Philosophy/ dp/ 1405134860/ ref=sr_1_1?s=books& ie=UTF8& qid=1347894498& sr=1-1& keywords=1405134860#reader_1405134860). Four Views on Free Will (Great Debates in Philosophy). Wiley-Blackwell. pp. pp.44 ff. ISBN 1405134860. . [18] Vihvelin, Kadri, "Arguments for Incompatibilism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), ((online)) (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ archives/ win2003/ entries/ incompatibilism-arguments/ ) [19] Suppes, P. (1993). "The Transcendental Character of Determinism". Midwest Studies in Philosophy 18: 242–257. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1993.tb00266.x. [20] Watt, Montgomery (1948) Free-Will and Predestination in Early Islam. London: Luzac & Co. [21] Hume, D. (1740). A Treatise of Human Nature SECTION VIII.: " Of liberty and necessity (http:/ / oll. libertyfund. org/ index. php?option=com_staticxt& staticfile=show. php& title=341& search="prisoner+ chains"& chapter=61966& layout=html#a_606067)" (1967 edition). Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 0-87220-230-5 [22] Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, System of Nature; or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World (London, 1797), Vol. 1, p. 92 [23] Descartes, René (1649). Passions of the Soul. ISBN 0-87220-035-3. [24] Kane, Robert; John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, Manuel Vargas (2007). Four Views on Free Will (Libertarianism). Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishing. p. 39. ISBN 1-4051-3486-0. [25] Lewis, C.S. (1947). Miracles. p. 24. ISBN 0-688-17369-1. [26] Kane, Robert (2007). "Libertarianism" (http:/ / www. amazon. com/ Views-Great-Debates-Philosophy-ebook/ dp/ B002M3SV9K/ ref=dp_kinw_strp_1#reader_1405134852). Four Views on Free Will (Great Debates in Philosophy). Wiley-Blackwell. p. 9. ISBN 1405134860. . "It would seem that undetermined events in the brain or body would occur spontaneously and would be more likely to undermine our freedom rather than enhance it." [27] Neils Bohr. "The Atomic Theory and the Fundamental Principles underlying the Description of Nature; Based on a lecture to the Scandinavian Meeting of Natural Scientists and published in Danish in Fysisk Tidsskrift in 1929. First published in English in 1934 by Cambridge University Press." (http:/ / www. informationphilosopher. com/ solutions/ scientists/ bohr/ fundamental_principles. html). The Information Philosopher, dedicated to the new information philosophy. Robert O. Doyle, publisher. . Retrieved 2012-09-14. [28] Niels Bohr (April 1, 1933). "Light and Life" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=4RStj6dJDSgC& pg=PA28& lpg=PA28). Nature: p. 457 ff. ISBN 9780444899729. . Full text on line at us.archive.org (http:/ / www23. us. archive. org/ stream/ AtomicPhysicsHumanKnowledge/ Bohr-AtomicPhysicsHumanKnowledge_djvu. txt). [29] Locke, J. (1689). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1998, ed). Book II, Chap. XXI, Sec. 17. Penguin Classics, Toronto. [30] Strawson, G. (1998, 2004). "Free will". In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. 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Free will [33] Hobbes, T. (1651) Leviathan CHAPTER XXI.: "Of the liberty of subjects" (http:/ / oll. libertyfund. org/ index. php?option=com_staticxt& staticfile=show. php& title=585& search="finds+ no+ stop"& chapter=89860& layout=html#a_2025807) (1968 edition). London: Penguin Books. [34] McKenna, Michael, "Compatibilism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), ((online)) (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ archives/ sum2004/ entries/ compatibilism/ ) [35] Timothy O'Connor (Oct 29, 2010). "Free Will" (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ archives/ sum2011/ entries/ freewill/ ). In Edward N. Zalta, ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. . [36] Frankfurt, H. (1971). "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person". Journal of Philosophy 68 (1): 5–20. doi:10.2307/2024717. JSTOR 2024717. 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Oxford University Press. pp. pp. 487 ff. ISBN 0195309987. . [41] Watson, D. (1982). Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. [42] Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. (1998). Responsibility and Control: An Essay on Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [43] Dennett, D. (2003) Freedom Evolves. Viking Books. ISBN 0-670-03186-0 [44] Kane, R. The Oxford Handbook to Free Will. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513336-6. [45] Honderich, T. (2001). "Determinism as True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as Both False and the Real Problem" in The Free Will Handbook, edited by Robert Kane of the University of Texas. Oxford University Press [46] Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Fate p.192 [47] "The Dilemma of Determinism, in The Will to Believe, Dover (1956), p.153; first delivered as an address to Harvard Divinity Students in Lowell Lecture Hall, and published in the Unitarian Review for September 1884 [48] Fiske, John . Outline of Cosmic Philosophy, part. H. chap. xvii, cited by William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. 2. Dover p. 577 [49] Atheism and Theism, Wiley-Blackwell (2003) p.63 [50] Camden Centre Talk, Terence McKenna [51] Frankfurt, Harry (1969). "Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility". Journal of Philosophy 66 (23): 829–39. doi:10.2307/2023833. JSTOR 2023833. [52] Benedict de Spinoza (2008). "Part III: On the origin and nature of the emotions; Postulates (Proposition II, Note)" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=2tTweH2JeXsC& pg=PA54& lpg=PA54). In R. H. M. Elwes, trans. The Ethics (Original work published 1677 ed.). Digireads.com Publishing. pp. p. 54. ISBN 1420931148. . [53] Hume, D. (1765)An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Co. Second edition. 1993. ISBN 0-87220-230-5 [54] Schopenhauer, Arthur, The Wisdom of Life, p 147 [55] Schopenhauer, Arthur, On the Freedom of the Will, Oxford: Basil Blackwell ISBN 0-631-14552-4 [56] Steiner, Rudolf. "Arthur Schopenhauers sämtliche Werke in zwölf Bänden. Mit Einleitung von Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart: Verlag der J.G. Cotta'schen Buchhandlung Nachfolger, o.J. (1894–96)" (http:/ / www. pitt. edu/ ~kafka/ k_s_bibII. html) (in German). . [57] Keimpe Algra (1999). "Chapter VI: The Chyrsippean notion of fate: soft determinism" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=9lRD6feR3hEC& pg=PA529). The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. p. 529. ISBN 0521250285. . [58] Steiner, R. (1964). Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1964, 1970, 1972, 1979, 230 pp., translated from the 12th German edition of 1962 by Michael Wilson. ((online)) (http:/ / www. rsarchive. org/ Books/ GA004/ ) [59] See Bricklin, Jonathan, "A Variety of Religious Experience: William James and the Non-Reality of Free Will", in Libet (1999), The Volitional Brain: Toward a Neuroscience of Free Will (Thorverton UK: Imprint Academic). [60] James, W. (1907) Pragmatism (1979 edition). 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Free will add a few more parts interlaced together and very quickly it becomes impossible to treat the system in terms of feedback circuits. In such complex systems, ... the concept of feedback is inadequate.[...] there is no reference state with which feedback can be compared and no place where comparison operations are performed." [63] A rather extended discussion is provided in Georg Northoff (2004). Philosophy of the Brain: The Brain Problem (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=r0Bf3lLys6AC& printsec=frontcover) (Volume 52 of Advances in Consciousness Research ed.). John Benjamins Publishing. ISBN 1588114171. . [64] See for example: Sandro Nannini (2004). "Chapter 5: Mental causation and intentionality in a mind naturalizing theory" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=zYEPifPTQK4C& pg=PA75& lpg=PA77). In Alberto Peruzzi, ed. Mind and Causality. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 69 ff. ISBN 1588114759. . [65] Karl Raimund Popper (1999). "Notes of a realist on the body-mind problem" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=Pa3cZYwdq28C& pg=PA23& lpg=PA23). All Life is Problem Solving (A lecture given in Mannheim, 8 May, 1972 ed.). Psychology Press. pp. 23 ff. ISBN 0415174864. . "The body-mind relationship...includes the problem of man's position in the physical world...'World 1'. The world of conscious human processes I shall call 'World 2', and the world of the objective creations of the human mind I shall call 'World 3'." [66] A key exponent of this view was Willard van Orman Quine. See Hylton, Peter (Apr 30, 2010). "Willard van Orman Quine" (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ archives/ fall2010/ entries/ quine/ ). In Edward N. Zalta, ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition). . [67] A thoughtful list of careful distinctions regarding the application of empirical science to these issues is found in Stoljar, Daniel (Sep 9, 2009). 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"Physics is simply unable to resolve the question of free will, although, if anything, it probably leans towards determinism." [72] Grand Design (2010), page 32: "the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets...so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion", and page 72: "Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty." (emphasis in original, discussing a Many worlds interpretation) [73] Honderich, E.. 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Academic Press. pp. 42–43. doi:10.1016/S0065-2601(08)00401-2. ISBN 978-0-12-374472-2 [121] Baumeister RF, Masicampo EJ, Dewall CN. (2009). Prosocial benefits of feeling free: disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 35(2):260-8. PMID 19141628 doi:10.1177/0146167208327217 [122] Susan Pockett (2009). "The neuroscience of movement" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=G5CaTnNksgkC& pg=PA19& lpg=PA19). In Susan Pockett, WP Banks, Shaun Gallagher, eds. Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?. MIT Press. pp. p. 19. ISBN 0262512572. . [123] Nahmias, Eddy; Stephen G Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Jason Turner (2006-07-01). "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?" (http:/ / onlinelibrary. wiley. com/ doi/ 10. 1111/ j. 1933-1592. 2006. tb00603. x/ abstract). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1): 28–53. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2006.tb00603.x. ISSN 1933-1592. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [124] Feltz, Adam; Edward T. Cokely, Thomas Nadelhoffer (2009-02-01). "Natural Compatibilism versus Natural Incompatibilism: Back to the Drawing Board" (http:/ / onlinelibrary. wiley. com/ doi/ 10. 1111/ j. 1468-0017. 2008. 01351. x/ abstract). Mind & Language 24 (1): 1–23. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2008.01351.x. ISSN 1468-0017. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [125] Nichols, Shaun; Joshua Knobe (2007-12-01). "Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions" (http:/ / onlinelibrary. wiley. com/ doi/ 10. 1111/ j. 1468-0068. 2007. 00666. x/ abstract). NoÃ"s 41 (4): 663–685. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2007.00666.x. ISSN 1468-0068. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [126] Sarkissian, HAGOP; Amita Chatterjee, Felipe de Brigard, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Smita Sirker (2010-06-01). "Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?" (http:/ / onlinelibrary. wiley. com/ doi/ 10. 1111/ j. 1468-0017. 2010. 01393. x/ abstract). Mind & Language 25 (3): 346–358. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2010.01393.x. ISSN 1468-0017. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [127] Pronin, Emily; Matthew B. Kugler (2010-12-28). "People believe they have more free will than others" (http:/ / www. pnas. org/ content/ 107/ 52/ 22469. abstract). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (52): 22469–22474. doi:10.1073/pnas.1012046108. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [128] Feltz, Adam; Edward T. Cokely (2009-03). "Do judgments about freedom and responsibility depend on who you are? Personality differences in intuitions about compatibilism and incompatibilism" (http:/ / www. sciencedirect. com/ science/ article/ B6WD0-4TGGCRP-1/ 2/ 49d6f7959d2e37c9d864d0151cac8575). Consciousness and Cognition 18 (1): 342–350. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2008.08.001. ISSN 1053-8100. PMID 18805023. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [129] Baumeister, R., A. W. Crescioni, and J. Alquist. 2009. Free will as advanced action control for human social life and culture. Neuroethics. doi:10.1007/s12152-009-9047-7. [130] Paulhus, D.L. and Margesson. A., {1994). Free Will and Determinism (FAD) scale. Unpublished manuscript, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: University of British Columbia. [131] Stillman, T.F., R.F. Baumeister, F.D. Fincham, T.E. Joiner, N.M. Lambert, A.R. Mele, and D.M. Tice. 2008. Guilty, free, and wise. Belief in free will promotes learning from negative emotions. Manuscript in preparation. [132] Bar-Hillel, M. 2007. Randomness is too important to trust to chance. Presented at the 2007 Summer Institute in Informed Patient Choice, Dartmouth Medical School, NH [133] Wagenaar, W.A. (1972). "Generation of random sequences by human subjects: A critical survey of literature". Psychological Bulletin 77: 65–72. doi:10.1037/h0032060. [134] Holton, Richard, (2011). Response to ‘Free Will as Advanced Action Control for Human Social Life and Culture’ by Roy F. Baumeister, A. William Crescioni and Jessica L. Alquist. Neuroethics 4:13–16. doi:10.1007/s12152-009-9046-8 [135] Nahmias, Eddy; D. Justin Coates, Trevor Kvaran (2007-09-01). "Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Mechanism: Experiments on Folk Intuitions" (http:/ / onlinelibrary. wiley. com/ doi/ 10. 1111/ j. 1475-4975. 2007. 00158. x/ abstract). Midwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1): 214–242. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.2007.00158.x. ISSN 1475-4975. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [136] Vohs, Kathleen D.; Jonathan W. Schooler (2008-01-01). "The Value of Believing in Free Will" (http:/ / pss. sagepub. com/ content/ 19/ 1/ 49. abstract). Psychological Science 19 (1): 49–54. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x. PMID 18181791. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [137] Vohs, K.D.; Schooler, J.W. (2008). "The value of believing in free will: Encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating". Psychological Science 19 (1): 49–54. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x. PMID 18181791. [138] Baumeister, R.F.; Masicampo, E.J.; DeWall, C.N. (2009). "Prosocial benefits of feeling free: Disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 (2): 260–268. doi:10.1177/0146167208327217. PMID 19141628. [139] Baumeister, Roy F.; E.J. Masicampo, C. Nathan DeWall (2009-02-01). "Prosocial Benefits of Feeling Free: Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness" (http:/ / psp. sagepub. com/ content/ 35/ 2/ 260. abstract). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 (2): 260–268. doi:10.1177/0146167208327217. PMID 19141628. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [140] Alquist, J.L., and R.F. Baumeister. 2008. [Free will and conformity]. Unpublished raw data / manuscript in preparation, Florida State University.

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Free will [141] Stillman, T.F. and Baumeister, R.F. (2008). Belief in free will supports guilt over personal misdeeds. Unpublished findings. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University. [142] Alquist, J.L., M. Daly, T. Stillman, and R.F. Baumeister, (2009). [Belief in determinism decreases counterfactual thinking]. Unpublished raw data. [143] Epstude, K., and N.J. Roese. 2008. The functional theory of counterfactual thinking. Personality and Social Psychology 12: 168–192. [144] Stillman, Tyler F.; Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Nathaniel M. Lambert, Frank D. Fincham, Lauren E. Brewer (2010-01-01). "Personal Philosophy and Personnel Achievement: Belief in Free Will Predicts Better Job Performance" (http:/ / spp. sagepub. com/ content/ 1/ 1/ 43. abstract). Social Psychological and Personality Science 1 (1): 43–50. doi:10.1177/1948550609351600. . Retrieved 2011-04-29. [145] Flood, Gavin (2004). The ascetic self: subjectivity, memory and tradition (http:/ / books. google. com/ ?id=fapXqp-JSL0C& printsec=frontcover& dq=The+ ascetic+ self:+ subjectivity,+ memory+ and+ tradition#v=onepage& q=kaivalya& f=false). Cambridge University Press. p. 73. ISBN 978-0-521-60401-7. . [146] Koller, J. (2007) Asian Philosophies. 5th ed. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-092385-0 [147] Swami Vivekananda (1907) "Sayings and utterances" (http:/ / www. ramakrishnavivekananda. info/ vivekananda/ volume_5/ sayings_and_utterances. htm). ramakrishnavivekananda.info. . [148] Gier, Nicholas and Kjellberg, Paul. "Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist Responses" in Freedom and Determinism. Campbell, Joseph Keim; O'Rourke, Michael; and Shier, David. 2004. MIT Press [149] Alston, William P. (1985). "Divine Foreknowledge and Alternative Conceptions of Human Freedom". International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 18 (1): 19–32. doi:10.1007/BF00142277. [150] Aristotle. "De Interpretatione" in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. I, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1984. [151] Ockham, William. Predestination, God's Knowledge, and Future Contingents, early 14th century, trans. Marilyn McCord Adams and Norman Kretzmann 1982, Hackett, esp p. 46–7 [152] H. A. Wolfson, Philo, 1947 Harvard University Press; Religious Philosophy, 1961 Harvard University Press; and "St. Augustine and the Pelagian Controversy" in Religious Philosophy [153] Watt, Montgomery. Free-Will and Predestination in Early Islam. Luzac & Co.: London 1948; Wolfson, Harry. The Philosophy of Kalam, Harvard University Press 1976 [154] "Man and His Destiny" (http:/ / www. al-islam. org/ mananddestiny/ 3. htm). Al-islam.org. . Retrieved 2010-11-21. [155] Tosun, Ender (2012). Guide to Understanding Islam (http:/ / www. islamicinformationcenter. info/ understandingislam. pdf). Istanbul. p. 209. ISBN 978-605-631-981-5. . [156] Jackson, Timothy P. (1998) "Arminian edification: Kierkegaard on grace and free will" in Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. [157] Kierkegaard, Søren. (1848) Journals and Papers, vol. III. Reprinted in Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1967–78. [158] Mackie, J.L. (1955) "Evil and Omnipotence," Mind, new series, vol. 64, pp. 200–212.

Hawking, Stephen, and Mlodinow, Leonard, The Grand Design, New York, Bantam Books, 2010.

Further reading • Bischof, Michael H. (2004). Kann ein Konzept der Willensfreiheit auf das Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten verzichten? Harry G. Frankfurts Kritik am Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten (PAP). In: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung (ZphF), Heft 4. • Dennett, Daniel C. (2003). Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking Press ISBN 0-670-03186-0 • Epstein J.M. (1999). Agent Based Models and Generative Social Science. Complexity, IV (5). • Gazzaniga, M. & Steven, M.S. (2004) Free Will in the 21st Century: A Discussion of Neuroscience and Law, in Garland, B. (ed.) Neuroscience and the Law: Brain, Mind and the Scales of Justice, New York: Dana Press, ISBN 1-932594-04-3, pp51–70. • Goodenough, O.R. (2004). "Responsibility and punishment". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 359 (1451): 1805–1809. doi:10.1098/rstb.2004.1548. • Harnad, Stevan (2009) The Explanatory Gap (http://www.google.com/search?q=harnad+"explanatory+gap"+ site:http://philpapers.org/&hl=en&num=10&lr=&ft=i&cr=&safe=images) PhilPapers (http://philpapers. org/) • Harnad, Stevan (2001). "No Easy Way Out" (http://cogprints.org/1624/). The Sciences 41 (2): 36–42. • Harnad, Stevan (1982). "Consciousness: An Afterthought" (http://cogprints.org/1570/). Cognition and Brain Theory 5: 29–47. • Harris, Sam. 2012. Free Will. Free Press. ISBN 978-1451683400

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Free will • Hofstadter, Douglas. (2007) I Am A Strange Loop. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-03078-1 • Kane, Robert (1998). The Significance of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-512656-4 • Lawhead, William F. (2005). The Philosophical Journey: An Interactive Approach. McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages ISBN 0-07-296355-7. • Libet, Benjamin; Anthony Freeman; and Keith Sutherland, eds. (1999). The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic. Collected essays by scientists and philosophers. • Morris, Tom Philosophy for Dummies. IDG Books ISBN 0-7645-5153-1. • Muhm, Myriam (2004). Abolito il libero arbitrio — Colloquio con Wolf Singer. L'Espresso 19.08.2004 larchivio.org (http://www.larchivio.org/xoom/myriam-singer.htm) • Nowak A., Vallacher R.R., Tesser A., Borkowski W. (2000). Society of Self: The emergence of collective properties in self-structure. Psychological Review. 107 • Schopenhauer, Arthur (1839). On the Freedom of the Will., Oxford: Basil Blackwell ISBN 0-631-14552-4. • Van Inwagen, Peter (1986). An Essay on Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-824924-1. • Velmans, Max (2003) How Could Conscious Experiences Affect Brains? Exeter: Imprint Academic ISBN 0-907845-39-8. • Wegner, D. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge: Bradford Books • Williams, Clifford (1980). Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company • John Baer, James C. Kaufman, Roy F. Baumeister (2008). Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will. Oxford University Press, New York ISBN 0-19-518963-9 • Horst, Steven (2011), Laws, Mind, and Free Will. (http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/ Freedom-and-the-laws-of-nature.php) (MIT Press) ISBN 0-262-01525-0 • Sri Aurobindo about freedom and free will (http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/ashram/sriauro/ downloadpdf.php?id=41)(PDF)

External links • Free will (http://philpapers.org/browse/free-will) at PhilPapers • Free will (https://inpho.cogs.indiana.edu/taxonomy/2214) at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries: • "Free Will" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/) by Timothy O'Connor • "Incompatibilism" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/) by Randolph Clarke • "Divine Foreknowledge and Free Will" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/) by Linda Zagzebski • Free Will and Determinism (http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Philosophy/Metaphysics/ Free_Will_and_Determinism/) at the Open Directory Project • Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries:

• • • •

• "Foreknowledge and Free Will" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/foreknow/) by Norman Swartz. • "Free will" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/) by Kevin Timpe "Free Will" (http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014) by Galen Strawson in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy "Free Will" (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06259a.htm) in Catholic Encyclopedia The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm) edited by Ted Honderich "Freedom and the Laws of Nature" (http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/ Freedom-and-the-laws-of-nature.php) by Steven Horst (The Montréal Review)

• The Skeptics Dictionary on 'free will' (http://www.skepdic.com/freewill.html)

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Free will • Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of the Will, slightly modified for easier reading (http://www.earlymoderntexts. com/f_edwards.html) This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "Free will", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.

Otherness Otherness may refer to: • • • • • •

Otherness (book), an anthology of science fiction stories by David Brin Otherness (F. Paul Wilson), a malevolent force in several novels by F. Paul Wilson Otherness of childhood Alterity or otherness, the philosophical principle of exchanging one's perspective for that of the "other" Otherness (EP), a 1995 EP by Scottish band Cocteau Twins Other

Identity (philosophy) In philosophy, identity, from Latin: identitas ("sameness"), is the relation each thing bears just to itself.[1][2] The notion of identity gives rise to many philosophical problems, including the identity of indiscernibles (if x and y share all their properties, are they one and the same thing?), and questions about change and personal identity over time (what has to be the case for a person x at one time and a person y at a later time to be one and the same person?). It is important to distinguish the philosophical concept of identity from the more well-known notion of identity in use in psychology and the social sciences. The philosophical concept concerns a relation, specifically, a relation that x and y stand in just in case they are one and the same thing, or identical to each other (i.e. just in case x = y). The sociological notion of identity, by contrast, has to do with a person's self-conception, social presentation, and more generally, the aspects of a person that make them unique, or qualitatively different from others (e.g. cultural identity, gender identity, national Identity, online identity and processes of identity formation.)

Metaphysics of identity Metaphysicians, and sometimes philosophers of language and mind, ask other questions: • • • •

What does it mean for an object to be the same as itself? If x and y are identical (are the same thing), must they always be identical? Are they necessarily identical? What does it mean for an object to be the same, if it changes over time? (Is applet the same as applet+1?) If an object's parts are entirely replaced over time, as in the Ship of Theseus example, in what way is it the same?

The Law of identity originates from classical antiquity. The modern formulation of identity is that of Gottfried Leibniz, who held that x is the same as y if and only if every predicate true of x is true of y as well. Leibniz's ideas have taken root in the philosophy of mathematics, where they have influenced the development of the predicate calculus as Leibniz's law. Mathematicians sometimes distinguish identity from equality. More mundanely, an identity in mathematics may be an equation that holds true for all values of a variable. Hegel argued that things are inherently self-contradictory and that the notion of something being self-identical only made sense if it were not also not-identical or different from itself and did not also imply the latter. In Hegel's words, "Identity is the identity of identity and non-identity." More recent metaphysicians have discussed trans-world identity—the notion that there can be the same object in different possible worlds. An alternative to trans-world identity is the counterpart relation in Counterpart theory. It is a similarity relation that rejects trans-world individuals and instead defends an objects

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Identity (philosophy) counterpart - the most similar object.

References • Gallois, A. 1998: Occasions of identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-823744-8 Google books [3] • Parfit, D. 1984: Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-824908-X Google books [4] • Robinson, D. 1985: Can amoebae divide without multiplying? Australasian journal of philosophy, 63(3): 299–319. doi:10.1080/00048408512341901 • Sidelle, A. 2000: [Review of Gallois (1998)]. Philosophical review, 109(3): 469-471. JSTOR [5] • Sider, T. 2001: [Review of Gallois (1998)]. British journal for the philosophy science, 52(2): 401-405. doi:10.1093/bjps/52.2.401

External references General Information • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Identity [6], First published Wed Dec 15, 2004; substantive revision Sun Oct 1, 2006. • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Identity over time [7]. First published Fri 18 March 2005. • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Personal identity [8]. First published Tue Aug 20, 2002; substantive revision Tue Feb 20, 2007. • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Relative identity [9]. First published Mon 22 April 2002. Citations [1] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Identity (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ identity/ ), First published Wed Dec 15, 2004; substantive revision Sun Oct 1, 2006. [2] The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd Edition, CUP: 1995 [3] http:/ / books. google. co. nz/ books?id=pTJDEliMcb4C& printsec=frontcover& source=gbs_atb#v=onepage& q& f=false [4] http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=SlgY93k936UC& printsec=frontcover& source=gbs_atb#v=onepage& q& f=false [5] http:/ / www. jstor. org/ stable/ 2693711 [6] http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ identity/ [7] http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ identity-time/ [8] http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ identity-personal/ [9] http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ identity-relative/

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Gaze

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Gaze Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses a degree of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage, in which a child encountering a mirror realizes that he or she has an external appearance. Lacan suggests that this gaze effect can similarly be produced by any conceivable object such as a chair or a television screen. This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object.

History of the concept Numerous existentialists and phenomenologists have addressed the concept of gaze beginning with Sartre. Foucault elaborated on gaze to illustrate a particular dynamic in power relations and disciplinary mechanisms in his Discipline and Punish. Derrida also elaborated on the relations of animals and humans via the gaze in The Animal That Therefore I Am.

Hieronymus Bosch's The Conjurer. While other figures observe objects within the painting, the woman in green observes the viewer. The painting thus makes the viewer aware of being on display.

Systems of power and the gaze Michel Foucault elaborated on the gaze to illustrate a particular dynamic in power relations and disciplinary mechanisms in his Discipline and Punish. Foucault uses the term gaze in the distribution of power in various institutions of society. The gaze is not something one has or uses; rather, it is the relationship in which someone enters. "The gaze is integral to systems of power and ideas about knowledge."[1] Three main concepts that Foucault introduced are panopticism, power/knowledge, and biopower. These concepts all address self-regulation under systems of surveillance. This refers to how people modify their behaviour under the belief that they are constantly being watched even if they cannot directly see who or what is watching them. This possible surveillance, whether real or unreal, has self-regulating effects.[2]

The "male gaze" in feminist theory In her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey introduced the second-wave feminist concept of "male gaze" as a feature of gender power asymmetry in film. The concept was present in earlier studies of the gaze, but it was Mulvey who brought it to the forefront. Mulvey stated that women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera. Hollywood films played to the models of voyeurism and scopophilia.[3] The concept has subsequently been influential in feminist film theory and media studies. The male gaze[4] occurs when the camera puts the audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man. It may linger over the curves of a woman's body, for instance.[5] The woman is usually displayed on two different levels: as an erotic object for both the characters within the film, as well as the spectator who is watching the film. The man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy. The woman is passive to the active gaze from the

Gaze man. This adds an element of 'patriarchal' order and it is often seen in "illusionistic narrative film".[6] Mulvey argues that, in mainstream cinema, the male gaze typically takes precedence over the female gaze, reflecting an underlying power asymmetry. Mulvey's essay also states that the female gaze is the same as the male gaze. This means that women look at themselves through the eyes of men.[7] The male gaze may be seen by a feminist either as a manifestation of unequal power between gazer and gazed, or as a conscious or subconscious attempt to develop that inequality. From this perspective, a woman who welcomes an objectifying gaze may be simply conforming to norms established to benefit men, thereby reinforcing the power of the gaze to reduce a recipient to an object. Welcoming such objectification may be viewed as akin to exhibitionism. The possibility of an analogous female gaze[8][9][10][11] may arise from considering the male gaze. Mulvey argues that "the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze…" Describing Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys, Nalini Paul indicates that the Antoinette character gazes at Rochester, placing a garland upon him, making him appear heroic: "Rochester does not feel comfortable with having this role enforced upon him; thus, he rejects it by removing the garland, and crushing the flowers." From the male perspective, a man possesses the gaze because he is a man, whereas a woman has the gaze only when she assumes the male gazer role — when she objectifies others by gazing at them like a man. Eva-Maria Jacobsson supports Paul's description of the "female gaze" as "a mere cross-identification with masculinity", yet evidence of women's objectification of men — the discrete existence of a female gaze — can be found in the "boy toy" adverts published in teen magazines, for example, despite Mulvey's contention that the gaze is property of one gender. Whether or not this is an example of female gaze or rather an internalized male gaze is up for debate, along with the other ideas on this subject. In terms of power relationships, the gazer can direct a gaze upon members of the same gender for asexual reasons, such as comparing the gazer's body image and clothing to those of the gazed-at individual. With respect to Laura Mulvey's essay, note the following points stressed by Mulvey in a 2011 interview with Roberta Sassatelli: "First, that the 1975 article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ was written as a polemic, and as Mandy Merck has described it, as a manifesto; so I had no interest in modifying the argument. Clearly I think, in retrospect from a more nuanced perspective, about the inescapability of the male gaze."[12]

Criticizing the male gaze Bracha Ettinger criticizes this notion of the male gaze by her proposition of a Matrixial Gaze.[13] The matrixial gaze is not operative where a "Male Gaze" is placed opposite to a "Female Gaze" and where both positive entities constitute each other from a lack (such an umbrella concept of the gaze would precisely be what scholars such as Slavoj Žižek claim is the Lacanian definition of "The Gaze.") Ettinger's proposal doesn't concern a subject and its object, existing or lacking. Rather, it concerns "trans-subjectivity" and shareability on a partial level, and it is based on her claim concerning a feminine-matrixial difference that escapes the phallic opposition of masculine/feminine and is produced in a process of co-emergence. Ettinger works from the very late Lacan, yet, from the angle she brings, it is the structure of the Lacanian subject itself that is deconstructed to a certain extent, and another kind of feminine dimension appears, with its hybrid and floating matrixial gaze.[14]

Ways of Seeing: Viewing women in Renaissance paintings John Berger, in his authoritative book Ways of Seeing, stated that "according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at."[15] In Renaissance images nude women were painted almost exclusively for the male viewer. Women are often depicted with their bodies turned towards the viewer while their heads are turned away and gazing in a mirror. The woman is aware of being the object of the male gaze.

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This ties into Lacan's theory of the alienation that results from the split between seeing oneself and seeing the ideal. In Renaissance nude painting this is the split that comes from being both the viewer, the viewed and seeing oneself through the gaze of others. [16]

Women and the gaze Griselda Pollock, in her article, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity" argues that the female gaze can often be visually negated. [17]Robert Doisneau's photo named "An oblique Look" supports this argument. In the photo, a middle-aged bourgeois couple is looking around art gallery. The spectator view of the picture is from inside the shop but the couple is looking in different places than the view of the spectator. The woman is commenting on an image to her husband, while the husband is being distracted by a nude female painting. The nude female painting is hung with view of the spectator. The woman is looking at another image, but it is out of view of the spectator. The man's gaze has found something more interesting and he has chosen to ignore the woman's comment. The woman is also in contrast to the nude female in the painting, and instead of passively accepting the male gaze, she presents herself as "actively returning and confirming the gaze of the masculine spectator". [18]

Definitions in Cinematic Theory The gaze is characterized by who is the gazer (viewer): • The spectator's gaze: that of the spectator viewing the text, i.e. the reader(s) of the text. • The Intra-diegetic gaze: in a text, a character gazes upon an object or another character in the text. • The Extra-diegetic gaze: a textual character consciously addresses (looks at) the viewer, e.g. in dramaturgy, an aside to the audience; in cinema, acknowledgement of the fourth wall, the viewer. • The camera's gaze: is the film director's gaze. • The editorial gaze: emphasises a textual aspect, e.g. a photograph, its cropping and caption direct the reader(s) to a specific person, place, or object in the text.

Théodore Géricault's Portrait of a Kleptomaniac.

Theorists Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen posit that the gaze is a relationship, between offering and demanding a gaze: the indirect gaze is the spectator's offer, wherein the spectator initiates viewing the subject, who is unaware of being viewed; the direct gaze is the subject's demand to be viewed.

Imperial gaze E. Ann Kaplan has introduced the post-colonial concept of the imperial gaze, in which the observed find themselves defined in terms of the privileged observer's own set of value-preferences.[19] From the perspective of the colonised, the imperial gaze infantilizes and trivializes what it falls upon,[20] asserting its command and ordering function as it does so.[21] Kaplan comments: “The imperial gaze reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central much as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject”.[22]

Gaze

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References [1] [2] [3] [4]

Sturken, Marita; Cartwright, Lisa. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press,Inc., 2009. p. 94, 103. Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press,Inc., 2009. pp. 106-108. Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press,Inc., 2001. p. 76. Streeter, Thomas; Hintlian, Nicole; Chipetz, Samantha; and Callender, Susanna (2005). This is Not Sex: A Web Essay on the Male Gaze, Fashion Advertising, and the Pose. web essay about the male gaze in advertising. Retrieved from http:/ / www. uvm. edu/ ~tstreete/ powerpose/ index. html. [5] TV Tropes Foundation (date unknown). Male Gaze in TV and film. Retrieved from http:/ / tvtropes. org/ pmwiki/ pmwiki. php/ Main/ MaleGaze. [6] Mulvey, Laura: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975, 1992), p. 14. [7] Sassatelli, Roberta. Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture. Theory, Culture & Society, September 2011, 28(5) p. 127. [8] Modules on Lacan, On the Gaze (http:/ / www. sla. purdue. edu/ academic/ engl/ theory/ psychoanalysis/ lacangaze. html) [9] A Female Gaze? (http:/ / cid. nada. kth. se/ pdf/ cid_51. pdf) PDF (96.7 KiB) [10] The Female Gaze (http:/ / www. sharp. arts. gla. ac. uk/ issue2/ paul. htm) gla.ac.uk [11] Salon Life, The Female Gaze (http:/ / www. salon. com/ mwt/ feature/ 2003/ 01/ 30/ gaze/ index_np. html) [12] Sassatelli, Roberta. Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture. Theory, Culture & Society, September 2011, 28(5) p. 128. [13] Ettinger, Bracha. The Matrixial Gaze. University of Leeds, 1995 [14] Ettinger, Bracha. "The With-in-Visible Screen." In: Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible, MIT Press, Boston, 1996. [15] Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Group, 1972. p. 45,47 [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22]

Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press,Inc., 2001. p. 81. Pollock, Griselda. "Modernity and the Spaces for Femininity". Routledge, 1988. pp. 50-90. Pollock, Griselda. "Modernity and the Spaces for Femininity". Routledge, 1988. pp. 50-90. Bill Ashcroft et al, Post-Colonial Studies (2000) p. 187 Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema (2002) p. 245 E. H. Yekani, The Privilege of Crisis (2011) p. 100 Quoted in Patricia Waugh, Literary Theory and Criticism (2006) p. 514

Sources • Armstrong, Carol and de Zegher, Catherine, Women Artists at the Millennium. MIT Press, October Books, 2006. • de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible. MIT Press, 1996. • Ettinger, Bracha, "The Matrixial Gaze" (1995), reprinted as Ch. 1 in: The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. • Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Lacan: On the Gaze." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory — see external links. • Florence, Penny and Pollock, Griselda, Looking back to the Future. G & B Arts, 2001. • Jacobsson, Eva-Maria: A Female Gaze? (1999) — see external links. • Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen: Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. (1996). • Lacan, Jacques:Seminar Eleven: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. NY & London, W.W. Norton and Co., 1978. • Lacan, Jacques: Seminar One: Freud's Papers On Technique (1988). • Lutz, Catherine & Jane Collins: The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic (1994). • Mulvey, Laura: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975, 1992). • Notes on The Gaze (1998) — see external links. • Pollock, Griselda (Ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image. Blackwell, 2006. • Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press,Inc., 2009. p. 94, 103. • Paul, Nalini: The Female Gaze — see external links. • Pollock, Griselda, "Modenity and the Spaces of Femininity". Routldge, 1988. • Schroeder, Jonathan E: SSRN.com Consuming Representation: A Visual Approach to Consumer Research (http:// papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1349954).

Gaze • Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, 2004.

External links • Notes on The Gaze (http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze.html) • Robert Doisneau, Un regard Oblique, 1948 (http://www.staleywise.com/collection/doisneau/doisneau_1. html) — photograph illustrating gaze • The Male Gaze (http://www.ltcconline.net/lukas/gender/pages/gaze.htm), with photographs of several advertisements • Aux Fenêtres de l'âme (Windows of the Soul), a Ron Padova film (http://www.auxfenetresdelame.com)

Abandonment (existentialism) Abandonment, in philosophy, refers to the infinite freedom of humanity without the existence of a condemning or omnipotent higher power. Original existentialism explores the liminal experiences of anxiety, death, the “nothing” and nihilism; the rejection of science (and above all, causal explanation) as an adequate framework for understanding human being; and the introduction of “authenticity” as the norm of self-identity, tied to the project of self-definition through freedom, choice, and commitment.[1] Existential thought bases itself fundamentally in the idea that one's identity is constituted neither by nature nor by culture, since to “exist” is precisely to constitute such an identity. It is from this foundation that one can begin to understand abandonment and forlornness.

Origin Søren Kierkegaard and Frederich Nietzsche, the supposed originators of the existentialist school of thought, constrained their theories to theological systems. Both were concerned with the "singularity of existence" [2] and the fact that "existence comes before essence";[3] but neither of them approach the belief that God never existed and therefore never controlled individual will. The first to do so were Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, and German Martin Heidegger. According to Sartre, there are three schools of philosophical thought that influence the freedom of the individual. 1. Christian Belief: The idea that God exists and creates people actively, with a purpose in mind that gives meaning to life. To believers, because men are inherently evil, a life without meaning accorded by a higher power the world will devolve into anarchy. 2. Christian Existentialism: Man creates his identity and gives meaning to his own life. However, he does so in his inimical search for union with God, and thus the struggle to find meaning itself defines the identity of an individual.[4] 3. Atheist Existentialism: The philosophy that there is no “human nature” because there is no creator, no definition of man until he encounters himself. The “human reality” [5] is subjective to the journey of the individual, existence comes before the development of the meaning of that existence. The absence of God in the conceptualization of life came to be known as “abandonment because of Sartre’s 1946 lecture L'Existentialisme est un humanisme in which he says: "…when we speak of “abandonment” – a favorite word of Heidegger – we only mean to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism, which seeks to suppress God at the least possible expense. " [6]

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Relationship with atheism Abandonment is, in essence, the derivative of atheism. In the Supreme Court case Murray v. Curlett, the case that removed reverential Bible reading and oral unison recitation of the Lord's Prayer in the public schools, the petitioners (atheists, all) defined their beliefs thus: "An atheist loves his fellow man instead of god. An atheist believes that heaven is something for which we should work now – here on earth for all men together to enjoy.An atheist believes that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it, and enjoy it...He seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to know a god. An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death." [7]

This foundational philosophy is the refrain of all of the most well known atheists: Sartre and Nietzsche yes, but also Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Avram Noam Chomsky. Ethical behavior - regardless of who the practitioner may be - results always from the same causes and is regulated by the same forces, and has nothing to do with the presence or absence of religious belief.[8] Therefore belief in a higher power is unnecessary (and for Sartre, unlikely) when one relates to the world under the understanding that humans have no original purpose or meaning to their creation.

Martin Heidegger Before Sartre defined abandonment as abandonment by, or of the idea of, a higher omnipotent power, philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote about the abandonment of self in much the same way. Deriving his ideas from Nietzsche’s work, Heidegger theorized that the abandonment of being is the cause of “the distress of lack of distress,” [9] under the belief that a person’s distress is the opening of the mind to the truth of existence, especially the truth that one’s existence is meaningless. Therefore a person’s truest state, one in which being comes before meaning, is also a one of extreme distress. Heidegger also summarizes this concept as the abandonment of being as the abandonment by being.He claims it is brought on by the darkness of the world in “modern” times and derangement of the West; the death of the moral (echoing Nietzsche).[10] The importance of abandonment theory is that it, according to Heidegger, determines an epoch in the historical search for “be-ing.” It is the disownment of the surety of being as less useful than the constant questioning of being, the magnitude of the non-form that reveals the “truth” of life better than transparent and empty platitudes. Heidegger claims that there are three “concealments” of the abandonment of being: calculation, acceleration, and the claim of massiveness. 1. Calculation- Heidegger characterizes this as the machination of technicity, or the belief that one fully understands scientific data and experiments and in so doing places their full faith in those concepts. Heidegger believes that this is a parallel to the belief in God, because there is no longer need for questioning this concept that has become own-most to truth.[11] 2. Acceleration- The mania for what is new or surprising, especially technologically. Heidegger believed that this overpowered the truth and questioning of abandonment because the excitement sweeps one away and gets one caught up in the quantitative enhancement of status of accomplishment, according to both Heidegger and Nietzsche a false moral governing.[12] 3. The outbreak of massiveness- An idea that the rare and unique quality of abandonment, is compromised by the beliefs of the masses, not only in the overwhelming societal numbers of people but in the beliefs and “moral identities” that are common to the many and the all.[13]

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References [1] ["Existentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 11 Oct. 2010. Web. 04 Dec. 2011. .] [2] ["Existentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 11 Oct. 2010. Web. 04 Dec. 2011. .] [3] [Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Existentialism Is a Humanism." 1946. Lecture.] [4] [Zunjic, Bob. "Fear and Trembling: Outline." The University of Rhode Island. URI. Web. 05 Dec. 2011. .] [5] [Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Existentialism Is a Humanism." 1946. Lecture.] [6] [Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Existentialism Is a Humanism." 1946. Lecture.] [7] [Owen, Robert. "American Atheists | Atheism." American Atheists | Welcome Free Thinkers. American Atheists. Web. 05 Dec. 2011. .] [8] [Zindler, Frank R. "Ethics Without Gods." The Probing Mind (1985). American Atheists. Web. .] [9] [Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy: from Enowning. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999. Print.] [10] [Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy: from Enowning. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999. Print.] [11] [Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy: from Enowning. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999. Print.] [12] [Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy: from Enowning. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999. Print.] [13] [Heidegger, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy: from Enowning. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999. Print.]

Existential crisis An existential crisis is a moment at which an individual questions the very foundations of his or her life: whether his or her life has any meaning, purpose or value.[1] This issue of the meaning and purpose of existence is the topic of the philosophical school of existentialism.

Description An existential crisis may result from: • • • • • •

The sense of being alone and isolated in the world; A new-found grasp or appreciation of one's mortality; Believing that one's life has no purpose or external meaning; Searching for the meaning of life; Awareness of one's freedom and the consequences of accepting or rejecting that freedom; An extremely pleasurable or hurtful experience that leaves one seeking meaning;

An existential crisis is often provoked by a significant event in the person's life — marriage, separation, major loss, the death of a loved one, a life-threatening experience, a new love partner, psychoactive drug use, adult children leaving home, reaching a personally-significant age (turning 20, turning 30, turning 40, etc.), etc. Usually, it provokes the sufferer's introspection about personal mortality, thus revealing the psychological repression of said awareness. An existential crisis may resemble anomie (a personal condition resulting from a lack of norms) or a midlife crisis. Sometimes, an existential crisis stems from a person's new perception of life and existence. Analogously, existentialism posits that a person can and does define the meaning and purpose of their life, and therefore must choose to resolve the crisis of existence.

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Handling existential crises There is no one given therapeutic method in modern psychology known to coerce a person out of existential despair; the issue is seldom, if at all, addressed from a medical standpoint. Peter Wessel Zapffe, a Norwegian philosopher, provided, in his work The Last Messiah, a fourfold route that he believed all self-conscious beings use in order to cope with the inherent indifference and absurdity of existence, comprising Anchoring, Isolation, Distraction, and Sublimation: • Anchoring is the "fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness". The anchoring mechanism provides individuals with a value or an ideal that allows them to focus their attentions in a consistent manner. Zapffe also applied the anchoring principle to society, and stated "God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future" are all examples of collective primary anchoring firmaments. • Isolation is "a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling". • Distraction occurs when "one limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions". Distraction focuses all of one's energy on a task or idea to prevent the mind from turning in on itself. • Sublimation is the refocusing of energy away from negative outlets, toward positive ones. The individual distances him / herself and looks at their existence from an aesthetic point of view (e.g. writers, poets, painters). Zapffe himself pointed out that his written works were the product of sublimation. Intense vipassana meditation will usually bring about a set of experiences, referred to as the dark night of the soul by Western spiritual traditions, that resemble the typical symptoms of an existential crisis.[2][3] During the "dark night", meditators become severely discouraged in regard to practice and life in general, although continuing meditation is the only known form of overcoming this difficult stage.[2]

Literary examples Prince Hamlet experiences an existential crisis as a result of the death of his father. This is shown especially by Shakespeare in the famous soliloquy which starts, "To be, or not to be: that is the question...".[4] Another example: Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

References [1] Richard K. James, Crisis intervention strategies (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=fAFg7z93gDwC& pg=PA13), [2] Daniel Ingram (April, 2007). "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" (http:/ / www. interactivebuddha. com/ mctb. shtml). . Retrieved November 17, 2009. [3] Henk Barendregt, " Buddhist Phenomenology I & II (http:/ / www. fnds. cs. ru. nl/ fndswiki/ Theoretical_papers)". [4] Thomas E. Wartenberg, Existentialism (http:/ / books. google. co. uk/ books?ei=srGkS_GdO8f94Aa7g7CeCg), p. 1,

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Further reading • J. Watson, Caring Science as Sacred Science 2005. Chapter 4: "Existential Crisis in Science and Human Sciences". • P. Strang, Existential crisis of the dying physician. Lakartidningen, 2004. (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) • T.M. Cousineau, A. Seibring, M.T. Barnard, P-673 Making meaning of infertility: Existential crisis or personal transformation? Fertility and Sterility, 2006.

External links • Alan Watts on meaningless life, and its resolution (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m72iWC-0UpU)

Existential therapy Existential psychotherapy is a philosophical method of therapy that operates on the belief that inner conflict within a person is due to that individual's confrontation with the givens of existence.[1] These givens, as noted by Irvin D. Yalom, are: the inevitability of death, freedom and its attendant responsibility, existential isolation (referring to Phenomenology), and finally meaninglessness. These four givens, also referred to as ultimate concerns, form the body of existential psychotherapy and compose the framework in which a therapist conceptualizes a client's problem in order to develop a method of treatment. In the British School of Existential therapy (Cooper, 2003), these givens are seen as predictable tensions and paradoxes of the four dimensions of human existence, the physical, social, personal and spiritual realms (Umwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt and Uberwelt).

Background The philosophers who are especially pertinent to the development of existential psychotherapy are those whose work is directly aimed at making sense of human existence. But the philosophical movements that are of most importance and that have been directly responsible for the generation of existential therapy are phenomenology and existential philosophy. The starting point of existential philosophy (see Warnock, 1970; Macquarrie, 1972; Mace, 1999; Van Deurzen and Kenward, 2005) can be traced back to the nineteenth century and the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Both were in conflict with the predominant ideologies of their time and committed to the exploration of reality as it can be experienced in a passionate and personal manner. Kierkegaard (1813–55) protested vigorously against popular misunderstanding and abuse of Christian dogma and the so-called 'objectivity' of science (Kierkegaard, 1841, 1844). He thought that both were ways of avoiding the anxiety inherent in human existence. He had great contempt for the way in which life was being lived by those around him and believed that truth could ultimately only be discovered subjectively by the individual in action. What was most lacking was people's courage to take the leap of faith and live with passion and commitment from the inward depth of existence. This involved a constant struggle between the finite and infinite aspects of our nature as part of the difficult task of creating a self and finding meaning. As Kierkegaard lived by his own word he was lonely and much ridiculed during his lifetime. Nietzsche (1844–1900) took this philosophy of life a step further. His starting point was the notion that God is dead, that is, the idea of God was outmoded and limiting (Nietzsche, 1861, 1874, 1886) and that it is up to us to re-evaluate existence in light of this. He invited people to shake off the shackles of moral and societal constraint and to discover their free will in order to live according to their own desires, now the only maintainable law in his philosophy. He encouraged people to transcend the mores of civilization and choose their own standards. The important existential themes of freedom, choice, responsibility and courage are introduced for the first time.

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Existential therapy While Kierkegaard and Nietzsche drew attention to the human issues that needed to be addressed, Husserl's phenomenology (Husserl, 1960, 1962; Moran, 2000) provided the method to address them in a rigorous manner. He contended that natural sciences are based on the assumption that subject and object are separate and that this kind of dualism can only lead to error. He proposed a whole new mode of investigation and understanding of the world and our experience of it. Prejudice has to be put aside or 'bracketed', in order for us to meet the world afresh and discover what is absolutely fundamental and only directly available to us through intuition. If people want to grasp the essence of things, instead of explaining and analyzing them, they have to learn to describe and understand them. Heidegger (1889–1976) applied the phenomenological method to understanding the meaning of being (Heidegger, 1962, 1968). He argued that poetry and deep philosophical thinking can bring greater insight into what it means to be in the world than can be achieved through scientific knowledge. He explored human being in the world in a manner that revolutionizes classical ideas about the self and psychology. He recognized the importance of time, space, death and human relatedness. He also favoured hermeneutics, an old philosophical method of investigation, which is the art of interpretation. Unlike interpretation as practised in psychoanalysis (which consists of referring a person's experience to a pre-established theoretical framework) this kind of interpretation seeks to understand how the person himself subjectively experiences something. Sartre (1905–80) contributed many other strands of existential exploration, particularly in terms of emotions, imagination, and the person's insertion into a social and political world. The philosophy of existence on the contrary is carried by a wide-ranging literature, which includes many other authors than the ones mentioned above. There is much to be learned from existential authors such as Karl Jaspers (1951, 1963), Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and Hans-Georg Gadamer within the Germanic tradition and Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Lévinas within the French tradition (see for instance Spiegelberg, 1972, Kearney, 1986 or van Deurzen-Smith, 1997). From the start of the 20th century some psychotherapists were, however, inspired by phenomenology and its possibilities for working with people. Otto Rank, an Austrian psychoanalyst who broke with Freud in the mid-1920s, was the first existential therapist. Ludwig Binswanger, in Switzerland, also attempted to bring existential insights to his work with patients, in the Kreuzlingen sanatorium where he was a psychiatrist. Much of his work was translated into English during the 1940s and 1950s and, together with the immigration to the USA of Paul Tillich (Tillich, 1952) and others, this had a considerable impact on the popularization of existential ideas as a basis for therapy (Valle and King, 1978; Cooper, 2003). Rollo May played an important role in this, and his writing (1969, 1983; May et al., 1958) kept the existential influence alive in America, leading eventually to a specific formulation of therapy (Bugental, 1981; May and Yalom, 1985; Yalom, 1980). Humanistic psychology was directly influenced by these ideas. In Europe, after Otto Rank, existential ideas were combined with some psychoanalytic principles and a method of existential analysis was developed by Medard Boss (1957a, 1957b, 1979) in close co-operation with Heidegger. In Austria, Viktor Frankl developed an existential therapy called logotherapy (Frankl, 1964, 1967), which focused particularly on finding meaning. In France the ideas of Sartre (1956, 1962) and Merleau-Ponty (1962) and of a number of practitioners (Minkowski, 1970) were important and influential but no specific therapeutic method was developed from them.

Development in Britain Britain became a fertile ground for the further development of the existential approach when R. D. Laing and David Cooper, often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, took Sartre's existential ideas as the basis for their work (Laing, 1960, 1961; Cooper, 1967; Laing and Cooper, 1964). Without developing a concrete method of therapy they critically reconsidered the notion of mental illness and its treatment. In the late 1960s they established an experimental therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall in the East End of London, where people could come to live through their madness without the usual medical treatment. They also founded the Philadelphia Association, an

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Existential therapy organization providing alternative living, therapy and therapeutic training from this perspective. The Philadelphia Association is still in existence today and is now committed to the exploration of the works of philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Derrida, Levinas and Foucault as well as the work of the French psychoanalyst Lacan. It also runs a number of small therapeutic households along these lines. The Arbours Association is another group that grew out of the Kingsley Hall experiment. Founded by Berke and Schatzman in the 1970s, it now runs a training programme in psychotherapy, a crisis centre and several therapeutic communities. The existential input in the Arbours has gradually been replaced with a more neo-Kleinian emphasis. The impetus for further development of the existential approach in Britain has largely come from the development of a number of existentially based courses in academic institutions. This started with the programmes created by Emmy van Deurzen, initially at Antioch University in London and subsequently at Regent's College, London and since then at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, also in London. The latter is a purely existentially based training institute, which offers postgraduate degrees validated by the University of Sheffield and Middlesex University. In the last decades the existential approach has spread rapidly and has become a welcome alternative to established methods. There are now a number of other, mostly academic, centres in Britain that provide training in existential counselling and psychotherapy and a rapidly growing interest in the approach in the voluntary sector and in the National Health Service. British publications dealing with existential therapy include contributions by Jenner (de Koning and Jenner, 1982), Heaton (1988, 1994), Cohn (1994, 1997), Spinelli (1997), Cooper (1989, 2002), Eleftheriadou (1994), Lemma-Wright (1994), Du Plock (1997), Strasser and Strasser (1997), van Deurzen (1997, 1998, 2002); van Deurzen and Arnold-Baker (2005); van Deurzen and Kenward (2005). Other writers such as Lomas (1981) and Smail (1978, 1987, 1993) have published work relevant to the approach although not explicitly 'existential' in orientation. The journal of the British Society for Phenomenology regularly publishes work on existential and phenomenological psychotherapy. An important development was that of the founding of the Society for Existential Analysis in 1988, initiated by van Deurzen. This society brings together psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and philosophers working from an existential perspective. It offers regular fora for discussion and debate as well as major annual conferences. It publishes the Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis twice a year. It is also a member of the International Federation for Daseinsanalysis, which stimulates international exchange between representatives of the approach from around the world. An international Society for Existential Therapists also exists. It was founded in 2006 by Emmy van Deurzen and Digby Tantam, and is called the International Community of Existential Counsellors and Therapists (ICECAP).[2]

Existential Therapy's View of the Human Mind Existential therapy starts with the belief that although humans are essentially alone in the world, they long to be connected to others. People want to have meaning in one another's lives, but ultimately they must come to realize that they cannot depend on others for validation, and with that realization they finally acknowledge and understand that they are fundamentally alone (Yalom, 1980). The result of this revelation is anxiety in the knowledge that our validation must come from within and not from others.

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Psychological Dysfunction Because there is no single existential view, opinions about psychological dysfunction vary. For theorists aligned with Yalom, psychological dysfunction results from the individual's refusal or inability to deal with the normal existential anxiety that comes from confronting life's "givens": mortality, isolation, meaninglessness, and freedom.[3] For other theorists, there is no such thing as psychological dysfunction or being mentally ill. Every way of being is merely an expression of how one chooses to live one's life. However, one may feel unable to come to terms with the anxiety of being alone in the world. If so, an existential psychotherapist can assist one in accepting these feelings rather than trying to change them as if there is something wrong. Everyone has the freedom to choose how they are going to be in life, however this may go unexercised because making changes is difficult; it may appear easier and safer not to make decisions that one will be responsible for. Many people will remain unaware of alternative choices in life for various societal reasons.

The Good Life Existentialism suggests that it is possible for people to face the anxieties of life head-on and embrace the human condition of aloneness, to revel in the freedom to choose and take full responsibility for their choices. They courageously take the helm of their lives and steer in whatever direction they choose; they have the courage to be. One does not need to arrest feelings of meaninglessness, but can choose new meanings for their lives. By building, by loving, and by creating one is able to live life as one's own adventure. One can accept one's own mortality and overcome fear of death. Though the French author Albert Camus denied the specific label of existentialist, in his novel, L'Etranger, his main character Meursault, ends the novel by doing just this. He accepts his mortality and rejects the constrictions of society he previously placed on himself, leaving him unencumbered and free to live his life with an unclouded mind.

Existential Therapy The existential psychotherapist is generally not concerned with the client's past; instead, the emphasis is on the choices to be made in the present and future. The counselor and the client may reflect upon how the client has answered life's questions in the past, but attention ultimately shifts to searching for a new and increased awareness in the present and enabling a new freedom and responsibility to act. The patient can then accept they are not special, and that their existence is simply coincidental, without destiny or fate. By accepting this, they can overcome their anxieties, and instead view life as moments in which they are fundamentally free.(The outline above is based on a strictly Sartrean perspective)

Four worlds Existential thinkers seek to avoid restrictive models that categorize or label people. Instead they look for the universals that can be observed cross-culturally. There is no existential personality theory which divides humanity into types or reduces people to part components. Instead there is a description of the different levels of experience and existence with which people are inevitably confronted. The way in which a person is in the world at a particular stage can be charted on this general map of human existence (Binswanger, 1963; Yalom, 1980; van Deurzen, 1984). One can distinguish four basic dimensions of human existence: the physical, the social, the psychological and the spiritual. On each of these dimensions people encounter the world and shape their attitude out of their particular take on their experience. Their orientation towards the world defines their reality. The four dimensions are obviously interwoven and provide a complex four-dimensional force field for their existence. Individuals are stretched between a positive pole of what they aspire to on each dimension and a negative pole of what they fear.

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Existential therapy Physical dimension On the physical dimension (Umwelt) individuals relate to their environment and to the givens of the natural world around them. This includes their attitude to the body they have, to the concrete surroundings they find themselves in, to the climate and the weather, to objects and material possessions, to the bodies of other people, their own bodily needs, to health and illness and to their own mortality. The struggle on this dimension is, in general terms, between the search for domination over the elements and natural law (as in technology, or in sports) and the need to accept the limitations of natural boundaries (as in ecology or old age). While people generally aim for security on this dimension (through health and wealth), much of life brings a gradual disillusionment and realization that such security can only be temporary. Recognizing limitations can bring great release of tension. Social dimension On the social dimension (Mitwelt) individuals relate to others as they interact with the public world around them. This dimension includes their response to the culture they live in, as well as to the class and race they belong to (and also those they do not belong to). Attitudes here range from love to hate and from cooperation to competition. The dynamic contradictions can be understood in terms of acceptance versus rejection or belonging versus isolation. Some people prefer to withdraw from the world of others as much as possible. Others blindly chase public acceptance by going along with the rules and fashions of the moment. Otherwise they try to rise above these by becoming trendsetters themselves. By acquiring fame or other forms of power, individuals can attain dominance over others temporarily. Sooner or later, however, everyone is confronted with both failure and aloneness. Psychological dimension On the psychological dimension (Eigenwelt) individuals relate to themselves and in this way create a personal world. This dimension includes views about their own character, their past experience and their future possibilities. Contradictions here are often experienced in terms of personal strengths and weaknesses. People search for a sense of identity, a feeling of being substantial and having a self. But inevitably many events will confront them with evidence to the contrary and plunge them into a state of confusion or disintegration. Activity and passivity are an important polarity here. Self-affirmation and resolution go with the former and surrender and yielding with the latter. Facing the final dissolution of self that comes with personal loss and the facing of death might bring anxiety and confusion to many who have not yet given up their sense of self-importance. Spiritual dimension On the spiritual dimension (Überwelt) (van Deurzen, 1984) individuals relate to the unknown and thus create a sense of an ideal world, an ideology and a philosophical outlook. It is here that they find meaning by putting all the pieces of the puzzle together for themselves. For some people this is done by adhering to a religion or other prescriptive world view, for others it is about discovering or attributing meaning in a more secular or personal way. The contradictions that have to be faced on this dimension are often related to the tension between purpose and absurdity, hope and despair. People create their values in search of something that matters enough to live or die for, something that may even have ultimate and universal validity. Usually the aim is the conquest of a soul, or something that will substantially surpass mortality (as for instance in having contributed something valuable to humankind). Facing the void and the possibility of nothingness are the indispensable counterparts of this quest for the eternal.

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References [1] Yalom, I (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. p. 9. [2] "Existential Psychotherapy" (http:/ / www. existentialpsychotherapy. net). . Retrieved 2007-08-29. [3] Yalom. 1980. Existential Psychotherapy

Further reading • • • • • • • •

Frankl, Viktor; Man's Search for Meaning (rev. & updtd.); Pocket, 1997 Yalom, Irvin D.; Existential Psychotherapy; Basic Books, 1980 Cooper, Mick; Existential Therapies; Sage Publ., 2003 Spinelli, Ernesto; The Mirror and the Hammer: Challenging Orthodoxies in Therapeutic Thought; Sage Publ., 2002 Kierkegaard, Søren; The Concept of Dread and The Sickness Unto Death, Princeton University Press Deurzen, E. van (2002) Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy in Practice, 2nd edition, London: Sage Publications. ibid (1997) Everyday Mysteries: Existential Dimensions of Psychotherapy, London: Routledge. (2nd edition 2006) ibid (1998) Paradox and Passion in Psychotherapy, Chichester: Wiley.

• Deurzen, E. van, and Kenward, R. (2005) Dictionary of Existential Psychotherapy and Counseling, London: Sage Publications. • Deurzen, E. van and Arnold-Baker, C., eds. (2005) Existential Perspectives on Human Issues: a Handbook for Practice, London: Palgrave, Macmillan. • Glasser, William, Choice Theory • Willburg, Peter, "The Therapist as Listener: Martin Heidegger and the Missing Dimension of Counseling and Psychotherapy Training" (http://www.heidegger.org.uk/theraslist.htm) • Wilkes, R and Milton, M, (2006) Being an Existential Therapist: An IPA study of existential therapists' experiences, Existential Analysis. Jan 2006 • Milton, M., Charles, L., Judd, D., O'Brien, Tipney, A. and Turner, A . (2003) The Existential-Phenomenological Paradigm: The Importance for Integration, Existential Analysis • Judd, D. and Milton, M. (2001) Psychotherapy with Lesbian and Gay Clients: Existential-Phenomenological Contributions to Training, Lesbian and Gay Psychology Review, 2(1): 16-23 • Corrie, S. and Milton, M . (2000) "The Relationship Between Existential-Phenomenological and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapies", European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counseling and Health. • May, R. "The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology" • May, R. "The Cry for Myth" • May, R. "Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence" • May, R. "Man's Search for Himself" • Milton, M (2000) "Is Existential Psychotherapy A Lesbian and Gay Affirmative Psychotherapy?" Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, • Milton, M. and Judd, D. (1999) "The Dilemma that is Assessment", Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 102-114. • Milton, M. (1999) "Depression and the Uncertainty of Identity: An existential-phenomenological exploration in just twelve sessions", Changes: An International Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy, • Milton, M (1997) "An Existential Approach to HIV Related Psychotherapy", Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, V8.1, 115-129 • Milton, M (1994) "The Case for Existential Therapy in HIV Related Psychotherapy", Counselling Psychology Quarterly, V7 (4). 367-374

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Existential therapy • Milton, M. (1994) "HIV Related Psychotherapy and Its Existential Concerns", Counselling Psychology Review, V9 (4). 13-24 • Milton, M (1993) "Existential Thought and Client Centred Therapy", Counselling Psychology Quarterly, V6 (3). 239-248 • Schneider, K.J. (2004). "Rediscovery of Awe: Splendor, Mystery, and the Fluid Center of Life." St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. • Schneider, K.J. (2008). "Existential-integrative Psychotherapy: Guideposts to the Core of Practice." New York: Routledge. • Schneider, K.J. (2009). "Awakening to Awe: Personal Stories of Profound Transformation." Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson. • Schneider, K.J.,& Krug, O.T. (2010). "Existential-Humanistic Therapy." Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press. • Schneider, K.J. (2011). "Existential-Humanistic Therapies". In S.B. Messer & Alan Gurman (Eds.), Essential Psychotherapies. (Third ed.). New York: Guilford. • Seidner, Stanley S. (June 10, 2009) "A Trojan Horse: Logotherapeutic Transcendence and its Secular Implications for Theology" (http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:FrKYAo88ckkJ:www.materdei.ie/media/ conferences/a-secular-age-parallel-sessions-timetable.pdf+"Stan+Seidner"&hl=en&gl=us). Mater Dei Institute. pp 10–12. • Tillich, Paul (1952). The Courage to Be. Yale University Press. • Wilberg, P. (2004) The Therapist as Listener - Martin Heidegger and the Missing Dimension of Counselling and Psychotherapy Training

External links • Existential therapy (http://www.existential-therapy.com/)

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Master–slave dialectic The master–slave dialectic is the common name for a famous passage of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, though the original German phrase, Herrschaft und Knechtschaft, is more properly translated as Lordship and Bondage.[1] It is widely considered a key element in Hegel's philosophical system, and has heavily influenced many subsequent philosophers. The passage describes, in narrative form, the development of self-consciousness as such in an encounter between what are thereby (i.e., emerging only from this Hegel was influenced by articles about the Haitian Revolution in Minerva encounter) two distinct, self-conscious beings; the essence of the dialectic is the movement or motion of recognizing, in which the two self-consciousnesses are constituted each in being recognized as self-conscious by the other. This movement, inexorably taken to its extreme, takes the form of a "struggle to the death" in which one masters the other, only to find that such lordship makes the very recognition he had sought impossible, since the bondsman, in this state, is not free to offer it.

Context "Independent and Dependent Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage" is the first of two titled subsections in the "Self-Consciousness" chapter of Phenomenology. It is preceded in the chapter by a discussion of "Life" and "Desire," among other things, and is followed by "Free Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness." It is a story or myth created by Hegel in order to explain his idea of how self-consciousness dialectically sublates into what he variously refers to as Absolute Knowledge, Spirit, and Science. As a work the Phenomenology may be considered both as an independent work, apparently considered by Hegel to be an a priori for understanding the Science of Logic, and as a part of the Science of Logic, where absolute knowledge is explained.

Recognition Crucially, for Hegel, absolute knowledge, or Spirit, cannot come to be without first a self-consciousness recognizing another self-consciousness. Such an issue in the history of philosophy had never been explored (except by Johann Gottlieb Fichte) and its treatment marks a watershed in European philosophy.

Hegel's myth In order to explain how this works, Hegel uses a story that is in essence an abstracted, idealized history about how two people meet. However, Hegel's idea of the development of self-consciousness from consciousness, and its sublation into a higher unity in absolute knowledge, is not the contoured brain of natural science and evolutionary biology, but a phenomenological construct with a history; one that must have passed through a struggle for freedom before realising itself.

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Masterslave dialectic The abstract language used by Hegel never allows one to interpret this story in a straightforward fashion. It can be read as self-consciousness coming to itself through a child's or adult's development, or self-consciousness coming to be in the beginning of human history (see hominization) or as that of a society or nation realising freedom. That the master–slave dialectic can be interpreted as an internal process occurring in one person or as an external process between two or more people is a result, in part, of the fact that Hegel asserts an "end to the antithesis of subject and object". What occurs in the human mind also occurs outside of it. The objective and subjective, according to Hegel, sublate one another until they are unified, and the "story" takes this process through its various "moments" when the lifting up of two contradictory moments results in a higher unity. First, the two abstract consciousnesses meet and are astounded at the realisation of the self as a foreign object. Each can choose to ignore the other, in which case no self-consciousness forms and each views the other merely as an animated object rather than an equivalent subject. Or, they become mesmerized by the mirror-like other and attempt, as they previously had done in controlling their own body, to assert their will. According to Hegel, "On approaching the other it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as another being; secondly, it has thereby sublated that other, for this primitive consciousness does not regard the other as essentially real but sees its own self in the other."[2]

Reaction When initially confronted with another person, the self cannot be immediately recognized 'Appearing thus immediately on the scene, they are for one another like ordinary objects, independent shapes, individuals submerged in the being [or immediacy] of Life'

Death struggle A struggle to the death ensues. However, if one of the two should die, the achievement of self-consciousness fails. Hegel refers to this failure as "abstract negation" not the negation or sublation required. This death is avoided by the agreement, communication of, or subordination to, slavery. In this struggle the Master emerges as Master because he doesn't fear death as much as the slave, and the slave out of this fear consents to the slavery. This experience of fear on the part of the slave is crucial, however, in a later moment of the dialectic, where it becomes the prerequisite experience for the slave's further development.

Enslavement and mastery Truth of oneself as self-conscious is achieved only if both live; the recognition of the other gives each of them the objective truth and self-certainty required for self-consciousness. Thus, the two enter into the relation of master/slave and preserve the recognition of each other.

Contradiction and Resolution However, this state is not a happy one and does not achieve full self-consciousness. The recognition by the slave is merely on pain of death. The master's self-consciousness is dependent on the slave for recognition and also has a mediated relation with nature: the slave works with nature and begins to shape it into products for the master. As the slave creates more and more products with greater and greater sophistication through his own creativity, he begins to see himself reflected in the products he created, he realises that the world around him was created by his own hands, thus the slave is no longer alienated from his own labour and achieves self-consciousness, while the master on the other hand has become wholly dependent on the products created by his slave; thus the master is enslaved by the labour of his slave. The realisation of this contradiction allows the slave to once again struggle against his master.

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Conclusions One interpretation of this dialectic is that neither a slave nor a master can be considered as fully self-conscious. A person who has already achieved self-consciousness could be enslaved, so self-consciousness must be considered not as an individual achievement, or an achievement of natural and genetic evolution, but as a social phenomenon.[3] As philosopher Robert Brandom explains, "Hegel's discussion of the dialectic of the Master and Slave is an attempt to show that asymmetric recognitive relations are metaphysically defective, that the norms they institute aren't the right kind to help us think and act with--to make it possible for us to think and act. Asymmetric recognition in this way is authority without responsibility, on the side of the Master, and responsibility without authority, on the side of the Slave. And Hegel's argument is that unless authority and responsibility are commensurate and reciprocal, no actual normative statuses are instituted. This is one of his most important and certainly one of his deepest ideas, though it's not so easy to see just how the argument works."[4] Kojeve's unique interpretation differs from this. For Kojeve, people are born and history began with the first struggle, which ended with the first masters and slaves. A person is always either master or slave; and there are no real humans where there are no masters and slaves. History comes to an end when the difference between master and slave ends, when the master ceases to be master because there are no more slaves and the slave ceases to be a slave because there are no more masters. A synthesis takes place between master and slave: the integral citizen of the universal and homogenous state created by Napoleon.[5]

Influence The master and slave relationship influenced numerous discussions and ideas in the 20th century, especially because of its supposed connection to Karl Marx's conception of class struggle as the motive force of social development, although Chris Arthur has argued that this connection was falsely instigated by Sartre under the influence of (Russian-born) French philosopher Alexandre Kojève.[6] Hegel's master–slave dialectic has been influential in the social sciences, philosophy, literary studies, critical theory, postcolonial studies and in psychoanalysis.[7] Furthermore, Hegel's master–slave trope, and particularly the emphasis on recognition, has been of crucial influence on Martin Buber's relational schema in I and Thou, Simone de Beauvoir's account of the history and dynamics of gender relations in The Second Sex and Frantz Fanon's description of the colonial relation in Black Skin, White Masks.[8] Susan Buck-Morss's article 'Hegel and Haiti'[9] considers how the Haitian revolution greatly influenced Hegel's writing of his slave-master dialectic. Kojève argued that Hegel's intentions were to illustrate that overcoming the fear of death was the only way to achieve true freedom. This was not actually stated by Hegel (in truth at points in this work he makes a direct argument against the use of force as the manner in which history develops). A recent work that uses this argument is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama admits in the work that his understanding of Hegel is mostly Kojèvian, in particular his conception of the end of history as an ultimate stage of history, while it is, according to Georg Lukács' interpretation, not a transcendent end but an aim immanent to the never-ending process.

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Notes [1] David A. Duquette, "Hegel’s Social and Political Thought" (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ hegelsoc/ ), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Accessed 9 February 2012). [2] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Paragraph 179, Pg. 111. [3] Philip Moran, Hegel and the Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, Holland: Grüner, 1988. [4] Robert Brandom, Interview, Summer 2008. Video: http:/ / video. google. com/ videoplay?docid=-1034802594689246468. 15m:25s. [5] Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, France: Gallimard, 1947. Translated as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, New York: Basic Books, 1969. [6] Chris Arthur, "Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology." (http:/ / www. newleftreview. org/ ?page=article& view=89) New Left Review I/142, November-December 1983 [7] Julia Borossa and Caroline Rooney, "Suffering, Transience and Immortal Longings: Salomé Between Nietzsche and Freud," Journal of European Studies 33(3/4): 287-304 London, 2003. [8] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967: 62. [9] Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4. (Summer, 2000), pp. 821-865.

Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy has been a major influence in the development of 20th century philosophy, especially existentialism and postmodernism. Kierkegaard was a 19th century Danish philosopher who has been called the "Father of Existentialism".[1] His philosophy also influenced the development of existential psychology.[2] Kierkegaard criticized aspects of the philosophical systems that were brought on by philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel before him and the Danish Hegelians. He was also indirectly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.[3] He measured himself against the model of philosophy which he found in Socrates, which aims to draw one's attention not to explanatory systems, but rather to the issue of how one exists.[4] One of Kierkegaard's recurrent themes is the importance of subjectivity, which has to do with the way people relate themselves to (objective) truths. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, he argues that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity." What he means by this is that Søren Kierkegaard most essentially, truth is not just a matter of discovering objective facts. While objective facts are important, there is a second and more crucial element of truth, which involves how one relates oneself to those matters of fact. Since how one acts is, from the ethical perspective, more important than any matter of fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather than objectivity.[5]

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Note on pseudonyms Many of Kierkegaard's earlier works from 1843 to 1846 were written pseudonymously. In the non-pseudonymous The Point of View of My Work as an Author, he explained that the pseudonymous works are written from perspectives which are not his own: while Kierkegaard himself was a religious author, the pseudonymous authors wrote from points of view that were aesthetic or speculative. One exception to this is Anti-Climacus, a pseudonymous author developed after the writing of The Point of View: Anti-Climacus is a religious author who writes from a Christian perspective so ideal that Kierkegaard did not wish it to be attributed to himself.[6] Because the pseudonymous authors write from perspectives which are not Kierkegaard's own, some of the philosophy mentioned in this article may or may not necessarily reflect Kierkegaard's own beliefs. Just as other philosophers bring up viewpoints in their essays to discuss and criticize them, Kierkegaard assigns pseudonyms to explore a particular viewpoint in-depth, which may take up a whole book or two in some instances, and Kierkegaard, or another pseudonym, critiques that position. For example, the author, Johannes Climacus is not a Christian and he argues from a non-Christian viewpoint. Anti-Climacus, as mentioned earlier, is a Christian to a high degree and he argues from a devout Christian viewpoint. Kierkegaard places his beliefs in-between these two authors.[6] Most of Kierkegaard's later philosophical and religious writings from 1846 to 1855 were written and authored by himself, and he assigned no pseudonyms to these works. Subsequently, these works are considered by most scholars to reflect Kierkegaard's own beliefs.[7] Where appropriate, this article will mention the respective author, pseudonymous or not.

Themes in his philosophy Alienation Alienation is a term philosophers apply to a wide variety of phenomena, including any feeling of separation from, and discontent with, society; feeling that there is a moral breakdown in society; feelings of powerlessness in the face of the solidity of social institutions; the impersonal, dehumanised nature of large-scale and bureaucratic social organisations.[8] Kierkegaard recognizes and accepts the notion of alienation, although he phrases it and understands it in his own distinctly original terms. For Kierkegaard, the present age is a reflective age—one that values objectivity and thought over action, lip-service to ideals rather than action, discussion over action, publicity and advertising to reality, and fantasy to the real world. For Kierkegaard, the meaning of values has been removed from life, by lack of finding any true and legitimate authority. Instead of falling into any claimed authority, any "literal" sacred book or any other great and lasting voice, self-aware humans must confront an existential uncertainty. Humanity has lost meaning because the accepted criterion of reality and truth is ambiguous and subjective thought—that which cannot be proven with logic, historical research, or scientific analysis. Humans cannot think our choices in life, we must live them; and even those choices that we often think about become different once life itself enters into the picture. For Kierkegaard, the type of objectivity that a scientist or historian might use misses the point—humans are not motivated and do not find meaning in life through pure objectivity. Instead, they find it through passion, desire, and moral and religious commitment. These phenomena are not objectively provable—nor do they come about through any form of analysis of the external world; they come about through inward reflection, a way of looking at one’s life that evades objective scrutiny. Kierkegaard's analysis of the present age uses terms that resemble but are not exactly coincident with Hegel and Marx's theory of alienation. However Kierkegaard expressly means that human beings are alienated from God because they are living too much in the world. Individuals need to gain their souls from the world because it actually belongs to God. Kierkegaard has no interest in external battles as Karl Marx does. His concern is about the inner fight for faith.

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard Luke 14:27 Whoever does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. (The Bible) Guidance enough is indeed offered on life's way, and no wonder, since every error passes itself off as guidance. But even though errors are numerous, truths are still only one, and there is only one who is “the Way and the Life,” only one guidance that indeed leads a person through life to life. Thousands upon thousands carry a name by which it is indicated that they have chosen this guidance, that they belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, after whom they call themselves Christians, that they are his bond-servants, whether they be masters or servants, slaves or freeborn, men or women. Christians they call themselves and they also call themselves by other names, and all of them designate the relation to this one guidance. They call themselves believers and thereby signify that they are pilgrims, strangers and aliens in the world. Indeed, a staff in the hand does not identify a pilgrim as definitely as calling oneself a believer publicly testifies that one is on a journey, because faith simply means: What I am seeking is not here, and for that very reason I believe it. Faith expressly signifies the deep, strong, blessed restlessness that drives the believer so that he cannot settle down at rest in this world, and therefore the person who has settled down completely at rest has also ceased to be a believer, because a believer cannot sit still as one sits with a pilgrim's staff in one's hand – a believer travels forward. • Soren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Hong 1993 p. 217-218 Albert Camus wrote about the idea of being a stranger in the world but reversed Kierkegaard's meaning. A stranger for Camus was someone living in the world who is forced to exist in a Christian way even though the individual does not want to be a Christian. But Kierkegaard was discussing the Christian who wants to be a Christian living in a world that has abandoned Christianity. Both Camus and Kierkegaard had in common an equal distaste for a Christian Democracy where all are forced to take a positive part in Christianity because freedom of choice would be lacking and a non-Christian Democracy where none are allowed to take an active part in Christianity. Kierkegaard put it this way in his Attack Upon Christianity, published 1854-55. In the New Testament sense, to be a Christian is, in an upward sense, as different from being a man as, in a downward sense, to be a man is different from being a beast. A Christian in the sense of the New Testament, although he stands suffering in the midst of life’s reality, has yet become completely a stranger to this life; in the words of the Scripture and also of the Collects (which still are read-O bloody satire!-by the sort of priests we now have, and in the ears of the sort of Christians that now live) he is a stranger and a pilgrim-just think, for example of the late Bishop Mynster intoning, “We are strangers and pilgrims in this world”! A Christian in the New Testament sense is literally a stranger and a pilgrim, he feels himself a stranger, and everyone involuntarily feels that this man is a stranger to him. • Soren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon Christianity, The Instant, No. 7, Soren Kierkegaard, 1854-1855, Walter Lowrie 1944, 1968

Abstraction An element of Kierkegaard's critique of modernity in his socio-political work, Two Ages, is the mention of money — which he calls an abstraction.[9][10] An abstraction is something that only has a reality in an ersatz reality. It is not tangible, and only has meaning within an artificial context, which ultimately serves devious and deceptive purposes. It is a figment of thought that has no concrete reality, neither now nor in the future. How is money an abstraction? Money gives the illusion that it has a direct relationship to the work that is done. That is, the work one does is worth so much, equals so much money. In reality, however, the work one does is an expression of who one is as a person; it expresses one's goals in life and associated meaning. As a person, the work one performs is supposed to be an external realization of one's relationship to others and to the world. It is one's way of making the world a better place for oneself and for others. What reducing work to a monetary value does is to replace the concrete reality of one's everyday struggles with the world —to give it shape, form and meaning— with an abstraction. Kierkegaard lamented that "a young man today would scarcely envy another his capacities or skill or the love of a beautiful girl or his fame, no, but he would envy him his money. Give me money, the young man will

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard say, and I will be all right."[11] Below are two quotes concerning Kierkegaard's idea of abstraction which cannot be thought about without thinking about concretion. He moves from the world historical, the general, to the single individual, the specific. The first from the esthete and the second from the ethicist in Either/Or and the third from the book that explained all his previous works; Concluding Unscientific Postscript. As has already been noted above, all classic productions stand equally high, because each one stands infinitely high. If, despite this fact, one were to attempt to introduce an order of rank into the classic procession, one would evidently have to choose as a basis for such a distinction, something that was not essential; for if the basis were essential, the difference itself would become an essential difference; from that it would again follow that the word “classic” was wrongly predicated of the group as a whole. The more abstract the idea is, the smaller the probability of a numerous representation. But how does the idea become concrete? By being permeated with the historical consciousness. The more concrete the idea, the greater the probability. The more abstract the medium, the smaller the probability; the more concrete, the greater. But what does it mean to say that the medium is concrete, other than to say it is language, or is seen in approximation to language; for language is the most concrete of all media. The idea, for example, which comes to expression in sculpture is wholly abstract, and bears no relation to the historical; the medium through which it is expressed is likewise abstract, consequently there is a great probability that the section of the classic works which includes sculpture will contain only a few. In this I have the testimony of time and experience on my side. If, on the other hand, I take a concrete idea and a concrete medium, then it seems otherwise. Homer is indeed a classic poet, but just because the epic idea is a concrete idea, and because the medium is language, it so happens that in the section of the classics which contains the epic, there are many epics conceivable, which are all equally classic, because history constantly furnishes us with new epic material. In this too, I have the testimony of history and the assent of experience. Either/Or Part I, Swenson p. 49, 53 The two positions touched on here could be regarded as attempts to actualize an ethical life-view. The reason that they do not succeed is that the individual has chosen himself in his isolation or has chosen himself abstractly. To say it in other words, the individual has not chosen himself ethically. He therefore has no connection with actuality, and when that is the case no ethical way of life can be put into practice. But the person who chooses himself ethically chooses himself concretely as this specific individual, and he achieves this concretion because this choice is identical with the repentance, which ratifies the choice. The individual with these capacities, these inclinations, these drives, these passions, influenced by this specific social milieu, as this specific product of a specific environment. But as he becomes aware of all this, he takes upon himself responsibility for all of it. He does not hesitate over whether he will take this particular thing or not, for he knows that if he does not do it something much more important will be lost. In the moment of choice, he is in complete isolation, for he withdraws from his social milieu, and yet at the same moment he is in absolute continuity, for he chooses himself as a product. And this choice is freedom’s choice in such a way that in choosing himself as product he can just as well be said to produce himself. At the moment of choice, he is at the point of consummation, for his personality is consummating itself, and yet at the same moment he is at the very beginning, because he is choosing himself according to his freedom. Either/Or Part II, Hong p. 251 When in pure thinking mention is made of an immediate unity of reflection-in-itself and reflection-in-the-other and of the annulment of this immediate unity, then something must indeed come between the elements of the immediate unity. What is this? Yes, it is time. But time cannot be assigned a place within pure thinking. What, then, do annulment and transition and a new unity signify? What, if anything, does it mean to think in such a way that one always merely makes a show of it because everything that is said is absolutely revoked? And what does it mean not to admit that one thinks this way but then continually to proclaim from the housetops the positive truth of this pure thinking? Just as existence has joined thinking and existing, inasmuch as an existing person is a thinking person, so are there two media: the medium of abstraction and the medium of

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard actuality. But pure thinking is yet a third medium, very recently invented. It begins, it is said, after the most exhaustive abstraction. Pure thinking is-what shall I say-piously or thoughtlessly unaware of the relation that abstraction still continually has to that from which it abstracts. Here in this pure thinking there is rest for every doubt; here is the eternal positive truth and whatever one cares to say. This means that pure thinking is a phantom. And if Hegelian philosophy is free from all postulates, it has attained this with one insane postulate: the beginning of pure thinking. For the existing person, existing is for him his highest interest, and his interestedness in existing in his actuality. What actuality is cannot be rendered in the language of abstraction. Actuality is an inter-esse [between being] between thinking and being in the hypothetical unity of abstraction. Abstraction deals with possibility and actuality, but its conception of actuality is a false rendition, since the medium is not actuality but possibility. Only by annulling actuality can abstraction grasp it, but to annul it is precisely to change it into possibility. Within abstraction everything that is said about actuality in the language of abstraction is said within possibility. That is, in the language of actuality all abstraction is related to actuality as a possibility, not to an actuality within abstraction and possibility. Actuality, existence, is the dialectical element in a trilogy, the beginning and end of which cannot be for an existing person, who qua existing is in the dialectical element. Abstraction merges the trilogy. Quite right. But how does it do it? Is abstraction a something that does it, or is it not the act of the abstractor? But the abstractor is, after all, an existing person, and as an existing person is consequently in the dialectical element, which he cannot mediate or merge, least of all absolutely, as long as he is existing. If he does do it, then this must be related as a possibility to actuality, to the existence which he himself is. He must explain how he goes about it-that is, how he as an existing person goes about it, or whether he ceases to be an existing person, and whether an existing person has a right to do that. As soon as we begin to ask such questions, we are asking ethically and are maintaining the claim of the ethical upon the existing person, which cannot be that he is supposed to abstract from existence, but that he is supposed to exist, which is also the existing person’s highest interest. • Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Vol 1, p. 314-315 Hong translation

Death Death is inevitable and temporally unpredictable. Kierkegaard believed that individuals needed to sincerely and intensely come to realize the truth of that fact in order to live passionately. Kierkegaard accuses society of being in death-denial. Even though people see death all around them and grasp as an objective fact that everyone dies, few people truly understand, subjectively and inwardly, that they will die someday. For example, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard notes that people never think to say, "I shall certainly attend your party, but I must make an exception for the contingency that a roof tile happens to blow down and kill me; for in that case, I cannot attend."[12] This is jest as far as Kierkegaard is concerned. But there is also earnestness involved in the thought of death. Kierkegaard said the following about death in his Three Upbuilding Discourses, 1844. We shall not decide which life fights the good fight most easily, but we all agree that every human being ought to fight the good fight, from which no one is shut out, and yet this is so glorious that if it were granted only once to a past generation under exceptional circumstances-yes, what a description envy and discouragement would then know how to give! The difference is about the same as that in connection with the thought of death. As soon as a human being is born, he begins to die. But the difference is that there are some people for whom the thought of death comes into existence with birth and is present to them in the quiet peacefulness of childhood and the buoyancy of youth; whereas others have a period in which this thought is not present to them until, when the years run out, the years of vigor and vitality, the thought of death meets them on their way. Who, now, is going to decide which life was easier, whether it was the life of those who continually lived with a certain reserve because the thought of death was present to them or the life of those who so abandoned themselves to life that they almost forgot the existence of death?[13]

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Dread or anxiety For Kierkegaard's author, Vigilius Haufniensis, anxiety/dread/angst (depending on the translation and context) is unfocused fear. Haufniensis uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. From this height he can see all the possibilities of life. He's reflecting on what he could become if he only threw himself into the power of his own choice. As long as he stands there he stands at the crossroads of life, unable to make a decision and live within its boundaries. The mere fact that one has the possibility and freedom to do something, even the most terrifying of possibilities, triggers immense feelings of dread. Haufniensis called this our "dizziness of freedom." Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become. Vigilius Haufniensis, The Concept of Anxiety p. 61 In The Concept of Anxiety, Haufniensis focuses on the first anxiety experienced by man: Adam's choice to eat from God's forbidden tree of knowledge or not. Since the concepts of good and evil did not come into existence before Adam ate the fruit, which is now dubbed original sin, Adam had no concept of good and evil, and did not know that eating from the tree was evil. What he did know was that God told him not to eat from the tree. The anxiety comes from the fact that God's prohibition itself implies that Adam is free and that he could choose to obey God or not. After Adam ate from the tree, sin was born. So, according to Kierkegaard, anxiety precedes sin, and it is anxiety that leads Adam to sin. Haufniensis mentions that anxiety is the presupposition for hereditary sin. However, Haufniensis mentions that anxiety is a way for humanity to be saved as well. Anxiety informs us of our choices, our self-awareness and personal responsibility, and brings us from a state of un-self-conscious immediacy to self-conscious reflection. (Jean-Paul Sartre calls these terms pre-reflexive consciousness and reflexive consciousness.) An individual becomes truly aware of their potential through the experience of dread. So, anxiety may be a possibility for sin, but anxiety can also be a recognition or realization of one's true identity and freedoms. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate. … Anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness. And no Grand Inquisitor has such dreadful torments in readiness as anxiety has, and no secret agent knows as cunningly as anxiety to attack his suspect in his weakest moment or to make alluring the trap in which he will be caught, and no discerning judge understands how to interrogate and examine the accused as does anxiety, which never lets the accused escape, neither through amusement, nor by noise, nor during work, neither by day nor by night. — Vigilius Haufniensis, The Concept of Anxiety p. 155-156

Despair Is despair a merit or a defect? Purely dialectically it is both. If one were to think of despair only in the abstract, without reference to some particular despairer, one would have to say it is an enormous merit. The possibility of this sickness is man’s advantage over the beast, and it is an advantage which characterizes him quite otherwise than the upright posture, for it bespeaks the infinite erectness or loftiness of his being spirit. The possibility of this sickness is man’s advantage over the beast; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian’s advantage over natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian’s blessedness. — Anti-Climacus, The Sickness Unto Death p. 45

Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard Most emphatically in The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard's author argues that the human self is a composition of various aspects that must be brought into conscious balance: the finite, the infinite, a consciousness of the "relationship of the two to itself," and a consciousness of "the power that posited" the self. The finite (limitations such as those imposed by one's body or one's concrete circumstances) and the infinite (those capacities that free us from limitations such as imagination) always exist in a state of tension. That tension between two aspects of the "self" that must be brought into balance. When the self is out of balance, i.e., has the wrong understanding of who it is because it conceives itself too much in terms of its own limiting circumstances (and thus fails to recognize its own freedom to determine what it will be) or too much in terms of what it would like to be, (thus ignoring its own circumstances), the person is in a state of despair. Notably, Anti-Climacus says one can be in despair even if one feels perfectly happy. Despair is not just an emotion, in a deeper sense it is the loss of self, i.e., it describes the state when one has the wrong conception of oneself. In Either/Or, A and Judge William each has one epistolary novel in two volumes. The A is an aesthete well aware that he can use the power of interpretation to define who he is and what he takes to be valuable. He knows he can shape and reshape his own self-identity. Nothing binds him to his relationships. Nothing binds him to his past actions. In the end though, he also knows he lacks a consistent understanding of who he is. He lacks a self that resists his own power of reinterpretation. His older friend Judge William, argues that a deeper concept of selfhood is discovered as one commits to one's actions, and takes ownership of the past and present. A concept of oneself, as this particular human being, begins to take form in one's own consciousness. Another perspective, one in which an individual can find some measure of freedom from despair, is available for the person with religious "faith." This attunes the individual so that he or she can recognize what has always been there: a self to be realized within the circumstances it finds itself right now, i.e., this inner attunement brings about a sort of synthesis between the infinite and the finite. In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio argues that the choice of Abraham to obey the private, unethical, commandment of God to sacrifice his son reveals what faith entails: he directs his consciousness absolutely toward "the absolute" rather than the merely ethical, i.e., he practices an inner spirituality that seeks to be "before god" rather than seeking to understand himself as an ethically upright person. His God requires more than being good, he demands that he seek out an inner commitment to him. If Abraham were to blithely obey, his actions would have no meaning. It is only when he acts with fear and trembling that he demonstrates a full awareness that murdering a son is absolutely wrong, ethically speaking. Despair has several specific levels that a person can find themselves, each one further in despair than the last as laid out in The Sickness Unto Death. The first level is "The despair that is ignorant of being despair or the despairing ignorance of having a self and an eternal self." Essentially this level is one which has the wrong conception of what a self is, i.e., is ignorant of how to realize the self one already potentially is. In this sense, the person does not recognize his own despair because he often measures the success of his life based on whether he himself judges himself to be happy. Regardless of whether you know you are in despair or not, Kierkegaard asserts, you can still be in that state. He notes that this is the most common in the world. The next level of despair is "The despair that is conscious of being despair and therefore is conscious of having a self in which there is something eternal and then either in despair does not will to be itself or in despair wills to be itself." The first form of this conscious despair is "In despair not to will or want to be oneself." This becomes further subdivided into three categories: the one already mentioned, the despair not to will to be a self, and lowest, the despair to wish for a new self. These three divisions are mostly the self-worth the person has and the amount to which they understand their own despair. The despair to not be oneself is pretty straightforward. A person sees themself as unworthy and as such does not see themself as worthy before something they do not understand. The despair not to be a self is deeper, because to not wish to be a self is to wish to not have a relation to God or at the very least see one's relation to God as unworthy, and thus shrink from it. The lowest form of this group, however, is the desire to be a new self. This is logically the deepest form as it assumes the deepest understanding of one's despair. Once in despair, without a complete relation to God one will always be in despair, so to be in this level one understands the permanence of the despair. The despair in this group arises from the nature of sensate things and

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard physical desires. These three sub groups are also grouped under the heading "Despair over the earthly." The second level of conscious despair under the heading "Despair over the eternal." Someone in this level views themself in light of their own weakness. Unlike in the upper level, this weakness is understood and as such, instead of turning to faith and humbling oneself before God, they despair in their own weakness and unworthiness. In this sense, they despair over the eternal and refuse to be comforted by the light of God. The last and lowest form of despair is the desire "In despair to will to be oneself." This last form of despair is also referred to by Kierkegaard as "demonic despair" (Note that the term demonic is used in the Classical Greek Sense, not the modern sense). In this form of despair, the individual finds him or herself in despair, understands they are in despair, seeks some way to alleviate it, and yet no help is forthcoming. As a result, the self becomes hardened against any form of help and "Even if God in heaven and all the angels offered him aid, he would not want it." At this level of despair the individual revels in their own despair and sees their own pain as lifting them up above the base nature of other humans who do not find themselves in this state. This is the least common form of despair and Kierkegaard claims it is mostly found in true poets. This despair can also be called the despair of defiance, as it is the despair that strikes out against all that is eternal. One last note is that as one travels further down the forms of despair, the number of people in each group becomes fewer.

Ethics Many philosophers who initially read Kierkegaard, especially Johannes de Silentio's Fear and Trembling, often come to the conclusion that Kierkegaard supports a divine command law of ethics. The divine command theory is a metaethical theory which claims moral values are whatever is commanded by a god or gods. However, Kierkegaard (through his pseudonym Johannes de Silentio) is not arguing that morality is created by God; instead, he would argue that a divine command from God transcends ethics. This distinction means that God does not necessarily create human morality: it is up to us as individuals to create our own In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio analyzes Abraham's morals and values. But any religious person must be action to sacrifice Isaac. Silentio argues that Abraham is a knight of prepared for the event of a divine command from God faith. that would take precedence over all moral and rational obligations. Kierkegaard called this event the teleological suspension of the ethical. Abraham, the knight of faith, chose to obey God unconditionally, and was rewarded with his son, his faith, and the title of Father of Faith. Abraham transcended ethics and leaped into faith. But there is no valid logical argument one can make to claim that morality ought to be or can be suspended in any given circumstance, or ever. Thus, Silentio believes ethics and faith are separate stages of consciousness. The choice to obey God unconditionally is a true existential 'either/or' decision faced by the individual. Either one chooses to live in faith (the religious stage) or to live ethically (the ethical stage). In Either/Or, Kierkegaard insists that the single individual has ethical responsibility of his life. However, everyone wants to enjoy themselves and ethics gets in the way of a person's enjoyment of life if taken to extremes. This results in a battle between those who want to live for pleasure and those who demand an ethical existence. But Kierkegaard always points toward the religious goal, an "eternal happiness", or the salvation of the soul as the highest good. He says, be whatever you want, but remember that your soul belongs to God, not to the world.

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard By now you have easily seen that in his life the ethical individual goes through stages we previously set forth as separate stages. He is going to develop in his life the personal, the civic, the religious virtues, and his life advances through his continually translating himself from one stage to another. As soon as a person thinks that one of these stages is adequate and that he dares to concentrate on it one-sidedly, he has not chosen himself ethically but has failed to see the significance of either isolation or continuity and above all has not grasped that the truth lies in the identity of the two. The person who has ethically chosen and found himself possess himself defined in his entire concretion. He then possesses himself as an individual who has these capacities, these passions, these inclinations [14], these habits, who is subject to these external influences, who is influenced in one direction thus and in another thus. Here he then possesses himself as a task in such a way that it is chiefly to order, shape, temper, inflame, control-in short, to produce an evenness in the soul, a harmony, which is the fruit of the personal virtues. Either/Or Part 2, Hong p. 262 Resignation has made the individual face or has seen to it that he face toward an eternal happiness as the τέλος. This τέλος is not an element among other elements. Thus the both-and of mediation is not much better, even though less naïve, than the previously described jovial chatter that includes everything. At the moment of resignation, of collecting oneself, of choice the individual is allowed to salute the absolute τέλος-but then, then comes the mediation. So, too, a dog can be taught to walk on two legs for a moment but then, then comes the mediation, and the dog walks on four legs – mediation also does that. Spiritually understood, a human being’s upright walk is his absolute respect for the absolute τέλος, otherwise he walks on all fours. When it is a matter of relative elements mediation has its significance (that they are all equal before mediation), but when it is a matter of the absolute end or goal, mediation means that the absolute τέλος is reduced to a relative τέλος. It is not true, either, that the absolute τέλος becomes concrete in the relative ends, because resignation’s absolute distinction will at every moment safeguard the absolute τέλος against all fraternizing. It is true that the individual oriented toward the absolute τέλος, is in the relative ends, but he is not in them in such a way that the absolute τέλος is exhausted in them. It is true that before God and before the absolute τέλος we are all equal, but it is not true that God or the absolute τέλος is equal with everything else for me or for a particular individual. It may be very commendable for a particular individual to be a councilor of justice, a good worker in the office, no.1 lover in the society, almost a virtuoso on the flute, caption of the popinjay shooting club, superintendent of the orphanage, a noble and respected father-in short, a devil of a fellow who can both-and and has time for everything. But let the councilor take care that he does not become too much a devil of a fellow and proceed to do both all this and have time to direct his life toward the absolute τέλος. In other words, this both-and means that the absolute τέλος is on the same level with everything else. But the absolute τέλος has the remarkable quality of wanting to be the absolute τέλος at every moment. If, then, at the moment of resignation, of collecting oneself, of choice, an individual has understood this, it surely cannot mean that he is supposed to have forgotten it the next moment. Therefore, as I said before, resignation remains in the individual and the task is so far from getting the absolute τέλος mediated into all sorts of both-and that, on the contrary, it is to aim at the form of existence that permanently has the pathos of the great moment Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hong, p. 400-401 In Works of Love and Purity of Heart, Kierkegaard skillfully examines Christian ethics and the maxim, Love Thy Neighbour.[15]

Individuality For Kierkegaard, true individuality is called selfhood. Becoming aware of our true self is our true task and endeavor in life—it is an ethical imperative, as well as preparatory to a true religious understanding. Individuals can exist at a level that is less than true selfhood. We can live, for example, simply in terms of our pleasures—our immediate satisfaction of desires, propensities, or distractions. In this way, we glide through life without direction or purpose. To have a direction, we must have a purpose that defines for us the meaning of our lives. Kierkegaard puts it this way in Either/Or,

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard Here, then, I have your view of life, and, believe me, much of your life will become clear to you if you will consider it along with me as thought-despair. You are a hater of activity in life-quite appropriately, because if there is to be meaning in it life must have continuity, and this your life does not have. You keep busy with your studies, to be sure; you are even diligent; but it is only for your sake, and it is done with as little teleology as possible. Moreover, you are unoccupied; like the laborers in the Gospel standing idle in the marketplace, you stick your hands in your pocket and contemplate life. Now you rest in despair. Nothing concerns you; you step aside for nothing; “If someone threw a roof tile down I would still not step aside.” You are like a dying person. You die daily, not in the profound, earnest sense in which one usually understands these words, but life has lost its reality and you “Always count the days of your life from one termination-notice to the next.” You let everything pass you by; nothing makes any impact. But then something suddenly comes along that grips you, an idea, a situation, a young girl’s smile, and now you are “involved,” for just on certain occasions you are not “involved,” so at other times you are “at your service” in every way. Wherever there is something going on you join in. You behave in life as you usually do in a crowd. “You work yourself into the tightest group, see to it, if possible, to get yourself shoved up over the others so that you come to be above them, and as soon as you are up there you make yourself as comfortable as possible, and in this way you let yourself be carried through life.” But when the crowd is gone, when the event is over, you again stand on the street corner and look at the world. Either/Or Part II p. 195-196 In Sickness Unto Death specifically Kierkegaard deals with the self as a product of relations. In this sense, a human results from a relation between the Infinite (Noumena, spirit, eternal) and Finite (Phenomena, body, temporal). This does not create a true self, as a human can live without a "self" as he defines it. Instead, the Self or ability for the self to be created from a relation to the Absolute or God (the Self can only be realized through a relation to God) arises as a relation between the relation of the Finite and Infinite relating back to the human. This would be a positive relation. An individual person, for Kierkegaard, is a particular that no abstract formula or definition can ever capture. Including the individual in "the public" (or "the crowd" or "the herd") or subsuming a human being as simply a member of a species is a reduction of the true meaning of life for individuals. What philosophy or politics try to do is to categorize and pigeonhole individuals by group characteristics, each with their own individual differences. In Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1843 Kierkegaard says the differences aren't important, the likeness with God is what brings equality. In the hallowed places, in every upbuilding view of life, the thought arises in a person’s soul that help him to fight the good fight with flesh and blood, with principalities and powers, and in the fight to free himself for equality before God, whether this battle is more a war of aggression against the differences that want to encumber him with worldly favoritism or a defensive war against the differences that want to make him anxious in worldly perdition. Only in this way is equality the divine law, only in this way is the struggle the truth, only in this way does the victory have validity- only when the single individual fights for himself with himself within himself and does not unseasonably presume to help the whole world to obtain external equality, which is of very little benefit, all the less so because it never existed, if for no other reason than that everyone would come to thank him and become unequal before him, only in this way is equality the divine law. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, by Soren Kiekegaard Hong, p. 143 Kierkegaard's critique of the modern age, therefore, is about the loss of what it means to be an individual. Modern society contributes to this dissolution of what it means to be an individual. Through its production of the false idol of "the public", it diverts attention away from individuals to a mass public that loses itself in abstractions, communal dreams, and fantasies. It is helped in this task by the media and the mass production of products to keep it distracted. Even the fight for temporal equality is a distraction. In Works of Love he writes,

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To bring about similarity among people in the world, to apportion to people, if possible equally, the conditions of temporality, is indeed something that preoccupies worldliness to a high degree. But even what we may call the well-intentioned worldly effort in this regard never comes to an understanding with Christianity. Well-intentioned worldliness remains piously, if you will, convinced that there must be one temporal condition, one earthly dissimilarity – found by means of calculations and surveys or in whatever other way – that is equality. Works of Love, by Soren Kierkegaard, 1847, Hong 1995 p. 71-72 see p. 61-90 Although Kierkegaard attacked "the public", he is supportive of communities: In community, the individual is, crucial as the prior condition for forming a community. … Every individual in the community guarantees the community; the public is a chimera, numerality is everything… — Søren Kierkegaard, Journals[6]

Pathos (passion) For Kierkegaard, in order to apprehend the absolute, the mind must radically empty itself of objective content. What supports this radical emptying, however, is the desire for the absolute. Kierkegaard names this desire Passion.[16] According to Kierkegaard, the human self desires that which is beyond reason. Desire itself appears to be a desire for the infinite, as Plato once wrote. Even the desire to propagate, according to Plato, is a kind of desire for immortality—that is, we wish to live on in time through our children and their children. Erotic love itself appears as an example of this desire for something beyond the purely finite. It is a taste of what could be, if only it could continue beyond the boundaries of time and space. As the analogy implies, humans seek something beyond the here and now. The question remains, however, why is it that human pathos or passion is the most precious thing? In some ways, it might have to do with our status as existential beings. It is not thought that gets us through life—it is action; and what motivates and sustains action is passion, the desire to overcome hardships, pain, and suffering. It is also passion that enables us to die for ideals in the name of a higher reality. While a scientist might see this as plain emotion or simple animal desire, Kierkegaard sees it as that which binds to the source of life itself. The desire to live, and to live in the right way, for the right reasons, and with the right desires, is a holy and sacred force. For Kierkegaard all Christian action should have its ground in love, which is a passion. If anyone is unwilling to learn from Christianity to love himself in the right way, he cannot love the neighbor either. He can perhaps hold together with another or a few other persons, “through thick and thin,” as it is called, but this is by no means loving the neighbor. To love yourself in the right way and to love the neighbor correspond perfectly to one another, fundamentally they are one and the same thing. When the Law’s as yourself has wrested from you the self-love that Christianity sadly enough must presuppose to be in every human being, then you actually have learned to love yourself. The Law is therefore: you shall love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbor when you love him as yourself. Whoever has any knowledge of people will certainly admit that just as he has often wished to be able to move them to relinquish self-love, he has also had to wish that it were possible to teach them to love themselves. When the bustler wastes his time and powers in the service of the futile, inconsequential [17] pursuits, is that not because he has not learned rightly to love himself? When the light-minded person throws himself almost like a nonentity [18] into the folly of the moment and makes nothing of it, is this not because he does not know how to love himself rightly? When the depressed person desires to be rid of life, indeed of himself, is this not because he is unwilling to learn earnestly and rigorously to love himself? When someone surrenders to despair because the world or another person has faithlessly left him betrayed, what then is his fault (his innocent suffering is not referred to here) except not loving himself in the right way? When someone self-tormentingly thinks to do God a service by torturing himself, what is his sin except not willing to love himself in the right way? And if, alas, a person presumptuously lays violent hands upon himself, is not his sin precisely this, that he does not rightly love himself in the sense in which a person ought to love himself? Oh, there is a lot of talk in the world about treachery, and faithlessness, and, God help us, it is unfortunately all too true, but still let us never because of

Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard this forget that the most dangerous traitor of all is the one every person has within himself. This treachery whether it consists in selfishly loving oneself or consists in selfishly not willing to love oneself in the right way – this treachery is admittedly a secret. No cry is raised as it usually is in the case of treachery and faithlessness. But is it not therefore all the more important that Christianity’s doctrine should be brought to mind again and again, that a person shall love his neighbor as himself, that is as he ought to love himself? … You shall love – this, then is the word of the royal Law. Works of Love, Hong p. 22-24 One can also look at this from the perspective of what the meaning of our existence is. Why suffer what humans have suffered, the pain and despair—what meaning can all of this have? For Kierkegaard, there is no meaning unless passion, the emotions and will of humans, has a divine source. Passion is closely aligned with faith in Kierkegaard's thought. Faith as a passion is what drives humans to seek reality and truth in a transcendent world, even though everything we can know intellectually speaks against it. To live and die for a belief, to stake everything one has and is in the belief in something that has a higher meaning than anything in the world—this is belief and passion at their highest. Kierkegaard wrote of the subjective thinker's task in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Intellectual reason had been deified by Hegel in his theology and Kierkegaard felt this would lead to the objectification of religion. There is an old proverb: oratio, tentatio, meditatio, faciunt theologum [prayer, trial, meditation, make a theologian]. Similarly, for a subjective thinker, imagination, feeling and dialectics in impassioned existence-inwardness are required. But first and last, passion, because for an existing person it is impossible to think about existence without becoming passionate, inasmuch as existing is a prodigious contradiction from which the subjective thinker is not to abstract, for then it is easy, but in which he is to remain. In a world-historical dialectic, individuals fade away into humankind; in a dialectic such as that it is impossible to discover you and me, an individual existing human being, even if new magnifying glasses for the concrete are invented. The subjective thinker is a dialectician oriented to the existential; he has the intellectual passion to hold firm the qualitative disjunction. But, on the other hand, if the qualitative disjunction is used flatly and simply, if it is applied altogether abstractly to the individual human being, then one can run the ludicrous risk of saying something infinitely decisive, and of being right in what one says, and still not say the least thing. Therefore, in the psychological sense it is really remarkable to see the absolute disjunction deceitfully used simply for evasion. When the death penalty is placed on every crime, the result is that no crimes at all are punished. It is the same with the absolute disjunction when applied flatly and simply; it is just like a silent letter-it cannot be pronounced or, if it can be pronounced, it says nothing. The subjective thinker, therefore, has with intellectual passion the absolute disjunction as belonging to existence, but he has it as the final decision that prevents everything from ending in a quantifying. Thus he has it readily available, but not in such a way that by abstractly recurring to it, he just frustrates existence. The subjective thinker, therefore, has also esthetic passion and ethical passion, whereby concretion is gained. All existence-issues are passionate, because existence, if one becomes conscious of it, involves passion. To think about them so as to leave out passion is not to think about them at all, is to forget the point that one indeed is oneself and existing person. Yet the subjective thinker is not a poet even if he is also a poet, not an ethicist even if he is also an ethicist, but is also a dialectician and is himself essentially existing, whereas the poet’s existence is inessential in relation to the poem, and likewise the ethicist’s in relation to the teaching, and the dialectician’s in relation to the thought. The subjective thinker is not a scientist-scholar; he is an artist. To exist is an art. The subjective thinker is esthetic enough for his life to have esthetic content, ethical enough to regulate it, dialectical enough in thinking to master it. The subjective thinker’s task is to understand himself in existence. p. 350-351

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Subjectivity Johannes Climacus, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, writes the following cryptic line: "Subjectivity is Truth". To understand Climacus's concept of the individual, it is important to look at what he says regarding subjectivity. What is subjectivity? In very rough terms, subjectivity refers to what is personal to the individual—what makes the individual who he is in distinction from others. It is what is inside—what the individual can see, feel, think, imagine, dream, etc. It is often opposed to objectivity—that which is outside the individual, which the individual and others around can feel, see, measure, and think about. Another way to interpret subjectivity is the unique relationship between the subject and object. Scientists and historians, for example, study the objective world, hoping to elicit the truth of nature—or perhaps the truth of history. In this way, they hope to predict how the future will unfold in accordance with these laws. In terms of history, by studying the past, the individual can perhaps elicit the laws that determine how events will unfold—in this way the individual can predict the future with more exactness and perhaps take control of events that in the past appeared to fall outside the control of humans. In most respects, Climacus did not have problems with science or the scientific endeavor. He would not disregard the importance of objective knowledge. Where the scientist or historian finds certainty, however, Climacus noted very accurately that results in science change as the tools of observation change. But Climacus's special interest was in history. His most vehement attacks came against those who believed that they had understood history and its laws—and by doing so could ascertain what a human’s true self is. That is, the assumption is that by studying history someone can come to know who he really is as a person. Kierkegaard especially accused Hegel's philosophy of falling prey to this assumption. He explained this in, Concluding Unscientific Postscript: It is the existing spirit who asks about truth, presumably because he wants to exist in it, but in any case the questioner is conscious of being an existing individual human being. In this way I believe I am able to make myself understandable to every Greek and to every rational human being. If a German philosopher follows his inclination to put on an act and first transforms himself into a superrational something, just as alchemists and sorcerers bedizen themselves fantastically, in order to answer the question about truth in an extremely satisfying way, this is of no more concern to me than his satisfying answer, which no doubt is extremely satisfying-if one is fantastically dressed up. But whether a German philosopher is or is not doing this can easily be ascertained by anyone who with enthusiasm concentrates his soul on willing to allow himself to be guided by a sage of that kind, and uncritically just uses his guidance compliantly by willing to form his existence according to it. When a person as a learner enthusiastically relates in this way to such a German professor, he accomplishes the most superb epigram upon him, because a speculator of that sort is anything but served by a learner’s honest and enthusiastic zeal for expressing and accomplishing, for existentially appropriating his wisdom, since this wisdom is something that the Herr Professor himself has imagined and has written books about but has never attempted himself. It has not even occurred to him that it should be done. Like the customers clerk who, in the belief that his business was merely to write, wrote what he himself could not read, so there are speculative thinkers who merely write, and write that which, if it is to be read with the aid of action, if I may put it that way, proves to be nonsense, unless it is perhaps intended only for fantastical beings. P. 191 Hegel wanted to philosophize about Christianity but had no intention to ever become a Christian. For Climacus, the individual comes to know who he is by an intensely personal and passionate pursuit of what will give meaning to his life. As an existing individual, who must come to terms with everyday life, overcome its obstacles and setbacks, who must live and die, the single individual has a life that no one else will ever live. In dealing with what life brings his way, the individual must encounter them with all his psycho-physical resources. Subjectivity is that which the individual—and no one else—has. But what does it mean to have something like this? It cannot be understood in the same way as having a car or a bank account. It means to be someone who is becoming someone—it means being a person with a past, a present, and a future. No one can have an individual's past, present

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard or future. Different people experience these in various ways—these experiences are unique, not anyone else's. Having a past, present, and future means that a person is an existing individual—that a person can find meaning in time and by existing. Individuals do not think themselves into existence, they are born. But once born and past a certain age, the individual begins to make choices in life; now those choices can be his, his parents', society’s, etc. The important point is that to exist, the individual must make choices—the individual must decide what to do the next moment and on into the future. What the individual chooses and how he chooses will define who and what he is—to himself and to others. The goal of life, according to Socrates, is to know thyself. Knowing oneself means being aware of who one is, what one can be and what one cannot be. Subjectivity comes with consciousness of myself as a self. It encompasses the emotional and intellectual resources that the individual is born with. Subjectivity is what the individual is as a human being. Now the problem of subjectivity is to decide how to choose—what rules or models is the individual going to use to make the right choices? What are the right choices? Who defines right? To be truly an individual, to be true to himself, his actions should in some way be expressed so that they describe who and what he is to himself and to others. The problem, according to Kierkegaard, is that we must choose who and what we will be based on subjective interests—the individual must make choices that will mean something to him as a reasoning, feeling being. Kierkegaard decided to step up to the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil for himself, replacing Adam, and make his choice in the presence of God, where no one was there to accuse or judge him but his Creator. This is what he had Abraham do in Fear and Trembling. This is how Kierkegaard thought learning about oneself takes place. Here is where the single individual learns about guilt and innocence. His book, The Concept of Anxiety, makes clear that Adam did have knowledge when he made his choice and that was the knowledge of freedom. The prohibition was there but so was freedom and Eve and Adam decided to use it.

Three stages of life Early American Kierkegaard scholars tried to reduce the complexity of Kierkegaard's authorship by focusing on three levels of individual existence, which are named in passing by one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, who wrote Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Though the stages represent only one way of interpreting Kierkegaard's thought, it has become a popular way of introducing his authorship among Anglo-American scholars. In continental European circles, stage theory never took hold in the same way. In one popular interpretation of stage theory, each of the so-called levels of existence envelops those below it: an ethical person is still capable of aesthetic enjoyment, for example, and a religious person is still capable of aesthetic enjoyment and ethical duty. The difference between these ways of living are internal, not external, and thus there are no external signs one can point to determine at what level a person is living. Back to the Stages. It is markedly different from Either/Or by a tripartition. There are three stages, an esthetic, an ethical, a religious, yet not abstract as the immediate mediate, the unity, but concrete in the qualification of existence categories as pleasure-perdition, action-victory, suffering. But despite this tripartition, the book is nevertheless an either/or. That is, the ethical and the religious stages have an essential relation to each other. The inadequacy of Either/Or is simply that the work ended ethically, as has been shown. In Stages that has been made clear, and the religious is maintained in its place. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hong p. 294 Stage One: Aesthetic Kierkegaard was interested in aesthetics, and is sometimes referred to as the "poet-philosopher" because of the passionate way in which he approached philosophy. But he is often said to be interested in showing the inadequacy of a life lived entirely in the aesthetic level. Aesthetic life is defined in numerous different ways in Kierkegaard's authorship, including a life defined by intellectual enjoyment, sensuous desire, and an inclination to interpret oneself as if one were "on stage." There are many degrees of this aesthetic existence and a single definition is thus difficult

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard to offer. At bottom, one might see the purely unreflective lifestyle. At the top, we might find those lives which are lived in a reflective, independent, critical and socially apathetic way. But many interpreters of Kierkegaard believe that most people live in the least reflective sort of aesthetic stage, their lives and activities guided by everyday tasks and concerns. Fewer aesthetically guided people are the reflective sort. Whether such people know it or not, their lives will inevitably lead to complete despair. Kierkegaard's author A is an example of an individual living the aesthetic life. You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy. You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation. Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage. Either/Or Part II p. 7-8 Just consider, your life is passing; for you, too, the time will eventually come even to you when your life is at an end, when you are no longer shown any further possibilities in life, when recollection alone is left, recollection, but not in the sense in which you love it so much, this mixture of fiction and truth, but the earnest and faithful recollection of your conscience. Beware that it does not unroll a list for you-presumably not of actual crimes but of wasted possibilities, showdown pictures it will be impossible for you to drive away. The intellectual agility you possess is very becoming to youth and diverts the eye for a time. We are astonished to see a clown whose joints are so loose that all the restraints of man’s gait and posture are annulled. You are like that in an intellectual sense; you can just as well stand on your head as on your feet. Everything is possible for you, and you can surprise yourself and others with this possibility, but it is unhealthy, and for your own peace of mind I beg you to watch out lest that which is an advantage to you end by becoming a curse. Any man who has a conviction cannot at his pleasure turn himself and everything topsy-turvy in this way. Therefore I do not warn you against the world but against yourself and the world against you. Either/Or II, Hong p. 16 Stage Two: Ethical The second level of existence is the ethical. This is where an individual begins to take on a true direction in life, becoming aware of and personally responsible for good and evil and forming a commitment to oneself and others. One's actions at this level of existence have a consistency and coherence that they lacked in the previous sphere of existence. For many readers of Kierkegaard, the ethical is central. It calls each individual to take account of their lives and to scrutinize their actions in terms of absolute responsibility, which is what Kierkegaard calls repentance. "He repents himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God. Only on this condition can he choose himself. And this is the only condition he wants, for only in this way can he choose himself absolutely." .... “I repent myself out of the whole existence. Repentance specifically expresses that evil essentially belongs to me and at the same time expresses that it does not essentially belong to me. If the evil in me did not essentially belong to me, I could not choose it; but if there were something in me that I could not choose absolutely, then I would not be choosing myself absolutely at all, then I myself would not be the absolute but only a product." .... "It is a sign of a well brought up child to be inclined to say it is sorry without too much pondering whether it is in the right or not, and it is likewise a sign of a high-minded person and a deep soul if he is inclined to repent, if he does not take God to court but repents and loves God in his repentance. Without this, his life is nothing, only like foam." ... "The Either/Or I erected between living esthetically and living ethically is not an unqualified dilemma, because it actually is a matter of only one choice. Through this choice, I actually choose between good and evil, but I choose the good, I choose eo ipso the choice between good and evil. The original choice is forever present in every succeeding choice." Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Part II, Hong, p. 216-217, 224, 237-238, 219

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard "Judge Wilhelm," a pseudonymous author of Either/Or and the voice who defines the ethical consciousness, argues that the commitment to take responsibility for one's own choices must be made individually. To take responsibility for the various relationships in which an individual finds him- or herself is a possibility open to every human being, but it does not follow that every human being chooses to do so as a matter of course. The meaning of a person's life for Wilhelm depends on how he takes responsibility for his current and future choices, and how he takes ownership of those choices already made. For Wilhelm, the ethically governed person takes responsibility for past actions, some good and some bad, seeks consistency, and takes seriously the obligation to live in a passionate and devoted way. The Christian God is spirit and Christianity is spirit, and there is discord between the flesh and the spirit but the flesh is not the sensuous-it is the selfish. In this sense, even the spiritual can become sensuous-for example, if a person took his spiritual gifts in vain, he would then be carnal. And of course I know that it is not necessary for the Christian that Christ must have been physically beautiful; and it would be grievous-for a reason different from the one you give-because if beauty were some essential, how the believer would long to see him; but from all this it by no means follows that the sensuous is annihilated in Christianity. The first love has the element of beauty in itself, and the joy and fullness that are in the sensuous in its innocence can very well be caught up in Christianity. But let us guard against one thing, a wrong turn that is more dangerous than the one you wish to avoid; let us not become too spiritual. Either/Or Part II p. 50 The question, namely, is this: Can this love be actualized? After having conceded everything up to this point, you perhaps will say: Well, it is just as difficult to actualize marriage as to actualize first love. To that I must respond: No, for in marriage there is a law of motion. First love remains an unreal in itself that never acquires inner substance because it moves only in the external medium. In the ethical and religious intention, marital love has the possibility of an inner history and is as different from first love as the historical is from the unhistorical. This love is strong, stronger than the whole world, but the moment it doubts it is annihilated; it is like a sleepwalker who is able to walk the most dangerous places with the complete security but plunges down when someone call his name. Marital love is armed, for in the intention not only is attentiveness directed to the surrounding world but the will is directed toward itself, toward the inner world. Either/Or II p. 94 The choice itself is crucial for the content of the personality: through the choice the personality submerges itself in that which is being chosen, and when it does not choose, it withers away in atrophy. ... Imagine a captain of a ship the moment a shift of direction must be made; then he may be able to say: I can do either this or that. But if he is not a mediocre captain he will also be aware that during all this the ship is ploughing ahead with its ordinary velocity, and thus there is but a single moment when it is inconsequential whether he does this or does that. So also with a person-if he forgets to take into account the velocity-there eventually comes a moment where it is no longer a matter of an Either/Or, not because he has chosen, but because he has refrained from it, which also can be expressed by saying: Because others have chosen for him-or because he has lost himself. Either/Or II p. 163-164

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard Stage Three: Religious The ethical and the religious are intimately connected: a person can be ethically serious without being religious, but the religious stage includes the ethical. Whereas living in the ethical sphere involves a commitment to some ethical absolute, living in the religious sphere involves a commitment and relation to the Christian God. Kierkegaard explained this in Concluding Unscientific Postscript like this: Johannes the Seducer ends with the thesis that woman is only the moment. This in its general sense is the essential esthetic thesis, that the moment is all and to that extent, in turn, essentially nothing, just as the Sophistic thesis that everything is true is that nothing is true. On the whole the conception of time is the decisive element in every standpoint up to the paradox, which paradoxically accentuates time. To the degree that time is accentuated, to the same degree there is movement from the esthetic, the metaphysical, to the ethical, the religious, and the Christian-religious. Where Johannes the Seducer ends, the Judge begins: Woman’s beauty increases with the years. Here time is accentuated ethically, but still not in such a way that precludes the possibility of recollection’s withdrawal out of existence into the eternal. p. 298-299 The Kierkegaardian pseudonyms who speak of stage theory consider religion to be the highest stage in human existence. In one discussion of religious life, one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, distinguishes two types within this stage, which have been called Religiousness A and Religiousness B.[19] One type is symbolized by the Greek philosopher Socrates, whose passionate pursuit of the truth and individual conscience came into conflict with his society. Another type of religiousness is one characterized by the realization that the individual is sinful and is the source of untruth. In time, through revelation and in direct relationship with the paradox that is Jesus, the individual begins to see that his or her eternal salvation rests on a paradox—God, the transcendent, coming into time in human form to redeem human beings. For Kierkegaard, the very notion of this occurring was scandalous to human reason—indeed, it must be, and if it is not then one does not truly understand the Incarnation nor the meaning of human sinfulness. For Kierkegaard, the impulse towards an awareness of a transcendent power in the universe is what religion is. Religion has a social and an individual (not just personal) dimension. But it begins with the individual and his or her awareness of sinfulness. Here are several quotes from Kierkegaard's where he discusses his concept of sin. The sin/faith opposition is the Christian one which transforms all ethical concepts in a Christian way and distils one more decoction from them. At the root of the opposition lies the crucial Christian specification: before God; and that in turn has the crucial Christian characteristic: the absurd, the paradox, the possibility of offense. And it is of the utmost importance that this is demonstrated in every specification of the Christian, since offense is the Christian protection against all speculative philosophy. In what, then, do we find the possibility of offense here? In the fact that a person should have the reality of his being, as a particular human being, directly before God, and accordingly, again, and by the same token, that man’s sin should be of concern of God. This notion of the single human being before God never occurs to speculative thought; it only universalizes particular human phantastically into the human race. It is exactly for this reason that a disbelieving Christianity came up with the idea that sin is sin, that it is neither here nor there whether it is before God. In other words, it wanted to get rid of the specification ‘before God’, and to that end invented a new wisdom, which nevertheless, curiously enough, was neither more nor less than what the higher wisdom generally is-old paganism. The Sickness Unto Death, Hannay, 1989 p. 115 Admittance is only through the consciousness of sin; to want to enter by any other road is high treason against Christianity. … The simple soul who humbly acknowledges himself to be a sinner, himself personally (the single individual), has no need at all to learn about all the difficulties that come when one is neither simple or humble. … To the extent Christianity, terrifying, will rise up against him and transform itself into madness or horror until he either learns to give up Christianity or-by means of what is anything but scholarly propaedeutics, apologetics, etc., by means of the anguish of a contrite

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard conscience, all in proportion to his need-learns to enter into Christianity by the narrow way, through the consciousness of sin. Practice in Christianity, Hong, 1991, p. 67-68

Kierkegaard's thoughts on other philosophers Kierkegaard and Hegel Many philosophers think that one of Kierkegaard's greatest contributions to philosophy is his critique of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Indeed, many of Kierkegaard's works are written in response to or as a critique of Hegel. Although Kierkegaard strongly criticized some aspects of Hegelian philosophy, his work also shows that he was also positively influenced by Hegel, and had respect for Hegel himself. Now everything is set in motion, and usually this also involves making the system popular — per systema influxus physici it lays hold of all men. How Kant was treated in his time is well known, and therefore I need only mention the infinite mass of lexicons, summaries, popular presentations, and explanations for everyman, etc. And how did Hegel Hegel fare later, Hegel, the most modern philosopher, who because of his rigorous form would most likely command silence? Has not the logical trinity been advanced in the most ludicrous way? And therefore it did not astound me that my shoemaker had found that it could also be applied to the development of boots, since, as he observes, the dialectic, which is always the first stage in life, finds expression even here, however insignificant this may seem, in the squeaking, which surely has not escaped the attention of some more profound research psychologist. Unity, however, appears only later, in which respect his shoes far surpass all others, which usually disintegrate in the dialectic, a unity which reached the highest level in that pair of boots Carl XII wore on his famous ride, and since he as an orthodox shoemaker proceeded from the thesis that the immediate (feet without shoes — shoes without feet) is a pure abstraction and took it [the dialectical] as the first stage in the development. And now our modern politicians! By veritably taking up Hegel, they have given a striking example of the way one can serve two masters, in that their revolutionary striving is paired with a life-outlook which is a remedy for it, an excellent remedy for lifting part of the illusion which is necessary for encouraging their fantastic striving. And the actuality of the phenomenon will surely not be denied if one recalls that the words "immediate or spontaneous unity" occur just as necessarily in every scientific-scholarly treatise as a brunette or a blonde in every well-ordered romantic household. At the happy moment everyone received a copy of Holy Scriptures, in which there was one book which was almost always too brief and sometimes almost invisible, and this was, I regret — the Acts of the Apostles. And how curious it is to note that the present age, whose social striving is trumpeted quite enough, is ashamed of the monks and nuns of the Middle Ages, when at the same time, to confine ourselves to our own native land, a society has been formed here which seems to embrace almost the entire kingdom and in which a speaker began thus: Dear Brothers and Sisters. How remarkable to see them censure the Jesuitry of the Middle Ages, since precisely the liberal development, as does every one-sided enthusiasm, has led and must lead to that. And now Christianity — how has it been treated? I share entirely your disapproval of the way every Christian concept has become so volatilized, so completely dissolved in a mass of fog, that it is beyond all recognition. To the concepts of faith, incarnation, tradition, inspiration, which in the Christian sphere are to lead to a particular historical fact, the philosophers choose to give an entirely different, ordinary meaning, whereby faith has become the immediate consciousness, which essentially is

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nothing other than the vitale Fluidum of mental life, its atmosphere, and tradition has become the content of a certain experience of the world, while inspiration has become nothing more than God's breathing of the life-spirit into man, and incarnation no more than the presence of one or another idea in one or more individuals. — Journals IA 328 1836 or 1837 In a journal entry made in 1844, Kierkegaard wrote: If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface or some other place, that it was merely an experiment in thought in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic. — Søren Kierkegaard, (Journals, 1844[6]) While Kierkegaard was a student of theology at the University of Copenhagen, Hegelianism had become increasingly popular. Johan Ludvig Heiberg and Hans Lassen Martensen were key figures in Danish Hegelianism. Kierkegaard remarked in his journal on 17 May 1843 that Heiberg's writings were "borrowed" from Hegel, implying Heiberg would have been a nobody without Hegel. Kierkegaard objected to Hegel's claim that he had devised a system of thought that could explain the whole of reality, with a dialectical analysis of history leading the way to this whole. Hegel claimed that the doctrines and history of Christianity could be explained as a part of the rational unfolding and development of our understanding of the natural world and our place within it. Kierkegaard considered Hegel's explanation of Christianity as a necessary part of world history to be a distortion of the Christian message and a misunderstanding of the limits of human reason. He attempted to refute this aspect of Hegel's thought by suggesting that many doctrines of Christianity - including the doctrine of Incarnation, a God who is also human - cannot be explained rationally but remain a logical paradox. To refute Hegel's claim that Christianity should be understood as a part of the necessary evolution of thought, or in Hegelians terms, Spirit, in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard attempts to use the story of Abraham to show that there is a goal higher than that of ethics (questioning the Hegelian claim that doing one's ethical duty is the highest that can be said of a human being) and that faith cannot be explained by Hegelian ethics, (disproving Hegel's claim that Christianity can be rationally explained by philosophy). Either way, this work can be read as a challenge to the Hegelian notion that a human being's ultimate purpose is to fulfill ethical demands. Kierkegaard's strategy was to invert this dialectic by seeking to make everything more difficult. Instead of seeing scientific knowledge as the means of human redemption, he regarded it as the greatest obstacle to redemption. Instead of seeking to give people more knowledge he sought to take away what passed for knowledge. Instead of seeking to make God and Christian faith perfectly intelligible he sought to emphasize the absolute transcendence by God of all human categories. Instead of setting himself up as a religious authority, Kierkegaard used a vast array of textual devices to undermine his authority as an author and to place responsibility for the existential significance to be derived from his texts squarely on the reader. … Kierkegaard's tactic in undermining Hegelianism was to produce an elaborate parody of Hegel's entire system. The pseudonymous authorship, from Either/Or to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, presents an inverted Hegelian dialectic which is designed to lead readers away from knowledge rather than towards it. — Søren Kierkegaard, William McDonald [20] By doing this, Hegelian critics accuse Kierkegaard of using the dialectic to disprove the dialectic, which seems somewhat contradictory and hypocritical. However, Kierkegaard would not claim the dialectic itself is bad, only the Hegelian premise that the dialectic would lead to a harmonious reconciliation of everything, which Hegel called the Absolute. Kierkegaard stated this most clearly in his book The Concept of Anxiety, Dogmatics must not explain hereditary sin but rather explain it by presupposing it, like that vortex about which Greek speculation concerning nature had so much to say, a moving something that no science can grasp. That such is the case with dogmatics will readily be granted if once again time is taken to

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understand Schleiermacher’s immortal service to this science. He was left behind long ago when men chose Hegel. Yet Schleiermacher was a thinker in the beautiful Greek sense, a thinker who spoke only of what he knew. Hegel, on the contrary, despite all his outstanding ability and stupendous learning, reminds us again and again by his performance that he was in the German sense a professor of philosophy on a large scale, because he a tout prix [at any price] must explain all things. The Concept of Anxiety, by Reidar Thomte Princeton University Press 1980 P. 20 Kierkegaardian scholars have made several interpretations of how Kierkegaard proceeds with parodying Hegel's dialectic. One of the more popular interpretations argues the aesthetic-ethical-religious stages are the triadic process Kierkegaard was talking about. See section Spheres of existence for more information. Another interpretation argues for the world-individual-will triadic process. The dialectic here is either to assert an individual's own desire to be independent and the desire to be part of a community. Instead of reconciliation of the world and the individual where problems between the individual and society are neatly resolved in the Hegelian system, Kierkegaard argues that there's a delicate bond holding the interaction between them together, which needs to be constantly reaffirmed. Jean-Paul Sartre takes this latter view and says the individual is in a constant state of reaffirming his or her own identity, else one falls into bad faith. This process of reconciliation leads to a "both/and" view of life, where both thesis and antithesis are resolved into a synthesis, which negates the importance of personal responsibility and the human choice of either/or. The work Either/Or is a response to this aspect of Hegel's philosophy. A passage from that work exemplifies Kierkegaard's contempt for Hegel's philosophy. Note the comparison between "A" and "B" (Judge Vilhelm) in Either/Or and Stages on Life's Way. Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it. Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it. Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. Whether you laugh at the stupidities of the world or you weep over them, you will regret it either way. Trust a girl, and you will regret it. Do not trust her, and you will also regret it. … Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. Whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life. — Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or Part I, Hong My dear reader, if you do not have the time and opportunity to take a dozen years of your life to travel around the world to see everything a world traveler is acquainted with, if you do not have the capability and qualifications from years of practice in a foreign language to penetrate to the differences in national characteristics as these become apparent to the research scholar, if you are not bent upon discovering a new astronomical system that will displace both the Copernican and the Ptolemaic-then marry; and if you have time for the first, the capability for the second, the idea for the last, then marry also. Even if you did not manage to see the whole globe or to speak in many tongues or to know all about the heavens, you will not regret it, for marriage is and remains the most important voyage of discovery a human being undertakes; compared with a married man’s knowledge of life, any other knowledge of it is superficial, for he and he alone has properly immersed himself in life. — Søren Kierkegaard, Judge Vilhelm, Stages on Life's Way, Hong p. 89 Here are two more from 1846 As is well known, Hegelian philosophy has canceled the principle of contradiction, and Hegel himself has more than once emphatically held judgment day on the kind of thinkers who remained in the sphere of understanding and reflection and who have therefore insisted that there is an either/or. Since that time, it has become a popular game, so that as soon as someone hints at an aut/aut [either/or] a Hegelian comes riding trip-trap-trap on horse and wins a victory and rides home again. Among us, too, the Hegelians have several

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times been on the move, especially against Bishop Mynster, in order to win speculative thought’s brilliant victory; and Bishop Mynster, has more than once become a defeated standpoint, even though for being a defeated standpoint he is holding up very well, and it is rather to be feared that the enormous exertion of the victory has been too exhausting to the undefeated victors. And yet there may be a misunderstanding at the root at the conflict and the victory, Hegel is perfectly and absolutely right in maintaining that, looked at eternally, sub specie aeterni, there is no aut/aut either/or in the language of abstraction, in pure thought and pure being. Where the devil would it be, since abstraction, after all, simply removes the contradiction; therefor Hegel and the Hegelians should instead take the trouble to explain what is meant by the masquerade of getting contradiction, movement, transition, etc. into logic. The defenders of aut/aut are in the wrong if they push their way into the territory of pure thinking and want to defend their cause there. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Volume I p. 305 According to Hegel the truth is the continuous world-historical process. Each generation, each stage of this process, is legitimated and yet is only an element of the truth. Short of resorting to a bit of charlatanry, which helps by assuming that the generation in which Hegel lived or the one after him is imprimatur, and this generation is the last and world history is past, we are all implicated in skepticism. The passionate question of truth does not even come up, because philosophy has first tricked the individuals into becoming objective. The positive Hegelian truth is just as deceptive as happiness was in paganism. Not until afterward does one come to know whether or not one has been happy, and thus the next generation comes to know what truth was in the preceding generation. The great secret of the system is close to Protagoras’s sophism “Everything is relative”, except that here everything is relative in the continuous process. But no living soul is served by that … Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments Volume I, by Johannes Climacus, edited by Soren Kierkegaard, Copyright 1846 – Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong 1992, Princeton University Press. Note p. 33 The whole idea of one generation spending all its time studying past generations and then the next generation spending their time studying past generations and making moral and social comments about preceding generations was called, "The Hegelian cud-chewing process with three-stomachs - first immediacy - then regurgitation - then down again." He said, "Maybe a suceeding master-mind could continue this with four stomachs, etc., down once more and up again. I don't know if the master-mind grasps what I mean."[21]

Kierkegaard and Schelling In 1841–1842, Kierkegaard attended the Berlin lectures of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Schelling was a critic of Georg Hegel and a professor at the University of Berlin. The university started a lecture series given by Schelling in order to espouse a type of positive philosophy which would be diametrically opposed to Hegelianism. Kierkegaard was initially delighted with Schelling. Before he left Copenhagen to attend Schelling's lectures in Berlin, he wrote to his friend Peter Johannes Sprang: I have put my trust in Schelling and at the risk of my life I have the courage to hear him once more. It may very well blossom during the first lectures, and if so one might gladly risk one's life. — Søren Kierkegaard, (Journals, 1841)[6]

Schelling

At Berlin, Kierkegaard gave high praises to Schelling. In a journal entry made sometime around October or November 1841, Kierkegaard wrote this piece about Schelling's second lecture: I am so pleased to have heard Schelling's second lecture -- indescribably! I have sighed for long enough and my thoughts have sighed within me; when he mentioned the word, "reality" in connection with the relation of

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philosophy to reality the fruit of my thought leapt for joy within me. I remember almost every word he said from that moment on. … Now I have put all my hopes in Schelling! — Søren Kierkegaard, (Journals, 1841)[6] As time went on, however, Kierkegaard, as well as many in Schelling's audience, began to become disillusioned with Schelling. In a particularly insulting letter about Schelling, Kierkegaard wrote to his brother, Peter Kierkegaard: Schelling drivels on quite intolerably! If you want to form some idea what this is like then I ask you to submit yourself to the following experiment as a sort of self-inflicted sadistic punishment. Imagine person R's meandering philosophy, his entirely aimless, haphazard knowledge, and person Hornsyld's untiring efforts to display his learning: imagine the two combined and in addition to an impudence hitherto unequalled by any philosopher; and with that picture vividly before your poor mind go to the workroom of a prison and you will have some idea of Schelling's philosophy. He even lectures longer to prolong the torture. … Consequently, I have nothing to do in Berlin. I am too old to attend lectures and Schelling is too old to give them. So I shall leave Berlin as soon as possible. But if it wasn't for Schelling, I would never have travelled to Berlin. I must thank him for that. … I think I should have become utterly insane if I had gone on hearing Schelling. — Søren Kierkegaard, (Journals, 27 February 1842)[6] It is common knowledge that Aristotle used the term first philosophy primarily to designate metaphysics, though he included within it a part that accorded to our conception belongs to theology. In paganism it is quite in order for theology to be treated there. It is related to the same lack of an infinite penetration reflection that endowed the theater in paganism with reality as a kind of divine worship. If we now abstract from this ambiguity, we could retain the designation and by first philosophy understand that totality of science which we might call “ethnical,” whose essence is immanence and is expressed in Greek thought by “recollection,” and by second philosophy understand that totality of science whose essence is transcendence or repetition. Schelling called attention to this Aristotelian term in support of his own distinction between negative and positive philosophy. By negative philosophy he meant “logic”; that was clear enough. On the other hand, it was less clear to me what he really meant by positive philosophy, except insofar as it became evident that it was the philosophy that he himself wished to provide. However, since I have nothing to go by except my own opinion, it is not feasible to pursue this subject further. Constantin Constantius has called attention to this by pointing out that immanence runs aground upon “interest.” With this concept, actuality for the first time comes into view. Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety 1844, p. 21 and Note p. 21 Nichol Kierkegaard became disillusioned with Schelling partly because Schelling shifted his focus on actuality, including a discussion on quid sit [what is] and quod sit [that is], to a more mythological, psychic-type pseudo-philosophy. Kierkegaard's last writing about Schelling's lectures was on 4 February 1842. He wrote the following in 1844, Some men of Schelling’s school have been especially aware of the alteration that has taken place in nature because of sin. Mention has been made also of the anxiety that is supposed to be in inanimate nature. Schelling’s main thought is that anxiety, etc., characterize the suffering of the deity in his endeavor to create. In Berlin he expressed the same thought more definitely by comparing God with Goethe and Jon Von Muller,[22] both of whom felt well only when producing, and also by calling attention to the fact that such a bliss, when it cannot communicate itself, is unhappiness. The Concept of Anxiety P. 59-60 Note p. 59 Although Schelling had little influence on Kierkegaard's subsequent writings, Kierkegaard's trip to Berlin provided him ample time to work on his masterpiece, Either/Or. In a reflection about Schelling in 1849, Kierkegaard remarked that Schelling was like the Rhine at its mouth where it became stagnant water - he was degenerating into a Prussian "Excellency". (Journals, January 1849)[6]

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Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer Kierkegaard became acquainted with Arthur Schopenhauer's writings quite late in his life. Kierkegaard felt Schopenhauer was an important writer, but disagreed on almost every point Schopenhauer made. In several journal entries made in 1854, a year before he died, Kierkegaard spoke highly of Schopenhauer: In the same way that one disinfects the mouth during an epidemic so as not to be infected by breathing in the poisonous air, one might recommend students who will have to live in Denmark in an atmosphere of nonsensical Christian optimism, to take a little dose of Schopenhauer's Ethic in order to protect themselves against infection from that malodourous twaddle. — Søren Kierkegaard, (Journals, 1854)[6]

Arthur Schopenhauer

However, Kierkegaard also considered him, a most dangerous sign of things to come: Schopenhauer is so far from being a real pessimist that at the most he represents 'the interesting': in a certain sense he makes asceticism interesting--the most dangerous thing possible for a pleasure-seeking age which will be harmed more than ever by distilling pleasure even out of asceticism… is by studying asceticism in a completely impersonal way, by assigning it a place in the system. — Søren Kierkegaard, (Journals, 1854)[6] Kierkegaard believes Schopenhauer's ethical point of view is that the individual succeeds in seeing through the wretchedness of existence and then decides to deaden or mortify the joy of life. As a result of this complete asceticism, one reaches contemplation: the individual does this out of sympathy. He sympathizes with all the misery and the misery of others, which is to exist. Kierkegaard here is probably referring to the pessimistic nature of Schopenhauer's philosophy. One of Kierkegaard's main concerns is a suspicion of his whole philosophy: After reading through Schopenhauer's Ethic one learns - naturally he is to that extent honest - that he himself is not an ascetic. And consequently he himself has not reached contemplation through asceticism, but only a contemplation which contemplates asceticism. This is extremely suspicious, and may even conceal the most terrible and corrupting voluptuous melancholy: a profound misanthropy. In this too it is suspicious, for it is always suspicious to propound an ethic which does not exert so much power over the teacher that he himself expresses. Schopenhauer makes ethics into genius, but that is of course an unethical conception of ethics. He makes ethics into genius and although he prides himself quite enough on being a genius, it has not pleased him, or nature has not allowed him, to become a genius where asceticism and mortification are concerned. — Søren Kierkegaard, (Journals, 1854)[6] Little else is known about Kierkegaard's attitude to Schopenhauer. On Schopenhauer himself, Kierkegaard felt that Schopenhauer would have been patronizing. "Schopenhauer interests me very much, as does his fate in Germany. If I could talk to him I am sure he would shudder or laugh if I were to show him [my philosophy]." (Journals, 1854)[6]

Kierkegaard and Eastern Philosophy Because Kierkegaard read Schopenhauer, and because Schopenhauer was heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy, it would seem that Kierkegaard would have shown an awareness of Eastern philosophy. There is, however, little direct reference to Asian thought in Kierkegaard's writings. Anyone who is familiar with such Asian traditions as Buddhist, Taoist, or Shinto philosophy, will quickly see the philosophical similarities that Kierkegaard shares with these traditions. These similarities perhaps explain the Japanese reception of Kierkegaard and the fact that Japanese

Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard awareness and translations of Kierkegaard were appearing at least 30 years before any English translations.[23] There is also extensive Japanese scholarship on Kierkegaard, a scholarship that interprets Kierkegaard's philosophy in terms of Asian thought.[24] This interpretation is understandable when one sees that Kierkegaard's central concerns of subjectivity, anxiety, freedom, despair, and self-deception, are also of central concern to Buddhism and, consequently, that there is nothing exclusively Christian about such concerns.[25] Both Kierkegaard and Zen Buddhism, for example, have seen the predicaments of existence in very similar ways.[26] A specific example of the similarities here can be seen in Purity of Heart where Kierkegaard describes the state of awareness that one must enter in order to partake of confession. Kierkegaard's description of this state is similar to the state of meditation described by Buddhist philosophers.[27] It is distinct, however, in that the aim of confession, for Kierkegaard, is "to center itself upon this relation to itself as an individual who is responsible to God" (cf. Kierkegaard, "Purity of Heart").[28] Kierkegaard aims to claim back the subject from the "crowd" mentality of Christendom (cf. Kierkegaard, "On the Dedication to 'That Single Individual' ")[29] and reaffirm the absolute responsibility to God, which is our telos (cf. Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling").[30] Kierkegaard's thought, as grounded in the Christian tradition ("Purity of Heart" begins "Father in heaven! What is a man without thee!"), while bearing similarities to Buddhist meditation, assumes the inability of the individual fully to grasp God and seeks to reclaim the individual for personal relationship with God, unmediated by the human "crowd", and so is at its foundation distinct from the foundation of Buddhist philosophies.

References [1] [2] [3] [4]

McGrath, Alister E. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought. Blackwell Publishing, 1993. p 202 Matustik, M. J. and M. Westphal (eds). Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, Indiana University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-253-20967-6 Green, Ronald M. Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt. SUNY Press, 1992, ISBN 0-7914-1107-9 See for example, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: "Socrates' infinite merit is to have been an existing thinker, not a speculative philosopher who forgets what it means to exist… The infinite merit of the Socratic position was precisely to accentuate the fact that the knower is an existing individual, and that the task of existing is his essential task." Swenson/Lowrie translation (1941), p.184-5. [5] Hong, Howard V. and Edna H. "Subjectivity/Objectivity." Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers. Vol. 4. Indiana University Press, 1975, p. 712-13. ISBN 0-253-18243-3 [6] Kierkegaard, Søren. Papers and Journals, trans. A. Hannay, London, Penguin Books, 1996. [7] Watts, Michael. Kierkegaard. Oneworld, 2003, ISBN 1-85168-317-8 [8] Dictionary of the History of Ideas (http:/ / etext. lib. virginia. edu/ cgi-local/ DHI/ dhi. cgi?id=dv1-06) [9] Kierkegaard, Søren. The Two Ages, trans. Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-07226-5 [10] Perkins, Robert L. Two Ages: International Kierkegaard Commentary. Mercer University Press, ISBN 978-0-86554-081-1 [11] Two Ages, p.75, Hong translation. [12] Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hong 1992 p. 88 [13] Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong p. 280 [14] http:/ / en. wiktionary. org/ wiki/ tendency [15] "D. Anthony Storm" (http:/ / sorenkierkegaard. org). Kierkegaard Commentary. . Retrieved September 15, 2006. [16] Kangas (http:/ / www. bib. uab. es/ pub/ enrahonar/ 0211402Xn29p119. pdf) [17] http:/ / en. wiktionary. org/ wiki/ inconsequential [18] http:/ / en. wiktionary. org/ wiki/ nonentity [19] See Concluding Unscientific Postscript p. 555ff [20] http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ kierkegaard/ #Rhet [21] Journals and Papers 25 August 1936 1A229 [22] See his Universal History published in 1818 http:/ / openlibrary. org/ authors/ OL4431565A/ John_von_Muller [23] Masugata, Kinya, “A Short History of Kierkegaard's Reception in Japan”, in J. Giles (ed.) Kierkegaard and Japanese Thought, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 31-52 [24] Mortensen, Finn Hauberg, Kierkegaard Made in Japan, University Press of Southern Denmark, 1996 [25] Giles, James “Introduction: Kierkegaard's among the Temples of Kamakura”, in J. Giles (ed.) Kierkegaard and Japanese Thought, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 1-30 [26] Jacobson, Nolan Pliny, “The Predicament of Man in Zen Buddhism and Kierkegaard”, Philosophy East and West 2, 1952, 238-253 [27] Giles, James, “To Practice One Thing: Kierkegaard through the Eyes of Dogen”, in J. Giles (ed.) Kierkegaard and Japanese Thought, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 87-105 [28] http:/ / www. religion-online. org/ showchapter. asp?title=2523& C=2401 [29] http:/ / www. ccel. org/ k/ kierkegaard/ untruth/ untruth. htm

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Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard [30] Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. and trans. Howard and Edna Hong, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 81.

Further reading • Dru, Alexander. The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, Oxford University Press, 1938. • Duncan, Elmer. Søren Kierkegaard: Maker of the Modern Theological Mind, Word Books 1976, ISBN 0-87680-463-6 • Garff, Joakim. Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, Princeton University Press 2005, ISBN 0-691-09165-X. • Hannay, Alastair. Kierkegaard: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, New edition 2003, ISBN 0-521-53181-0. • Kierkegaard. The Concept of Anxiety, Princeton University Press, 1981, ISBN 0-691-02011-6 • Kierkegaard. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, Princeton University Press 1989, ISBN 0-691-07354-6 • Kierkegaard. The Sickness Unto Death, Princeton University Press, 1983, ISBN 0-691-02028-0 • Lippit, John. Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, Routledge 2003, ISBN 0-415-18047-3 • Ostenfeld, Ib and Alastair McKinnon. Søren Kierkegaard's Psychology, Wilfrid Laurer University Press 1972, ISBN 0-88920-068-8 • Westphal, Merold. A Reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Purdue University Press 1996, ISBN 1-55753-090-4

External links • D. Anthony Storm's Commentary On Kierkegaard (http://www.sorenkierkegaard.org) • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Søren Kierkegaard (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/) • Kierkegaard, Søren (http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Philosophy/Philosophers/K/Kierkegaard,_Søren//) at the Open Directory Project

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Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Nietzsche developed his philosophy during the late 19th century. He owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, 1819, revised 1844) and admitted that Schopenhauer was one of the few thinkers that he respected, dedicating to him his essay Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Schopenhauer as Educator), published in 1874 as one of his Untimely Meditations. Since the dawn of the 20th century, the philosophy of Nietzsche has had great intellectual and political influence around the world. Nietzsche applied himself to such topics as morality, religion, epistemology, psychology, ontology, and social criticism. Because of Nietzsche's evocative style and his often outrageous claims, his philosophy generates passionate reactions running from love to disgust, and it has drawn amateurs of all kinds to be heavily involved in the project of interpretation as well. Nietzsche noted in his autobiographical Ecce Homo that his philosophy developed over time, so interpreters have found it difficult to relate concepts The cover for the first part of the first edition of Thus central to one work to those central to another, for example, the Spoke Zarathustra. thought of the eternal recurrence features heavily in Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), but is almost entirely absent from his next book, Beyond Good and Evil. Added to this challenge is the fact that Nietzsche did not seem concerned to develop his thought into a system, even going so far as to disparage the attempt in Beyond Good and Evil. Common themes in his thought can, however, be identified and discussed. His earliest work emphasized the opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art, and the figure of Dionysus continued to play a role in his subsequent thought. Other major currents include the will to power, the claim that God is dead, the distinction between master and slave moralities, and radical perspectivism. Other concepts appear rarely, or are confined to one or two major works, yet are considered centerpieces of Nietzschean philosophy, such as the Übermensch and the thought of eternal recurrence. His later works involved a sustained attack on Christianity and Christian morality, and he seemed to be working toward what he called the transvaluation of all values (Umwertung aller Werte). While Nietzsche is often associated in the public mind with fatalism and nihilism, Nietzsche himself viewed his project as the attempt to overcome the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Nihilism and God is dead Nietzsche saw nihilism as the outcome of repeated frustrations in the search for meaning. He diagnosed nihilism as a latent presence within the very foundations of European culture, and saw it as a necessary and approaching destiny. The religious worldview had already suffered a number of challenges from contrary perspectives grounded in philosophical skepticism, and in modern science's evolutionary and heliocentric theory. Nietzsche saw this intellectual condition as a new challenge to European culture, which had extended itself beyond a sort of point-of-no-return. Nietzsche conceptualizes this with the famous statement "God is dead", which first appeared in his work in section 108 of The Gay Science, again in section 125 with the parable of "The Madman", and even more famously in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The statement, typically placed in quotation marks,[1] accentuated the crisis

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Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche that Nietzsche argued that Western culture must face and transcend in the wake of the irreparable dissolution of its traditional foundations, moored largely in classical Greek philosophy and Christianity.[2] In aphorisms 55 and 56 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about the ladder of religious cruelty that suggests how Nihilism emerged from the intellectual conscience of Christianity. Nihilism is sacrificing the meaning "God" brings into our lives, for "matter and motion", physics, "objective truth." In aphorism 56, he explains how to emerge from the utter meaninglessness of life by reaffirming it through the Nietzsche's ideal of Eternal Return.

Christianity and morality In The Antichrist, Nietzsche fights against the way in which Christianity has become an ideology set forth by institutions like churches, and how churches have failed to represent the life of Jesus. Nietzsche finds it important to distinguish between the religion of Christianity and the person of Jesus. Nietzsche attacked the Christian religion, as represented by churches and institutions, for what he called its "transvaluation" of healthy instinctive values. Transvaluation consists of the process by which one can view the meaning of a concept or ideology from a "higher" context. Nietzsche went beyond agnostic and atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, who simply regarded Christianity as untrue. He claimed that the Apostle Paul may have deliberately propagated Christianity as a subversive religion (a "psychological warfare weapon") within the Roman Empire as a form of covert revenge for the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and of the Second Temple in 70 AD during the Jewish War of 66-73 AD. Nietzsche contrasts the Christians with Jesus, whom he regarded as a unique individual, and argues he established his own moral evaluations. As such, Jesus represents a kind of step towards his ideation of the Übermensch. Ultimately, however, Nietzsche claims that, unlike the Übermensch, who embraces life, Jesus denied reality in favor of his "kingdom of God". Jesus's refusal to defend himself, and subsequent death, logically followed from this total disengagement. Nietzsche goes further to analyze the history of Christianity, finding it has progressively distorted the teachings of Jesus more and more. He criticizes the early Christians for turning Jesus into a martyr and Jesus's life into the story of the redemption of mankind in order to dominate the masses, and finds the Apostles cowardly, vulgar, and resentful. He argues that successive generations further misunderstood the life of Jesus as the influence of Christianity grew. By the 19th century, Nietzsche concludes, Christianity had become so worldly as to parody itself—a total inversion of a world view which was, in the beginning, nihilistic, thus implying the "death of God".

Master morality and slave morality Nietzsche argued that two types of morality existed: a master morality that springs actively from the "noble man", and a slave morality that develops reactively within the weak man. These two moralities do not present simple inversions of one another. They form two different value systems: master morality fits actions into a scale of 'good' or 'bad' whereas slave morality fits actions into a scale of "good" or "evil". Notably he disdained both, though the first clearly less than the second.

The Wille zur Macht and the thought of Eternal Recurrence Since Martin Heidegger at least, the concepts of the will to power (Wille zur macht), of Übermensch and of the thought of Eternal Recurrence have been inextricably linked. According to Heidegger's interpretation, one can not be thought without the others. During Nazi Germany, Alfred Baeumler attempted to separate the concepts, claiming that the Eternal Recurrence was only an "existential experience" that, if taken seriously, would endanger the possibility of a "will to power"—deliberately misinterpreted, by the Nazis, as a "will for domination".[3] Baeumler attempted to interpret the "will to power" along Social Darwinist lines, an interpretation refuted by Heidegger in his 1930s courses on Nietzsche. The term Wille zur Macht first appeared in the posthumous fragment 23 [63] of 1876-1877. Heidegger's reading has become predominant among commentators, although some have criticized it: Mazzino Montinari by declaring that it was forging the figure of a "macroscopical Nietzsche", alien to all of his nuances.[4]

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The will to power Nietzsche's "will to power" (Wille zur Macht) is the name of a concept created by Nietzsche; the title of a projected book which he finally decided not to write; and the title of a book compiled from his notebooks and published posthumously and under suspicious circumstances by his sister and Peter Gast. The work consists of four separate books, entitled "European Nihilism", "Critique of the Highest Values Hitherto", "Principles of a New Evaluation", and "Discipline and Breeding". Within these books there are some 1067 small sections, usually less than a page, and sometimes just a key phrase—such as his opening comments in the 1st section of the preface: "Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness—that means cynically and with innocence."[5] Despite Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's falsifications (highlighted in 1937 by Georges Bataille[3] and proved in the 1960s by the complete edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments by Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli), his notes, even in the form given by his sister, remain a key insight into the philosophy of Nietzsche, and his unfinished transvaluation of all values. An English edition of Montinari & Colli's work is forthcoming (it has existed for decades in Italian, German and French).

Übermensch In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche posits the Übermensch (often translated as "overman" or "superman") as a goal that humanity can set for itself. While interpretations of Nietzsche's overman vary wildly, here are a few of his quotes from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? [...] All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughingstock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to Übermensch: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche than any ape...The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Übermensch shall be the meaning of the earth... Man is a rope, tied between beast and Übermensch—a rope over an abyss...what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end...

Amor fati and the eternal recurrence Nietzsche may have encountered the idea of the Eternal Recurrence in the works of Heinrich Heine, who speculated that one day a person would be born with the same thought-processes as himself, and that the same applied to every other individual. Nietzsche expanded on this thought to form his theory, which he put forth in The Gay Science and developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Schopenhauer directly influenced this theory.[6] Schopenhauer postulated that a person who unconditionally affirms life would do so even if everything that has happened were to happen again repeatedly. Nietzsche's view on eternal return is similar to that of Hume: "the idea that an eternal recurrence of blind, meaningless variation—chaotic, pointless shuffling of matter and law—would inevitably spew up worlds whose evolution through time would yield the apparently meaningful stories of our lives. This idea of eternal recurrence became a cornerstone of his nihilism, and thus part of the foundation of what became existentialism."[7] Nietzsche was so impressed by this idea, that he at first thought he had discovered a new scientific proof of the greatest

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Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche importance, referring to it as the "most scientific of hypotheses". He gradually backed-off of this view, and in later works referred to it as a thought-experiment. "Nietzsche viewed his argument for eternal recurrence as a proof of the absurdity or meaninglessness of life, a proof that no meaning was given to the universe from on high."[8] What if a demon were to creep after you one day or night, in your loneliest loneness, and say: "This life which you live and have lived, must be lived again by you, and innumerable times more. And mere will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh—everything unspeakably small and great in your life—must come again to you, and in the same sequence and series. . . . The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned—and you with it, dust of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and curse the demon who spoke to you thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment, in which you would answer him: "Thou art a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!" [The Gay Science (1882), p. 341 (passage translated in Danto 1965, p. 210).] Alexander Nehamas wrote in Nietzsche: Life as Literature of three ways of seeing the eternal recurrence: "(A) My life will recur in exactly identical fashion." This expresses a totally fatalistic approach to the idea. "(B) My life may recur in exactly identical fashion." This second view conditionally asserts cosmology, but fails to capture what Nietzsche refers to in The Gay Science, 341. Finally, "(C) If my life were to recur, then it could recur only in identical fashion." Nehamas shows that this interpretation exists totally independently of physics and does not presuppose the truth of cosmology. Nehamas draws the conclusion that if individuals constitute themselves through their actions, then they can only maintain themselves in their current state by living in a recurrence of past actions (Nehamas 153).

Nietzsche's place in contemporary ethical theory Nietzsche's work addresses ethics from several perspectives: meta-ethics, normative ethics, and descriptive ethics. In the field of meta-ethics, one can perhaps most accurately classify Nietzsche as a moral skeptic; meaning that he claims that all ethical statements are false, because any kind of correspondence between ethical statements and "moral facts" remains illusory. (This forms part of a more general claim that no universally true fact exists, roughly because none of them more than "appear" to correspond to reality). Instead, ethical statements (like all statements) remain mere "interpretations." However, Nietzsche does not claim that all interpretations are equivalent, since some testify for "noble" character while others are the symptom of a "decadent" life-form. Sometimes Nietzsche may seem to have very definite opinions on what he regards as moral or as immoral. Note, however, that one can explain Nietzsche's moral opinions without attributing to him the claim of their truth. For Nietzsche, after all, we needn't disregard a statement merely because it expresses something false. On the contrary, he depicts falsehood as essential for "life". Interestingly enough, he mentions a "dishonest lie", (discussing Wagner in The Case of Wagner) as opposed to an "honest" one, recommending further to consult Plato with regard to the latter, which should give some idea of the layers of paradox in his work. In the juncture between normative ethics and descriptive ethics, Nietzsche distinguishes between "master morality" and "slave morality". Although he recognizes that not everyone holds either scheme in a clearly delineated fashion without some syncretism, he presents them in contrast to one another. Some of the contrasts in master vs. slave morality include: • "good" and "bad" interpretations vs. "good" and "evil" interpretations • "aristocratic" vs. "part of the 'herd'" • determines values independently of predetermined foundations (nature) vs. determines values on predetermined, unquestioned foundations (Christianity). Nietzsche elaborated these ideas in his book On the Genealogy of Morality, in which he also introduced the key concept of ressentiment as the basis for the slave morality. Nietzsche's primarily negative assessment of the ethical and moralistic teachings of Christianity followed from his earlier considerations of the questions of God and

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Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche morality in the works The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These considerations led Nietzsche to the idea of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche primarily meant that, for all practical purposes, his contemporaries lived as if God were dead, though they had not yet recognized it. Nietzsche believed this "death" had already started to undermine the foundations of morality and would lead to moral relativism and moral nihilism. As a response to the dangers of these trends he believed in re-evaluating the foundations of morality to better understand the origins and motives underlying them, so that individuals might decide for themselves whether to regard a moral value as born of an outdated or misguided cultural imposition or as something they wish to hold true.

Social and political views While a political tone may be discerned in Nietzsche's writings, his work does not in any sense propose or outline a "political project." The man who stated that "The will to a system is a lack of integrity" was consistent in never devising or advocating a specific system of governance, enquiry, or ethics — just as, being an advocate of individual struggle and self-realization, he never concerned himself with mass movements or with the organization of groups and political parties — although there are parts of his works where he considers an enigmatic "greater politics", and others where he thinks the problem of community.[9] In this sense, some have read Nietzsche as an anti-political thinker. Walter Kaufmann put forward the view that the powerful individualism expressed in his writings would be disastrous if introduced to the public realm of politics. Georges Bataille argued in 1937, in the Acéphale review, that Nietzsche's thoughts were too free to be instrumentalized by any political movement. In "Nietzsche and Fascists," he argued against such instrumentalization, by the left or the right, declaring that Nietzsche's aim was to by-pass the short timespan of modern politics, and its inherent lies and simplifications, for a greater historical timespan.[3] Later writers, led by the French intellectual Left, have proposed ways of using Nietzschean theory in what has become known as the "politics of difference" — particularly in formulating theories of political resistance and sexual and moral difference. Owing largely to the writings of Kaufmann and others, the spectre of Nazism has now been almost entirely exorcised from his writings.

Nietzsche and individualism Nietzsche often referred to the common people who participated in mass movements and shared a common mass psychology as "the rabble", or "the herd". He allegedly valued individualism above all else, although this has been considered by many philosophers to be an oversimplification, as Nietzsche criticized the concept of the subject and of atomism (that is, the existence of an atomic subject at the foundation of everything, found for example in social contract theories). He considered the individual subject as a complex of instincts and wills-to-power, just as any other organization. Beginning in the 1890s some scholars have attempted to link his philosophy with Max Stirner's radical individualism of The Ego and Its Own (1844). The question remained pendant. Recently there was unearthed further, still circumstantial, evidence clarifying the relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner.[10] In any case, few philosophers really consider Nietzsche an "individualist" thinker. He is best characterized as a thinker of "hierarchy", although the precise nature of this hierarchy does not cover the current social order (the "establishment") and is related to his thought of the Will to Power. Against the strictly "egoist" perspective adopted by Stirner, Nietzsche concerned himself with the "problem of the civilization" and the necessity to give humanity a goal and a direction to its history, making him, in this sense, a very political thinker.[11][12] Furthermore, in the context of his criticism of morality and Christianity, expressed, among others works, in On the Genealogy of Morals and in The Antichrist, Nietzsche often criticized humanitarian feelings, detesting how pity and altruism were ways for the "weak" to take power over the "strong". However, he qualified his critique of Christianism as a "particular case" of his criticisms of free will.[13] Along with the rejection of teleology, this critique of free will is one of the common points he shared with Spinoza, whom he qualified as a "precursor".[14] To the "ethics of compassion" (Mitleid, "shared suffering") exposed by Schopenhauer,[15] Nietzsche opposed an "ethics of

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Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche friendship" or of "shared joy" (Mitfreude).[16] While he had a dislike of the state in general, which he called a "cold monster" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche also spoke negatively of anarchists and socialism, and made it clear that only certain individuals could attempt to break away from the herd mentality. This theme is common throughout Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Nietzsche's criticism of anti-Semitism and nationalism Although Nietzsche has famously been represented (some strongly argue misrepresented)[17] as a predecessor to Nazism, he criticized anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism and, to a lesser extent, nationalism. Thus, he broke with his editor in 1886 because of opposition to his anti-Semitic stances, and his rupture with Richard Wagner, expressed in The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (both written in Peter Gast would "correct" Nietzsche's writings 1888), had much to do with Wagner's endorsement of pan-Germanism even after the philosopher's breakdown and so and anti-Semitism — and also of his rallying to Christianity. In a without his approval - something heavily March 29, 1887 letter to Theodor Fritsch, he mocked anti-Semitics, criticized by today's Nietzsche scholarship. Fritsch, Eugen Dühring, Wagner, Ebrard, Wahrmund, and the leading advocate of pan-Germanism, Paul de Lagarde, who would become, along with Wagner and Houston Chamberlain, main official influences of Nazism.[3] This 1887 letter to Fritsch ended by: "— And finally, how do you think I feel when the name Zarathustra is mouthed by anti-Semites? ..."[18] Section VIII of Beyond Good and Evil, titled "Peoples and Fatherlands", criticized pan-Germanism and patriotism, advocating instead the unification of Europe (§256, etc.). In Ecce Homo (1888), he criticized the "German nation", its "will to power (to Empire, to Reich)", thus underscoring an easy misinterpretation of the Wille zur Macht, the conception of Germans as a "race", the "anti-Semitic way of writing history", or of writing "history conform to the German Empire," and stigmatized "nationalism, this national neurosis from which Europe is sick", this "small politics".[19] Nietzsche heavily criticized his sister's husband, Bernhard Förster, and his sister, speaking harshly against the "anti-Semitic canaille.": "I've seen proof, black on white, that Herr Dr. Förster has not yet severed his connection with the anti-Semitic movement...Since then I've had difficulty coming up with any of the tenderness and protectiveness I've so long felt toward you. The separation between us is thereby decided in really the most absurd way. Have you grasped nothing of the reason why I am in the world?...Now it has gone so far that I have to defend myself hand and foot against people who confuse me with these anti-Semitic canaille; after my own sister, my former sister, and after Widemann more recently have given the impetus to this most dire of all confusions. After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse's Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!". Draft for a letter [20] to his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (December 1887) Georges Bataille was one of the first to denounce the deliberate misinterpretation of Nietzsche carried out by Nazis, among them Alfred Baeumler. He dedicated in January 1937 an issue of Acéphale, titled "Reparations to Nietzsche," to the theme "Nietzsche and the Fascists.[3]" There, he called Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche "Elisabeth Judas-Förster," recalling Nietzsche's declaration: "To never frequent anyone who is involved in this bare-faced fraud concerning races."[3] Nietzsche titled aphorism 377 [21] in the fifth book of The Gay Science (published in 1887) "We who are homeless" (litt. "We who are without Fatherlands" — Heimatlosen), in which he criticized pan-Germanism and patriotism and called himself a "good European". In the second part of this aphorism, which according to Bataille contained the most important parts of Nietzsche's political thought, the thinker of the Eternal Return stated:

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Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche "No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly "German" enough, in the sense in which the word "German" is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are too open-minded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well-informed, too "traveled": we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, "untimely," in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit by making it vain and that is, moreover, petty politics:—to keep its own creation from immediately falling apart again, is it not finding it necessary to plant it between two deadly hatreds? must it not desire the eternalization of the European system of a lot of petty states? ... We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being "modern men," and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the "historical sense." We are, in one word—and let this be our word of honor!— good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, oversupplied, but also overly obligated heirs of thousands of years of European spirit: as such, we have also outgrown Christianity and are averse to it, and precisely because we have grown out of it, because our ancestors were Christians who in their Christianity were uncompromisingly upright; for their faith they willingly sacrificed possessions and position, blood and fatherland. We—do the same. For what? For our unbelief? For every kind of unbelief? No, you know better than that, my friends! The hidden Yes in you is stronger than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease; and when you have to embark on the sea, you emigrants, you, too, are compelled to this by— a faith! ..."[22]

Views on women Nietzsche's views on women have served as a magnet for controversy, beginning during his life and continuing to the present. He frequently made remarks in his writing that some view as misogynistic. He claimed in Twilight of the Idols (1888) "Women are considered profound. Why? Because we never fathom their depths. But women aren't even shallow."[23] He is also quoted as saying "Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent".

Relation to Søren Kierkegaard Nietzsche knew little of the 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.[24][25] Georg Brandes, a Danish philosopher, wrote to Nietzsche in 1888 asking him to study the works of Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would.[26][27] Recent research, however, suggests that Nietzsche was exposed to the works of Kierkegaard through secondary literature. Aside from Brandes, Nietzsche owned and read a copy of Hans Lassen Martensen’s Christliche Ethik (1873) in which Martensen extensively quoted and wrote about Kierkegaard’s individualism in ethics and religion. Nietzsche also read Harald Høffding’s Psychologie in Umrissen auf Grundlage der Erfahrung (ed. 1887) which expounded and critiqued Kierkegaard’s psychology. Thomas Brobjer believes one of the works Nietzsche wrote about Kierkegaard is in Morgenröthe, which was partly written in response to Martensen's work. In one of the passages, Nietzsche wrote: Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions. Brobjer believes Kierkegaard is one of "those moralists".[28] The first philosophical study comparing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche was published even before Nietzsche's death.[29] More than 60 articles and 15 full-length studies have been published devoted entirely in comparing these two thinkers.[29]

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Relation to Schopenhauer According to Santayana, Nietzsche considered his philosophy to be a correction of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In his Egotism in German Philosophy [30][31], Santayana listed Nietzsche’s antithetical reactions to Schopenhauer. The will to live would become the will to dominate; pessimism founded on reflection would become optimism founded on courage; the suspense of the will in contemplation would yield to a more biological account of intelligence and taste; finally in the place of pity and asceticism (Schopenhauer’ s two principles of morals) Nietzsche would set up the duty of asserting the will at all costs and being cruelly but beautifully strong. These points of difference from Schopenhauer cover the whole philosophy of Nietzsche. These emendations show how Schopenhauer’s philosophy was not a mere initial stimulus for Nietzsche, but formed the basis for much of Nietzsche’s thinking.

Legacy Perhaps Nietzsche's greatest philosophical legacy lies in his 20th century interpreters, among them Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari), and Jacques Derrida. Foucault's later writings, for example, adopt Nietzsche's genealogical method to develop anti-foundationalist theories of power that divide and fragment rather than unite polities (as evinced in the liberal tradition of political theory). The systematic institutionalisation of criminal delinquency, sexual identity and practice, and the mentally ill (to name but a few) are examples used to demonstrate how knowledge or truth is inseparable from the institutions that formulate notions of legitimacy from 'immoralities' such as homosexuality and the like (captured in the famous power-knowledge equation). Deleuze, arguably the foremost of Nietzsche's interpreters, used the much-maligned 'will to power' thesis in tandem with Marxian notions of commodity surplus and Freudian ideas of desire to articulate concepts such the rhizome and other 'outsides' to state power as traditionally conceived. Certain recent Nietzschean interpretations have emphasized the more untimely and politically controversial aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzschean commentator Keith Ansell Pearson has pointed out the absurd hypocrisy of modern egalitarian liberals, socialists, feminists and anarchists claiming Nietzsche as a herald of their own left-wing politics: "The values Nietzsche wishes to subject to a revaluation are largely altruistic and egalitarian values such as pity, self-sacrifice, and equal rights. For Nietzsche, modern politics rests largely on a secular inheritance of Christian values (he interprets the socialist doctrine of equality in terms of a secularization of the Christian belief in the equality of all souls before God" (On the Genealogy of Morality, Ansell-Pearson and Diethe, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 9). Works such as Bruce Detwiler's Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 1990), Fredrick Appel's Nietzsche Contra Democracy (Cornell University Press, 1998), and Domenico Losurdo's Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002) challenge the prevalent liberal interpretive consensus on Nietzsche and assert that Nietzsche's elitism was not merely an aesthetic pose but an ideological attack on the widely held belief in equal rights of the modern West, locating Nietzsche in the conservative-revolutionary tradition.

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References [1] The Gay Science, Section 108, provides an exception. [2] See Beyond Good and Evil. [3] Georges Bataille, "Nietzsche and Fascists", in the January 1937 issue of Acéphale ( available on-line (http:/ / i. a. m. free. fr/ acephale/ nietzsheetlesfascistes. html)) [4] Mazzino Montinari, Friedrich Nietzsche (1974; transl. in German in 1991, Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine Einführung., Berlin-New York, De Gruyter; and in French, Friedrich Nietzsche, PUF, 2001, p.121 chapter "Nietzsche and the consequences" [5] Book 1 of Wille zur Macht (http:/ / www. holtof. com/ library/ nietzsche/ Nietzsche_the_will_to_power/ the_will_to_power_book_I. htm) [6] see Steven Luper's introduction on Nietzsche in Existing for a detailed analysis of these efforts [7] Dennett, D. C. (1995), Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon & Schuster [8] "For a clear reconstruction of Nietzsche's uncharacteristically careful deduction of what he once described as 'the most scientific of hypotheses,' see Danto 1965, pp. 201-9- For a discussion and survey of this and other interpretations of Nietzsche's notorious idea of eternal recurrence, see Nehamas 1980, which argues that by 'scientific' Nietzsche meant specifically 'not-teleological.' A recurring—but, so far, not eternally recurring—problem with the appreciation of Nietzsche's version of the eternal recurrence is that, unlike Wheeler, Nietzsche seems to think that this life will happen again not because it and all possible variations on it will happen over and over, but because there is only one possible variation—this one—and it will happen over and over." Dennett, D. C. (1995), Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon & Schuster [9] For ex. Beyond Good and Evil, first section, §19 [10] Bernd A. Laska: Nietzsche's Initial Crisis (http:/ / www. lsr-projekt. de/ poly/ ennietzsche. html). In: Germanic Notes and Reviews, vol. 33, n. 2, fall/Herbst 2002, pp. 109-133.] [11] Conclusion (http:/ / kropot. free. fr/ Stirner-Nietszche. htm#CONCLUSION) of Stirner et Nietzsche by Albert Lévy, op.cit. [12] Patrick Wotling, Nietzsche et le problème de la civilisation, PUF, 1995 (2nd ed. 1999) [13] Ecce Homo, " Why I am So Wise", §7 (http:/ / www. geocities. com/ thenietzschechannel/ eh3. htm) [14] Letter to Overbeck, 30 July 1881 [15] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, §68 ( available on-line (http:/ / www. archive. org/ details/ theworldaswillan01schouoft)) [16] Olivier Ponton, ""Mitfreude". Le projet nietzschéen d'une "éthique de l'amitié" dans "Choses humaines, trop humaines"" , HyperNietzsche, 2003-12-09 ( on-line (http:/ / www. hypernietzsche. org/ navigate. php?sigle=oponton-1)) (French) [17] Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 33-34. [18] March 29, 1887 letter (http:/ / www. geocities. com/ thenietzschechannel/ nlett1887. htm) to Theodor Fritsch (English) [19] Ecce Homo, "Why I Write Such Good Books", The Case of Wagner, §1 and 2 (http:/ / www. geocities. com/ thenietzschechannel/ eh15. htm) [20] http:/ / www. consciencia. org/ nietzsches-letters-1887 [21] http:/ / www. geocities. com/ thenietzschechannel/ diefrohl7f. htm [22] The Gay Science, aphorism 377, transl. by "We who are homeless" (litt. "We who are without Fatherlands"), read here (http:/ / www. geocities. com/ thenietzschechannel/ diefrohl7f. htm) [23] Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Twilight of the Idols (1888) http:/ / www. handprint. com/ SC/ NIE/ GotDamer. html#sect1 [24] Angier, Tom P. Either Kierkegaard/or Nietzsche: Moral Philosophy in a New Key. ISBN 0-7546-5474-5 [25] Hubben, William. Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kafka. ISBN 0-684-82589-9 [26] Nietzsche Chronicle: 1888 (http:/ / www. dartmouth. edu/ ~fnchron/ 1888. html) [27] Brandes and Nietzsche wrote letters back and forth between 1886-1888. In 1886 Neitzsche sent Brandes copies of Beyond Good and Evil (written in 1885) and later Genealogy of Morals and Human, All Too Human. (p. 314). Brandes sent Nietzsche a copy of Main Currents in 1888. (p. 331-331) Nietzsche wrote in May of 1888 that “Dr. George Brandes is now delivering an important course of lectures at the University of Copenhagen on the German philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche! According to the papers these lectures are having the most brilliant success. The hall is full to overflowing each time; more than three hundred people present.” (p. 227). “They were ready for my theory of “master morality” owing to the thorough general knowledge they possess of the Icelandic sagas which provide very rich material for the theory. I am glad to hear that the Danish philologists approve and accept my derivation of bonus: in itself it seems rather a tall order to trace the concept “good” back to the concept “warrior”. (p. 229) On January 11, 1888 Brandes wrote the following to Nietzsche, “There is a Northern writer whose works would interest you, if they were but translated, Soren Kierkegaard. He lived from 1813 to 1855, and is in my opinion one of the profoundest psychologists to be met with anywhere. A little book which I have written about him (the translation published at Leipzig in 1879) gives me exhaustive idea of his genius, for the book is a kind of polemical tract written with the purpose of checking his influence. It is, nevertheless, from a psychological point of view, the finest work I have published.” (p. 325) Nietzsche wrote back that he would “tackle Kierkegaard’s psychological problems” (p. 327) and then Brandes asked if he could get a copy of everything Nietzsche had published. (p. 343) so he could spread his “propaganda.” (p. 348, 360-361) Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche 1st ed. edited, with a preface, by Oscar Levy ; authorized translation by Anthony M. Ludovici Published 1921 by Doubleday, Page & Co (http:/ / www. archive. org/ stream/ selectedletterso00nietuoft#page/ 226/ mode/ 2up/ search/ brandes) [28] Journal of the History of Philosophy (http:/ / muse. jhu. edu/ cgi-bin/ access. cgi?uri=/ journals/ journal_of_the_history_of_philosophy/ v041/ 41. 2brobjer. html)

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Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche [29] Miles, Thomas. Rival Visions of the Best Way of Life in Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Jon Stewart, ed. p.263. [30] http:/ / archive. org/ details/ cu31924082445465 [31] Chapter XI, “Nietzsche and Schopenhauer”

Notes Further reading • On Nietzsche's view on women, see Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1979). • On Nietzsche and biology, see Barbara Stiegler, Nietzsche et la biologie, PUF, 2001, ISBN 2-13-050742-5.

External links • Nietzsche Source: Digital version of the German critical edition of the complete works / Digital facsimile edition of the entire Nietzsche estate (http://www.nietzschesource.org/) • The Nietzsche Channel (http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.geocities.com/ thenietzschechannel&date=2009-10-25+23:01:00) (include letters, section on Nietzsche's library, etc.) • Journal of Nietzsche Studies (http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/philosophy/jns/) • The 'Superman', the Overman or Übermensch (http://www.centrebouddhisteparis.org/En_Anglais/ Sangharakshita_en_anglais/Nietzsche_and_Superman/Superman_or_Overman/superman_or_overman.html) • Nietzsche Quotes (http://www.nietzsche-quotes.com/) Searchable database of Nietzsche quotations, with daily quotes • "On the Significance of Genealogy in Nietzsche's Critique of Morality" (http://www.carsten-korfmacher.com/ PHILOSOPHY/Papers/fngenealogy.html), by Carsten Korfmacher • Martin Heidegger and Nietzsche’s Overman: Aphorisms on the Attack (http://www.freewebs.com/m3smg2/ HeideggerOverman.htm) • The Nietzsche Pyramid (http://nietzsche.21.forumer.com) Nietzsche discussion fora on various levels of expertise.

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Born

May 19, 1762 Rammenau, Saxony

Died

January 27, 1814 (aged 51) Berlin, Prussia

Residence

Germany

Nationality

German

Era

18th-century philosophy

Region

Western Philosophy

School

German Idealism, German Romanticism, Post-Kantianism

Main interests

Self-consciousness and Self-awareness, moral Philosophy, political Philosophy

Notable ideas

Absolute consciousness, thesis–antithesis–synthesis, the not-I, das Streben (striving), mutual recognition, Wissenschaftslehre, Anstoss, Tathandlung, Urtrieb (original drive), "Fichte's original insight"

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (German: [ˈjoːhan ˈɡɔtliːp ˈfɪçtə]; May 19, 1762 – January 27, 1814) was a German philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Fichte is often perceived as a figure whose philosophy forms a bridge between the ideas of Kant and those of the German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Like Descartes and Kant before him, he was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness. Fichte also wrote works of political philosophy and is considered one of the fathers of German nationalism.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Biography Origins Fichte was born in Rammenau, Upper Lusatia. The son of a ribbon weaver,[1] he came of peasant stock which had lived in the region for many generations. The family was noted in the neighborhood for its probity and piety. Christian Fichte, Johann Gottlieb's father, married somewhat above his station. It has been suggested that a certain impatience which Fichte himself displayed throughout his life was an inheritance from his mother.[2] Young Fichte received the rudiments of his education from his father. He early showed remarkable ability, and it was owing to his reputation among the villagers that he gained the opportunity for a better education than he otherwise would have received. The story runs that the Freiherr von Militz, a country landowner, arrived too late to hear the local pastor preach. He was, however, informed that a lad in the neighborhood would be able to repeat the sermon practically verbatim. As a result the baron took the lad into his protection, which meant that he paid his tuition.[2]

Early schooling Fichte was placed in the family of Pastor Krebel at Niederau near Meissen and there received thorough grounding in the classics. From this time onward, Fichte saw little of his parents. In October 1774, he was attending the celebrated foundation-school at Pforta near Naumburg. This school is associated with the names of Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel and Nietzsche. The spirit of the institution was semi-monastic and, while the education given was excellent in its way, it is doubtful whether there was enough social life and contact with the world for a pupil of Fichte's temperament and antecedents. Perhaps his education strengthened a tendency toward introspection and independence, characteristics which appear strongly in his doctrines and writings.[2]

Theological studies In 1780, he began study at the Jena theology seminary. Fichte seems to have supported himself at this period of bitter poverty and hard struggle.[2] Freiherr von Militz continued to support him, but when he died in 1784, Fichte had to end his studies prematurely, without completing his degree. During the years 1784 to 1788, he supported himself in a precarious way as tutor in various Saxon families.[1] Fichte then worked as a private tutor in Zürich for two years, which was a time of great contentment for him. Here he met Johanna Rahn,[2] and became acquainted with Pestalozzi.[1] In 1790, he became engaged to Johanna Rahn, who happened to be the niece of the famous poet F. G. Klopstock. In 1790 Fichte began to study the works of Kant, but this occurred initially because one of his students wanted to know about them. They had a lasting effect on the trajectory of his life and thought. While he was assimilating the Kantian philosophy and preparing to develop it, fate dealt him a blow: the Rahn family had suffered financial reverses, and his impending marriage had to be postponed.[2]

Kant From Zurich, Fichte returned to Leipzig, and in 1791 obtained a tutorship at Warsaw, in the house of a Polish nobleman. The situation, however, proved disagreeable.[1] He was soon released. He then got a chance to see Kant at Königsberg. After a disappointing interview, he shut himself in his lodgings and threw all his energies into the composition of an essay which would compel Kant's attention and interest. This essay, completed in five weeks, was the Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, 1792).[2] In this book Fichte investigated the connections between divine revelation and Kant's critical philosophy. The first edition of the book was published, without Kant or Fichte's knowledge, without Fichte's name and signed preface; it was thus mistakenly thought to be a new work by Kant himself.[3] Everyone, including the first reviews of the book, assumed Kant was the author; when Kant cleared the confusion and openly praised the work and author, Fichte's reputation skyrocketed, as many intellectuals of the day were of the opinion that it was "...the most shocking and astonishing

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte news... [since] nobody but Kant could have written this book. This amazing news of a third sun in the philosophical heavens has set me into such confusion..."[4]

Jena In October 1793, he was married at Zürich, where he remained the rest of the year. Stirred by the events and principles of the French Revolution, he wrote and published anonymously two pamphlets which led to him being seen as a devoted defender of liberty of thought and action and an advocate of political changes. In December of the same year, he received an invitation to fill the position of extraordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. He accepted and began his lectures in May of the next year. With extraordinary zeal, he expounded his system of “transcendental idealism.” His success was immediate. He seems to have excelled as a lecturer because of the earnestness and force of his personality. These lectures were later published under the title The Vocation of the Scholar. He gave himself up to intense production, and a succession of works soon appeared.[1][2]

Atheism Dispute After weathering a couple of academic storms, he was finally dismissed from Jena in 1799 as a result of a charge of atheism. He was accused of atheism in 1798 after publishing his essay “Ueber den Grund unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung” (On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance), which he had written in response to Friedrich Karl Forberg's essay “Development of the Concept of Religion,” in his Philosophical Journal. For Fichte, God should be conceived primarily in moral terms: "The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other." (On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance).

Berlin Since all the German states except Prussia had joined in the cry against him, he was forced to go to Berlin. Here he associated himself with the Schlegels, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Tieck.[2] In April 1800, through the introduction of Hungarian writer Ignaz Aurelius Fessler, he was initiated into Freemasonry in the Lodge Pythagoras of the Blazing Star where he was elected minor warden. At first Fichte was the warm admirer of Fessler, and was disposed to aid him in his proposed Masonic reform. But later he became Fessler's bitter opponent. Their controversy attracted much attention among Freemasons.[5] In 1805, Fichte was appointed to a professorship in Erlangen. The disaster at Jena in 1806, in which Napoleon completely crushed the Prussian army, drove him to Königsberg for a time, but he returned to Berlin in 1807 and continued his literary activity.[1][2] The deplorable situation of Germany stirred him to the depths and led him to deliver the famous Addresses to the German Nation (1808) which guided the uprising against Napoleon. He became a professor of the new university at Berlin founded in 1809. By the votes of his colleagues Fichte was unanimously elected its rector in the succeeding year. But, once more, his impetuosity and reforming zeal led to friction, and he resigned in 1812. The campaign against Napoleon began, and the hospitals at Berlin were soon full of patients. Fichte's wife devoted herself to nursing and caught a virulent fever. Just as she was recovering, he himself was stricken down. He died of typhus at the age of 51.[1][2] His son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, also made contributions to philosophy.

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Fichte's philosophy In mimicking Kant's difficult style, his critics argued that Fichte produced works that were barely intelligible. "He made no hesitation in pluming himself on his great skill in the shadowy and obscure, by often remarking to his pupils, that 'there was only one man in the world who could fully understand his writings; and even he was often at a loss to seize upon his real meaning.' "[6] This remark was often mistakenly attributed to Hegel. On the other hand, Fichte himself acknowledged the difficulty of his writings, but argued that his works were clear and transparent to those who made the effort to think without preconceptions and prejudices. Fichte did not endorse Kant's argument for the existence of noumena, of "things in themselves", the supra-sensible reality beyond the categories of human reason. Fichte saw the rigorous and systematic separation of "things in themselves" (noumena) and things "as they appear to us" (phenomena) as an invitation to skepticism. Rather than invite such skepticism, Fichte made the radical suggestion that we should throw out the notion of a noumenal world and instead accept the fact that consciousness does not have a grounding in a so-called "real world". In fact, Fichte achieved fame for originating the argument that consciousness is not grounded in anything outside of itself. The phenomenal world as such, arises from self-consciousness; the activity of the ego; and moral awareness. His student (and critic), Schopenhauer, wrote: ...Fichte who, because the thing-in-itself had just been discredited, at once prepared a system without any thing-in-itself. Consequently, he rejected the assumption of anything that was not through and through merely our representation, and therefore let the knowing subject be all in all or at any rate produce everything from its own resources. For this purpose, he at once did away with the essential and most meritorious part of the Kantian doctrine, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori and thus that between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. For he declared everything to be a priori, naturally without any evidence for such a monstrous assertion; instead of these, he gave sophisms and even crazy sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom. Moreover, he appealed boldly and openly to intellectual intuition, that is, really to inspiration. — Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, §13

Central theory In his work Foundations of Natural Right (1796), Fichte argued that self-consciousness was a social phenomenon — an important step and perhaps the first clear step taken in this direction by modern philosophy. A necessary condition of every subject's self-awareness, for Fichte, is the existence of other rational subjects. These others call or summon (fordern auf) the subject or self out of its unconsciousness and into an awareness of itself as a free individual. Fichte's account proceeds from the general principle that the I must set itself up as an individual in order to set itself up at all, and that in order to set itself up as an individual it must recognize itself as it were to a calling or summons (Aufforderung) by other free individual(s) — called, moreover, to limit its own freedom out of respect for the freedom of the other. The same condition applied and applies, of course, to the other(s) in its development. Hence, mutual recognition of rational individuals turns out to be a condition necessary for the individual 'I' in general. This argument for intersubjectivity is central to the conception of selfhood developed in the Doctrine of Science (German: Wissenschaftslehre). In Fichte's view consciousness of the self depends upon resistance or a check by something that is understood as not part of the self yet is not immediately ascribable to a particular sensory perception. In his later lectures (his Nova Methodo), Fichte incorporated it into his revised presentation of the very foundations of his system, where the summons takes its place alongside original feeling, which takes the place of the earlier Anstoss (see below) as both a limit upon the absolute freedom of the I and a condition for the positing of the same. The I (Das Ich) itself sets this situation up for itself (it posits itself). To 'set' (setzen) does not mean to 'create' the objects of consciousness. The principle in question simply states that the essence of an I lies in the assertion of ones own self-identity, i.e., that consciousness presupposes self-consciousness. Such immediate self-identity, however, cannot be understood as a psychological fact, nor as an act or accident of some previously existing substance or

Johann Gottlieb Fichte being. It is an action of the I, but one that is identical with the very existence of this same I. In Fichte's technical terminology, the original unity of self-consciousness is to be understood as both an action and as the product of the same I, as a fact and/or act (Tathandlung), a unity that is presupposed by and contained within every fact and every act of empirical consciousness, though it never appears as such therein. The 'I' must set (setzen) itself in order to be an 'I' at all; but it can set itself only insofar as it sets itself up as limited. Moreover, it cannot even set for itself its own limitations, in the sense of producing or creating these limits. The finite I cannot be the ground of its own passivity. Instead, for Fichte, if the 'I' is to set itself off at all, it must simply discover itself to be limited, a discovery that Fichte characterizes as a repulse or resistance (Anstoss; German: Anstoß) to the free practical activity of the I. Such an original limitation of the I is, however, a limit for the I only insofar as the I sets it out as a limit. The I does this, according to Fichte's analysis, by setting its own limitation, first, as only a feeling, then as a sensation, then as an intuition of a thing, and finally as a summons of another person. The Anstoss thus provides the essential impetus that first sets in motion the entire complex train of activities that finally result in our conscious experience both of ourselves and others as empirical individuals and of the world around us. Though Anstoss plays a similar role as the thing in itself does in Kantian philosophy, unlike Kant, Fichte's Anstoss is not something foreign to the I. Instead, it denotes the I's original encounter with its own finitude. Rather than claim that the Not-I is the cause or ground of the Anstoss, Fichte argues that non-I is set up by the I precisely in order to explain to itself the Anstoss, that is, in order to become conscious of Anstoss. Though the Wissenschaftslehre demonstrates that such an Anstoss must occur if self-consciousness is to come about, it is quite unable to deduce or to explain the actual occurrence of such an Anstoss — except as a condition for the possibility of consciousness. Accordingly, there are strict limits to what can be expected from any a priori deduction of experience, and this limitation, for Fichte, equally applies to Kant's transcendental philosophy. According to Fichte, transcendental philosophy can explain that the world must have space, time, and causality, but it can never explain why objects have the particular sensible properties they happen to have or why I am this determinate individual rather than another. This is something that the I simply has to discover at the same time that it discovers its own freedom, and indeed, as a condition for the latter.

Other works Fichte also developed a theory of the state based on the idea of self-sufficiency. In his mind, the state should control international relations, the value of money, and remain an autarky. Because of this necessity to have relations with other rational beings in order to achieve consciousness, Fichte writes that there must be a 'relation of right,' in which there is a mutual recognition of rationality by both parties.

Nationalism Fichte made important contributions to political nationalism in Germany. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), a series of speeches delivered in Berlin under French occupation, he urged the German peoples to "have character and be German"--entailed in his idea of Germanness was antisemitism, since he argued that "making Jews free German citizens would hurt the German nation."[7] Fichte answered the call of Freiherr vom Stein, who attempted to develop the patriotism necessary to resist the French specifically among the "educated and cultural elites of the kingdom." Fichte located Germanness in the supposed continuity of the German language, and based it on Tacitus, who had hailed German virtues in Germania and celebrated the heroism of Arminius in his Annales.[8] In an earlier work from 1793 dealing with the ideals and politics of the French Revolution, Beiträge zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die Französische Revolution (Contributions to the Correction of the Public's Judgment concerning the French Revolution), he called Jews a "state within a state" that could "undermine" the German nation.[9] In regard to Jews getting "civil rights," he wrote that this would only be possible if one managed "to cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea."[9]

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Historian Robert Nisbet thought him to be "the true author of National Socialism".[10]

Women Fichte argued that "active citizenship, civic freedom and even property rights should be withheld from women, whose calling was to subject themselves utterly to the authority of their fathers and husbands."[11]

Final period in Berlin Fichte gave a wide range of public and private lectures in Berlin from the last decade of his life. These form some of his best known work, and are the basis of a revived German-speaking scholarly interest in his work.[12] The lectures include two works from 1806. In The Characteristics of the Present Age, Fichte outlines his theory of different historical and cultural epochs. His mystic work The Way Towards the Blessed Life gave his fullest thoughts on religion. In 1808 he gave a series of speeches in French-occupied Berlin, Addresses to the German Nation. In 1810, the new Berlin University was set up, designed along lines put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Fichte was made its rector and also the first Chair of Philosophy. This was in part because of educational themes in Addresses..., and in part because of his earlier work at Jena University. Fichte lectured on further versions of his Wissenschaftslehre. Of these, he only published a brief work from 1810, The Science of Knowledge in its General Outline. His son published some of these thirty years after his death.

Tombs of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his wife Johanna Marie, Dorotheenstaedtischer Friedhof (cemetery), Berlin

Most only became public in the last decades of the twentieth century, in his collected works.[13] This included reworked versions of the Wissenschaftslehre, (1810–1813), a Doctrine of Right (1812), and a Doctrine of Ethics (1812).

Criticism British philosopher Isaiah Berlin listed Fichte, along with his fellow German idealist G.W.F. Hegel, French materialist and utilitarian philosophe Claude Adrien Helvétius, Swiss collectivist philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, and Savoyard conservative Joseph de Maistre as thinkers who constituted the ideological basis for modern authoritarianism, in his book Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty.[14]

Collected Works in German The new standard edition of Fichte's works in German, which supersedes all previous editions, is the Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works or Complete Edition, commonly abbreviated as 'GA'), prepared by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 42 volumes. Edited by Reinhard Lauth, Hans Gliwitzky, Erich Fuchs and Peter Schneider, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1962-2012. It is organized into four parts. Part I: Published Works Part II: Unpublished Writings Part III: Correspondence Part IV: Lecture Transcripts.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Works in English • Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation. Trans. Garrett Green. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978 (Translation of Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung, 1st ed. 1792, 2nd ed. 1793). • Early Philosophical Writings Trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. (Contains Selections from Fichte's Writings and Correspondence from the Jena period, 1794–1799). • Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (1794/95, 2nd ed. 1802). Translation of: Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte's first major exposition of the Wissenschaftlehre. In: The Science of Knowledge, trans. and ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. • Foundations of Natural Right. Trans. Michael Baur. Ed. Frederick Neuhouser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (Translation of Grundlage des Naturrechts 1796/97). • Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1798/99). Trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. • The System of Ethics according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre (1798). Ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller. Cambridge University Press, 2005. • Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings. Trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale. Indianapolis, and Cambridge: Hackett, 1994. (Contains mostly writings from the late Jena period, 1797–1799). • The Vocation of Man. Trans. Peter Preuss. Indianapolis. (Translation of Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800). • A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand. Trans. John Botterman and William Rash. In: Philosophy of German Idealism, pp. 39–115. (Translation of Sonnenklarer Bericht an das grössere Publikum über das Wesen der neuesten Philosophie, 1801). • The Science of Knowing: J. G. Fichte's 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre. Ed. and trans. Walter W. Wright. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 2005. • Characteristics of the Present Age (Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, 1806). In: The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 2 vols., trans. and ed. William Smith. London: Chapman, 1848/49. Reprint, London: Thoemmes Press, 1999. • Addresses to the German Nation (1808), ed. and trans. Gregory Moore. Cambridge University Press, 2008. • The Philosophical Rupture Between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802). Trans. and eds. Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012. Includes the following texts by Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Correspondence with F.W.J. Schelling (1800–1802); "Announcement" (1800); extract from "New Version of the Wissenschaftslehre" (1800); "Commentaries on Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism and Presentation of My System of Philosophy" (1800–1801).

Other Works • Jacobi an Fichte, German Text (1799/1816), with Introduction and Critical Apparatus by Marco Ivaldo and Ariberto Acerbi (Introduction, German Text, Italian Translation, 3 Appendices with Jacobi's and Fichte's complementary Texts, Philological Notes, Commentary, Bibliography, Index): Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici - Press, Naples 2011, ISBN 978-88-905957-5-2.

Secondary sources • Arash Abizadeh. "Was Fichte an Ethnic Nationalist?" [15] History of Political Thought 26.2 (2005): 334–359. • Daniel Breazeale. "Fichte's 'Aenesidemus' Review and the Transformation of German Idealism" The Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980/1) 545–68. • Daniel Breazeale and Thomas Rockmore (eds) Fichte: Historical Contexts/Contemporary Controversies. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997.

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte • Franks, Paul, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005 • Dieter Henrich. "Fichte's Original Insight" Contemporary German Philosophy 1 (1982) 15–52. • T. P. Hohler. Imagination and Reflection: Intersubjectivity. Fichte's 'Grundlage' of 1794. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982. • Wayne Martin. Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte's Jena Project. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. • Frederick Neuhouser. Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. • Peter Suber. "A Case Study in Ad Hominem Arguments: Fichte's Science of Knowledge [16]," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 23, 1 (1990) 12–42. • Robert R Williams. Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. • Xavier Tilliette, Fichte. La science la liberté, pref. by Reinhard Lauth, Vrin, 2003 • Gunther Zoller. Fichte's Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. • Rainer Schafer. Johann Gottlieb Fichtes >Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre< von 1794. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006. • Ulrich Schwabe. Indivdiuelles und Transindividuelles Ich. Die Selbstindividuation reiner Subjektivität und Fichtes "Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo". Paderborn 2007. • David W. Wood. 'Mathesis of the Mind': A Study of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre and Geometry. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2012 (Fichte-Studien-Supplementa, volume 29). • Fichte, 1) Johann Gottlieb [17]. article in: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 4. Aufl. 1888–1890, Bd. 6, S. 234 f.

References [1] "Fichte, Johann Gottlieb". New International Encyclopedia. 1905. [2] "Fichte, Johann Gottlieb". Encyclopedia Americana. 1920. [3] Traditionally, it has been assumed that either the omission was an accident or a deliberate attempt by the publisher to move copies. In either case, Fichte did not plan it, and in fact only heard of the accident much later; he writes to his fiancée: "Why did I have to have such utterly strange, excellent, unheard-of good luck?" See Garrett Green's Introduction to Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. [4] Letter from Jens Baggeson to Karl Reinhold. Quoted in Editor's Introduction to Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings. London: Cornell University Press, 1988. [5] Albert G. Mackey, ed. (October 1872 to September 1873). "Fichte as a Freemason" (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=Ip5bF1xtRB0C& pg=PA430). Mackey's National Freemason: 430. . [6] Robert Blakely, History of the Philosophy of Mind, Vol. IV, p. 114, London: Longmans, 1850 [7] Dawidowicz, Lucy S. (1978). Hitler's war against the Jews: a young reader's version of The war against the Jews, 1933-1945 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=nKl2Vv8HoDwC). Behrman House. ISBN 978-0-87441-222-2. . [8] Geary, Patrick J. (2002). The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton UP. pp. 24–25. ISBN 978-0-691-11481-1. [9] Gesamtausgabe, v. I/1, pp. 292–293 [10] Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the progress of feminism: evolution, gender, empire, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, p. 70. [11] Christopher M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (Harvard University Press, 2006: ISBN 0-674-02385-4), p. 377. [12] Breazeale, Dan, "Johann Gottlieb Fichte", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL: . [13] Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften approx. 40 volumes. Edited by Reinhard Lauth, Erich Fuchs, Hans Gliwitzky, Ives Radrizzani, Günter Zöller, et al., Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1962 [14] Berlin, Isaiah, Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton University Press, 2003) ISBN 0-691-09099-8 [15] http:/ / www. profs-polisci. mcgill. ca/ abizadeh/ Fichte. htm [16] http:/ / www. earlham. edu/ ~peters/ writing/ fichte. htm [17] http:/ / polonius. bibliothek. uni-ulm. de:8080/ Meyers2/ seite/ werk/ meyers/ band/ 6/ seite/ 0234/ meyers_b6_s0234. html#Fichte

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte

External links • Outlines of the Doctrine of Knowledge (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/ fichte.htm) • Johann Gottlieb Fichte (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte) entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy • The North American Fichte Society (http://digilib.bu.edu/nnafs/) • Works by Fichte, original German texts (http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Fichte,+Johann+Gottlieb) • Internationale Johann-Gottlieb-Fichte-Gesellschaft (http://www.fichte-gesellschaft.de/) • KULTUR & KONGRESSWERK-fichte (http://www.kulturwerk-fichte.de/) - Eventlocation in Magdeburg, named after Johann-Gottlieb Fichte • A Case Study in Ad Hominem Arguments: Fichte's Science of Knowledge (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/ writing/fichte.htm/) • Works by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Fichte+Johann+Gottlieb) at Project Gutenberg • Timeline of German Philosophers (http://www.weple.org/timeline. html#ids=14631,12007,12598,700,10671,9518,37304,95184,&title=8 German Philosophers)

Works online • Addresses to the German Nation (1922). (Trs. R.F. Jones and G.H. Turnbull.) IA (UToronto) (http://www. archive.org/details/addressestothege00fichuoft) • The Destination of Man (1846). (Tr. Mrs. Percy Sinnett.) IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/details/ thedestinationof00fichuoft) • (French) Doctrine de la science (Paris, 1843). Google (Harvard) (http://books.google.com/ books?id=0i8RAAAAYAAJ) Google (Oxford) (http://books.google.com/books?id=MMIIAAAAQAAJ) Google (UMich) (http://books.google.com/books?id=XRhIAAAAMAAJ) • Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Popular Works (1873). (Tr. William Smith.) IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/ details/johanngottlieb00fichuoft) • New Exposition of the Science of Knowledge (1869). (Tr. A.E. Kroeger.) Google (Harvard) (http://books.google. com/books?id=7C8RAAAAYAAJ) Google (NYPL) (http://books.google.com/books?id=qfQNAAAAYAAJ) IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/details/newexposition00fichuoft) • On the Nature of the Scholar (1845). (Tr. William Smith.) IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/details/ onthenatureofthe00fichuoft) • The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1848–49). (Tr. William Smith.) •

Volume 1,

1848. Google (Oxford) (http://books.google.com/books?id=Q0EEAAAAQAAJ) IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/details/popularfichte01fichuoft) 4th ed., 1889. IA (UIllinois) (http://www. archive.org/details/popularworksofjo01fich) IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/details/ popularworks01fichuoft) • Volume 2, 1849. IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/details/thepopularworkso00fichuoft) 4th ed., 1889. Google (Stanford) (http://books.google.com/books?id=uGS4OxWk5UsC) IA (UIllinois) (http://www. archive.org/details/popularworksofjo02fich) IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/details/ popularworks02fichuoft) • The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge (1897). (Tr. A.E. Kroeger.) Google (UMich) (http:// books.google.com/books?id=xJMZAAAAMAAJ) IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/details/ scienceofethics00fichuoft) • The Science of Knowledge (1889). (Tr. A.E. Kroeger.) IA (UToronto) (http://www.archive.org/details/ thescienceofknow00fichuoft)

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Johann Gottlieb Fichte • The Science of Rights (1889). (Tr. A.E. Kroeger.) IA (UCal) (http://www.archive.org/details/ scienceofrights00fichiala) • (German) Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Königsberg, 1792). 2nd ed., 1793. Gallica (http://gallica.bnf. fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k64806f) Google (Oxford) (http://books.google.com/books?id=r78IAAAAQAAJ) Google (Oxford-Taylor) (http://books.google.com/books?id=acIFAAAAQAAJ) • The Vocation of Man (1848). (Tr. William Smith.) Google (Oxford) (http://books.google.com/ books?id=qCUEAAAAQAAJ) 1910. Google (UCal) (http://books.google.com/books?id=J2o_AAAAIAAJ) • The Vocation of the Scholar (1847). (Tr. William Smith.) IA (UCal) (http://www.archive.org/details/ vocationofschola00fich) • The Way Towards the Blessed Life (1849). (Tr. William Smith.) Google (Oxford) (http://books.google.com/ books?id=s08EAAAAQAAJ) • On the Foundation of Our Belief in a Divine Government of the Universe (1798) (http://ecmd.nju.edu.cn/ UploadFile/9/4176/ncp07sc.doc)

Intersubjectivity Intersubjectivity is a key term used in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology to conceptualize the psychological relation between people. It is usually used in contrast to solipsistic individual experience, emphasizing our inherently social being.

Definition The term has been defined in at least three ways:[1] 1. First, in its weakest sense intersubjectivity refers to agreement. There is intersubjectivity between people if they agree on a given set of meanings or a definition of the situation. For example, Thomas Scheff defines intersubjectivity as "the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals."[2] 2. Second, and more subtly intersubjectivity refers to the "common-sense," shared meanings constructed by people in their interactions with each other and used as an everyday resource to interpret the meaning of elements of social and cultural life. If people share common sense, then they share a definition of the situation.[3] 3. Third, the term has been used to refer to shared (or partially shared) divergences of meaning. Self-presentation, lying, practical jokes, and social emotions, for example, all entail not a shared definition of the situation, but partially shared divergences of meaning. Someone who is telling a lie is engaged in an intersubjective act because they are working with two different definitions of the situation. Lying is thus genuinely inter-subjective (in the sense of operating between two subjective definitions of reality). Intersubjectivity emphasizes that shared cognition and consensus is essential in the shaping of our ideas and relations. Language, quintessentially, is viewed as communal rather than private. Therefore, it is problematic to view the individual as partaking in a private world, one which has a meaning defined apart from any other subjects. But in our shared divergence from a commonly understood experience, these private worlds of semi-solipsism naturally emerge. Intersubjectivity can also be understood as the process of psychological energy moving between two or more subjects. In a room where someone is lying on their deathbed, for example, the room can appear to be enveloped in a shroud of gloom for other people interacting with the dying person. The psychological weight of one subject comes to bear on the minds of others depending on how they react to it, thereby creating an intersubjective experience that, without multiple consciousnesses interacting with each other, would be otherwise strictly solitary. Love is a prime example of intersubjectivity that implies a shared feeling of care and affection, among others.

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Intersubjectivity

In psychoanalysis Intersubjectivity is an important concept in modern schools of psychoanalysis, where it has found application to the theory of the interrelations between analyst and analysand. Adopting an intersubjective perspective in psychoanalysis means, above all, to give up what Robert Stolorow and George E. Atwood define as "the myth of isolated mind."[4] In Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange's "intersubjective-systems theory," "intersubjective" refers not to the sharing of subjective states but to the constitution of psychological systems or fields in the interplay of differently organized experiential worlds. In their view, emotional experience always takes form within such intersubjective systems. Among the early authors who explored this conception in psychoanalysis, in an explicit or implicit way, were Heinz Kohut, Robert Stolorow, George E. Atwood, Jessica Benjamin in the United States and Silvia Montefoschi in Italy. Since the late 1980s, a direction in psychoanalysis often referred to as relational psychoanalysis or just relational theory has developed. A central person figure in the theory is Daniel Stern.[5] Empirically, the intersubjective school is inspired by research on the non-verbal communication of infants, young children, and their parents.[6][7] A central question is how relational issues are communicated at a very fast pace in a non-verbal fashion. Scholars also stress the importance of real relationships between two equivalent partners. The journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues is devoted to relational psychoanalysis.

In philosophy Intersubjectivity is a major topic in philosophy. The duality of self and other has long been contemplated by philosophers, and what it means to have an intersubjective experience, and what sort of lessons can be drawn from them. Ethics, for example, deals with how one should act and what one owes in an intersubjective experience where there is an identifiable other.

Phenomenology In phenomenology, intersubjectivity performs many functions. It allows empathy, which in phenomenology involves experiencing another person as a subject rather than just as an object among objects. In so doing, one experiences oneself as seen by the Other, and the world in general as a shared world instead of one only available to oneself. Early studies on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity were done by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. His student, Edith Stein, extended the concept and its basis in empathy in her 1917 doctoral dissertation On the Problem of Empathy (Zum Problem der Einfühlung). Intersubjectivity also helps in the constitution of objectivity: in the experience of the world as available not only to oneself, but also to the Other, there is a bridge between the personal and the shared, the self and the Others.

In Psychology Studies of dialogue and dialogism have revealed how language is deeply intersubjective. When we speak, we always address our interlocutors, taking their perspective, and orienting to what we think they think (or more usually don't think).[8] Within this tradition of research it has been argued that the structure of individual signs or symbols, the basis of language, are intersubjective[9] and that the psychological process of self-reflection entails intersubjectivity.[10] Recent research on mirror neurons provides evidence for the deeply intersubjective basis of human psychology,[11] and arguably much of the literature on empathy and theory of mind relate directly to intersubjectivity.

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References [1] Gillespie, A. & Cornish, F. (2010). Intersubjectivity: Towards a dialogical analysis (http:/ / lse. academia. edu/ AlexGillespie/ Papers/ 1347646/ Intersubjectivity_Towards_a_dialogical_analysis). Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 40, 19-46 [2] Scheff, Thomas et al. (2006). Goffman Unbound!: A New Paradigm for Social Science (The Sociological Imagination), Paradigm Publishers (ISBN 978-1-59451-196-7) [3] Clive Seale. Glossary (http:/ / people. brunel. ac. uk/ ~hsstcfs/ glossary. htm), Researching Society and Culture. [4] http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=EbuJO7ZOHtMC& pg=PA7& lpg=PA7& dq=the+ myth+ of+ isolated+ mind& source=web& ots=q8NGjSl1CH& sig=JlbsdG9ldNL_K3yffYPf5waPbmQ [5] Stern, Daniel (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-70429-7. [6] Beebe, Beatrice; Frank M Lachmann (2002). Infant Research and Adult Treatment. Co-constructing Interactions. London: Analytic Press. ISBN 978-0-88163-245-3. [7] Schechter DS (2003). Intergenerational communication of maternal violent trauma: Understanding the interplay of reflective functioning and posttraumatic psychopathology. In S.W. Coates, J.L. Rosenthal and D.S. Schechter (eds.) September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds. Hillside, NJ: Analytic Press, Inc. pp. 115-142. [8] Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind and world dialogically. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing [9] Gillespie, A. (2009). The intersubjective nature of symbols (http:/ / lse. academia. edu/ AlexGillespie/ Papers/ 1347714/ The_intersubjective_nature_of_symbols). In Brady Wagoner (Ed), Symbolic transformations. London: Routledge [10] Gillespie, A. (2007). The social basis of self-reflection (http:/ / lse. academia. edu/ AlexGillespie/ Papers/ 1347645/ The_social_basis_of_self-reflection). In Valsiner and Rosa (Eds), The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University press [11] Rizzolatti, G. & Arbib, M. A. (1998). Language within our grasp. Trends in neurosciences, 21, 188-194.

Further reading In psychoanalysis • Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J. B. (1974). The Language of Psycho-Analysis, Edited by W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN 0-393-01105-4 • Stolorow, R. D., Atwood, G. E., & Orange, D. M. (2002). Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.

Philosophy • • • •

Edmund Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1905-1920 Edmund Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1921-1928 Edmund Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1929-1935 Edmund Husserl Cartesian Meditations, Edited by S. Strasser, 1950. ISBN 978-90-247-0068-4

External links • Critique of intersubjectivity (http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/intersubj.htm) Article by Mats Winther • Edmund Husserl: Empathy, intersubjectivity and lifeworld (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/ #EmpIntLif), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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The Symbolic

The Symbolic The Symbolic (or Symbolic Order) is a part of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, part of his attempt 'to distinguish between those elementary registers whose grounding I later put forward in these terms: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real - a distinction never previously made in psychoanalysis'.[1]

The rise of the Symbolic Lacan's early work was centred around an exploration of the Imaginary - of those 'specific images, which we refer to by the ancient term of imago....it set out from their formative function in the subject'.[2] Thereafter 'The notion of the "symbolic came to the forefront in the Rome Report[1953]...henceforth it is the symbolic, not the imaginary, that is seen to be the determining order of the subject'.[3] Lacan's concept of the symbolic 'owes much to a key event in the rise of structuralism...the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949....In many ways, the symbolic is for Lacan an equivalent to Lévi-Strauss's order of culture'[4]: a language-mediated order of culture. 'Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man...superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature'.[5] Accepting then that 'language is the basic social institution in the sense that all others presuppose language',[6] Lacan found in Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic division of the verbal sign between signifier and signified a new key to the Freudian understanding that 'his therapeutic method was "a talking cure"'.[7]

The triumph of the Symbolic For a decade or so after the Rome Report - the decade of his work immortalised in Ecrits - Lacan found in the concept of the symbolic an answer to the neurotic problematic of the imaginary: 'It is the task of symbolism to forbid imaginary capture...supremacy of the symbolic over the imaginary...supremacy of the symbolic over the real'.[8] Accepting through Lévi-Strauss the anthropological premise that 'man is indeed an "animal symbolicum"', and that 'the self-illumination of society through symbols is an essential part of social reality',[9] Lacan made the leap to seeing 'the Oedipus complex - in so far as we continue to recognise it as covering the whole field of our experience with its signification'[10] - as the point whereby the weight of social reality was mediated to the developing child by the (symbolic) father: 'It is in the name of the Father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law'.[11] The imaginary now came to be seen increasingly as belonging to the earlier, closed realm of the dual relationship of mother and child - 'Melanie Klein describes the relation to the mother as a mirrored relationship...[neglecting] the third term, the father'[12] - to be broken up and opened to the wider symbolic order. Lacan's shorthand for that wider world was the Other - 'the big other, that is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words [which]...are public, communal property'.[13] But though it is an essentially linguistic dimension, Lacan does not simply equate the symbolic with language, since the latter is involved also in the Imaginary and the Real. The symbolic dimension of language is that of the signifier, in which elements have no positive existence but are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences. The unconscious is the discourse of the Other and thus belongs to the symbolic order. It is also the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex, and is determinant of subjectivity. 'The unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject, at the level at which the subject constitutes himself out of the effects of the signifier...we depend on the field of the Other, which was there long before we came into the world, and whose circulating structures determine us as subjects'[14] - on the symbolic order.

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The eclipse of the Symbolic With the Sixties, the early rush of expectations associated with the concept of the symbolic order had begun to fade, and the symbolic was increasingly seen as part of the human condition, rather than as a therapeutic cure-all. Lacan's critical attention began to shift instead to the concept of the Real, seen as 'that over which the symbolic stumbles...that which is lacking in the symbolic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation...the umbilical cord of the symbolic'.[15] By the turn of the decade, '(1968–71) Lacan gradually came to dismiss the Oedipus...as "Freud's dream"'[16] - despite his own earlier warning of the dangers if 'one wishes to ignore the symbolic articulation that Freud discovered at the same time as the unconscious...his methodical reference to the Oedipus complex'.[17] Whether his development of the concept of jouissance, or 'the "identification with the sinthome" (as the naming of one's Real) advocated in Lacan's last works as the aim of psychoanalysis',[18] will in time prove as fruitful as that of the symbolic order perhaps remains to be seen. Part of Lacan's enduring legacy will surely however remain bound up with the triumphal exploration of the symbolic order that was the Rome Report: 'Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together...the shape of his destiny'.[19]

References [1] Jacques Lacan, Ecrits:A Selection (London 1997) p. 95 [2] Lacan, Ecrits p. 11 [3] Alan Sheridan,"Translator' Note", Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London 1994) p. 279 [4] David Macey, "Introduction", Lacan, Four, p. xxii and p. xxv [5] Lacan, Ecrits p. 65-6 [6] John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London 1995) p. 60 [7] Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, quoted in Macey, Four p. xxvii [8] Jacques-Alain Miller, "Commentary" in Lacan, Ecrits p. 332 and p. 327 [9] Alfred Schutz,The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague 1973) p. 356 and p. 330 [10] Lacan, Ecrits p.66 [11] Lacan, Ecrits p. 67 [12] Lacan, Seminar III, in J. Mitchell and J. Rose, Feminine Sexuality (New York 1982) p. 57-8 [13] Philip Hill, Lacan for Beginners (London 1997) p. 160 and p. 73 [14] Lacan, Four, p. 126 and p. 246 [15] Sheridan, Four p. 280 [16] J. Clemens and R. Grigg eds., Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII (London 2006) p. 51 [17] Lacan, Ecrits p. 191 [18] Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness (London 2007) p. 188 [19] Lacan, Ecrits p. 68

Sources • The Seminars of Jacques Lacan (http://www.lacan.com/seminars1a.htm) • An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis - Dylan Evans (http://www.amazon.com/dp/ 0415135222/)

External links • Chronology of Jacques Lacan (http://www.lacan.com/rolleyes.htm) • Lacan Dot Com (http://www.lacan.com/lacan1.htm)

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Metaphysics of presence

Metaphysics of presence The concept of the metaphysics of presence is an important consideration within the area of deconstruction. The deconstructive interpretation holds that the entire history of Western philosophy and its language and traditions has emphasized the desire for immediate access to meaning, and thus built a metaphysics or ontotheology around the privileging of presence over absence. In Being and Time Martin Heidegger argues that the concept of time prevalent in all Western thought has largely remained unchanged since the definition offered by Aristotle in the Physics. He says "Aristotle's essay on time is the first detailed Interpretation of this phenomenon [time] which has come down to us. Every subsequent account of time, including Bergson's, has been essentially determined by it."[1] Aristotle defined time as "the number of movement in respect of before and after".[2] By defining time in this way Aristotle is privileging what is present-at-hand, namely the 'presence' of time. Heidegger argues in response that "Entities are grasped in their Being as 'presence'; this means that they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time - the 'Present'".[3] Central to Heidegger's own philosophical project is the attempt to gain a more authentic understanding of time. Heidegger considers time to be the unity of three ecstases, the past, the present and the future. Deconstructive thinkers, like Jacques Derrida, describe their task as the questioning or deconstruction of this metaphysical tendency in philosophy. This argument is largely based on the earlier work of Martin Heidegger, who in Being and Time claimed the parasitic nature of the theoretical attitude of pure presence upon a more originary involvement with the world in concepts such as the ready-to-hand and being-with. Friedrich Nietzsche is a more distant, but clear, influence as well. The presence to which Heidegger refers is both a presence as in a "now" and also a presence as in an eternal, always present, as one might associate with god or the "eternal" laws of science. This hypostatized (underlying) belief in presence is undermined by novel phenomenological ideas — such that presence itself does not subsist, but comes about primordially through the action of our futural projection, our realization of finitude and the reception or rejection of the traditions of our time.

References [1] Being and Time, §6, 26 [2] Physics, Book IV, part 11 [3] Being and Time, §6, 26

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The saying and the said

The saying and the said Emmanuel Levinas, in an attempt to overcome a certain naivety within his exploration of ethics as given in what he describes as the face-to-face encounter, attempts to introduce language into what had only been a "picture" of such an encounter. He distinguishes between The saying of something and what it is that is said during the talk, The said.

Ethics and language The Saying The Saying relates to an irreducible exposure to the other. The saying makes the self-exposure of sincerity possible, a way of giving everything, of not holding secrets, of complete generosity. One is corrupted into, learns or decides, to lie, to simulate, to dissimulate, to ignore and remain politically or economically silent.

The Said The said, on the other hand, refers to the intelligibility and reference of what is communicated or transferred, it can be subjected to the closure truth as total presence, it is associated with ontology (i.e., philosophy and science). Man can give himself in saying to the point of poetry - or he can withdraw into the non-saying of lies. Language as saying is an ethical openness to the other; as that which is said - reduced to a fixed identity or synchronized presence - it is an ontological closure of the other.’ [1] The complication Levinas introduces into his analysis of the face-to-face gives his ethics a further reach toward the kind of universalist ethics of a humanism: One can see an image of destitution and choose a logic in which to ignore it, one can hear the cry, the plea, and be summoned to the logic of another person.

Notes [1] Kearney, Richard. "Dialogues with contemporary continental thinkers", Manchester: MUP, 1984

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Minority (philosophy)

Minority (philosophy) Minority, and the related concept of "becoming-minor," is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their books Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975), A Thousand Plateaus (1980), and elsewhere. In these texts, they criticize the concept of "majority". For Deleuze and Guattari, "becoming-minoritarian" is primarily an ethical action, one of the becomings one is affected by when avoiding "becoming-fascist". They argued further that the concept of a "people", when invoked by subordinate groups or those aligned with them, always refers to a minority, whatever its numerical power might be. This has inspired some political philosophers, such as Paul Patton and William Connolly, to elaborate on the concept of "becoming-minoritarian" in order to apply it to modern democratic thought. For Deleuze and Guattari the "minor" and "becoming-minority" does not refer to minority groups as described in ordinary language. Minority groups are defined by identities and are thus molar configurations belonging to the majoritarian State Machine. Deleuze and Guattari's central example here is Kafka. Kafka finds himself at home among neither the Prague Jews nor the dominant German and Austria-Hungarian power structure. For him a "people is missing" and his literature sets out to summon that people. Nonetheless, there is a connection between what are ordinarily referred to as "minorities" and Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the minor and becoming-minor. If becoming-minor often occurs in the context of what are ordinarily called minority groups, then this is because, Deleuze and Guattari argue, becoming-minor is catalyzed by existence in cramped social spaces. The key point not to be missed is that becoming-minor is not related to molar identities, nor is it a politics that seeks representation or recognition of such identities (though Deleuze and Guattari stress that these are worthwhile political ambitions). The example of patriarchy provides an illustration of how the concept of "minority" is used: while there may be more women than men numerically, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, which are sensitive to relations of power, men still constitute the majority whereas women form a minority. Thus the concept of "becoming-minor" converges with that of "becoming-woman" (as they say, "everyone has to 'become-woman', even women..."),"becoming-animal", "becoming-molecular", "becoming-imperceptible" and ultimately, "becoming-revolutionary". Each type of affective becoming marks a new phase of a larger process that Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialization.

Sources • Deleuze, Gilles. 1979. "One Manifesto Less." Trans. Alan Orenstein. The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 204-222. ISBN 0-231-07269-4. Also appears in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought. Ed. Timothy Murray. Trans. Eliane dal Molin and Timothy Murray. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Ser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997. 239-258. ISBN 0-472-06635-8. Trans. from Superpositions. By Gilles Deleuze and Carmelo Bene. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. • Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1972. Anti-Œdipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of L'Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0-8264-7695-3. • ---. 1975. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature 30. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Trans. of Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0-8166-1515-2. • ---. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0-8264-7694-5. • Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ISBN 0-14-055160-3.

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Minority (philosophy) • ---. 1995. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1-57027-019-8. • ---. 1996. Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1-57027-030-9. • Massumi, Brian. 1992. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Swerve editions. Cambridge, USA and London: MIT. ISBN 0-262-63143-1. • Paul Patton, "Deleuze and Democracy", Contemporary Political Theory (2000) 4:4

Subject–object problem The subject–object problem, a longstanding philosophical issue, is concerned with the analysis of human experience, and of what within experience is "subjective" and what is "objective." It arises from the premise that the world consists of objects (entities) which are perceived or otherwise presumed to exist as entities, by subjects (observers). This results in questions regarding how subjects relate to objects, one of which is called the "knowing subject".[1] (see knowledge acquisition) The subject–object problem is twofold: firstly, there is the question of "what" is known. This dilemma goes back at least as far as Descartes, and arises from his skepticism that an evil demon might, conceivably, be controlling his every experience. (see Brain in a vat and Simulated reality) The second problem is that of "how" does one know what one knows. The field of Epistemology attempts to answer this question; but it is a subject–object problem as described in the section below on 19th and 20th Century philosophy.

The omniscient perspective By far the most common problem in discourse since the Enlightenment is the assumption of the existence of a God's eye view. That is, assuming that society can select a single perspective and apply it to all events, without needing to take into account the varying point of view of many cognitive beings moving through time and the fusion of this into one, omniscient, unified, perception of what "is". E Prime is a proposed solution to this problem in the field of General Semantics. This objective perspective, as opposed to all other subjective points of view, is also what Georg Lukács refers to with the concept of "totality". Writers and critics of narrative prose call this view the omniscient narrator, who appears to know everything about the story being told, including what all the characters are thinking, and usually speaks in the third person.

In 19th and 20th Century philosophy Immanuel Kant and especially his followers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel raised the issue of the relationship between the subject and the object, or what perceives and what is perceived. Fichte reduced the notion of the self to the pure passive self that is not really an object. This notion was later explored by Husserl and by Dilthey in his notion of Das Verstehen. Kant's Copernican revolution was the inversion of the traditional relation between the subject of knowledge and the object of that knowledge. Instead of the observed objects affecting the observing subject, the subject's constitution affects the way that the objects are observed. Following this transcendental idealism theory, the possibility of knowledge was thus to be found in the structure of the subject itself, instead of in an objective reality from which nothing can be said. Schopenhauer claimed that “everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation.”[2] According to him there can be

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Subjectobject problem "No object without subject" because "everything objective is already conditioned as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject with the forms of its knowing, and presupposes these forms….".[3] Schopenhauer also asserted that the Principle of sufficient reason does not apply between subject and object. It only applies between objects. Therefore, Fichte was mistaken when he posited that the subject produces or causes the object. Realism and Materialism are wrong when they assert that the object causes the subject.[4] In his lecture "Mind and Matter," Erwin Schrödinger claimed "we exclude the Subject of Cognizance [knowing subject] from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world…." He claimed that we are unaware "of the fact that a moderately satisfying picture of the world has only been reached at the high price of taking ourselves out of the picture, stepping back into the role of a non-concerned observer."[5] This is similar to Schopenhauer's assertion that, when we forget about the knowing subject, "we imagined that we had thought of matter, but in fact we had thought of nothing but the subject that represents matter, the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it."[3] As a result, the object is considered to be really experienced, but the subject is not considered at all.

In science In physics There are related concerns in philosophy of physics where observers are claimed to affect a result, e.g. certain interpretations in quantum mechanics, in a way which defies the conventional assignment of an object role to experimenter, with everything else as a subject. Otherwise, physics is uncontroversially agreed upon as describing a reality that exists independent of observation.

In mathematics Cognitive science of mathematics raises some similar concerns with philosophy of mathematics. Among them, the assignment of subjective status to mathematical objects as in Platonism, although they are formalisms used in a linguistic fashion for communications between living beings, and thus subject to the same subject–object problems as other forms of such communication. This raises some concerns, dating back as far as Eugene Wigner's 1960 observations on the matter, that what we call foundations of mathematics and cosmology may be not observable or discoverable absolutes, but rather, aspects of humanity and its cognition. Nick Bostrom in 2002 addressed this concern with a theory of anthropic bias.

In clinical trials One of the purposes of blinding clinical trials is to avoid the introduction of bias caused by investigators beliefs about the therapy being tested influencing perceptions, measurements, and actions. Making effective decisions and ensuring patient care while investigators remain unaware of what treatment particular patients receive has been a continuing problem in the design of clinical trials. The phenomenon of adaptive designs - designs whose characteristics can change mid-trial based on the information obtained so far—has created further problems in avoiding bias. Susan Ellenberg, Thomas Fleming, and David DeMets expressed concern that using data monitoring committees to alter the parameters of a clinical trial through an adaptive design in a manner known to the investigators could introduce bias into the trial. Increasing the sample size, for example, could signal that the experimental product was not as efficacious as originally hoped. The authors expressed concern that participant-observer bias would need to be assessed and addressed in order to ensure the reliability of adaptive designs.[6]

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In psychology A cognitive bias, as studied in experimental psychology, demonstrates how human judgment deviates in particular situations. For example, the confirmation bias is the tendency of an individual to perceive an event such that it coheres with his previous views.

Other approaches • Analytic philosophy discusses various aspects of the problem of subject and object such as the mind body problem, first-person versus third-person perspective and also issues of non-referential use of I presented by G. E. M. Anscombe. • Robert M. Pirsig's philosophy of the Metaphysics of Quality is largely concerned with the subject–object problem. • Sun Myung Moon's philosophy, Unification Thought, treats subject and object in a way different from classical ideas of Hegel and Marx. • Philosopher Ken Wilber has written extensively on this, calling the omniscient view (or subject–object distinction) the fundamental modernist paradigm, and cataloging its effects on society, and in the way many subjects have been compressed into a "flat" view by this perspective

In Vedas The subject–object problem was also discussed in several sections of the Vedas, the earliest sacred texts of Hinduism, and in several schools of Indian philosophy such as Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism. According to the Vedas, subject is transcendental, while object is either different (material) or of same category - spiritual: "The Absolute Truth is both subject and object, and there is no qualitative difference there. .. In the relative world the knower is different from the known, but in the Absolute Truth both the knower and the known are one and the same thing." [7]

References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

(http:/ / www. newadvent. org/ cathen/ 08673a. htm) Catholic Encyclopedia The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, § 1 The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, § 7 The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, § 5 "Mind and Matter" in What is Life & Mind and Matter, Ch. 4 Susan Ellenberg, Thomas Fleming, David DeMets, "Data Monitoring Committees in Clinical Trials: A Practical Perspective" (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2002) ISBN 0-471-48986-7 [7] Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 1.2.11 (http:/ / vedabase. net/ sb/ 1/ 2/ 11/ en) In the relative world the knower is the living spirit or superior energy, whereas the known is inert matter or inferior energy. Therefore, there is a duality of inferior and superior energy, whereas in the absolute realm both the knower and the known are of the same superior energy. There are three kinds of energies of the supreme energetic. There is no difference between the energy and energetic, but there is a difference of quality of energies. The absolute realm and the living entities are of the same superior energy, but the material world is inferior energy. The living being in contact with the inferior energy is illusioned, thinking he belongs to the inferior energy. Therefore there is the sense of relativity in the material world. In the Absolute there is no such sense of difference between the knower and the known, and therefore everything there is absolute.

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Bibliography • Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Dover, Volume I. ISBN 0-486-21761-2. • Schrödinger, Erwin. What is Life? & Mind and Matter. Cambridge University Press. (1974) ISBN 0-521-09397-X.

External links • Subject–object problem and double hermeneutic (http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/staff/wkolsen/smithrev.htm) • N. Lektorsky's approach (http://www.marxists.org/subject/psychology/works/lektorsky/essay_77.htm)

Positivism Positivism is a philosophy of science based on the view that in the social as well as natural sciences information derived from sensory experience, and logical and mathematical treatments of such data, are together the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge.[1] Positivism assumes that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in scientific knowledge.[2] Obtaining and verifying data that can be received from the senses is known as empirical evidence.[1] This view holds that society operates according to general laws like the physical world. Introspective and intuitional attempts to gain knowledge are rejected. Though the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of Western thought,[3] the concept was developed in the modern sense in the early 19th century by the philosopher and founding sociologist, Auguste Comte.[4] Comte argued that society operates according to its own quasi-absolute laws, much as the physical world operates according to gravity and other absolute laws of nature.[5]

Etymology Re-imported in the 19th century from the French word positivisme, derived from positif in its philosophical sense of 'imposed on the mind by experience'. The adjective, however, as applied to law (natural law, positive law) occurs in this, its fundamental sense (lat. positīvus 'arbitrarily imposed', from pono 'put in place'), as early as Chaucer.[6] The classical Latin usage goes back to the Greek distinction between φύσις from φύω 'grow' and 'put in place' (cf. thesis, synthetic), very broadly speaking 'heredity' and 'environment'.

Overview Antecedents Positivism is part of the more general and ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, which was notably laid out by Plato, and which was later reformulated as the quarrel between the humanities and the sciences.[7] Plato elaborates a critique of poetry from the point of view of philosophy in his dialogues Phaedrus 245a, Symposium 209a, Republic 398a, Laws 817 b-d and Ion.[8] The distinction popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey between Geisteswissenschaft (humanities) and Naturwissenschaften (natural science),[9] The consideration was that, if laws in physics are not quasi-absolute but relative or probabilistic instead of absolute, more so can be in social sciences.[10] was started, with different terminology, by G. B. Vico in 1725.[11] Vico, in contrast to the positivist movement, asserted the superiority of the science of the human mind, because natural sciences tell us nothing about the inner aspects of natural things.[12]

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Auguste Comte Positivism states that the only authentic knowledge is that which allows positive verification. Positivism assumes that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in scientific knowledge.[2] As an approach to the philosophy of science deriving from Enlightenment thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Pierre-Simon Laplace, Auguste Comte saw the scientific method as replacing metaphysics in the history of thought, observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. Sociological positivism was later reformulated by Émile Durkheim as a foundation to social research.[13] Wilhelm Dilthey, in contrast, fought strenuously against the positivist assumption that only natural sciences explanations are valid.[9] Dilthey was in part influenced by the historicism of Leopold von Ranke.[9] Dilthey reprised the argument, already found in Vico, that scientific explanations do not reach the inner nature of phenomena.[9] The humanist knowledge of the humanities instead, gives us insights into the sphere of thoughts, feelings and desires.[9]

Antipositivism At the turn of the 20th century the first wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, rejected the doctrine, thus founding the antipositivist tradition in sociology. Later antipositivists and critical theorists have associated positivism with "scientism"; science as ideology.[14] Later in his career (1969),[15] German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for the creation of quantum mechanics, distanced himself from positivism by saying: The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing. If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

Logical positivism and postpositivism In the early 20th century, logical positivism — a descendant of Comte's basic thesis but an independent movement — sprang up in Vienna and grew to become one of the dominant schools in Anglo-American philosophy and the analytic tradition. Logical positivists (or 'neopositivists') reject metaphysical speculation and attempted to reduce statements and propositions to pure logic. Critiques of this approach by philosophers such as Karl Popper, Willard Van Orman Quine and Thomas Kuhn have been highly influential, and led to the development of postpositivism.

In historiography In historiography the debate on positivism has been characaterized by the quarrel between positivism and historicism.[10] (Historicism is also sometimes termed historism in the German tradition .)[16] Arguments against positivist approaches in historiography include that history differs from sciences like physics and ethology in subject matter and method.[17] That much of what history studies is nonquantifiable, and therefore to quantify is to lose in precision. Experimental methods and mathematical models do not generally apply to history, and it is not possible to formulate general (quasi-absolute) laws in history.[17]

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In other fields In the social sciences, positivism is usually characterized by a pretension towards quantitative approaches and quasi-absolute laws. A significant exception to this trend is represented by cultural anthropology, which tends naturally toward qualitative approaches.[10] In psychology, the positivist movement was influential in the development of behavioralism and operationalism. The 1927 philosophy of science book The Logic of Modern Physics in particular, which was originally intended for physicists, coined the term operational definition, which went on to dominate psychological method for the whole century.[18] In economics, practising researchers tend to emulate the methodological assumptions of classical positivism, but only in a de facto fashion: the majority of economists do not explicitly concern themselves with matters of epistemology.[19] In jurisprudence, "legal positivism" essentially refers to the rejection of natural law, thus its common meaning with philosophical positivism is somewhat attenuated and in recent generations generally emphasizes the authority of human political structures as opposed to a "scientific" view of law. In the early 1970s, urbanists of the positivist-quantitative school like David Harvey started to question the positivist approach itself, saying that the arsenal of scientific theories and methods developed so far in their camp was "incapable of saying anything of depth and profundity" on the real problems of contemporary cities.[20]

In 1990s sociology In contemporary social science, strong accounts of positivism have long since fallen out of favour. Practitioners of positivism today acknowledge in far greater detail observer bias and structural limitations. Modern positivists generally eschew metaphysical concerns in favor of methodological debates concerning clarity, replicability, reliability and validity.[21] This positivism is generally equated with "quantitative research" and thus carries no explicit theoretical or philosophical commitments. The institutionalization of this kind of sociology is often credited to Paul Lazarsfeld,[22] who pioneered large-scale survey studies and developed statistical techniques for analyzing them. This approach lends itself to what Robert K. Merton called middle-range theory: abstract statements that generalize from segregated hypotheses and empirical regularities rather than starting with an abstract idea of a social whole.[23]

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In 2000s sociology Other new movements, such as critical realism, have emerged to reconcile the overarching aims of social science with various so-called 'postmodern' critiques.[24]/[25] There are now at least twelve distinct epistemologies that are referred to as positivism.[26]

Sociological positivism Comte's positivism Auguste Comte (1798–1857) first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in The Course in Positive Philosophy, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed by the 1844 work, A General View of Positivism (published in French 1848, English in 1865). The first three volumes of the Course dealt chiefly with the physical sciences already in existence (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two emphasized the inevitable coming of social science. Observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and classifying the sciences in this way, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.[27] For him, the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex "Queen science" of human society itself. His View of Positivism therefore set-out to define the empirical goals of sociological method.

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"The most important thing to determine was the natural order in which the sciences stand — not how they can be made to stand, but how they must stand, irrespective of the wishes of any one....This Comte accomplished by taking as the criterion of the position of each the degree of what he called "positivity," which is simply the degree to which the phenomena can be exactly determined. This, as may be readily seen, is also a measure of their relative complexity, since the exactness of a science is in inverse proportion to its complexity. The degree of exactness or positivity is, moreover, that to which it can be subjected to mathematical demonstration, and therefore mathematics, which is not itself a concrete science, is the general gauge by which the position of every science is to be determined. Generalizing thus, Comte found that there were five great groups of phenomena of equal classificatory value but of successively decreasing positivity. To these he gave the names astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology." — Lester F. Ward, The Outlines of Sociology (1898), [28] Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general 'law of three stages'. The idea bears some similarity to Marx's view that human society would progress toward a communist peak. This is perhaps unsurprising as both were profoundly influenced by the early Utopian socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon, who was at one time Comte's mentor. Both Comte and Marx intended to develop secular-scientific ideologies in the wake of European secularisation. Comte's stages were (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical, and (3) the positive.[29] The theological phase of man was based on whole-hearted belief in all things with reference to God. God, Comte says, had reigned supreme over human existence pre-Enlightenment. Humanity's place in society was governed by its association with the divine presences and with the church. The theological phase deals with humankind's accepting the doctrines of the church (or place of worship) rather than relying on its rational powers to explore basic questions about existence. It dealt with the restrictions put in place by the religious organization at the time and the total acceptance of any "fact" adduced for society to believe.[30] Comte describes the metaphysical phase of humanity as the time since the

Positivism Enlightenment, a time steeped in logical rationalism, to the time right after the French Revolution. This second phase states that the universal rights of humanity are most important. The central idea is that humanity is invested with certain rights that must be respected. In this phase, democracies and dictators rose and fell in attempts to maintain the innate rights of humanity.[31] The final stage of the trilogy of Comte's universal law is the scientific, or positive, stage. The central idea of this phase is that individual rights are more important than the rule of any one person. Comte stated that the idea of humanity's ability to govern itself makes this stage innately different from the rest. There is no higher power governing the masses and the intrigue of any one person can achieve anything based on that individual's free will and authority. The third principle is most important in the positive stage.[32] Comte calls these three phases the universal rule in relation to society and its development. Neither the second nor the third phase can be reached without the completion and understanding of the preceding stage. All stages must be completed in progress.[33] Comte believed that the appreciation of the past and the ability to build on it towards the future was key in transitioning from the theological and metaphysical phases. The idea of progress was central to Comte's new science, sociology. Sociology would "lead to the historical consideration of every science" because "the history of one science, including pure political history, would make no sense unless it was attached to the study of the general progress of all of humanity".[34] As Comte would say: "from science comes prediction; from prediction comes action."[35] It is a philosophy of human intellectual development that culminated in science. The irony of this series of phases is that though Comte attempted to prove that human development has to go through these three stages, it seems that the positivist stage is far from becoming a realization. This is due to two truths. The positivist phase requires having a complete understanding of the universe and world around us and requires that society should never know if it is in this positivist phase. Anthony Giddens argues that since humanity constantly uses science to discover and research new things, humanity never progresses beyond the second metaphysical phase. In this view, Comte's positivism appears circular.[33] Comte's fame today owes in part to Emile Littré, who founded The Positivist Review in 1867. As an approach to the philosophy of history, positivism was appropriated by historians such as Hippolyte Taine. Many of Comte's writings were translated into English by the Whig writer, Harriet Martineau, regarded by some as the first female sociologist. Debates continue to rage as to how much Comte appropriated from the work of his mentor, Saint-Simon.[36] He was nevertheless influential: Brazilian thinkers turned to Comte's ideas Positivist temple in Porto Alegre about training a scientific elite in order to flourish in the industrialization process. Brazil's national motto, Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress") was taken from the positivism motto, "Love as principle, order as the basis, progress as the goal", which was also influential in Poland. In later life, Comte developed a 'religion of humanity' for positivist societies in order to fulfil the cohesive function once held by traditional worship. In 1849, he proposed a calendar reform called the 'positivist calendar'. For close associate John Stuart Mill, it was possible to distinguish between a "good Comte" (the author of the Course in Positive Philosophy) and a "bad Comte" (the author of the secular-religious system).[27] The system was unsuccessful but met with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species to influence the proliferation of various Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century, especially through the work of secularists such as George Holyoake and Richard Congreve. Although Comte's English followers, including George Eliot and Harriet Martineau, for the most part rejected the full gloomy panoply of his system, they liked the idea of a religion of humanity and his injunction to "vivre pour autrui" ("live for others", from which comes the word "altruism").[37] The early sociology of Herbert Spencer came about broadly as a reaction to Comte; writing after various developments in evolutionary biology, Spencer attempted (in vain) to reformulate the discipline in what we might

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Durkheim's positivism The modern academic discipline of sociology began with the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). While Durkheim rejected much of the details of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method, maintaining that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisting that they may retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality.[22] Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing his Rules of the Sociological Method (1895).[38] In this text he argued: "[o]ur main goal is to extend scientific rationalism to human conduct... What has been called our positivism is but a consequence of this rationalism." [28] Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy. By carefully examining suicide Émile Durkheim statistics in different police districts, he attempted to demonstrate that Catholic communities have a lower suicide rate than Protestants, something he attributed to social (as opposed to individual or psychological) causes. He developed the notion of objective sui generis "social facts" to delineate a unique empirical object for the science of sociology to study.[22] Through such studies, he posited, sociology would be able to determine whether a given society is 'healthy' or 'pathological', and seek social reform to negate organic breakdown or "social anomie". Durkheim described sociology as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning".[39] Accounts of Durkheim's positivism are vulnerable to exaggeration and oversimplification: Comte was the only major sociological thinker to postulate that the social realm may be subject to scientific analysis in exactly the same way as natural science, whereas Durkheim saw a far greater need for a distinctly sociological scientific methodology. His lifework was fundamental in the establishment of practical social research as we know it today - techniques which continue beyond sociology and form the methodological basis of other social sciences, such as political science, as well of market research and other fields.[40]

Antipositivism and critical theory At the turn of the 20th century, the first wave of German sociologists formally introduced methodological antipositivism, proposing that research should concentrate on human cultural norms, values, symbols, and social processes viewed from a subjective perspective. Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a 'science' as it is able to identify causal relationships—especially among ideal types, or hypothetical simplifications of complex social phenomena.[41] As a nonpositivist, however, one seeks relationships that are not as "ahistorical, invariant, or generalizable"[42] as those pursued by natural scientists. Weber regarded sociology as the study of social action, using critical analysis and verstehen techniques. The sociologists Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, George Herbert Mead, and Charles Cooley were also influential in the development of sociological antipositivism, whilst neo-Kantian philosophy, hermeneutics and phenomenology facilitated the movement in general. Karl Marx's theory of historical materialism and critical analysis drew upon positivism.,[43] a tradition which would continue in the development of critical theory. However, following in the tradition of both Weber and Marx, the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas has critiqued pure instrumental rationality (in its relation to the cultural "rationalisation" of the modern West) as meaning that scientific thinking becomes something akin to ideology itself. Positivism may be espoused by 'technocrats' who believe in the inevitability of social progress through science and

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Positivism technology.[44][45] New movements, such as critical realism, have emerged in order to reconcile postpositivist aims with various so-called 'postmodern' perspectives on the social acquisition of knowledge.

Contemporary positivism In the original Comtean usage, the term "positivism" roughly meant the use of scientific methods to uncover the laws according to which both physical and human events occur, while "sociology" was the overarching science that would synthesize all such knowledge for the betterment of society. "Positivism is a way of understanding based on science"; people don't rely on the faith of god but instead of the science behind humanity. "Antipositivism" formally dates back to the start of the twentieth century, and is based on the belief that natural and human sciences are ontologically and epistemologically distinct. Neither of these terms is any longer used in this meaning.[22] There are no fewer than twelve distinct epistemologies that are referred to as positivism.[26] Many of these approaches do not self-identify as "positivist", some because they themselves arose in opposition to older forms of positivism, and some because the label has over time become a term of abuse[22] by being mistakenly linked with a theoretical empiricism. The extent of antipositivist criticism has also become broad, with many philosophies broadly rejecting the scientifically based social epistemology and other ones only seeking to amend it to reflect 20th century developments in the philosophy of science. However, positivism (understood as the use of scientific methods for studying society) remains the dominant approach to both the research and the theory construction in contemporary sociology, especially in the United States.[22] The majority of articles published in leading American sociology and political science journals today are positivist (at least to the extent of being quantitative rather than qualitative).[46][47] This popularity may be because research utilizing positivist quantitative methodologies holds a greater prestige in the social sciences than qualitative work.[48] Such research is generally perceived as being more scientific and more trustworthy, and thus has a greater impact on policy and public opinion (though such judgments are frequently contested by scholars doing non-positivist work).[48]

Logical positivism Logical positivism (later and more accurately called logical empiricism) is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism, the idea that our knowledge includes a component that is not derived from observation. Logical positivism grew from the discussions of a group called the "First Vienna Circle" which gathered at the Café Central before World War I. After the war Hans Hahn, a member of that early group, helped bring Moritz Schlick to Vienna. Schlick's Vienna Circle, along with Hans Reichenbach's Berlin Circle, propagated the new doctrines more widely in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was Otto Neurath's advocacy that made the movement self-conscious and more widely known. A 1929 pamphlet written by Neurath, Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap summarized the doctrines of the Vienna Circle at Moritz Schlick, the founding father of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. that time. These included: the opposition to all metaphysics, especially ontology and synthetic a priori propositions; the rejection of metaphysics not as wrong but as having no meaning (by meaning positivists meant not empirically verifiable); a criterion of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's early work (which he later refuted); the idea that all knowledge should be codifiable in a single standard language of science; and above all the project of "rational reconstruction," in which

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ordinary-language concepts were gradually to be replaced by more precise equivalents in that standard language. However, the project is widely considered to have failed:[49][50] The secondary and historical literature on logical positivism affords substantial grounds for concluding that logical positivism failed to solve many of the central problems it generated for itself. Prominent among the unsolved problems was the failure to find an acceptable statement of the verifiability (later confirmability) criterion of meaningfulness. Until a competing tradition emerged (about the late 1950's), the problems of logical positivism continued to be attacked from within that tradition. But as the new tradition in the philosophy of science began to demonstrate its effectiveness — by dissolving and rephrasing old problems as well as by generating new ones — philosophers began to shift allegiances to the new tradition, even though that tradition has yet to receive a canonical formulation.[51] —L.D. Smith, Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance In the early 1930s, the Vienna Circle dispersed, mainly because of fascist persecution and the untimely deaths of Hans Hahn and Schlick. The most prominent proponents of logical positivism emigrated to the United Kingdom and to the United States, where they considerably influenced American philosophy. Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science. After moving to the United States, Carnap proposed a replacement for the earlier doctrines in his Logical Syntax of Language. This change of direction and the somewhat differing views of Reichenbach and others led to a consensus that the English name for the shared doctrinal platform, in its American exile from the late 1930s, should be "logical empiricism."

Further thinkers Within years of the publication of Comte's book A General View of Positivism (1848), other scientific and philosophical thinkers began creating their own definitions for positivism. They included Émile Zola, Emile Hennequin, Wilhelm Scherer, and Dimitri Pisarev. Émile Zola was an influential French novelist, the most important example of the literary school of naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France. Emile Hennequin was a Parisian publisher and writer who wrote theoretical and critical pieces. He "exemplified the tension between the positivist drive to systematize literary criticism and the unfettered imagination inherent in literature." He was one of the few thinkers who disagreed with the notion that subjectivity invalidates observation, judgment and prediction. Unlike many positivist thinkers before him, he believed that subjectivity does play a role in science and society. His contribution to positivism pertains not to science and its objectivity, but rather to the subjectivity of art and the way artists, their work, and audiences interrelate. Hennequin tried to analyze positivism strictly on the predictions, and the mechanical processes, but was perplexed due to the contradictions of the reactions of patrons to artwork that showed no scientific inclinations. Wilhelm Scherer was a German philologist, a university professor, and a popular literary historian. He was known as a positivist because he based much of his work on "hypotheses on detailed historical research, and rooted every literary phenomenon in 'objective' historical or philological facts". His positivism is different due to his involvement with his nationalist goals. His major contribution to the movement was his speculation that culture cycled in a six-hundred-year period. Dimitri Pisarev was a Russian critic who showed the greatest contradictions with his belief in positivism. His ideas focused around an imagination and style though he did not believe in romantic ideas because they reminded him of the oppressive tsarist government under which he lived. His basic beliefs were "an extreme anti-aesthetic scientistic position." He focused his efforts on defining the relation between literature and the environment.

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Stephen Hawking is a recent high profile advocate of positivism, at least in the physical sciences. In The Universe in a Nutshell (p. 31) he writes: Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others. According to this way of thinking, a scientific theory is a mathematical model that describes and codifies the observations we make. A good theory will describe a large range of phenomena on the basis of a few simple postulates and will make definite predictions that can be tested… If one takes the positivist position, as I do, one cannot say what time actually is. All one can do is describe what has been found to be a very good mathematical model for time and say what predictions it makes.

Stephen Hawking

However, the claim that Popper was a positivist is a common misunderstanding that Popper himself termed the "Popper legend." In fact, he developed his views in stark opposition to and as a criticism of positivism and held that scientific theories talk about how the world really is, not, as positivists claim, about phenomena or observations experienced by scientists.[52] In the same vein, continental philosophers like Theodore Adorno and Jürgen Habermas regarded Popper as a positivist because of his alleged devotion to a unified science. However, this was also part of the "Popper legend"; Popper had in fact been the foremost critic of this doctrine of the Vienna Circle, critiquing it, for instance, in his "Conjectures and Refutations".[53]

Positivism in science today The key features of positivism as of the 1950s, as defined in the "received view",[54] are: 1. A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements; 2. A concern with axiomatization, that is, with demonstrating the logical structure and coherence of these statements; 3. An insistence on at least some of these statements being testable, that is amenable to being verified, confirmed, or falsified by the empirical observation of reality; statements that would, by their nature, be regarded as untestable included the teleological; thus positivism rejects much of classical metaphysics. 4. The belief that science is markedly cumulative; 5. The belief that science is predominantly transcultural; 6. The belief that science rests on specific results that are dissociated from the personality and social position of the investigator; 7. The belief that science contains theories or research traditions that are largely commensurable; 8. The belief that science sometimes incorporates new ideas that are discontinuous from old ones; 9. The belief that science involves the idea of the unity of science, that there is, underlying the various scientific disciplines, basically one science about one real world. Positivism is elsewhere defined as "the view that all true knowledge is scientific,"[55] and that all things are ultimately measurable. Positivism is closely related to reductionism, in that both involve the view that "entities of one kind... are reducible to entities of another,"[55] such as societies to configurations of individuals, or mental events to neural phenomena. It also involves the contention that "processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events,"[55] and even that "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals,"[55] or that "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems."[55]

Positivism While most social scientists today are not explicit about their epistemological commitments, articles in top American sociology and political science journals generally follow a positivist logic of argument.[46][47] It can be thus argued that "natural science and social science [research articles] can therefore be regarded with a good deal of confidence as members of the same genre".[46]

Criticisms Historically, positivism has been criticized for its reductionism, i.e. for contending that all "processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events," "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals," and that "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems."[55] Max Horkheimer criticized the classic formulation of positivism on two grounds. First, he claimed that it falsely represented human social action.[56] The first criticism argued that positivism systematically failed to appreciate the extent to which the so-called social facts it yielded did not exist 'out there', in the objective world, but were themselves a product of socially and historically mediated human consciousness.[56] Positivism ignored the role of the 'observer' in the constitution of social reality and thereby failed to consider the historical and social conditions affecting the representation of social ideas.[56] Positivism falsely represented the object of study by reifying social reality as existing objectively and independently and labor actually produced those conditions.[56] Secondly, he argued, representation of social reality produced by positivism was inherently and artificially conservative, helping to support the status quo, rather than challenging it.[56] This character may also explain the popularity of positivism in certain political circles. Horkheimer argued, in contrast, that critical theory possessed a reflexive element lacking in the positivistic traditional theory.[56] Some scholars today hold the views critiqued in Horkheimer's work, but since the time of his writing critiques of positivism, especially from philosophy of science, have led to the development of postpositivism. This philosophy greatly relaxes the epistemological commitments of logical positivism and no longer claims a separation between the knower and the known. Rather than dismissing the scientific project outright, postpositivists seek to transform and amend it, though the exact extent of their affinity for science varies vastly. For example, some postpositivists accept the critique that observation is always value-laden, but argue that the best values to adopt for sociological observation are those of science: skepticism, rigor and modesty. Just as some critical theorists see their position as a moral commitment to egalitarian values; these postpositivists see their methods as driven by a moral commitment to these scientific values. Such scholars may see themselves as either positivists or antipositivists.[57] Positivism has also come under fire on religious and philosophical grounds, whose proponents state that truth begins in sense experience, but does not end there. Positivism fails to prove that there are not abstract ideas, laws, and principles, beyond particular observable facts and relationships and necessary principles, or that we cannot know them. Nor does it prove that material and corporeal things constitute the whole order of existing beings, and that our knowledge is limited to them. According to positivism, our abstract concepts or general ideas are mere collective representations of the experimental order — for example; the idea of "man" is a kind of blended image of all the men observed in our experience. This runs contrary to a Platonic or Christian ideal, where an idea can be abstracted from any concrete determination, and may be applied identically to an indefinite number of objects of the same class. From the idea's perspective, the latter is more precise as collective images are more or less confused, become more so as the collection represented increases; an idea by definition remains always clear. Echoes of the "positivist" and "antipositivist" debate persist today, though this conflict is hard to define. Authors writing in different epistemological perspectives do not phrase their disagreements in the same terms and rarely actually speak directly to each other.[58] To complicate the issues further, few practicing scholars explicitly state their epistemological commitments, and their epistemological position thus has to be guessed from other sources such as choice of methodology or theory. However, no perfect correspondence between these categories exists, and many scholars critiqued as "positivists" actually hold postpositivist views.[59] One scholar has described this debate in terms of the social construction of the "other", with each side defining the other by what it is not rather than what

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it is, and then proceeding to attribute far greater homogeneity to their opponents than actually exists.[58] Thus, it is better to understand this not as a debate but as two different arguments: the "antipositivist" articulation of a social meta-theory which includes a philosophical critique of scientism, and "positivist" development of a scientific research methodology for sociology with accompanying critiques of the reliability and validity of work that they see as violating such standards.

Notes [1] John J. Macionis, Linda M. Gerber, "Sociology", Seventh Canadian Edition, Pearson Canada [2] Jorge Larrain (1979) The Concept of Ideology p.197 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=9ocOAAAAQAAJ& pg=PA197), quotation:

one of the features of positivism is precisely its postulate that scientific knowledge is the paradigm of valid knowledge, a postulate that indeed is never proved nor intended to be proved. [3] Cohen, Louis; Maldonado, Antonio (2007). "Research Methods In Education". British Journal of Educational Studies (Routledge) 55 (4): 9. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00388_4.x. [4] Sociology Guide. "Auguste Comte" (http:/ / www. sociologyguide. com/ thinkers/ Auguste-Comte. php). Sociology Guide. . [5] Macionis, John J. (2012). Sociology 14th Edition. Boston: Pearson. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-205-11671-3. [6] Le petit Robert s. vv.; OED s. v. positive [7] Egan, Kieran (1997) The Educated Mind (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=FvpFsAtffQYC& pg=PA115), pp.115-6 quotation:

Positivism is marked by the final recognition that science provides the only valid form of knowledge and that facts are the only possible objects of knowledge; philosophy is thus recognized as essentially no different from science [...] Ethics, politics, social interactions, and all other forms of human life about which knowledge was possible would eventually be drawn into the orbit of science [...] The positivists' program for mapping the inexorable and immutable laws of matter and society seemed to allow no greater role for the contribution of poets than had Plato. [...] What Plato represented as the quarrel between philosophy and poetry is resuscitated in the "two cultures" quarrel of more recent times between the humanities and the sciences. [8] Saunders, T. J. Introduction to Ion. London: Penguin Books, 1987, p.46 [9] Wallace and Gach (2008) p.27 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=64Y6wtqzs7IC& pg=PA27) [10] Wallace, Edwin R. and Gach, John (2008) History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology: With an Epilogue on Psychiatry and the Mind-Body Relation. p.14 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=64Y6wtqzs7IC& pg=PA14) [11] Giambattista Vico, Principi di scienza nuova, Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1953), p. 365–905. [12] Morera, Esteve (1990) Gramsci's Historicism: A Realist Interpretation p.13 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=I44OAAAAQAAJ& pg=PA13) [13] Craig J. Calhoun (2002). Classical sociological theory (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=6mq-H3EcUx8C& pg=PA103). Wiley-Blackwell. p. 104. ISBN 978-0-631-21348-2. . [14] Jürgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968, chap. 1. [15] Heisenberg (1969) The Part and The Whole [16] Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud, A Critical Dictionary of Sociology (http:/ / books. google. gr/ books?id=O9ae9kWCtHkC& pg=PA198), Routledge, 1989: "Historicism", p. 198. [17] Wallace and Gach (2008) p.28 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=64Y6wtqzs7IC& pg=PA28) [18] Koch, Sigmund (1992) Psychology's Bridgman vs. Bridgman's Bridgman: An Essay in Reconstruction., in Theory and Psychology vol. 2 no. 3 (1992) p. 275 [19] Lawrence A. Boland, Economic Positivism 2012. (http:/ / www. positivists. org/ 44. html) [20] Portugali, Juval and Han Meyer, Egbert Stolk (2012) Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age p.51 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=2VZCQhvfBpIC& pg=PA51) [21] Gartell, David, and Gartell, John. 1996. "Positivism in sociological practice: 1967-1990". Canadian Review of Sociology, Vol. 33 No. 2. [22] Wacquant, Loic. 1992. "Positivism." In Bottomore, Tom and William Outhwaite, ed., The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought [23] Boudon, Raymond. 1991. "Review: What Middle-Range Theories are". Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 20 Num. 4 pp 519-522. [24] Macionis, John (2011). Sociology. Pearson Education Canada. pp. 688. ISBN 0-13-800270-3. [25] Straker, David. "Positivism" (http:/ / changingminds. org/ explanations/ research/ philosophies/ positivism. htm). changingminds.org. . Retrieved 21 February 2012. [26] Halfpenny, Peter. Positivism and Sociology: Explaining Social Life. London:Allen and Unwin, 1982. [27] http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ comte/ Stanford Encyclopaedia: Auguste Comte [28] Durkheim, Emile. 1895. The Rules of the Sociological Method. Cited in Wacquant (1992). [29] Giddens, Positivism and Sociology, 1

Positivism [30] Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism 3 [31] Mises, Positivism: A Study In Human Understanding,5 [32] Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 4 [33] Giddens, Positivism and Sociology, 9 [34] Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume I, 622 [35] Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume I, 566 [36] Pickering, Mary (1993) Auguste Comte: an intellectual biography Cambridge University Press, pp. 192 [37] "Comte's secular religion is no vague effusion of humanistic piety, but a complete system of belief and ritual, with liturgy and sacraments, priesthood and pontiff, all organized around the public veneration of Humanity, the Nouveau Grand-Être Suprême (New Supreme Great Being), later to be supplemented in a positivist trinity by the Grand Fétish (the Earth) and the Grand Milieu (Destiny)" According to Davies (p. 28-29), Comte's austere and "slightly dispiriting" philosophy of humanity viewed as alone in an indifferent universe (which can only be explained by "positive" science) and with nowhere to turn but to each other, was even more influential in Victorian England than the theories of Charles Darwin or Karl Marx. [38] Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [39] Durkheim, Émile [1895] "The Rules of Sociological Method" 8th edition, trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John M. Mueller, ed. George E. G. Catlin (1938, 1964 edition), pp. 45 [40] Ashley D, Orenstein DM (2005). Sociological theory: Classical statements (6th ed.). Boston, MA, USA: Pearson Education. pp. 94–98, 100–104. [41] Ashley D, Orenstein DM (2005). Sociological theory: Classical statements (6th ed.). Boston, MA, USA: Pearson Education. pp. 239–240. [42] Ashley D, Orenstein DM (2005). Sociological theory: Classical statements (6th ed.). Boston, MA, USA: Pearson Education. p. 241. [43] "Main Currents of Marxism" by Leszek Kolakowski page 331, 327, [44] Schunk, Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective, 5th, 315 [45] Outhwaite, William, 1988 Habermas: Key Contemporary Thinkers, Polity Press (Second Edition 2009), ISBN 978-0-7456-4328-1 p.68 [46] Holmes, Richard. 1997. "Genre analysis, and the social sciences: An investigation of the structure of research article discussion sections in three disciplines" English For Specific Purposes, vol. 16, num. 4:321-337. [47] Brett, Paul. 1994. "A genre analysis of the results section of sociology articles". English For Specific Purposes. Vol 13, Num 1:47-59. [48] Linda Grant, Kathryn B. Ward and Xue Lan Rong Is There An Association between Gender and Methods in Sociological Research? in American Sociological Review Vol. 52, No. 6 (Dec., 1987), pp. 856-862 . JSTOR 2095839. [49] Bunge, M.A. (1996). Finding Philosophy in Social Science (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=8YAV43gVMsIC& pg=PA317). Yale University Press. p. 317. ISBN 9780300066067. LCCN lc96004399. . "To conclude, logical positivism was progressive compared with the classical positivism of Ptolemy, Hume, d'Alembert, Compte, Mill, and Mach. It was even more so by comparison with its contemporary rivals — neo-Thomisism, neo-Kantianism, intuitionism, dialectical materialism, phenomenology, and existentialism. However, neo-positivism failed dismally to give a faithful account of science, whether natural or social. It failed because it remained anchored to sense-data and to a phenomenalist metaphysics, overrated the power of induction and underrated that of hypothesis, and denounced realism and materialism as metaphysical nonsense. Although it has never been practiced consistently in the advanced natural sciences and has been criticized by many philosophers, notably Popper (1959 [1935], 1963), logical positivism remains the tacit philosophy of many scientists. Regrettably, the anti-positivism fashionable in the metatheory of social science is often nothing but an excuse for sloppiness and wild speculation." [50] "Popper, Falsifiability, and the Failure of Positivism" (http:/ / www. drury. edu/ ess/ philsci/ popper. html). 7 August 2000. . Retrieved 30 June 2012. "The upshot is that the positivists seem caught between insisting on the V.C. [Verifiability Criterion] — but for no defensible reason — or admitting that the V.C. requires a background language, etc., which opens the door to relativism, etc. In light of this dilemma, many folk — especially following Popper's "last-ditch" effort to "save" empiricism/positivism/realism with the falsifiability criterion — have agreed that positivism is a dead-end." [51] Smith, L.D. (1986). Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=IZ6aAAAAIAAJ& pg=PA314). Stanford University Press. p. 314. ISBN 9780804713016. LCCN 85030366. . [52] Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934, 1959 (1st English ed.) [53] Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p256 Routledge, London, 1963 [54] Hacking, I. (ed.) 1981. Scientific revolutions. - Oxford Univ. Press, New York. [55] Alan Bullock and Stephen Trombley, [Eds] The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London: Harper-Collins, 1999, pp.669-737 [56] Fagan, Andrew. "Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)" (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ adorno/ ). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . Retrieved 24 February 2012. [57] Tittle, Charles. 2004. "The Arrogance of Public Sociology". Social Forces, June 2004, 82(4) [58] Hanson, Barbara. 2008. "Wither Qualitative/Quantitative?: Grounds for Methodological Convergence." Quality and Quantity 42:97-111. [59] Bryman, Alan. 1984. "The Debate about Quantitative and Qualitative Research: A Question of Method or Epistemology?." The British Journal of Sociology 35:75-92.

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References • Amory, Frederic."Euclides da Cunha and Brazilian Positivism", Luso-Brazilian Review. Vol. 36, No. 1 (Summer, 1999), pp. 87–94. • Giddens, Anthony. Positivism and Sociology. Heinemann. London. 1974. • Kremer-Marietti, Angèle. L'Anthropologie positiviste d'Auguste Comte, Librairie Honoré Champion, Paris, 1980. • Kremer-Marietti, Angèle. Le positivisme, Collection "Que sais-je?",Paris, PUF, 1982. • LeGouis, Catherine. Positivism and Imagination: Scientism and Its Limits in Emile Hennequin, Wilhelm Scherer and Dmitril Pisarev. Bucknell University Press. London: 1997. • Mill, John Stuart. August Comte and Positivism (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16833). • Mises, Richard von. Positivism: A Study In Human Understanding. Harvard University Press. Cambridge; Massachusetts: 1951. • Pickering, Mary. Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, England; 1993. • Richard Rorty (1982) Consequences of Pragmatism (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/ works/us/rorty.htm) • Schunk, Dale H. Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective, 5th. Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall. 1991, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008. • "Positivism." Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. < http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ philosophy/help/mach1.htm>.

External links • • • • • • •

Société Positiviste Internationale, Paris (http://membres.lycos.fr/clotilde/) Parana, Brazil (http://www.palm.com.br/cpp/frameset.htm) Porto Alegre, Brazil (http://www.positivismors.blogspot.com/) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (http://www.igrejapositivistabrasil.org.br/) Posnan, Poland (http://www.pozytywista.pl/) Positivists Worldwide (http://positivists.org/) Maison d'Auguste Comte, France (http://www.augustecomte.org/)

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Rationalism In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification".[1] In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".[2] Different degrees of emphasis on this method or theory lead to a range of rationalist standpoints, from the moderate position "that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge" to the more extreme position that reason is "the unique path to knowledge".[3] Given a pre-modern understanding of reason, rationalism is identical to philosophy, the Socratic life of inquiry, or the zetetic (skeptical) clear interpretation of authority (open to the underlying or essential cause of things as they appear to our sense of certainty). In recent decades, Leo Strauss sought to revive "Classical Political Rationalism" as a discipline that understands the task of reasoning, not as foundational, but as maieutic. Rationalism should not be confused with rationality, nor with rationalization. In politics, rationalism since the Enlightenment historically emphasized a "politics of reason" centered upon rational choice, utilitarianism, secularism, and irreligion — the antitheistic tendencies of this last aspect since having been partly ameliorated by millennials' more tolerant and utilitarian adoption of methodological, pluralistic rationalist practices applicable irrespective of religious or political affiliation.

Background Since the Enlightenment, rationalism is usually associated with the introduction of mathematical methods into philosophy, as in Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza.[2] This is commonly called continental rationalism, because it was predominant in the continental schools of Europe, whereas in Britain empiricism dominated. Rationalism is often contrasted with empiricism. Taken very broadly these views are not mutually exclusive, since a philosopher can be both rationalist and empiricist.[1] Taken to extremes the empiricist view holds that all ideas come to us through experience, either through the external senses or through such inner sensations as pain and gratification, and thus that knowledge is essentially based on or derived from experience. At issue is the fundamental source of human knowledge, and the proper techniques for verifying what we think we know (see Epistemology). Proponents of some varieties of rationalism argue that, starting with foundational basic principles, like the axioms of geometry, one could deductively derive the rest of all possible knowledge. The philosophers who held this view most clearly were Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, whose attempts to grapple with the epistemological and metaphysical problems raised by Descartes led to a development of the fundamental approach of rationalism. Both Spinoza and Leibniz asserted that, in principle, all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be gained through the use of reason alone, though they both observed that this was not possible in practice for human beings except in specific areas such as mathematics. On the other hand, Leibniz admitted in his book Monadology that "we are all mere Empirics in three fourths of our actions."[3] Rationalism is predicting and explaining behavior based on logic.

Philosophical usage The distinction between rationalists and empiricists was drawn at a later period, and would not have been recognized by the philosophers involved. Also, the distinction was not as clear-cut as is sometimes suggested; for example, Descartes and Locke have similar views about the nature of human ideas.[4] The three main rationalists were all committed to the importance of empirical science, and in many respects the empiricists were closer to Descartes in their methods and metaphysical theories than were Spinoza and Leibniz.

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History René Descartes (1596–1650) Descartes thought that only knowledge of eternal truths – including the truths of mathematics, and the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the sciences – could be attained by reason alone; other knowledge, the knowledge of physics, required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method. He also argued that although dreams appear as real as sense experience, these dreams cannot provide persons with knowledge. Also, since conscious sense experience can be the cause of illusions, then sense experience itself can be doubtable. As a result, Descartes deduced that a rational pursuit of truth should doubt every belief about reality. He elaborated these beliefs in such works as Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy. Descartes developed a method to attain truths according to which nothing that cannot be recognised by the intellect (or reason) can be classified as knowledge. These truths are gained "without any sensory experience", according to Descartes. Truths that are attained by reason are broken down into elements that intuition can grasp, which, through a purely deductive process, will result in clear truths about reality. Descartes therefore argued, as a result of his method, that reason alone determined knowledge, and that this could be done independently of the senses. For instance, his famous dictum, cogito ergo sum, is a conclusion reached a priori i.e. not through an inference from experience. This was, for Descartes, an irrefutable principle upon which to ground all forms of other knowledge. Descartes posited a metaphysical dualism, distinguishing between the substances of the human body ("res extensa") and the mind or soul ("res cogitans"). This crucial distinction would be left unresolved and lead to what is known as the mind-body problem, since the two substances in the Cartesian system are independent of each other and irreducible.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) The philosophy of Baruch Spinoza is a systematic, logical, rational philosophy developed in seventeenth-century Europe.[5][6][7] Spinoza's philosophy is a system of ideas constructed upon basic building blocks with an internal consistency with which Spinoza tried to answer life's major questions and in which he proposed that "God exists only philosophically."[7][8] He was heavily influenced by thinkers such as Descartes,[9] Euclid[8] and Thomas Hobbes,[9] as well as theologians in the Jewish philosophical tradition such as Maimonides.[9] But his work was in many respects a departure from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many of Spinoza's ideas continue to vex thinkers today and many of his principles, particularly regarding the emotions, have implications for modern approaches to psychology. Even top thinkers have found Spinoza's "geometrical method"[7] difficult to comprehend: Goethe admitted that he "could not really understand what Spinoza was on about most of the time."[7] His magnum opus, Ethics, contains unresolved obscurities and has a forbidding mathematical structure modeled on Euclid's geometry.[8] Spinoza's philosophy attracted believers such as Albert Einstein[10] and much intellectual attention.[11][12][13][14][15]

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) Leibniz was the last of the great Rationalists who contributed heavily to other fields such as mathematics. He did not develop his system, however, independently of these advances. Leibniz rejected Cartesian dualism and denied the existence of a material world. In Leibniz's view there are infinitely many simple substances, which he called "monads" (possibly taking the term from the work of Anne Conway). Leibniz developed his theory of monads in response to both Descartes and Spinoza. In rejecting this response he was forced to arrive at his own solution. Monads are the fundamental unit of reality, according to Leibniz, constituting both inanimate and animate things. These units of reality represent the universe, though they are not subject to the laws of causality or space (which he called "well-founded phenomena"). Leibniz, therefore, introduced his principle of pre-established harmony to account for apparent causality in the world.

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Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) Immanuel Kant started as a traditional rationalist, having studied the rationalists Leibniz and Wolff, but after studying David Hume's works, which "awoke [him] from [his] dogmatic slumbers", he developed a distinctive and very influential rationalism of his own, which attempted to synthesize the traditional rationalist and empiricist traditions. Kant named his branch of epistemology Transcendental Idealism, and he first laid out these views in his famous work The Critique of Pure Reason. In it he argued that there were fundamental problems with both rationalist and empiricist dogma. To the rationalists he argued, broadly, that pure reason is flawed when it goes beyond its limits and claims to know those things that are necessarily beyond the realm of all possible experience: the existence of God, free will, and the immortality of the human soul. Kant referred to these objects as "The Thing in Itself" and goes on to argue that their status as objects beyond all possible experience by definition means we cannot know them. To the empiricist he argued that while it is correct that experience is fundamentally necessary for human knowledge, reason is necessary for processing that experience into coherent thought. He therefore concludes that both reason and experience are necessary for human knowledge.

References [1] Lacey, A.R. (1996), A Dictionary of Philosophy, 1st edition, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976. 2nd edition, 1986. 3rd edition, Routledge, London, UK, 1996. page 286 [2] Bourke, Vernon J., "Rationalism", p. 263 in Runes (1962). [3] Audi, Robert, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1995. 2nd edition, 1999, page 771. [4] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rationalism vs. Empiricism (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ rationalism-empiricism/ ) First published Thu Aug 19, 2004; substantive revision Wed Aug 6, 2008; cited on 19 June 2012. [5] Lisa Montanarelli (book reviewer) (January 8, 2006). "Spinoza stymies 'God's attorney' – Stewart argues the secular world was at stake in Leibniz face off" (http:/ / www. sfgate. com/ cgi-bin/ article. cgi?f=/ c/ a/ 2006/ 01/ 08/ RVGO9GEOKH1. DTL). San Francisco Chronicle. . Retrieved 2009-09-08. [6] Kelley L. Ross (1999). "Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)" (http:/ / www. friesian. com/ spinoza. htm). History of Philosophy As I See It. . Retrieved 2009-12-07. "While for Spinoza all is God and all is Nature, the active/passive dualism enables us to restore, if we wish, something more like the traditional terms. Natura Naturans is the most God-like side of God, eternal, unchanging, and invisible, while Natura Naturata is the most Nature-like side of God, transient, changing, and visible." [7] Anthony Gottlieb (July 18, 1999). "God Exists, Philosophically" (http:/ / www. times. com/ books/ 99/ 07/ 18/ reviews/ 990718. 18gottlit. html). The New York Times: Books. . Retrieved 2009-12-07. "Spinoza, a Dutch Jewish thinker of the 17th century, not only preached a philosophy of tolerance and benevolence but actually succeeded in living it. He was reviled in his own day and long afterward for his supposed atheism, yet even his enemies were forced to admit that he lived a saintly life." [8] ANTHONY GOTTLIEB (2009-09-07). "God Exists, Philosophically (review of "Spinoza: A Life" by Steven Nadler)" (http:/ / www. nytimes. com/ books/ 99/ 07/ 18/ reviews/ 990718. 18gottlit. html). The New York Times – Books. . Retrieved 2009-09-07. [9] Michael LeBuffe (book reviewer) (2006-11-05). "Spinoza's Ethics: An Introduction, by Steven Nadler" (http:/ / ndpr. nd. edu/ review. cfm?id=8004). University of Notre Dame. . Retrieved 2009-12-07. "Spinoza's Ethics is a recent addition to Cambridge's Introductions to Key Philosophical Texts, a series developed for the purpose of helping readers with no specific background knowledge to begin the study of important works of Western philosophy..." [10] "EINSTEIN BELIEVES IN "SPINOZA'S GOD"; Scientist Defines His Faith in Reply, to Cablegram From Rabbi Here. SEES A DIVINE ORDER But Says Its Ruler Is Not Concerned "Wit Fates and Actions of Human Beings."" (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ gst/ abstract. html?res=F10B1EFC3E54167A93C7AB178FD85F4D8285F9). The New York Times. April 25, 1929. . Retrieved 2009-09-08. [11] Hutchison, Percy (November 20, 1932). "Spinoza, "God-Intoxicated Man"; Three Books Which Mark the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Philosopher's Birth BLESSED SPINOZA. A Biography. By Lewis Browne. 319 pp. New York: The Macmillan Com- pany. $4. SPINOZA. Liberator of God and Man. By Benjamin De Casseres, 145pp. New York: E.Wickham Sweetland. $2. SPINOZA THE BIOSOPHER. By Frederick Kettner. Introduc- tion by Nicholas Roerich, New Era Library. 255 pp. New York: Roerich Museum Press. $2.50. Spinoza" (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ gst/ abstract. html?res=F40A14F83A5513738DDDA90A94D9415B828FF1D3). The New York Times. . Retrieved 2009-09-08. [12] "Spinoza's First Biography Is Recovered; THE OLDEST BIOGRAPHY OF SPINOZA. Edited with Translations, Introduction, Annotations, &c., by A. Wolf. 196 pp. New York: Lincoln Macveagh. The Dial Press." (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ gst/ abstract. html?res=F60D1EFF395C147A93C3A81789D95F438285F9). The New York Times. December 11, 1927. . Retrieved 2009-09-08. [13] IRWIN EDMAN (July 22, 1934). "The Unique and Powerful Vision of Baruch Spinoza; Professor Wolfson's Long-Awaited Book Is a Work of Illuminating Scholarship. (Book review) THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA. By Henry Austryn Wolfson" (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ gst/ abstract. html?res=FB0610FC395D13728DDDAB0A94DF405B848FF1D3). The New York Times. . Retrieved 2009-09-08.

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Rationalism [14] Cummings, M E (September 8, 1929). "ROTH EVALUATES SPINOZA" (http:/ / pqasb. pqarchiver. com/ latimes/ access/ 370934682. html?dids=370934682:370934682& FMT=ABS& FMTS=ABS:AI& type=historic& date=Sep+ 08,+ 1929& author=& pub=Los+ Angeles+ Times& desc=ROTH+ EVALUATES+ SPINOZA& pqatl=google). Los Angeles Times. . Retrieved 2009-09-08. [15] SOCIAL NEWS BOOKS (November 25, 1932). "TRIBUTE TO SPINOZA PAID BY EDUCATORS; Dr. Robinson Extols Character of Philosopher, 'True to the Eternal Light Within Him.' HAILED AS 'GREAT REBEL'; De Casseres Stresses Individualism of Man Whose Tercentenary Is Celebrated at Meeting." (http:/ / select. nytimes. com/ gst/ abstract. html?res=F30D13F6355516738DDDAC0A94D9415B828FF1D3). The New York Times. . Retrieved 2009-09-08.

Primary sources • • • •

Descartes, René (1637), Discourse on Method. Spinoza, Baruch (1677), Ethics. Leibniz, Gottfried (1714), Monadology. Kant, Immanuel, (1781/1787), Critique of Pure Reason.

Secondary sources • Audi, Robert (ed., 1999), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1995. 2nd edition, 1999. • Blackburn, Simon (1996), The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1994. Paperback edition with new Chronology, 1996. • Bourke, Vernon J. (1962), "Rationalism", p. 263 in Runes (1962). • Fischer, Louis (1997). The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. Harper Collins. pp. 306–307. ISBN 0-00-638887-6. • Lacey, A.R. (1996), A Dictionary of Philosophy, 1st edition, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976. 2nd edition, 1986. 3rd edition, Routledge, London, UK, 1996. • Runes, Dagobert D. (ed., 1962), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ. • Baird, Forrest E.; Walter Kaufmann (2008). From Plato to Derrida. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-158591-6.

External links • Rationalism vs. Empiricism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism) entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy • Rationalism (http://philpapers.org/browse/rationalism) at PhilPapers • Rationalism (https://inpho.cogs.indiana.edu/taxonomy/2382) at the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project • Continental Rationalism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/continental-rationalism) entry by Thomas M. Lennon and Shannon Dea in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy • Markie, Peter (2004), " Rationalism vs. Empiricism (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2004/entries/ rationalism-empiricism)", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), • John F. Hurst (1867), History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19397)

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Disenchantment

Disenchantment In social science, disenchantment (German: Entzauberung) is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of mysticism apparent in modern society. The concept was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller[1] by Max Weber to describe the character of modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society, where scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and where processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society where for Weber "the world remains a great enchanted garden".[2]

Enlightenment ambivalence Weber's ambivalent appraisal of the process of disenchantment as both positive and negative[3] was taken up by the Frankfurt school in their examination of the self-destructive elements in Enlightenment rationalism.[4] Habermas has subsequently striven to find a positive foundation for modernity in the face of disenchantment, even while appreciating Weber's recognition of how far secular society was created from, and is still "haunted by the ghosts of dead religious beliefs".[5] Some have seen the disenchantment of the world as a call for existentialist commitment and individual responsibility in the face of a collective normative void.[6]

Sacralisation Disenchantment is not unrelated to the notion of desacralization, whereby the structures and institutions that previously channeled spiritual belief into rituals that promoted collective identities came under attack and waned in popularity. According to Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, the ritual of sacrifice involved two processes: sacralization and desacralization. The first process endows a profane offering with sacred properties—consecration—which provides a bridge of communication between the worlds of the sacred and profane. Once the sacrifice has been made, the ritual must be desacralized in order to return the worlds of the sacred and profane to their proper places.[7] Disenchantment operates on a macro-level, rather than the micro-level described above. It also destroys part of the process whereby the chaotic social elements that require sacralization in the first place continue with mere knowledge as their antidote. Thereby disenchantment can be related to Durkheim's concept of anomie: an un-mooring of the individual from the ties that bind in society.[8]

Reenchantment In recent years, Weber's paradigm has been challenged by thinkers who see a process of "reenchantment" operating alongside that of disenchantment.[9] Jung considered symbols to provide a means for the numinous to return from the unconscious to the desacralised world[10] - a means for the recovery of myth, and the sense of wholeness it once provided, by a disenchanted modernity.[11] Ernest Gellner argued that though disenchantment was the inevitable product of modernity, many people just could not stand a disenchanted world, and therefore opted for various "re-enchantment creeds" (as he called them) such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, Wittgensteinianism, phenomenology and ethnomethodology. A noticable feature of these re-enchantment creeds is that they all tried to make themselves compatible with naturalism: i.e., they did not refer to supernatural forces. (This is hard to understand)about fairies the end. Enchantment is about fluffy little butterflies. [12]

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References [1] Dis-echantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment (http:/ / www. maxweberstudies. org/ MWSJournal/ 1. 1pdfs/ 1. 1 11-32. pdf) [2] Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1971) p. 270 [3] A. J. Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (1992) p. 19 [4] G. Borradori, Philosophy in an Age of Terror (2004) p. 69 [5] Murray E. G. Smith, Early Modern Social Theory (1998) p. 274 [6] L. Embree ed., Schutzian Social Science (1999) p. 110-1 [7] Bell, Catherine (1997). Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 26 [8] Bell [9] Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Stanford University Press, 2009. [10] C. G. Jung, Man and his Symbols (1978) p. 83-94 [11] Ann Casement, Who Owns Jung/ (2007) p. 20 [12] John A. Hall, Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography, Verso, 2010.

Further reading • Berger, Peter L. (1971) A Rumour of Angels', New York: Anchor. • Bennett, Jane (2002) The Enchantment of Modern Life: Crossings, Attachments, and Ethics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. • Berman, Morris (1981) The Reenchantment of the World, Cornell University Press. • During, Simon (2002) Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. • Landy, Joshua and Michael Saler, eds. (2009) The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. • Weber, Max (1958) "Science as a Vocation" in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press.

External links • Disenchantment (http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/disenchantment.htm)

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Existentiell

Existentiell In English translations, the word rendered "existentiell" was, with the philosophical meaning discussed in this article, first used by Martin Heidegger. In the work Being and Time, the word existentiell is used to describe an ontic understanding of beings in the world. An existentiell understanding addresses the facts about things in the context of the world, in terms of their existence, but differs from the ontological understanding that however vague is a necessary precondition for ontic understanding. The latter is reached by going about our daily business, interacting with things in the world, whereas existential understanding is theoretical and ontological in character. Heidegger claims that his examination of Dasein (human being) is an existential analysis. However, this is not to disparage existentiell understanding--Heidegger argues that any authentic potentialities of Dasein (the human being in this case) brought out in the existential analysis must be realized in existentiell understanding; i.e. it is the role of the existential analysis to function as a hermeneutic, to explicitly question Being and to interpret its structure, but Da-sein is not acting authentically until those interpretations are realized in Da-sein's ontic life. Though it is not commonly used in philosophy outside of discussions of Heidegger's seminal work Being and Time, it is important to understand Heidegger's definition of the term if one wishes to study Being and Time. Heidegger distinguishes between his two terms "existential" and "existentiell" in the Introduction to Being and Time. In Being and Time, the word existentiell is used to describe an ontic understanding of beings in the world. An existentiell understanding addresses the facts about things in the context of the world, in terms of their existence, but differs from the ontological understanding that however vague is a necessary precondition for ontic understanding.

Definition Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of its possibility to be itself or not be itself. Dasein has either chosen these possibilities itself, stumbled upon them, or already grown up in them. Existence is decided only by each Dasein itself in the manner of seizing upon or neglecting such possibilities. We come to terms with the question of existence always only through existence itself. We shall call this kind of understand of itself existentiell understanding. The question of existence is an ontic "affair" of Dasein. For this the theoretical perspicuity of the ontological structure of existence is not necessary. The question of structure aims at the analysis of what constitutes existence. We shall call the coherence of these structures existentiality. Its analysis does not have the character of an existentiell understanding but rather an existential one. The task of an existential analysis of Dasein is prescribed with regard to its possibility and necessity in the ontic constitution of Dasein.[1]

Etymology Heidegger did not coin the term "existentiell". The common German word "existenziell" is usually translated into English as "existential". However, in Heidegger's works, he coined the German word "existenzial", giving it a meaning distinct from the common German word "existenziell". In English translations of Heidegger, then, the German "existenziell" is transliterated as "existentiell" in English, and the German word "existenzial" is transliterated as "existential", each word having its own technical meaning specific to Heidegger.[2]

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Notes [1] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Introduction, Section 4. Basic Works pg. 52, HarperCollins Publishers, 1977 [2] http:/ / www. religion-online. org/ showchapter. asp?title=806& C=1097

Phenomenology (philosophy) Phenomenology (from Greek: phainómenon "that which appears"; and lógos "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of subjective experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.[1] Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. This phenomenological ontology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another. Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by himself but also by students such as Edith Stein, by existentialists, such as Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and by other philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and sociologists Alfred Schütz and Eric Voegelin.

Overview Stephen Hicks writes that to understand phenomenology, one must identify its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).[2] In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguished between "phenomena" (objects as interpreted by human sensibility and understanding), and "noumena" (objects as things-in-themselves, which humans cannot directly experience). According to Hicks, 19th-century Kantianism operated in two broad camps: • structural linguistics and • phenomenology. Hicks writes, "In effect, the Structuralists were seeking subjective noumenal categories, and the Phenomenologists were content with describing the phenomena without asking what connection to an external reality those experiences might have."[3] In its most basic form, phenomenology thus attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgments, perceptions, and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience. Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology from the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf.[4] An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano is intentionality (often described as "aboutness"), the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways, through, for instance, perception, memory, retention and protention, signification, etc. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have different structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an object is still constituted as the identical object; consciousness is directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it is in the immediately following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of it.

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Phenomenology (philosophy) Though many of the phenomenological methods involve various reductions, phenomenology is, in essence, anti-reductionistic; the reductions are mere tools to better understand and describe the workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to these descriptions. In other words, when a reference is made to a thing's essence or idea, or when one details the constitution of an identical coherent thing by describing what one "really" sees as being only these sides and aspects, these surfaces, it does not mean that the thing is only and exclusively what is described here: The ultimate goal of these reductions is to understand how these different aspects are constituted into the actual thing as experienced by the person experiencing it. Phenomenology is a direct reaction to the psychologism and physicalism of Husserl's time. Although previously employed by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, it was Husserl’s adoption of this term (circa 1900) that propelled it into becoming the designation of a philosophical school. As a philosophical perspective, phenomenology is its method, though the specific meaning of the term varies according to how it is conceived by a given philosopher. As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual’s “lived experience.”[5] Loosely rooted in an epistemological device, with Sceptic roots, called epoché, Husserl’s method entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing. Sometimes depicted as the “science of experience,” the phenomenological method is rooted in intentionality, Husserl’s theory of consciousness (developed from Brentano). Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness, which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because it is available only through perceptions of reality that are representations of it in the mind. Husserl countered that consciousness is not “in” the mind but rather conscious of something other than itself (the intentional object), whether the object is a substance or a figment of imagination (i.e., the real processes associated with and underlying the figment). Hence the phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy. According to Maurice Natanson (1973, p. 63), “The radicality of the phenomenological method is both continuous and discontinuous with philosophy’s general effort to subject experience to fundamental, critical scrutiny: to take nothing for granted and to show the warranty for what we claim to know.” In practice, it entails an unusual combination of discipline and detachment to suspend, or bracket, theoretical explanations and second-hand information while determining one's “naive” experience of the matter. The phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the world of speculation by returning the subject to his or her primordial experience of the matter, whether the object of inquiry is a feeling, an idea, or a perception. According to Husserl the suspension of belief in what we ordinarily take for granted or infer by conjecture diminishes the power of what we customarily embrace as objective reality. According to Rüdiger Safranski (1998, 72), “[Husserl and his followers’] great ambition was to disregard anything that had until then been thought or said about consciousness or the world [while] on the lookout for a new way of letting the things [they investigated] approach them, without covering them up with what they already knew.” Martin Heidegger modified Husserl’s conception of phenomenology because of (what Heidegger perceived as) Husserl's subjectivist tendencies. Whereas Husserl conceived humans as having been constituted by states of consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to the primacy of one’s existence (i.e., the mode of being of Dasein), which cannot be reduced to one’s consciousness of it. From this angle, one’s state of mind is an “effect” rather than a determinant of existence, including those aspects of existence that one is not conscious of. By shifting the center of gravity from consciousness (psychology) to existence (ontology), Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology, making it at once both personal and mysterious. As one consequence of Heidegger’s modification of Husserl’s conception, phenomenology became increasingly relevant to psychoanalysis. Whereas Husserl gave priority to a depiction of consciousness that was fundamentally alien to the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious, Heidegger offered a way to conceptualize experience that could accommodate those aspects of one’s existence that lie on the periphery of sentient awareness.[6][7]

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Phenomenological terminology Intentionality Intentionality refers to the notion that consciousness is always the consciousness of something. The word itself should not be confused with the "ordinary" use of the word intentional, but should rather be taken as playing on the etymological roots of the word. Originally, intention referred to a "stretching out" ("in tension," lat. intendere[8][9]), and in this context it refers to consciousness "stretching out" towards its object (although one should be careful with this image, seeing as there is not some consciousness first that, subsequently, stretches out to its object. Rather, consciousness occurs as the simultaneity of a conscious act and its object.) Intentionality is often summed up as "aboutness." Whether this something that consciousness is about is in direct perception or in fantasy is inconsequential to the concept of intentionality itself; whatever consciousness is directed at, that is what consciousness is conscious of. This means that the object of consciousness doesn't have to be a physical object apprehended in perception: it can just as well be a fantasy or a memory. Consequently, these "structures" of consciousness, i.e., perception, memory, fantasy, etc., are called intentionalities. The cardinal principle of phenomenology, the term intentionality originated with the Scholastics in the medieval period and was resurrected by Brentano who in turn influenced Husserl’s conception of phenomenology, who refined the term and made it the cornerstone of his theory of consciousness. The meaning of the term is complex and depends entirely on how it is conceived by a given philosopher. The term should not be confused with “intention” or the psychoanalytic conception of unconscious “motive” or “gain.”

Intuition Intuition in phenomenology refers to those cases where the intentional object is directly present to the intentionality at play; if the intention is "filled" by the direct apprehension of the object, you have an intuited object. Having a cup of coffee in front of you, for instance, seeing it, feeling it, or even imagining it - these are all filled intentions, and the object is then intuited. The same goes for the apprehension of mathematical formulae or a number. If you do not have the object as referred to directly, the object is not intuited, but still intended, but then emptily. Examples of empty intentions can be signitive intentions - intentions that only imply or refer to their objects.

Evidence In everyday language, we use the word evidence to signify a special sort of relation between a state of affairs and a proposition: State A is evidence for the proposition "A is true." In phenomenology, however, the concept of evidence is meant to signify the "subjective achievement of truth."[10] This is not an attempt to reduce the objective sort of evidence to subjective "opinion," but rather an attempt to describe the structure of having something present in intuition with the addition of having it present as intelligible: "Evidence is the successful presentation of an intelligible object, the successful presentation of something whose truth becomes manifest in the evidencing itself."[11]

Noesis and Noema In Husserl's phenomenology, which is quite common, this pair of terms, derived from the Greek nous (mind), designate respectively the real content, noesis, and the ideal content, noema, of an intentional act (an act of consciousness). The Noesis is the part of the act that gives it a particular sense or character (as in judging or perceiving something, loving or hating it, accepting or rejecting it, and so on). This is real in the sense that it is actually part of what takes place in the consciousness (or psyche) of the subject of the act. The Noesis is always correlated with a Noema; for Husserl, the full Noema is a complex ideal structure comprising at least a noematic sense and a noematic core. The correct interpretation of what Husserl meant by the Noema has long been

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Phenomenology (philosophy) controversial, but the noematic sense is generally understood as the ideal meaning of the act[12] and the noematic core as the act's referent or object as it is meant in the act. One element of controversy is whether this noematic object is the same as the actual object of the act (assuming it exists) or is some kind of ideal object.[13]

Empathy and Intersubjectivity In phenomenology, empathy refers to the experience of one's own body as another. While we often identify others with their physical bodies, this type of phenomenology requires that we focus on the subjectivity of the other, as well as our intersubjective engagement with them. In Husserl's original account, this was done by a sort of apperception built on the experiences of your own lived-body. The lived body is your own body as experienced by yourself, as yourself. Your own body manifests itself to you mainly as your possibilities of acting in the world. It is what lets you reach out and grab something, for instance, but it also, and more importantly, allows for the possibility of changing your point of view. This helps you differentiate one thing from another by the experience of moving around it, seeing new aspects of it (often referred to as making the absent present and the present absent), and still retaining the notion that this is the same thing that you saw other aspects of just a moment ago (it is identical). Your body is also experienced as a duality, both as object (you can touch your own hand) and as your own subjectivity (you experience being touched). The experience of your own body as your own subjectivity is then applied to the experience of another's body, which, through apperception, is constituted as another subjectivity. You can thus recognise the Other's intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of empathy is important in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity. In phenomenology, intersubjectivity constitutes objectivity (i.e., what you experience as objective is experienced as being intersubjectively available - available to all other subjects. This does not imply that objectivity is reduced to subjectivity nor does it imply a relativist position, cf. for instance intersubjective verifiability). In the experience of intersubjectivity, one also experiences oneself as being a subject among other subjects, and one experiences oneself as existing objectively for these Others; one experiences oneself as the noema of Others' noeses, or as a subject in another's empathic experience. As such, one experiences oneself as objectively existing subjectivity. Intersubjectivity is also a part in the constitution of one's lifeworld, especially as "homeworld."

Lifeworld The lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) is the "world" each one of us lives in. One could call it the "background" or "horizon" of all experience, and it is that on which each object stands out as itself (as different) and with the meaning it can only hold for us. The lifeworld is both personal and intersubjective (it is then called a "homeworld"), and, as such, it does not enclose each one of us in a solus ipse.

Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901) In the first edition of the Logical Investigations, still under the influence of Brentano, Husserl describes his position as "descriptive psychology." Husserl analyzes the intentional structures of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The first volume of the Logical Investigations, the Prolegomena to Pure Logic, begins with a devastating critique of psychologism, i.e., the attempt to subsume the a priori validity of the laws of logic under psychology. Husserl establishes a separate field for research in logic, philosophy, and phenomenology, independently from the empirical sciences.[14]

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Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913) Some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl made some key elaborations that led him to the distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata). • "noetic" refers to the intentional act of consciousness (believing, willing, etc.) • "noematic" refers to the object or content (noema), which appears in the noetic acts (the believed, wanted, hated, and loved ...). What we observe is not the object as it is in itself, but how and inasmuch it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of an external world and the inessential (subjective) aspects of how the object is concretely given to us. This procedure Husserl called epoché. Husserl in a later period concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. Now Transcendental Phenomenology is the study of the essential structures that are left in pure consciousness: This amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and the relations among them. The philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl's concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique Against Epistemology, which is anti-foundationalist in its stance. Transcendental phenomenologists include Oskar Becker, Aron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schutz.

Realist phenomenology After Husserl's publication of the Ideen in 1913, many phenomenologists took a critical stance towards his new theories. Especially the members of the Munich group distanced themselves from his new transcendental phenomenology and preferred the earlier realist phenomenology of the first edition of the Logical Investigations. Realist phenomenologists include Adolf Reinach, Alexander Pfänder, Johannes Daubert, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, Nicolai Hartmann, Dietrich von Hildebrand.

Existential phenomenology Existential phenomenology differs from transcendental phenomenology by its rejection of the transcendental ego. Merleau-Ponty objects to the ego's transcendence of the world, which for Husserl leaves the world spread out and completely transparent before the conscious. Heidegger thinks of a conscious being as always already in the world. Transcendence is maintained in existential phenomenology to the extent that the method of phenomenology must take a presuppositionless starting point - transcending claims about the world arising from, for example, natural or scientific attitudes or theories of the ontological nature of the world. While Husserl thought of philosophy as a scientific discipline that had to be founded on a phenomenology understood as epistemology, Heidegger held a radically different view. Heidegger himself states their differences this way: For Husserl, the phenomenological reduction is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us, phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the Being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).[15] According to Heidegger, philosophy was not at all a scientific discipline, but more fundamental than science itself. According to him science is only one way of knowing the world with no special access to truth. Furthermore, the

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Phenomenology (philosophy) scientific mindset itself is built on a much more "primordial" foundation of practical, everyday knowledge. Husserl was skeptical of this approach, which he regarded as quasi-mystical, and it contributed to the divergence in their thinking. Instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or a foundational discipline, Heidegger took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy... this means that philosophy is not a science of beings but of being.".[15] Yet to confuse phenomenology and ontology is an obvious error. Phenomena are not the foundation or Ground of Being. Neither are they appearances, for, as Heidegger argues in Being and Time, an appearance is "that which shows itself in something else," while a phenomenon is "that which shows itself in itself." While for Husserl, in the epoché, being appeared only as a correlate of consciousness, for Heidegger being is the starting point. While for Husserl we would have to abstract from all concrete determinations of our empirical ego, to be able to turn to the field of pure consciousness, Heidegger claims that "the possibilities and destinies of philosophy are bound up with man's existence, and thus with temporality and with historicality."[15] However, ontological being and existential being are different categories, so Heidegger's conflation of these categories is, according to Husserl's view, the root of Heidegger's error. Husserl charged Heidegger with raising the question of ontology but failing to answer it, instead switching the topic to the Dasein, the only being for whom Being is an issue. That is neither ontology nor phenomenology, according to Husserl, but merely abstract anthropology. To clarify, perhaps, by abstract anthropology, as a non-existentialist searching for essences, Husserl rejected the existentialism implicit in Heidegger's distinction between being (sein) as things in reality and Being (Da-sein) as the encounter with being, as when being becomes present to us, that is, is unconcealed.[16] Existential phenomenologists include: Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961).

Phenomenology and Eastern thought Some researchers in phenomenology (in particular in reference to Heidegger's legacy) see possibilities of establishing dialogues with traditions of thought outside of the so-called Western philosophy, particularly with respect to East-Asian thinking, and despite perceived differences between "Eastern" and "Western".[17] Furthermore, it has been claimed that a number of elements within phenomenology (mainly Heidegger's thought) have some resonance with Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly with Zen Buddhism and Taoism.[18] According to Tomonubu Imamichi, the concept of Dasein was inspired — although Heidegger remains silent on this — by Okakura Kakuzo's concept of das-in-der-Welt-sein (being in the world) expressed in The Book of Tea to describe Zhuangzi's philosophy, which Imamichi's teacher had offered to Heidegger in 1919, after having studied with him the year before.[19] There are also recent signs of the reception of phenomenology (and Heidegger's thought in particular) within scholarly circles focused on studying the impetus of metaphysics in the history of ideas in Islam and Early Islamic philosophy;[20] perhaps under the indirect influence of the tradition of the French Orientalist and philosopher Henri Corbin.[21] In addition, the work of Jim Ruddy in the field of comparative philosophy, combined the concept of Transcendental Ego in Husserl's phenomenology with the concept of the primacy of self-consciousness in the work of Sankaracharya. In the course of this work, Ruddy uncovered a wholly new eidetic phenomenological science, which he called "convergent phenomenology." This new phenomenology takes over where Husserl left off, and deals with the constitution of relation-like, rather than merely thing-like, or "intentional" objectivity.[22]

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Historical overview of the use of the term Phenomenology has at least two main meanings in philosophical history: one in the writings of G.W.F. Hegel, another in the writings of Edmund Husserl in 1920, and a third, deriving from Husserl's work, in the writings of his former research assistant Martin Heidegger in 1927. • For G.W.F. Hegel, phenomenology is an approach to philosophy that begins with an exploration of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as a means to finally grasp the absolute, logical, ontological and metaphysical Spirit that is behind phenomena. This has been called a "dialectical phenomenology". • For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is "the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view."[23] Phenomenology takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in phenomenological reflexion) as its starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. When generalized to the essential features of any possible experience, this has been called "Transcendental Phenomenology". Husserl's view was based on aspects of the work of Franz Brentano and was developed further by philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Emmanuel Levinas. Although the term "phenomenology" was used occasionally in the history of philosophy before Husserl, modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method. Following is a list of thinkers in rough chronological order who used the term "phenomenology" in a variety of ways, with brief comments on their contributions:[24] • Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782) German pietist, for the study of the "divine system of relations"[25] • Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) (mathematician, physician and philosopher) known for the theory of appearances underlying empirical knowledge.[26] • Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in the Critique of Pure Reason, distinguished between objects as phenomena, which are objects as shaped and grasped by human sensibility and understanding, and objects as things-in-themselves or noumena, which do not appear to us in space and time and about which we can make no legitimate judgments. • G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) challenged Kant's doctrine of the unknowable thing-in-itself, and declared that by knowing phenomena more fully we can gradually arrive at a consciousness of the absolute and spiritual truth of Divinity, most notably in his Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807. • Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), student of Brentano and mentor to Husserl, used "phenomenology" to refer to an ontology of sensory contents. • Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) established phenomenology at first as a kind of "descriptive psychology" and later as a transcendental and eidetic science of consciousness. He is considered to be the founder of contemporary phenomenology. • Max Scheler (1874–1928) developed further the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and extended it to include also a reduction of the scientific method. He influenced the thinking of Pope John Paul II, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Edith Stein. • Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) criticized Husserl's theory of phenomenology and attempted to develop a theory of ontology that led him to his original theory of Dasein, the non-dualistic human being. • Alfred Schütz (1899–1959) developed a phenomenology of the social world on the basis of everyday experience that has influenced major sociologists such as Harold Garfinkel, Peter Berger, and Thomas Luckmann. • Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean philosopher and biologist. Developed the basis for experimental phenomenology and neurophenomenology. Later usage is mostly based on or (critically) related to Husserl's introduction and use of the term. This branch of philosophy differs from others in that it tends to be more "descriptive" than "prescriptive".

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References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Zahavi, Dan (2003), Husserl's Phenomenology, Stanford: Stanford University Press Hicks, Stephen (2004). Understanding Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, Tempe, AZ: Scholargy. Hicks, p. 43-44 Rollinger, Robin (1999), Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, pg. 240. [6] Natanson, M. (1973) Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of infinite tasks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. [7] Safranski, R. (1998) Martin Heidegger: Between good and evil. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [8] http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ intentionality/ [9] http:/ / www. etymonline. com/ index. php?term=intent [10] Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press (2000). Pp. 159–160. This use of the word evidence may seem strange in English, but is more common in German, which is the language Husserl wrote in. [11] Sokolowski, Introduction, pp. 160–161. [12] I.e. if A loves B, loving is a real part of A's conscious activity - Noesis - but gets its sense from the general concept of loving, which has an abstract or ideal meaning, as "loving" has a meaning in the English language independently of what an individual means by the word when they use it. [13] For a full account of the controversy and a review of positions taken, see David Woodruff Smith, Husserl, Routledge, 2007, pp304-311. [14] On the Logical Investigations, see Zahavi, Dan; Stjernfelt, Frederik, eds. (2002), One Hundred Years of Phenomenology (Husserl's Logical Investigations Revisited), Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer; and Mohanty, Jitendra Nath, ed. (1977), Readings on Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Den Haag: Nijhoff [15] Heidegger, Martin (1975), "Introduction" (http:/ / www. marxists. org/ reference/ subject/ philosophy/ works/ ge/ heidegge. htm), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Indiana University Press, [16] I have attempted to respond to the request for clarification of Heidegger's distinction between being and Being. My info source was http:/ / www. uni. edu/ boedeker/ NNhHeidegger2. doc. It was not copied and pasted but rephrased for copyright reasons. [17] See for instance references to Heidegger's "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer," in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Heidegger himself had contacts with some leading Japanese intellectuals, including members of the Kyoto School, notably Hajime Tanabe, Kuki Shūzō and Kiyoshi Miki. [18] An account given by Paul Hsao (in Heidegger and Asian Thought) records a remark by Chang Chung-Yuan claiming that "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands but has intuitively grasped Taoist thought" [19] Tomonubu Imamichi, In Search of Wisdom. One Philosopher's Journey, Tokyo, International House of Japan, 2004 (quoted by Anne Fagot-Largeau during her lesson (http:/ / www. college-de-france. fr/ default/ EN/ all/ phi_sci/ p1184676830986. htm) at the Collège de France on December 7, 2006). [20] See for instance: Nader El-Bizri, The Phenomenological Quest between Avicenna and Heidegger (Binghamton, N.Y.: Global Publications SUNY, 2000) ISBN 1-58684-005-3 [21] A book-series under the title: Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue (http:/ / www. springer. com/ series/ 6137) has been recently established by Springer (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht) in association with the World Phenomenology Institute (http:/ / www. phenomenology. org/ ). This initiative has been initiated by the Polish phenomenologist Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, editor of Analecta Husserliana. [22] See the thesis, "Convergent Phenomenology," presented to the University of Madras, June, 1979. [23] Smith, David Woodruff (2007), Husserl, London-New York: Routledge [24] Partially based on Schuhmann, Karl (2004), ""Phänomenologie": Eine Begriffsgeschichtilche Reflexion", in Leijenhorst, Cees; Steenbakkers, Piet, Karl Schuhmann. Selected Papers on Phenomenology, Dordrecht / Boston / London: Kluwer, pp. 1–33 [25] Ernst Benz, Christian Kabbalah: Neglected Child of Theology [26] Lambert, Johann Heinrich (1772). Anmerkungen und Zusätze zur Entwerfung der Land- und Himmelscharten. Von J. H. Lambert (1772.) Hrsg. von A. Wangerin. Mit 21 Textfiguren. (xml). W. Engelmann, reprint 1894.

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External links • • • • • • • • • • •

What is Phenomenology? (http://www.phenomenologycenter.org/phenom.htm) About Edmund Husserl (http://www.husserlpage.com/) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/) Organization of Phenomenology Organizations (http://www.o-p-o.net/) Romanian Society for Phenomenology (http://www.phenomenology.ro) Phenomenology Online (http://www.phenomenologyonline.com/) Dialectical Phenomenology (http://www.thenewdialectics.org) The New Phenomenology (http://www.thenewphenomenology.org) Springer's academic Phenomenology program (http://www.springer.com/philosophy/phenomenology) Phenomenology and First Philosophy (http://www.fenomenologiayfilosofiaprimera.com/) Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy (http://www.metajournal.org/ display_page.php?title=home) • Phenomenology Research Center (http://www.phenomenologyresearchcenter.org/)

Nihilism Nihilism (  /ˈnaɪ.ɪlɪzəm/ or /ˈniː.ɪlɪzəm/; from the Latin nihil, nothing) is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.[1] Moral nihilists assert that morality does not inherently exist, and that any established moral values are abstractly contrived. Nihilism can also take epistemological or metaphysical/ontological forms, meaning respectively that, in some aspect, knowledge is not possible, or that reality does not actually exist. The term nihilism is sometimes used in association with anomie to explain the general mood of despair at a perceived pointlessness of existence that one may develop upon realising there are no necessary norms, rules, or laws.[2] Movements such as Futurism and deconstruction,[3] among others, have been identified by commentators as "nihilistic" at various times in various contexts. Nihilism is also a characteristic that has been ascribed to time periods: for example, Jean Baudrillard and others have called postmodernity a nihilistic epoch,[4] and some Christian theologians and figures of religious authority have asserted that postmodernity[5] and many aspects of modernity[3] represent a rejection of theism, and that rejection of their theistic doctrine entails nihilism.

Forms of nihilism Nihilism has many definitions and is thus used to describe philosophical positions which are arguably independent.

Metaphysical nihilism Metaphysical nihilism is the philosophical theory that there might be no objects at all, i.e. that there is a possible world in which there are no objects at all; or at least that there might be no concrete objects at all, so even if every possible world contains some objects, there is at least one that contains only abstract objects. An extreme form of metaphysical nihilism is commonly defined as the belief that nothing exists as a correspondent component of the self efficient world."[6] One way of interpreting such a statement would be: It is impossible to distinguish 'existence' from 'non-existence' as there are no objective qualities, and thus a reality, that one state could possess in order to discern between the two. If one cannot discern existence from its negation, then the concept of existence has no meaning; or in other words, does not 'exist' in any meaningful way. 'Meaning' in this sense is used

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Nihilism to argue that as existence has no higher state of reality, which is arguably its necessary and defining quality, existence itself means nothing. It could be argued that this belief, once combined with epistemological nihilism, leaves one with an all-encompassing nihilism in which nothing can be said to be real or true as such values do not exist. A similar position can be found in solipsism; however, in this viewpoint the solipsist affirms whereas the nihilist would deny the self. Both these positions are forms of anti-realism.

Epistemological nihilism Nihilism of an epistemological form can be seen as an extreme form of skepticism in which all knowledge is denied.[7]

Mereological nihilism Mereological nihilism (also called compositional nihilism) is the position that objects with proper parts do not exist (not only objects in space, but also objects existing in time do not have any temporal parts), and only basic building blocks without parts exist, and thus the world we see and experience full of objects with parts is a product of human misperception (i.e., if we could see clearly, we would not perceive compositive objects).

Existential nihilism Existential nihilism is the belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. With respect to the universe, existential nihilism posits that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant, without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence. The meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism.

Moral nihilism Moral nihilism, also known as ethical nihilism, is the meta-ethical view that morality does not exist as something inherent to objective reality; therefore no action is necessarily preferable to any other. For example, a moral nihilist would say that killing someone, for whatever reason, is not inherently right or wrong. Other nihilists may argue not that there is no morality at all, but that if it does exist, it is a human and thus artificial construction, wherein any and all meaning is relative for different possible outcomes. As an example, if someone kills someone else, such a nihilist might argue that killing is not inherently a bad thing, bad independently from our moral beliefs, only that because of the way morality is constructed as some rudimentary dichotomy, what is said to be a bad thing is given a higher negative weighting than what is called good: as a result, killing the individual was bad because it did not let the individual live, which was arbitrarily given a positive weighting. In this way a moral nihilist believes that all moral claims are false.

Political nihilism Political nihilism, a branch of nihilism, follows the characteristic nihilist's rejection of non-rationalized or non-proven assertions; in this case the necessity of the most fundamental social and political structures, such as government, family, and law. The Nihilist movement in 19th century Russia espoused a similar doctrine. Political nihilism is rather different from other forms of nihilism, and is generally considered to be more like a form of utilitarianism. An influential analysis of political nihilism is presented by Leo Strauss.[8]

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History 19th century Though the term nihilism was first popularized by the novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) in his novel Fathers and Sons,[9] it was first introduced into philosophical discourse by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819). Jacobi used the term to characterize rationalism[10] and in particular Immanuel Kant's "critical" philosophy in order to carry out a reductio ad absurdum according to which all rationalism (philosophy as criticism) reduces to nihilism, and thus it should be avoided and replaced with a return to some type of faith and revelation. Bret W. Davis writes, for example, "The first philosophical development of the idea of nihilism is generally ascribed to Friedrich Jacobi, who in a famous letter criticized Fichte's idealism as falling into nihilism. According to Jacobi, Fichte’s absolutization of the ego (the 'absolute I' that posits the 'not-I') is an inflation of subjectivity that denies the absolute transcendence of God."[11] A related but oppositional concept is fideism, which sees reason as hostile and inferior to faith. With the popularizing of the word nihilism by Turgenev, a new Russian political movement called the Nihilism movement adopted the term. They supposedly called themselves nihilists because nothing "that then existed found favor in their eyes."[12]

Kierkegaard Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) posited an early form of nihilism, to which he referred as levelling.[13] He saw levelling as the process of suppressing individuality to a point where the individual's uniqueness becomes non-existent and nothing meaningful in his existence can be affirmed: Levelling at its maximum is like the stillness of death, where one can hear one's own heartbeat, a stillness like death, into which nothing can penetrate, in which everything sinks, powerless. One person can head a rebellion, but one person cannot head this levelling process, for that would make him a leader and he would avoid being levelled. Each individual can in his little circle participate in this levelling, but it is an abstract process, and levelling is abstraction conquering individuality. —Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, translated by Alexander Dru with Foreword by Walter Kaufmann, p. 51-53 Kierkegaard, an advocate of a philosophy of life, generally argued against levelling and its nihilist consequence, although he believed it would be "genuinely educative to live in the age of levelling [because] people will be forced to face the judgement of [levelling] alone."[14] George Cotkin asserts Kierkegaard was against "the standardization and levelling of belief, both spiritual and political, in the nineteenth century [and he] opposed tendencies in mass culture to reduce the individual to a cipher of conformity and deference to the dominant opinion."[15] In his day, tabloids (like the Danish magazine Corsaren) and corrupt Christianity were instruments of levelling and contributed to the "reflective apathetic age" of 19th century Europe.[16] Kierkegaard argues that individuals who can overcome the levelling process are stronger for it and that it represents a step in the right direction towards "becoming a true self."[14][17] As we must overcome levelling,[18] Hubert Dreyfus and Jane Rubin argue that Kierkegaard's interest, "in an increasingly nihilistic age, is in how we can recover the sense that our lives are meaningful".[19] Note however that Kierkegaard's meaning of "nihilism" differs from the modern definition in the sense that, for Kierkegaard, levelling led to a life lacking meaning, purpose or value,[16] whereas the modern interpretation of nihilism posits that there was never any meaning, purpose or value to begin with.

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Nietzsche Nihilism is often associated with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who provided a detailed diagnosis of nihilism as a widespread phenomenon of Western culture. Though the notion appears frequently throughout Nietzsche's work, he uses the term in a variety of ways, with different meanings and connotations, both positive and negative. Karen Carr describes Nietzsche's characterization of nihilism "as a condition of tension, as a disproportion between what we want to value (or need) and how the world appears to operate."[20] When we find out that the world does not possess the objective value or meaning that we want it to have or have long since believed it to have, we find ourselves in a crisis.[21] Nietzsche asserts that with the decline of Christianity and the rise of physiological decadence, nihilism is in fact characteristic of the modern age,[22] though he implies that the rise of nihilism is still incomplete and that it has yet to be overcome.[23] Though the problem of nihilism becomes especially explicit in Nietzsche's notebooks (published posthumously), it is mentioned repeatedly in his published works and is closely connected to many of the problems mentioned there. Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. This observation stems in part from Nietzsche's perspectivism, or his notion that "knowledge" is always by someone of some thing: it is always bound by perspective, and it is never mere fact.[24] Rather, there are interpretations through which we understand the world and give it meaning. Interpreting is something we can not go without; in fact, it is something we need. One way of interpreting the world is through morality, as one of the fundamental ways in which people make sense of the world, especially in regard to their own thoughts and actions. Nietzsche distinguishes a morality that is strong or healthy, meaning that the person in question is aware that he constructs it himself, from weak morality, where the interpretation is projected on to something external. Regardless of its strength, morality presents us with meaning, whether this is created or 'implanted,' which helps us get through life.[25] This is exactly why Nietzsche states that nihilism as "absolute valuelessness" or "nothing has meaning"[26] is dangerous, or even "the danger of dangers":[27] it is through valuation that people survive and endure the danger, pain and hardships they face in life. The complete destruction of all meaning and all values would lead to an existence of apathy and stillness, where positive actions, affirmative actions, would be replaced by a state of reaction and destruction. This is the prophecy of "der letzte Mensch", the last man,[28] the most despicable man, devoid of values, incapable of self-realization through creation of his own good and evil, devoid of any "will to power" (Wille zur Macht). Nietzsche discusses Christianity, one of the major topics in his work, at length in the context of the problem of nihilism in his notebooks, in a chapter entitled 'European Nihilism'.[29] Here he states that the Christian moral doctrine provides people with intrinsic value, belief in God (which justifies the evil in the world) and a basis for objective knowledge. In this sense, in constructing a world where objective knowledge is possible, Christianity is an antidote against a primal form of nihilism, against the despair of meaninglessness. However, it is exactly the element of truthfulness in Christian doctrine that is its undoing: in its drive towards truth, Christianity eventually finds itself to be a construct, which leads to its own dissolution. It is therefore that Nietzsche states that we have outgrown Christianity "not because we lived too far from it, rather because we lived too close."[30] As such, the self-dissolution of Christianity constitutes yet another form of nihilism. Because Christianity was an interpretation that posited itself as the interpretation, Nietzsche states that this dissolution leads beyond skepticism to a distrust of all meaning.[31][32] Stanley Rosen identifies Nietzsche's concept of nihilism with this situation of meaninglessness, where "everything is permitted." According to him, the loss of higher metaphysical values which existed in contrast with the base reality of the world or merely human ideas give rise to the idea that all human ideas are therefore valueless. Rejection of idealism thus results in nihilism, because only similarly transcendent ideals would live up to the previous standards that the nihilist still implicitly holds.[33] The inability for Christianity to serve as a source of valuating the world is reflected in Nietzsche's famous aphorism of the madman in The Gay Science.[34] The death of God, in particular the statement that "we killed him", is similar to the self-dissolution of Christian doctrine: due to the advances of the sciences, which for Nietzsche show that man is the product of evolution, that earth has no special place among the

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stars and that history is not progressive, the Christian notion of God can no longer serve as a basis for a morality. One such reaction to the loss of meaning is what Nietzsche calls 'passive nihilism', which he recognises in the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's doctrine, which Nietzsche also refers to as Western Buddhism, advocates a separating oneself of will and desires in order to reduce suffering. Nietzsche characterises this ascetic attitude as a "will to nothingness," whereby life turns away from itself, as there is nothing of value to be found in the world. This mowing away of all value in the world is characteristic of the nihilist, although in this, the nihilist appears to be inconsistent:[35] A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos — at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists. —Friedrich Nietzsche, KSA 12:9 [60], taken from The Will to Power, section 585, translated by Walter Kaufmann Nietzsche's relation to the problem of nihilism is a complex one. He approaches the problem of nihilism as a deeply personal one, stating that this problem of the modern world is a problem that has "become conscious" in him.[36] Furthermore, he emphasises both the danger of nihilism and the possibilities it offers, as seen in his statement that "I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength!"[37] According to Nietzsche, it is only when nihilism is overcome that a culture can have a true foundation upon which to thrive. He wished to hasten its coming only so that he could also hasten its ultimate departure.[22] He states that there is at least the possibility of another type of nihilist in the wake of Christianity's self-dissolution, one that does not stop after the destruction of all value and meaning and succumb to the following nothingness. This alternate, 'active' nihilism on the other hand destroys to level the field for constructing something new. This form of nihilism is characterized by Nietzsche as "a sign of strength,"[38] a wilful destruction of the old values to wipe the slate clean and lay down one's own beliefs and interpretations, contrary to the passive nihilism that resigns itself with the decomposition of the old values. This wilful destruction of values and the overcoming of the condition of nihilism by the constructing of new meaning, this active nihilism, could be related to what Nietzsche elsewhere calls a 'free spirit'[39] or the Übermensch from Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Antichrist, the model of the strong individual who posits his own values and lives his life as if it were his own work of art. It may be questioned, though, whether ‘active nihilism’ is indeed the correct term for this stance, and whether Nietzsche takes the problems nihilism poses seriously enough.[40]

Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche Many postmodern thinkers who investigated the problem of nihilism as put forward by Nietzsche, were influenced by Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche. It is only recently that Heidegger’s influence on nihilism research by Nietzsche has faded.[41] As early as the 1930s, Heidegger was giving lectures on Nietzsche’s thought.[42] Given the importance of Nietzsche’s contribution to the topic of nihilism, Heidegger's influential interpretation of Nietzsche is important for the historical development of the term nihilism. Heidegger's method of researching and teaching Nietzsche is explicitly his own. He does not specifically try to present Nietzsche as Nietzsche. He rather tries to incorporate Nietzsche's thoughts into his own philosophical system of Being, Time and Dasein.[43] In his Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being (1944–46),[44] Heidegger tries to understand Nietzsche’s nihilism as trying to achieve a victory through the devaluation of the, until then, highest values. The principle of this devaluation is, according to Heidegger, the Will to Power. The Will to Power is also the principle of every earlier valuation of values.[45] How does this devaluation occur and why is this nihilistic? One of Heidegger’s main critiques on philosophy is that philosophy, and more specifically metaphysics, has forgotten to

Nihilism discriminate between investigating the notion of a Being (Seiende) and Being (Sein). According to Heidegger, the history of Western thought can be seen as the history of metaphysics. And because metaphysics has forgotten to ask about the notion of Being (what Heidegger calls Seinsvergessenheit), it is a history about the destruction of Being. That is why Heidegger calls metaphysics nihilistic.[46] This makes Nietzsche’s metaphysics not a victory over nihilism, but a perfection of it.[47] Heidegger, in his interpretation of Nietzsche, has been inspired by Ernst Jünger. Many references to Jünger can be found in Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche. For example, in a letter to the rector of Freiburg University of November 4, 1945, Heidegger, inspired by Jünger, tries to explain the notion of “God is dead” as the “reality of the Will to Power.” Heidegger also praises Jünger for defending Nietzsche against a too biological or anthropological reading during the Third Reich.[48] A number of important postmodernist thinkers were influenced by Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche. Gianni Vattimo points at a back and forth movement in European thought, between Nietzsche and Heidegger. During the 1960s, a Nietzschean 'renaissance' began, culminating in the work of Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli. They began work on a new and complete edition of Nietzsche's collected works, making Nietzsche more accessible for scholarly research. Vattimo explains that with this new edition of Colli and Montinari, a critical reception of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche began to take shape. Like other contemporary French and Italian philosophers, Vattimo does not want, or only partially wants, to rely on Heidegger for understanding Nietzsche. On the other hand, Vattimo judges Heidegger's intentions authentic enough to keep pursuing them.[49] Philosophers who Vattimo exemplifies as a part of this back and forth movement are French philosophers Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida. Italian philosophers of this same movement are Cacciari, Severino and himself.[50] Habermas, Lyotard and Rorty are also philosophers who are influenced by Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche.[51]

Postmodernism Postmodern and poststructuralist thought question the very grounds on which Western cultures have based their 'truths': absolute knowledge and meaning, a 'decentralization' of authorship, the accumulation of positive knowledge, historical progress, and certain ideals and practices of humanism and the Enlightenment. Jacques Derrida, whose deconstruction is perhaps most commonly labeled nihilistic, did not himself make the nihilistic move that others have claimed. Derridean deconstructionists argue that this approach rather frees texts, individuals or organizations from a restrictive truth, and that deconstruction opens up the possibility of other ways of being.[52] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for example, uses deconstruction to create an ethics of opening up Western scholarship to the voice of the subaltern and to philosophies outside of the canon of western texts.[53] Derrida himself built a philosophy based upon a 'responsibility to the other'.[54] Deconstruction can thus be seen not as a denial of truth, but as a denial of our ability to know truth (it makes an epistemological claim compared to nihilism's ontological claim). Lyotard argues that, rather than relying on an objective truth or method to prove their claims, philosophers legitimize their truths by reference to a story about the world which is inseparable from the age and system the stories belong to, referred to by Lyotard as meta-narratives. He then goes on to define the postmodern condition as one characterized by a rejection both of these meta-narratives and of the process of legitimation by meta-narratives. "In lieu of meta-narratives we have created new language-games in order to legitimize our claims which rely on changing relationships and mutable truths, none of which is privileged over the other to speak to ultimate truth." This concept of the instability of truth and meaning leads in the direction of nihilism, though Lyotard stops short of embracing the latter. Postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote briefly of nihilism from the postmodern viewpoint in Simulacra and Simulation. He stuck mainly to topics of interpretations of the real world over the simulations of which the real world is composed. The uses of meaning was an important subject in Baudrillard's discussion of nihilism:

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217 The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference…all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency. —Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, "On Nihilism", trans. 1995

Nihilism and culture Television Thomas Hibbs suggested that the show Seinfeld is a manifestation of nihilism in television. The very basis of the sitcom is that it is a "show about nothing." The majority of the episodes focused on minutiae. The view presented in Seinfeld is arguably consistent with the philosophy of nihilism, the idea that life is pointless, and from which arises a feeling of the absurd that characterizes the show's ironic humor.[55]

Dada The term Dada was first used by Tristan Tzara in 1916.[56] The movement, which lasted from approximately 1916 to 1922, arose during World War I, an event that influenced the artists.[57] The Dada Movement began in Zürich, Switzerland – known as the "Niederdorf" or "Niederdörfli" – in the Café Voltaire.[58] The Dadaists claimed that Dada was not an art movement, but an anti-art movement, sometimes using found objects in a manner similar to found poetry. The "anti-art" drive is thought to have stemmed from a post-war emptiness. This tendency toward devaluation of art has led many to claim that Dada was an essentially nihilistic movement. Given that Dada created its own means for interpreting its products, it is difficult to classify alongside most other contemporary art expressions. Hence, due to its ambiguity, it is sometimes classified as a nihilistic modus vivendi.[57]

Literature Anton Chekhov portrayed nihilism when writing Three Sisters. The phrase "what does it matter" or such variants is often spoken by several characters in response to events; the significance of some of these events suggests a subscription to nihilism by said characters as a type of coping strategy. In the graphic novel Watchmen, the character The Comedian/Edward Blake displays and is characterized as being a nihilist, both moral and political, to the extent of openly committing murder in order to demonstrate the lack of human concern or nerve (stating that Dr. Manhattan could have stopped him at any moment, but chose not to). Dr. Manhattan is also portrayed as a nihilist on the cosmic scale by stating if the Earth was destroyed and all life on it eradicated, the universe would not notice. In the novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand condemns nihilism quite aggressively. The philosophical ideas of the French author, the Marquis De Sade, are often noted as early examples of nihilistic principles.

Nihilism

Music In Act III of Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District", a nihilist is tormented by the Russian Police. A 2007 article in The Guardian noted that "...in the summer of 1977, ...punk's nihilistic swagger was the most thrilling thing in England."[59] The Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen, with its chant-like refrain of "no future", became a slogan for unemployed and disaffected youth during the late 1970s.[60] Black metal and death metal music often emphasize nihilistic themes.[61][62][63] The Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral has several nihilistic themes and concepts throughout the overall storyline, with the narrator rejecting the world and the concept of God and attempting to forge his own versions (with lines such as "God is dead/ And no one cares/ If there is a Hell/ I'll see you there"). Nihilism is also expressed in some gangster rap, as part of a "street code", but it is only one of many viewpoints or perspectives presented in such music.[64] Rapper Tyler the Creator of OFWGKTA has been referred to as a nihilist due to his lyrical content.[65] "Nihilism" is also the name of a song released by the band Rancid in their 1994 album Let's Go. Much of the music by the band The Acacia Strain is written from a nihilistic point of view.

Film The character John Morlar from Peter Van Greenaway's 1973 novel The Medusa Touch and the 1978 film version holds nihilistic beliefs as does the character Animal Mother from Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket and the ruthless thug O-Dog from the 1993 film Menace II Society by the Hughes Brothers. Three of the antagonists in the 1998 movie The Big Lebowski are explicitly described as "nihilists;" and the 1999 film The Matrix portrays the character Thomas A. Anderson with a hollowed out copy of Baudrillard's treatise, Simulacra and Simulation, in which he stores contraband data files under the chapter "On Nihilism."

Notes [1] Alan Pratt defines existential nihilism as "the notion that life has no intrinsic meaning or value, and it is, no doubt, the most commonly used and understood sense of the word today." Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (http:/ / www. utm. edu/ research/ iep/ n/ nihilism. htm) [2] Bazarov, the protagonist in the classic work Fathers and Sons written in the early 1860s by Ivan Turgenev, is quoted as saying nihilism is "just cursing", cited in Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967) Vol. 5, "Nihilism", 514 ff. This source states as follows: "On the one hand, the term is widely used to denote the doctrine that moral norms or standards cannot be justified by rational argument. On the other hand, it is widely used to denote a mood of despair over the emptiness or triviality of human existence. This double meaning appears to derive from the fact that the term was often employed in the nineteenth century by the religiously oriented as a club against atheists, atheists being regarded as ipso facto nihilists in both senses. The atheist, it was held [by the religiously oriented], would not feel bound by moral norms; consequently, he would tend to be callous or selfish, even criminal" (at p. 515). [3] Phillips, Robert (1999). "Deconstructing the Mass" (http:/ / www. latinmassmagazine. com/ articles/ articles_1999_WI_Phillips. html). Latin Mass Magazine (Winter). . "For deconstructionists, not only is there no truth to know, there is no self to know it and so there is no soul to save or lose." and "In following the Enlightenment to its logical end, deconstruction reaches nihilism. The meaning of human life is reduced to whatever happens to interest us at the moment…" [4] For some examples of the view that postmodernity is a nihilistic epoch see Toynbee, Arnold (1963) A Study of History vols. VIII and IX; Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination; Bell, Daniel (1976) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism; and Baudrillard, Jean (1993) "Game with Vestiges" in Baudrillard Live, ed. Mike Gane and (1994) "On Nihilism" in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glasser. For examples of the view that postmodernism is a nihilistic mode of thought, see Rose, Gillian (1984) Dialectic of Nihilism; Carr, Karen L. (1988) The Banalization of Nihilism; and Pope John-Paul II (1995), Evangelium vitae: Il valore e l’inviolabilita delta vita umana. Milan: Paoline Editoriale Libri.", all cited in Woodward, Ashley: Nihilism and the Postmodern in Vattimo's Nietzsche (http:/ / www. ul. ie/ ~philos/ vol6/ nihilism. html), ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 6, 2002, fn 1. [5] For example, Leffel, Jim; Dennis McCallum. "The Postmodern Challenge: Facing the Spirit of the Age" (http:/ / www. equip. org/ free/ DP321. htm). Christian Research Institute. . "…the nihilism and loneliness of postmodern culture..." [6] Oxford Dictionary (http:/ / www. askoxford. com/ concise_oed/ nihilism?view=uk) Answers dictionary defines one form of nihilism as "an extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence." Answers.com (http:/ / www. answers. com/ nihilism)

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Nihilism [7] Alan Pratt defines nihilism as "the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http:/ / www. utm. edu/ research/ iep/ n/ nihilism. htm) [8] L. Strauss, “German Nihilism”, Interpretation 26 (3) (1999): pp. 353-378. [9] Kornilov, Alexander. Modern Russian History: From the age of Catherine the Great to the end of the nineteenth century. translated by John S. Curtiss. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1917, 1924, 1943. Vol. II, p.69. [10] George di Giovanni, "Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi", The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Stanford.edu (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ archives/ fall2008/ entries/ friedrich-jacobi/ ) [11] Davis, Bret W. - "Zen After Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism" Journal of Nietzsche Studies Issue 28 (2004):89-138 (here 107). [12] Douglas Harper, " Nihilism (http:/ / www. etymonline. com/ index. php?search=nihilism& searchmode=none)", in: Online Etymology Dictionary, retrieved at December 2, 2009. [13] Dreyfus, Hubert. Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age. Berkeley.edu (http:/ / socrates. berkeley. edu/ ~hdreyfus/ html/ paper_kierkegaard. html) [14] Hannay, Alastair. Kierkegaard, p. 289. [15] Cotkin, George. Existential America, p. 59. [16] Kierkegaard, Søren. The Present Age, translated by Alexander Dru with Foreword by Walter Kaufmann [17] Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death [18] Barnett, Christopher. Kierkegaard, pietism and holiness, p. 156. [19] Wrathall, Mark et al. Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity, p. 107. [20] Carr, K., The Banalisation of Nihilism, State University of New York Press, 1992, p. 25. [21] F. Nietzsche, KSA 12:6 [25] [22] Steven Michels, "Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Virtue of Nature," Dogma, 2004, Free.fr (http:/ / dogma. free. fr/ txt/ SM-Nietzsche. htm) [23] F. Nietzsche, KSA 12:10 [142] [24] F. Nietzsche, KSA 13:14 [22] [25] Carr, K., The Banalisation of Nihilism, State University of New York University Press, 1992 p. 38. [26] F. Nietzsche, KSA 12:2 [1] [27] F. Nietzsche, KGW VIII:2[100] [28] F. Nietzsche, "Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen." [29] F. Nietzsche, KSA 12:5 [71] [30] F. Nietzsche, KSA 12:2 [200] [31] F. Nietzsche, KSA 12:2 [127] [32] Carr, K., The Banalisation of Nihilism (1992), p. 41-42. [33] Rosen, Stanley. Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1969. p. xiii. [34] F. Nietzsche, the Gay Science: 125. [35] This "will to nothingness" is still a willing of some sort, because it is exactly as as pessimist that Schopenhauer clings to life. See F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III:7. [36] F. Nietzsche, KSA 12:7 [8] [37] Friedrich Nietzsche, Complete Works Vol. 13. [38] F. Nietzsche, KSA 12:9 [35] [39] K. Carr, The Banalisation of Nihilism, State University of New York Press, 1992, pp. 43-50. [40] J. Doomen, “Consistent Nihilism”, Journal of Mind and Behavior 33 (1/2) (2012): pp. 103-117. [41] “Heideggers ,Aus-einander-setzung’ mit Nietzsches hat mannigfache Resonanz gefunden. Das Verhältnis der beiden Philosophen zueinander ist dabei von unterschiedlichen Positionen aus diskutiert worden. Inzwischen ist es nicht mehr ungewöhnlich, daß Heidegger, entgegen seinem Anspruch auf ,Verwindung’ der Metaphysik und des ihr zugehörigen Nihilismus, in jenen Nihilismus zurückgestellt wird, als dessen Vollender er Nietzsche angesehen hat.” Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Heidegger und Nietzsche. Nietzsche-Interpretationen III, Berlin-New York 2000, p. 303. [42] Cf. both by Heidegger: Vol. I, Nietzsche I (1936-39). Translated as Nietzsche I: The Will to Power as Art by David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Vol. II, Nietzsche II (1939-46). Translated as “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same” by David F. Krell in Nietzsche II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (New York, Harper & Row, 1984). [43] “Indem Heidegger das von Nietzsche Ungesagte im Hinblick auf die Seinsfrage zur Sprache zu bringen sucht, wird das von Nietzsche Gesagte in ein diesem selber fremdes Licht gerückt.”, Müller-Lauter, Heidegger und Nietzsche, p. 267. [44] Original German: Die seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus. Found in the second volume of his lectures: Vol. II, Nietzsche II (1939-46). Translated as “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same” by David F. Krell in Nietzsche II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (New York, Harper & Row, 1984). [45] “Heidegger geht davon aus, daß Nietzsche den Nihilismus als Entwertung der bisherigen obersten Werte versteht; seine Überwindung soll durch die Umwertung der Werte erfolgen. Das Prinzip der Umwertung wie auch jeder früheren Wertsetzung ist der Wille zur Macht.”, Müller-Lauter, Heidegger und Nietzsche, p. 268. [46] “What remains unquestioned and forgotten in metaphysics is being; and hence, it is nihilistic.”, UTM.edu (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ heidegge/ ), visited on November 24, 2009.

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Nihilism [47] Müller-Lauter, Heidegger und Nietzsche, p. 268. [48] Müller-Lauter, Heidegger und Nietzsche, pp. 272-275. [49] Müller-Lauter, Heidegger und Nietzsche, pp. 301-303. [50] “Er (Vattimo) konstatiert ,,in vielen europäischen Philosophien eine Hin- und Herbewegung zwischen Heidegger und Nietzsche”. Dabei denkt er, wie seine späteren Ausführungen zeigen, z.B. an Deleuze, Foucault und Derrida auf französischer Seite, an Cacciari, Severino und an sich selbst auf italienischer Seite.”, Müller-Lauter, Heidegger und Nietzsche, p. 302. [51] Müller-Lauter, Heidegger und Nietzsche, pp. 303-304. [52] Borginho, Jose (http:/ / www. abc. net. au/ specials/ derrida/ josenihil. htm) 1999; Nihilism and Affirmation. Retrieved 05-12-07. [53] Spivak, Chakravorty Gayatri; 1988; Can The Subaltern Speak?; in Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence (eds); 1988; Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture; Macmillan Education, Basingstoke. [54] Reynolds, Jack; 2001; The Other of Derridean Deconstruction: Levinas, Phenomenology and the Question of Responsibility (http:/ / www. mic. ul. ie/ stephen/ derrida. pdf); Minerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy 5: 31–62. Retrieved 05-12-07. [55] "Observer Newspaper - News" (http:/ / www. nd. edu/ ~observer/ 12031999/ News/ 5. html). Nd.edu. 1999-12-03. . Retrieved 2009-09-02. [56] de Micheli, Mario (2006). Las vanguardias artísticas del siglo XX. Alianza Forma. p.135-137. [57] Tzara, Tristan (December 2005). Trans/ed. Mary Ann Caws "Approximate Man" & Other Writings. Black Widow Press, p. 3. [58] de Micheli, Mario (2006). Las vanguardias artísticas del siglo XX. Alianza Forma, p. 137. [59] Stuart Jeffries. "A right royal knees-up." The Guardian. 20 July 2007. [60] Robb, John (2006). Punk Rock: An Oral History (London: Elbury Press). ISBN 0-09-190511-7. From the foreword by Mike Bracewell. Nihilism is strongly associated with many styles of metal music. Death Metal is specifically defined by its nihilistic subject matter. [61] Reddick, Brad H.; Beresin, Eugene V. (March 2002). "Rebellious Rhapsody: Metal, Rap, Community, and Individuation" (http:/ / www. ap. psychiatryonline. org/ cgi/ content/ full/ 26/ 1/ 51). Academic Psychiatry (American Psychiatric Publishing) 26 (1): 51–59. doi:10.1176/appi.ap.26.1.51. ISSN 1042-9670. PMID 11867430. . Retrieved 2010-01-04. [62] Jack Levin; Jack McDevitt (2002). Hate Crimes Revisited: America's war against those who are different (http:/ / books. google. com/ ?id=Da0OyfWDCncC& pg=PA41#v=onepage& q=). Westview Press. p. 41. ISBN 0-8133-3922-7. . Retrieved 2010-01-04. "Known widely as Black metal or the Satanic Metal Underground, this latest genre represents the hardest strain of heavy metal, emphasizing cold-blooded murder, hate and prejudice, nihilism, and the unbridled expression of masculine lust." [63] Ardet, Natalie (2004) (PDF). Teenagers, Internet and Black Metal (http:/ / www-gewi. uni-graz. at/ staff/ parncutt/ cim04/ CIM04_paper_pdf/ Ardet_CIM04_proceedings. pdf). Proceedings of the Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology. . Retrieved 2010-01-04. [64] "Charis E. Kubrin, ""I see death around the corner": Nihilism in Rap music", ''Sociological Perspectives'', Vol. 48, No. 4, pp. 433–459, Winter (2005)" (http:/ / caliber. ucpress. net/ doi/ abs/ 10. 1525/ sop. 2005. 48. 4. 433). Caliber.ucpress.net. . Retrieved 2009-09-02. [65] http:/ / www. barkbiteblog. com/ 2011/ 02/ tyler-the-creator-and-odd-future. html

References Primary texts • Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, Jacobi an Fichte (1799/1816), German Text (1799/1816), Appendix with Jacobi's and Fichte's complementary Texts, critical Apparatus, Commentary, and Italian Translation, Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, Naples 2011, ISBN 978-88-905957-5-2. • Heidegger, Martin (1982), Nietzsche, Vols. I-IV, trans. F.A. Capuzzi, San Francisco: Harper & Row. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1998/1854), The Moment and Late Writings: Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. 23, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-03226-9. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1978/1846), The Two Ages : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 14, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong, and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-07226-5. • Kierkegaard, Søren (1995/1850), Works of Love : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 16, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-03792-9. • Nietzsche, Friedrich (2005/1886), Beyond Good and Evil (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19634), trans. Helen Zimmern. • Nietzsche, Friedrich (1974/1887), The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman, Vintage, ISBN 0-394-71985-9. • Nietzsche, Friedrich (1980), Sämtliche Werken. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. C. Colli and M. Montinari, Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-007680-2. • Nietzsche, Friedrich (2008/1885), Thus Spake Zarathustra (http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext99/ spzar10.txt), trans. Thomas Common. Secondary texts

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Nihilism • Barnett, Christopher (2011), Kierkegaard, pietism and holiness, Ashgate Publishing. • Carr, Karen (1992), The Banalisation of Nihilism, State University of New York Press. • Cunningham, Conor (2002), Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing & the Difference of Theology, New York, NY: Routledge. • Dreyfus, Hubert L. (2004), Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age (http:// socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_kierkegaard.html). Retrieved at December 1, 2009. • Fraser, John (2001), " Nihilism, Modernisn and Value (http://www.jottings.ca/john/preface.html)", retrieved at December 2, 2009. • Gillespie, Michael Allen (1996), Nihilism Before Nietzsche, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. • Giovanni, George di (2008), " Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/ friedrich-jacobi/)", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Retrieved on December 1, 2009. • Harper, Douglas, " Nihilism (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=nihilism&searchmode=none)", in: Online Etymology Dictionary, retrieved at December 2, 2009. • Harries, Karsten (2010), Between nihilism and faith: a commentary on Either/or, Walter de Gruyter Press. • Hibbs, Thomas S. (2000), Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld, Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing Company. • Korab-Karpowicz, W. J. (2005), " Martin Heidegger (1889—1976) (http://www.iep.utm.edu/heidegge/)", in: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retrieved at December 2, 2009. • Kuhn, Elisabeth (1992), Friedrich Nietzsches Philosophie des europäischen Nihilismus, Walter de Gruyter. • Löwith, Karl (1995), Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, New York, NY: Columbia UP. • Marmysz, John (2003), Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. • Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang (2000), Heidegger und Nietzsche. Nietzsche-Interpretationen III, Berlin-New York. • Parvez Manzoor, S. (2003), " Modernity and Nihilism. Secular History and Loss of Meaning (http://www. pmanzoor.info/MWBR-Modernity-Nihilism.htm)", retrieved at December 2, 2009. • Rose, Eugene Fr. Seraphim (1995), Nihilism, The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Forestville, CA: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation. • Rosen, Stanley (2000), Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay, South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press (2nd Edition). • Slocombe, Will (2006), Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern: The (Hi)Story of a Difficult Relationship, New York, NY: Routledge. • Villet, Charles (2009), Towards Ethical Nihilism: The Possibility of Nietzschean Hope, Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr. Müller. • Williams, Peter S. (2005), I Wish I Could Believe in Meaning: A Response to Nihilism, Damaris Publishing.

External links • Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spake Zarathustra (http://philosophy.eserver.org/nietzsche-zarathustra.txt), translated by Thomas Common • Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Nihilism (http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/n/nihilism.htm) • "Fathers and Sons" by Ivan Turgenev (http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ist/fas.htm) • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Moral Skepticism, "Skeptical Hypotheses" (http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/skepticism-moral/#3.4) •  "Nihilism". New International Encyclopedia. 1905.

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Postmodernism Postmodernism is a general and wide-ranging term which is applied to many disciplines, including literature, art, economics, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to scientific or objective efforts to explain reality. There is no consensus among scholars on the precise definition. In essence, postmodernism is based on the position that reality is not mirrored in human understanding of it, but is rather constructed as the mind tries to understand its own personal reality. Postmodernism is therefore skeptical of explanations that claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person (i.e. postmodernism = relativism). In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, arguing that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain or universal. Postmodernism postulates that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs and are therefore subject to change. It claims that there is no absolute truth and that the way people perceive the world is subjective and emphasises the role of language, power relations, and motivations in the formation of ideas and beliefs. In particular it attacks the use of sharp binary classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial; it holds realities to be plural and relative, and to be dependent on who the interested parties are and the nature of these interests. Postmodernist approaches therefore often consider the ways in which social dynamics, such as power and hierarchy, affect human conceptualizations of the world to have important effects on the way knowledge is constructed and used. Postmodernist thought often emphasizes constructivism, idealism, pluralism, relativism, and scepticism in its approaches to knowledge and understanding. Postmodernism is generally considered to have been conceived during the early twentieth century. Postmodernism gained significant popularity in the 1950s and dominated literature and art by the 1960s.[1] Postmodernism has influenced many disciplines, including religion, literary criticism, sociology, ethics and morality, linguistics, architecture, history, politics, international relations, anthropology, visual arts, and music.

Definitional issues The term "Postmodernism" is often used to refer to different, sometimes contradictory concepts. Conventional definitions include: • Compact Oxford English Dictionary: "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions."[2] • Merriam-Webster: Either "of, relating to, or being an era after a modern one", or "of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)", or, finally "of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language".[3] • American Heritage Dictionary: "Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes: 'It [a roadhouse] is so architecturally interesting ... with its postmodern wooden booths and sculptural clock.'"[4] While the term "Postmodern" and its derivatives are freely used, with some uses apparently contradicting others, those outside the academic milieu have described it as merely a buzzword that means nothing. Dick Hebdige, in his text "Hiding in the Light", writes: When it becomes possible for a people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television

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Postmodernism commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates - when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘Postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.[5] British historian Perry Anderson's history of the term and its understanding, "The Origins of Postmodernity", states that the contradictions are only apparent, and that "postmodernism" as a category and a phenomenon is important in the analysis of contemporary culture.[6] In addition to the possible terms given, Kaya Yilmaz presents the idea that when studying this theory one must remember that there is not one definition, hence the multiple provided. The term itself does not allow it to own one specific definition, rather it contains specific attributes and characteristics that can be agreed upon. Yamaz also acknowledges the very important idea that this idea of postmodernism can and does alter depending on the location on the globe. There are three reasons behind the lack of concrete definition. One being that the disposition itself, is that the theory is “anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist”. The idea of postmodernism in its entirety is not to be clearly defined or predictable. The second reason is that it is a theory that is contrasting and does not have a specific way of presenting or explaining itself. Finally, the theory is not even clearly defined by its inventors and researchers. Those scholars who first founded this ideal intentionally did not give it a clear, concrete diagnosis.[7]

Deconstruction One of the most popular postmodernist tendencies within aesthetics is deconstruction. "Deconstruction" is a Derridean approach to textual analysis (typical literary criticism, but variously applied). Deconstructions work entirely within the studied text to expose and undermine its frame of references, assumptions, and ideological foundations.[8] Although Deconstructions can be developed using different methods and techniques, the process typically involves demonstrating the multiple interpretations of a text and their resulting internal conflicts, and subversive binary oppositions (e.g. masculine/feminine, old/new). Jacques Derrida's theories on "Deconstruction" influenced the creation of Deconstructivism, a postmodern architectural movement characterized by fragmentation, distortion and dislocation of elements such as structure and envelope. The Indian theorist Gayatri Spivak, described Deconstruction as an approach fundamental to many different fields of postmodernist thought, including postcolonialism.[9]

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Postmodernism and Structuralism Structuralism was a broad philosophical movement that developed particularly in France in the 1950s, partly in response to French Existentialism, but is considered by many to be an exponent of High-Modernism, though its categorization as either a Modernist or Postmodernist trend is contested. Many Structuralists later moved away from the most strict interpretations and applications of "structure", and are thus called "Post-structuralists". Though many Post-structuralists were referred to as Postmodern in their lifetimes, many explicitly rejected the term. Notwithstanding, Post-structuralism in much American academic literature in the Humanities is very strongly associated with the broader and more nebulous movement of Postmodernism. Thinkers most typically linked with Structuralism include anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the early writings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the early writings of literary theorist Roland Barthes, and the semiotician Algirdas Greimas. Philosophers commonly referred to as Post-structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze (all of whom began their careers within a Structuralist framework), Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and, sometimes, the American cultural theorists, critics and intellectuals they influenced (e.g. Judith Butler, Jonathan Crary, John Fiske, Rosalind Krauss, Hayden White). Though by no means a unified movement with a set of shared axioms or methodologies, Post-structuralism emphasizes the ways in which different aspects of a cultural order, from its most banal material details to its most abstract theoretical exponents, determine one another (rather than espousing a series of strict, uni-directional, cause and effect relationships – see Reductionism – or resorting to Epiphenomenalism). Like Structuralism, it places particular focus on the determination of identities, values and economies in relation to one another, rather than assuming intrinsic properties or essences of signs or components as starting points.[10] In this limited sense, there is a nascent Relativism and Constructionism within the French Structuralists that was consciously addressed by them but never examined to the point of dismantling their reductionist tendencies. Unlike Structuralists, however, the Post-structuralists questioned the division between relation and component and, correspondingly, did not attempt to reduce the subjects of their study to an essential set of relations that could be portrayed with abstract, functional schemes or mathematical symbols (as in Claude Lévi-Strauss's algebraic formulation of mythological transformation in "The Structural Study of Myth"[11]).

Post-structuralism Post-Structuralists generally reject the notion of formulations of “essential relations” in primitive cultures, languages, or descriptions of psychological phenomena being forms of Aristotelianism, Rationalism, or Idealism. Another common thread among thinkers associated with the Post-Structuralist movement is the criticism of the absolutist, quasi-scientific claims of Structuralist theorists as more reflective of the mechanistic bias[12] inspired by bureaucratization and industrialization than of the inner-workings of actual primitive cultures, languages or psyches. Generally, Post-structuralists emphasize the inter-determination and contingency of social and historical phenomena with each other and with the cultural values and biases of perspective. Such realities were not to be dissected, in the manner of some Structuralists, as a system of facts that could exist independently from values and paradigms (either those of the analysts or the subjects themselves), but to be understood as both causes and effects of each other.[13] For this reason, most Post-structuralists hold a more open-ended view of function within systems than did Structuralists and were sometimes accused of circularity and ambiguity. Post-structuralists countered that, when closely examined, all formalized claims describing phenomena, reality, or truth, rely on some form or circular reasoning and self-referential logic that is often paradoxical in nature. Thus, it was important to uncover the hidden patterns of circularity, self-reference and paradox within a given set of statements rather that feign objectivity, as such an investigation might allow new perspectives to have influence and new practices to be sanctioned or adopted. In this latter respect, Post-structuralists were, as a group, continuing the philosophical project initiated by Martin Heidegger, who saw himself as extending the implications of Friedrich Nietzsche's work.

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Postmodernism Post-structuralist writing tends to connect observations and references from many, widely varying disciplines into a synthetic view of knowledge and its relationship to experience, the body, society and economy - a synthesis in which it sees itself as participating. Structuralists, while also somewhat inter-disciplinary, were more comfortable within departmental boundaries and often maintained the autonomy of their analytical methods over the objects they analyzed. Post-structuralists, unlike Structuralists, did not privilege a system of (abstract) "relations" over the specifics to which such relations were applied, but tended to see the notion of “the relation” or of systemization itself as part-and-parcel of any stated conclusion rather than a reflection of reality as an independent, self-contained state or object. If anything, if a part of objective reality, theorization and systemization to Post-structuralists was an exponent of larger, more nebulous patterns of control in social orders – patterns that could not be encapsulated in theory without simultaneously conditioning it. For this reason, certain Post-structural thinkers were also criticized by more Realist, Naturalist or Essentialist thinkers of anti-intellectualism or anti-Philosophy. Post-structuralists, in contrast to Structuralists, tend to place a great deal of skepticism on the independence of theoretical premises from collective bias and the influence of power, and reject the notion of a "pure" or "scientific" methodology in social analysis, semiotics or philosophical speculation. No theory, they said – especially when concerning human society or psychology – was capable of reducing phenomena to elemental systems or abstract patterns, nor could abstract systems be dismissed as secondary derivatives of a fundamental nature: systemization, phenomena, and values were part of each other.

Postmodernism and Post-postmodernism Recently the notions of metamodernism, Post-postmodernism and the "death of postmodernism" have been increasingly widely debated: in 2007 Andrew Hoborek noted in his introduction to a special issue of the journal Twentieth Century Literature titled "After Postmodernism" that "declarations of postmodernism's demise have become a critical commonplace". A small group of critics has put forth a range of theories that aim to describe culture and/or society in the alleged aftermath of postmodernism, most notably Raoul Eshelman (performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky (hypermodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud (Altermodern), and Alan Kirby (digimodernism, formerly called pseudo-modernism). None of these new theories and labels have so far gained very widespread acceptance. The exhibition Postmodernism - Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 24 September 2011 – 15 January 2012) was billed as the first show ever to document postmodernism as a historical movement.

History The term "Postmodern" was first used around the 1870s. John Watkins Chapman suggested "a Postmodern style of painting" as a way to move beyond French Impressionism.[14] J. M. Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion: "The raison d'etre of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition."[15] In 1917, Rudolf Pannwitz used the term to describe a philosophically-oriented culture. His idea of post-modernism drew from Friedrich Nietzsche's analysis of modernity and its end results of decadence and nihilism. Pannwitz's post-human would be able to overcome these predicaments of the modern human. Contrary to Nietzsche, Pannwitz also included nationalist and mythical elements in his use of the term.[16] In 1921 and 1925, Postmodernism had been used to describe new forms of art and music. In 1942 H. R. Hays described it as a new literary form. However, as a general theory for a historical movement it was first used in 1939 by Arnold J. Toynbee: "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918."[17]

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In 1949 the term was used to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, and led to the postmodern architecture movement,[18] perhaps also a response to the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style. Postmodernism in architecture is marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles. After that, Postmodernism was applied to a whole host of movements, many in art, music, and literature, that reacted against tendencies in the imperialist phase of Portland Building, an capitalism called "modernism," and are typically marked by revival of historical example of Postmodern architecture elements and techniques.[19] Walter Truett Anderson identifies Postmodernism as one of four typological world views. These four world views are the Postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed; the scientific-rational, in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry; the social-traditional, in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilization; and the neo-romantic, in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.[20] Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and culture, starting in the late 20th century. These developments—re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968—are described with the term Postmodernity, Influences on postmodern thought, Paul Lützeler (St. Louis) as opposed to Postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement. Postmodernism has also been used interchangeably with the term post-structuralism out of which postmodernism grew, a proper understanding of postmodernism or doing justice to the postmodernist thought demands an understanding of the poststructuralist movement and the ideas of its advocates. Post-structuralism resulted similarly to postmodernism by following a time of structuralism. It is characterized by new ways of thinking through structuralism, contrary to the original form.[21] "Postmodernist" describes part of a movement; "Postmodern" places it in the period of time since the 1950s, making it a part of contemporary history.

Influence on art Architecture The movement of Postmodernism began with architecture, as a response to the perceived blandness, hostility, and Utopianism of the Modern movement. Modern Architecture, as established and developed by people such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Philip Johnson, was focused on the pursuit of a perceived ideal perfection, and attempted harmony of form and function,[22] and dismissal of "frivolous ornament."[23][24] Critics of modernism argued Detail of the postmodern Abteiberg Museum in Germany. that the attributes of perfection and minimalism themselves were subjective, and pointed out anachronisms in modern thought and questioned the benefits of its philosophy.[25] Definitive postmodern architecture such as the work of Michael Graves and Robert Venturi reject the notion of a 'pure' form or 'perfect' architectonic detail, instead conspicuously drawing from all methods, materials, forms and colors available to architects. Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is associated with the phrase "less is more"; in contrast Venturi famously said, "Less is a bore." Postmodernist architecture was one of the first aesthetic movements to openly challenge Modernism

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Postmodernism as antiquated and "totalitarian", favoring personal preferences and variety over objective, ultimate truths or principles. It is this atmosphere of criticism, skepticism, and emphasis on difference over and against unity that distinguishes the postmodernism aesthetic. Among writers defining the terms of this discourse is Charles Jencks, described by Architectural Design Magazine as "the definer of Post-Modernism for thirty years" and the "internationally acclaimed critic..., whose name became synonymous with Post-modernism in the 80s".[26]

Urban planning Postmodernism is a rejection of 'totality', of the notion that planning could be 'comprehensive', widely applied regardless of context, and rational. In this sense, Postmodernism is a rejection of its predecessor: Modernism. From the 1920s onwards, the Modern movement sought to design and plan cities which followed the logic of the new model of industrial mass production; reverting to large-scale solutions, aesthetic standardisation and prefabricated design solutions (Goodchild 1990). Postmodern also brought a break from the notion that planning and architecture could result in social reform, which was an integral dimension of the plans of Modernism (Simonsen 1990). Furthermore, Modernism eroded urban living by its failure to recognise differences and aim towards homogenous landscapes (Simonsen 1990, 57). Within Modernism, urban planning represented a 20th century move towards establishing something stable, structured, and rationalised within what had become a world of chaos, flux and change (Irving 1993, 475). The role of planners predating Postmodernism was one of the 'qualified professional' who believed they could find and implement one single 'right way' of planning new urban establishments (Irving 1993). In fact, after 1945, urban planning became one of the methods through which capitalism could be managed and the interests of developers and corporations could be administered (Irving 1993, 479). Considering Modernism inclined urban planning to treat buildings and developments as isolated, unrelated parts of the overall urban ecosystems created fragmented, isolated, and homogeous urban landscapes (Goodchild, 1990). One of the greater problems with Modernist-style of planning was the disregard of resident or public opinion, which resulted in planning being forced upon the majority by a minority consisting of affluent professionals with little to no knowledge of real 'urban' problems characteristic of post-Second World War urban environments; slums, overcrowding, deteriorated infrastructure, pollution and disease, among others (Irving 1993). These were precisely the 'urban ills' Modernism was meant to 'solve', but more often than not, the types of 'comprehensive', 'one size fits all' approaches to planning made things worse., and residents began to show interest in becoming involved in decisions which had once been solely entrusted to professionals of the built environment. Advocacy planning and participatory models of planning emerged in the 1960s to counter these traditional elitist and technocratic approaches to urban planning (Irving 1993; Hatuka & D'Hooghe 2007). Furthermore, an assessment of the 'ills' of Modernism among planners during the 1960s, fuelled development of a participatory model that aimed to expand the range of participants in urban interventions (Hatuka & D'Hooghe 2007, 21). Jane Jacobs's 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a sustained critique of urban planning as it had developed within Modernism and marked a transition from modernity to postmodernity in thinking about urban planning (Irving 1993, 479). However, the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism is often said to have happened at 3:32pm on the 15th of July in 1972, when Pruitt Igoe; a housing development for low-income people in St. Louis designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, which had been a prize winning version of Le Corbusier's 'machine for modern living' was deemed uninhabitable and was torn down (Irving 1993, 480). Since then, Postmodernism has involved theories that embrace and aim to create diversity, and it exhaults uncertainty, flexibility and change (Hatuka & D'Hooghe 2007). Postmodern planning aims to accept pluralism and heighten awareness of social differences in order to accept and bring to light the claims of minority and disadvantaged groups (Goodchild 1990). It is important to note that urban planning discourse within Modernity and Postmodernity has developed in different contexts, even though they both grew within a capitalist culture. Modernity was shaped by a capitalist ethic of Fordist-Keynesian paradigm of mass, standardized production and consumption, while postmodernity was created

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Postmodernism out of a more flexible form of capital accumulation, labor markets and organisations (Irving 1993, 60). Also, there is a distinction between a postmodernism of 'reaction' and one of 'resistance'. A postmodernism of 'reaction' rejects Modernism and seeks to return to the lost traditions and history in order to create a new cultural synthesis, while Postmodernity of 'resistance' seeks to deconstruct Modernism and is a critique of the origins without necessarily returning to them (Irving 1993, 60). As a result of Postmodernism, planners are much less inclined to lay a firm or steady claim to there being one single 'right way' of engaging in urban planning and are more open to different styles and ideas of 'how to plan' (Irving 474).[27][28][29][30]

Literature Literary postmodernism was officially inaugurated in the United States with the first issue of boundary 2, subtitled "Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture", which appeared in 1972. David Antin, Charles Olson, John Cage, and the Black Mountain College school of poetry and the arts were integral figures in the intellectual and artistic exposition of postmodernism at the time.[31] boundary 2 remains an influential journal in postmodernist circles today.[32] Jorge Luis Borges's (1939) short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. is often considered as predicting postmodernism[33] and conceiving the ideal [34] of the ultimate parody. Samuel Beckett is sometimes seen as an important precursor and influence. Novelists who are commonly connected with postmodern literature include Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, William Burroughs, Giannina Braschi, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, E.L. Doctorow, Jerzy Kosinski, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, Ana Lydia Vega, and Paul Auster. In 1971, the Arab-American scholar Ihab Hassan published The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, an early work of literary criticism from a postmodern perspective, in which the author traces the development of what he calls "literature of silence" through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman. In 'Postmodernist Fiction' (1987), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that the former is characterized by an epistemological dominant, and that postmodern works have developed out of modernism and are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. In Constructing Postmodernism (1992), McHale's second book, he provides readings of postmodern fiction and of some of the contemporary writers who go under the label of cyberpunk. McHale's "What Was Postmodernism?" (2007)[35], follows Raymond Federman's lead in now using the past tense when discussing postmodernism.

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Music Postmodern music is either music of the postmodern era, or music that follows aesthetic and philosophical trends of postmodernism. As the name suggests, the postmodernist movement formed partly in reaction to the ideals of the modernist. Because of this, Postmodern music is mostly defined in opposition to modernist music, and a work can either be modernist, or postmodern, but not both. Jonathan Kramer posits the idea (following Umberto Eco and Jean-François Lyotard) that postmodernism (including musical postmodernism) is less a surface style or historical period (i.e., condition) than an attitude. The postmodern impulse in classical music arose in the 1960s with the advent of musical minimalism. Composers such as Terry Riley, Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti, Henryk Górecki, Bradley Joseph, John Adams, George Crumb, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Michael Nyman, and Lou Composer Henryk Górecki. Harrison reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies, whilst others, most notably John Cage challenged the prevailing Narratives of beauty and objectivity common to Modernism. Some composers have been openly influenced by popular music and world ethnic musical traditions. Postmodern Classical music as well is not a musical style, but rather refers to music of the postmodern era. It bears the same relationship to postmodernist music that postmodernity bears to postmodernism. Postmodern music, on the other hand, shares characteristics with postmodernist art—that is, art that comes after and reacts against modernism (see Modernism in Music). Though representing a general return to certain notions of music-making that are often considered to be classical or romantic, not all postmodern composers have eschewed the experimentalist or academic tenets of modernism. The works of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, for example, exhibit experimentalist preoccupation that is decidedly anti-romantic. Eclecticism and freedom of expression, in reaction to the rigidity and aesthetic limitations of modernism, are the hallmarks of the postmodern influence in musical composition.

Other Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, part of the Metal Gear series, is widely considered to be an example of a postmodern video game and a case for video games as art. The game explores the relationship between the player, character, and narrative in a manner widely considered groundbreaking, as well as exploring themes such as censorship, memes, and the flaws of democracy.

Influential postmodernist philosophers Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) Rejected the philosophical basis of the concepts of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" and asserted that similar grounding oppositions in logic ultimately refer to one another. Instead of resisting the admission of this paradox in the search for understanding, Heidegger requires that we embrace it through an active process of elucidation he called the "Hermeneutic Circle". He stressed the historicity and cultural construction of concepts while simultaneously advocating the necessity of an atemporal and immanent apprehension of them. In this vein, he asserted that it was the task of contemporary philosophy to recover the original question of (or "openness to") Dasein (translated as Being or Being-in-the-World) present in the Presocratic philosophers but normalized, neutered and standardized since Plato. This was to be done, in part, by tracing the record of

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Postmodernism Dasein's sublimation or forgetfulness through the history of philosophy which meant that we were to ask again what constituted the grounding conditions in ourselves and in the World for the affinity between beings and between the many usages of the term "being" in philosophy. To do this, however, a non-historical and, to a degree, self-referential engagement with whatever set of ideas, feelings or practices would permit (both the non-fixed concept and reality of) such a continuity was required - a continuity permitting the possible experience, possible existence indeed not only of beings but of all differences as they appeared and tended to develop. Such a conclusion led Heidegger to depart from the Phenomenology of his teacher Husserl and prompt instead an (ironically anachronistic) return to the yet-unasked questions of Ontology, a return that in general did not acknowledge an intrinsic distinction between phenomena and noumena or between things in themselves (de re) and things as they appear (see qualia): Being-in-the-world, or rather, the openness to the process of Dasein's/Being's becoming was to bridge the age-old gap between these two. In this latter premise, Heidegger shares an affinity with the late Romantic philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, another principal forerunner of Post-structuralist and Postmodernist thought. Influential to thinkers associated with Postmodernism are Heidegger's critique of the subject-object or sense-knowledge division implicit in Rationalism, Empiricism and Methodological Naturalism, his repudiation of the idea that facts exist outside or separately from the process of thinking and speaking them (however, Heidegger is not specifically a Nominalist), his related admission that the possibilities of philosophical and scientific discourse are wrapped up in the practices and expectations of a society and that concepts and fundamental constructs are the expression of a lived, historical exercise rather than simple derivations of external, apriori conditions independent from historical mind and changing experience (see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Heinrich von Kleist, Weltanschauung and Social Constructionism), and his Instrumentalist and Negativist notion that Being (and, by extension, reality) is an action, method, tendency, possibility and question rather than a discreet, positive, identifiable state, answer or entity (see also Process Philosophy, Dynamism, Instrumentalism, Pragmatism and Vitalism). Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) Re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of 'presence' or metaphysics in an analytical technique which, beginning as a point of departure from Heidegger's notion of Destruktion, came to be known as Deconstruction. Derrida utilized, like Heidegger, references to Greek philosophical notions associated with the Skeptics and the Presocratics, such as Epoché and Aporia to articulate his notion of implicit circularity between premises and conclusions, origins and manifestations, but - in a manner analogous in certain respects to Gilles Deleuze - presented a radical re-reading of canonical philosophical figures such as Plato, Aristotle and Descartes as themselves being informed by such "destabilizing" notions. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) Introduced concepts such as 'discursive regime', or re-invoked those of older philosophers like 'episteme' and 'genealogy' in order to explain the relationship among meaning, power, and social behavior within social orders (see The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality). In direct contradiction to what have been typified as Modernist perspectives on epistemology, Foucault asserted that rational judgment, social practice and what he called 'biopower' are not only inseparable but co-determinant. While Foucault himself was deeply involved in a number of progressive political causes and maintained close personal ties with members of the far-Left, he was also controversial with Leftist thinkers of his day, including those associated with various strains of Marxism, proponents of Left libertarianism (e.g. Noam Chomsky) and Humanism (e.g. Jürgen Habermas), for his rejection of what he deemed to be Enlightenment-derived concepts of freedom, liberation, self-determination and human nature. Instead, Foucault focused on the ways in which such constructs can foster cultural hegemony, violence and exclusion. In line with his rejection of such 'positive' tenets of Enlightenment-era Humanism, he was active,

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Postmodernism with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, considering much of institutionalized psychiatry and, in particular, Freud's concept of repression central to Psychoanalysis (which was still very influential in France during the 1960s and 70s), to be both harmful and misplaced. Foucault was known for his controversial aphorisms, such as "language is oppression", meaning that language functions in such a way as to render nonsensical, false or silent tendencies that might otherwise threaten or undermine the distributions of power backing a society's conventions - even when such distributions purport to celebrate liberation and expression or value minority groups and perspectives. His writings have had a major influence on the larger body of Postmodern academic literature. Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) Identified in The Postmodern Condition a crisis in the 'discourses of the Human Sciences' latent in Modernism but catapulted to the fore by the advent of the "computerized" or "telematic" era (see Information Revolution). This crisis, insofar as it pertains to academia, concerns both the motivations and justification procedures for making research claims: unstated givens or values that have validated the basic efforts of academic research since the late 18th century might no longer be valid (particularly, in Social Science & Humanities research, though examples from Mathematics are given by Lyotard as well). As formal conjecture about real-world issues becomes inextricably linked to automated calculation, information storage and retrieval, such knowledge becomes increasingly "exteriorised" from its knowers in the form of information. Knowledge is materialized and made into a commodity exchanged between producers and consumers; it ceases to be either an idealistic end-in-itself or a tool capable of bringing about liberty or social benefit; it is stripped of its humanistic and spiritual associations, its connection with education, teaching and human development, being simply rendered as "data" - omnipresent, material, unending and without any contexts or pre-requisites.[36] Furthermore, the 'diversity' of claims made by various disciplines begins to lack any unifying principle or intuition as objects of study become more and more specialized due to the emphasis on specificity, precision and uniformity of reference that competitive, database-oriented research implies. The value-premises upholding academic research have been maintained by what Lyotard considers to be quasi-mythological beliefs about human purpose, human reason and human progress - large, background constructs he calls "Metanarratives". These Metanarratives still remain in Western society but are now being undermined by rapid Informatization and the commercialization of the University and its functions. The shift of authority from the presence and intuition of knowers - from the good-faith of Reason to seek diverse knowledge integrated for human benefit or truth fidelity - to the automated database and the market had, in Lyotard's view, the power to unravel the very idea of 'justification' or 'legitimation' and, with it, the rationale for research altogether - esp. in disciplines pertaining to human life, society and meaning. We are now controlled not by binding extra-linguistic value paradigms defining notions of collective identity and ultimate purpose, but rather by our automatic responses to different species of "language games" (a concept Lyotard imports from JL Austin's theory of Speech Acts). In his vision of a solution to this "vertigo," Lyotard opposes the assumptions of universality, consensus, and generality that he identified within the thought of Humanistic, Neo-Kantian philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and proposes a continuation of experimentation and diversity to be assessed pragmatically in the context of language games rather than via appeal to a resurrected series of transcendentals and metaphysical unities. Richard Rorty (1931–2007) Argues in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that contemporary Analytic philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods. In addition, he denounces the traditional epistemological perspectives of Representationalism and Correspondence theory that rely upon the independence of knowers and observers from phenomena and the passivity of natural phenomena in relation to consciousness. As a proponent of anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism within a Pragmatist framework, he echoes Postmodern strains of Conventionalism and Philosophical Relativism, but opposes much Postmodern thinking with his commitment

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Postmodernism to Social Liberalism. Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), In Simulacra and Simulation, introduced the concept that reality or the principle of the "real" is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs in an era whose communicative and semantic acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies. Baudrillard proposes the notion that, in such a state, where subjects are detached from the outcomes of events (political, literary, artistic, personal, or otherwise), events no longer hold any particular sway on the subject nor have any identifiable context; they therefore have the effect of producing widespread indifference, detachment, and passivity in industrialized populations. He claimed that a constant stream of appearances and references without any direct consequences to viewers or readers could eventually render the division between appearance and object indiscernible, resulting, ironically, in the "disappearance" of mankind in what is, in effect, a virtual or holographic state, composed only of appearances. Fredric Jameson (born 1934) set forth one of the first expansive theoretical treatments of Postmodernism as a historical period, intellectual trend and social phenomenon in a series of lectures at the Whitney Museum, later expanded as Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Eclectic in his methodology, Jameson has continued a sustained examination of the role that Periodization continues to play as a grounding assumption of critical methodologies in Humanities disciplines. He has contributed extensive effort to explicating the importance of concepts of Utopianism and Utopia as driving forces in the cultural and intellectual movements of Modernity, and outlining the political and existential uncertainties that may result from the decline or suspension of this trend in the theorized state of Postmodernity. Like Susan Sontag, Jameson served to introduce a wide audience of American readers to key figures of the 20th Century Continental European intellectual Left, particularly those associated with the Frankfurt School, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Thus, his importance as a 'translator' of their ideas to the common vocabularies of a variety of disciplines in the Anglo-American academic complex is equally as important as his own critical engagement with them. Douglas Kellner (born 1943) In "Analysis of the Journey," a journal birthed from postmodernism, Kellner insists that the "assumptions and procedures of modern theory" must be forgotten. His terms defined in the depth of postmodernism is based off of advancement, innovation, and adaptation. Extensively, Kellner analyzes the terms of this theory in real life experiences and examples. Kellner used science and technology studies as a major part of his analysis; he urged that the theory is incomplete without it. The scale was larger than just postmodernism alone, it must be interpreted through cultural studies where science and technology studies play a huge role. The reality of the September Eleventh attacks on the United States of America is the catalyst for his explanation. This catalyst is used as a great representation due to the mere fact of the planned ambush and destruction of "symbols of globalization", insinuating the World Trade Centers. One of the numerous, yet appropriate definitions of postmodernism and the qualm aspect aids this attribute to seem perfectly accurate. In response, Kellner continues to examine the repercussions of understanding the affects of the September Eleventh attacks. He questions if the attacks are only able to be understood in a limited form of postmodern theory due to the level of irony.[37] In further studies, he enhances the idea of semiotics in alignment with the theory. Similar to the act of September Eleventh and the symbols that were interpreted through this postmodern ideal, he continues to even describe this as "semiotic systems" that people use to make sense of their lives and the events that occur in them. Kellner's adamancy that signs are necessary to understand one's culture is what he analyzes from the evidence that most cultures have used signs in place of existence. Finally, he recognizes that many theorists of postmodernism are trapped by their own cogitations. He finds strength in theorist Baudrillard and his idea of Marxism. Kellner cannot deny Marxism's end and lack of importance to his theory. The conclusion he depicts is simple: postmodernism, as most utilize it today, will decide what experiences and signs in one's reality will be one's reality as they know it.[38]

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Criticisms Criticism of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, including the assertions that postmodernism is meaningless and promotes obscurantism. For example, philosopher Noam Chomsky has argued that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals do not respond like people in other fields when asked, "what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc?...If [these requests] can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames."[39] Formal, academic critiques of postmodernism can also be found in works such as Beyond the Hoax and Fashionable Nonsense.

References [1] An Overview of Premodernism, Modernism, & Postmodernism. Postmodern Psychology. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Feb 2012. (http:/ / www. postmodernpsychology. com) [2] Askoxford.com (http:/ / www. askoxford. com/ concise_oed/ postmodernism?view=uk) [3] Merriam-Webster's definition of postmodernism (http:/ / www. merriam-webster. com/ dictionary/ postmodernism) [4] Ruth Reichl, Cook's November 1989; American Heritage Dictionary's definition of "postmodern" (http:/ / www. bartleby. com/ 61/ 26/ P0472600. html) [5] ’Postmodernism and “the other side”’, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A reader, edited by John Storey, London, : Pearson Education .2006 [6] Perry Anderson, "The Origins of Postmodernity", London: Verso, 1998. [7] Yilmaz, K 2010, "Postmodernism and its Challenge to the Discipline of History: Implications for History Education", Educational Philosophy & Theory, 42, 7, pp. 779-795, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 15 April 2012. [8] "there is nothing outside the text" translated from French (il n'y a pas de hors-texte), which means that “there is no such a thing as out-of-the-text”, in other words, the context is an integral part of the text. Derrida (1967) Of Grammatology, Part II Introduction to the "Age of Rousseau," section 2 "...That Dangerous Supplement...", title The Exorbitant. Question of Method, pp. 158–59, 163 [9] On 9 March 2007, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger appointed Spivak University Professor, the institution's highest faculty rank. In a letter to the faculty, he wrote: "Not only does her world-renowned scholarship—grounded in deconstructivist literary theory—range widely from critiques of post-colonial discourse to feminism, Marxism, and globalization; her lifelong search for fresh insights and understanding has transcended the traditional boundaries of discipline while retaining the fire for new knowledge that is the hallmark of a great intellect." [10] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (First published New York: Basic Books, 1963; New York: Anchor Books Ed., 1967), 324. Lévi-Strauss, quoting D'Arcy Westworth Thompson states - "To those who question the possibility of defining the interrelations between entities whose nature is not completely understood, I shall reply with the following comment by a great naturalist In a very large part of morphology, our essential task lies in the comparison of related forms rather than in the precise definition of each; and the deformation of a complicated figure may be a phenomenon easy of comprehension, though the figure itself has to be left unanalyzed and undefined. [11] Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropologie Structurale. Paris: Éditions Plon, 1958. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 228 (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=RmeUknlauJAC& lpg=PP1& ots=NJWcwczLLV& dq=Structural Anthropology Basic Books& pg=PA228#v=onepage& q=Structural Anthropology Basic Books& f=false). [12] See the following (http:/ / www. anarchopedia. org/ mechanistic_bias) web reference for a common critique of from an "Anti-positivist" perspective. [13] Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. II: A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 101. Orig. published as Mille Plateaux, in 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris. Deleuze, here echoing the sentiments of Derrida's reflection on Foucault's "The History of Madness" (1961) in his essay "Cogito and the History of Madness" (1963), makes a very thinly veiled reference to semiological certainty of both Saussure and Lacan (who speaks of "The Unity of the Father" in his theory of semantic coherence), critiquing the premise of objectivity in their methodology "The scientific model taking language as an object of study is one with the political model by which language is homogenized, centralized, and standardized, becoming a language of power, a major or dominant language. Linguistics can claim all it wants to be science, nothing but pure science -- it wouldn't be the first time that the order of pure science was used to secure the requirements of another order...The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at times advances along a broad front, and at times swoops down on diverse centers simultaneously...The scientific enterprise of extracting constants and constant relations is always coupled with the political enterprise of imposing them on speakers and transmitting order-worlds." [14] The Postmodern Turn, Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, Ohio University Press, 1987. p12ff

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Postmodernism [15] Thompson, J. M. "Post-Modernism," The Hibbert Journal. Vol XII No. 4, July 1914. p. 733 [16] Pannwitz, Rudolf. Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur, Nürnberg 1917 [17] OED long edition [18] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2004 [19] Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 2004 [20] Walter Truett Anderson (1996). The Fontana Postmodernism Reader. [21] Yilmaz, K 2010, 'Postmodernism and its Challenge to the Discipline of History: Implications for History Education', Educational Philosophy & Theory, 42, 7, pp. 779-795, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 18 April 2012. [22] Sullivan, Louis. "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” published Lippincott's Magazine (March 1896). [23] Loos, Adolf. "Ornament and Crime,” published 1908. [24] Manfredo Tafuri, 'Architecture and utopia: design and capitalist development', Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976. [25] Venturi, et al. [26] "Radical Post-Modernism: Architectural Design" (http:/ / www. architectural-design-magazine. com/ details/ book/ 1338909/ Radical-Post-Modernism-Architectural-Design. html). . Retrieved 12 February 2012. [27] Goodchild, B 1990, 'Planning and the Modern'Postmodern Debate', in The Town Planning Review, vol. 61, no. 2, pp. 119–137. [28] Hatuka, T & D'Hooghe, A 2007, 'After Postmodernism: readdressing the Role of Utopia in Urban Design and Planning', in Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm, vol. 19, Issue 2, pp. 20–27/ [29] Irving, A 1993, 'The Modern/Postmodern Divide and Urban Planning', in The University of Toronto Quareterly, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 474–487. [30] Simonsen, K 1990, 'Planning on 'Postmodern' Conditions', in Acta Sociologica, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 51–62. [31] Anderson, The origins of postmodernity, London: Verso, 1998, Ch.2: "Crystallization". [32] boundary 2, Duke University Press, Boundary2.dukejournals.org (http:/ / boundary2. dukejournals. org/ ) [33] Elizabeth Bellalouna, Michael L. LaBlanc, Ira Mark Milne (2000) Literature of Developing Nations for Students: L-Z (http:/ / books. google. es/ books?id=CecJAQAAMAAJ) p.50 [34] Stavans (1997) p.31 (http:/ / books. google. es/ books?id=Ro6a1EyaS2AC& pg=PA31) [35] http:/ / www. electronicbookreview. com/ thread/ fictionspresent/ tense [36] Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979. English Translation by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester University Press, 1984. See Chapter 1, The Field: Knowledge in Computerised Societies. (http:/ / www. marxists. org/ reference/ subject/ philosophy/ works/ fr/ lyotard. htm)// [37] Lule, Jack. "The Postmodern Adventure (Book)." Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78.4 (2001): 865-866. Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 Apr 2012. [38] Danto, AC 1990, "The Hyper-Intellectual", New Republic, 203, 11/12, pp. 44-48, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 2 April 2012. . [39] Noam Chomsky on Post-Modernism (http:/ / www. cscs. umich. edu/ ~crshalizi/ chomsky-on-postmodernism. html)

Further reading • Powell, Jim (1998). "Postmodernism For Beginners" (ISBN 978-1-934389-09-6) • Alexie, Sherman (2000). "The Toughest Indian in the World" (ISBN 0-8021-3800-4) • Anderson, Walter Truett. The Truth about the Truth (New Consciousness Reader). New York: Tarcher. (1995) (ISBN 0-87477-801-8) • Anderson, Perry. The origins of postmodernity. London: Verso, 1998. • Ashley, Richard and Walker, R. B. J. (1990) “Speaking the Language of Exile.” International Studies Quarterly v 34, no 3 259-68. • Bauman, Zygmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. • Beck, Ulrich (1986) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. • Benhabib, Seyla (1995) 'Feminism and Postmodernism' in (ed. Nicholson) Feminism Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New York: Routledge. • Berman, Marshall (1982) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (ISBN 0-14-010962-5). • Bertens, Hans (1995) The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge. (ISBN 0-145-06012-5). • Best, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory (1991) excerpt and text search (http://www. amazon.com/dp/0898624185) • Best, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Turn (1997) excerpt and text search (http://www. amazon.com/dp/1572302216)

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Postmodernism • Bielskis, Andrius (2005) Towards a Postmodern Understanding of the Political: From Genealogy to Hermeneutics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). • Braschi, Giannina (1994), Empire of Dreams, introduction by Alicia Ostriker, Yale University Press, New Haven, London. • Brass, Tom, Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism (London: Cass, 2000). • Butler, Judith (1995) 'Contingent Foundations' in (ed. Nicholson) Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. New Yotk: Routledge. • Callinicos, Alex, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). • Drabble, M. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6 ed., article "Postmodernism". • Farrell, John. "Paranoia and Postmodernism," the epilogue to Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Cornell UP, 2006), 309-327. • Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer culture and postmodernism, London; Newbury Park, Calif., Sage Publications. • Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self Identity, Cambridge: Polity Press. • Gosselin, Paul (2012) Flight From the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West. volume I. Samizdat (http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/publications/Flight_Absolute_pg.htm) (ISBN 978-2-9807774-3-1) • Goulimari, Pelagia (ed.) (2007) Postmodernism. What Moment? Manchester: Manchester University Press (ISBN 978-0-7190-7308-3) • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Grebowicz, Margaret (ed.), Gender After Lyotard. NY: Suny Press, 2007. (ISBN 978-0-7914-6956-9) Greer, Robert C. Mapping Postmodernism. IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003. (ISBN 0-8308-2733-1) Groothuis, Douglas. Truth Decay. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000. Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (ISBN 0-631-16294-1) Hicks, Stephen R. C. (2004) Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (ISBN 1-59247-646-5) Honderich, T., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, article "Postmodernism". Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. (2002) online edition] (http://www.questia.com/read/ 107450059?title=The Politics of Postmodernism) Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (ISBN 0-8223-1090-2) Kirby, Alan (2009) Digimodernism. New York: Continuum. Lash, S. (1990) The sociology of postmodernism London, Routledge. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (ISBN 0-8166-1173-4) --- (1988). The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985. Ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. (ISBN 0-8166-2211-6) --- (1993), "Scriptures: Diffracted Traces." In: Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 21(1), 2004. --- (1995), "Anamnesis: Of the Visible." In: Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 21(1), 2004. McHale,Brian, (1987) 'Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge. --- (1992), 'Constructing Postmodernism. NY & London: Routledge. --- (2008), "1966 Nervous Breakdown, or, When Did Postmodernism Begin?" Modern Language Quarterly 69, 3:391-413. --- (2007), "What Was Postmodernism?" electronic book review, (http://www.electronicbookreview.com/ thread/fictionspresent/tense) MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, 2nd edn.). Magliola, Robert, Derrida on the Mend (Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1984; 1986; pbk. 2000, ISBN I-55753-205-2).

• ---, On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture (Atlanta: Scholars Press of American Academy of Religion, 1997; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; ISBN 0-7885-0295-6, cloth, ISBN 0-7885-0296-4, pbk).

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Postmodernism • Manuel, Peter. "Music as Symbol, Music as Simulacrum: Pre-Modern, Modern, and Postmodern Aesthetics in Subcultural Musics," Popular Music 1/2, 1995, pp. 227–239. • Murphy, Nancey, Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Ethics (Westview Press, 1997). • Natoli, Joseph (1997) A Primer to Postmodernity (ISBN 1-57718-061-5) • Norris, Christopher (1990) What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (ISBN 0-8018-4137-2) • Pangle, Thomas L., The Ennobling of Democracy: The Challenge of the Postmodern Age, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991 ISBN 0-8018-4635-8 • Park, Jin Y., ed., Buddhisms and Deconstructions (Lanham: Rowland & Littlefield, 2006, ISBN 978-0-7425-3418-6; ISBN 0-7425-3418-9. • Sim, Stuart. (1999). "The Routledge critical dictionary of postmodern thought" (ISBN 0415923530) • Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont (1998) Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (ISBN 0-312-20407-8) • Vattimo, Gianni (1989). The Transparent Society (ISBN 0-8018-4528-9) • Veith Jr., Gene Edward (1994) Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture (ISBN 0-89107-768-5) • Windshuttle, Keith (1996) The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering our Past. New York: The Free Press. • Woods, Tim, Beginning Postmodernism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999,(Reprinted 2002)(ISBN 0-7190-5210-6 Hardback,ISBN 0-7190-5211-4 Paperback) .

External links • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on postmodernism (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ postmodernism/) • Discourses of Postmodernism. Multilingual Bibliography by Janusz Przychodzen (PDF file) (http://www.umass. edu/complit/aclanet/SyllPDF/JanuList.pdf) • Modernity, postmodernism and the tradition of dissent, by Lloyd Spencer (1998) (http://www.tasc.ac.uk/ depart/media/staff/ls/Modules/Theory/PoMoDis.htm) • Dueling Paradigms: Modernist v. Postmodernist Thought * Characterizing a Fogbank: What Is Postmodernism, and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of it? (http://www.critcrim.org/critpapers/milovanovic_postmod.htm) • Postmodernism and truth (http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/postmod.tru.htm) by philosopher Daniel Dennett • Postmodernism is the new black (http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8401159): How the shape of modern retailing was both predicted and influenced by some unlikely seers (The Economist 19 December 2006) • Gaining clarity: after postmodernism (http://acheret.co.il/en/?cmd=articles.326), Eretz Acheret (http:// acheret.co.il/en) Magazine

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Nous This article is about the concept of nous or intellect in philosophy. See also Intelligence (disambiguation) and Intellect (disambiguation). Nous (British:  /ˈnaʊs/;[1] US: /ˈnuːs/), sometimes equated to intellect or intelligence, is a philosophical term for the faculty of the human mind which is described in classical philosophy as necessary for understanding what is true or real, similar in meaning to intuition. It is also often described as a form of perception which works within the mind ("the mind's eye"), rather than only through the physical senses.[2] The three commonly used philosophical terms are from Greek, νοῦς or νόος, and Latin intellectus and intelligentia respectively. In philosophy, common English translations include "understanding" and "mind"; or sometimes "reason" and "thought".[3][4] To describe the activity of this faculty, apart from verbs based on "understanding", the verb "intellection" is sometimes used in philosophical contexts, and the Greek words noēsis and noein are sometimes also used. In colloquial British English, nous denotes "common sense", which is close to the original everyday meaning it had in Ancient Greece. Apart from referring to a faculty of the human mind, this philosophical concept has often been extended to describe the source of order in nature itself.

Introduction: nous in philosophy The basic meaning of "nous" or "intellect" is "understanding", but several sources or types of "understandings" are often distinguished from each other: • Sense perception is a source of feelings, impressions, or raw data about things, but it needs to be interpreted in order to be converted into real understanding. • Reason is a source of new understandings but it is built by putting together and distinguishing other things already understood. Philosophical discussion of nous has therefore centred around the origin of the most basic understandings which This diagram shows the medieval understanding of spheres of the cosmos, derived from allow people to make sense of what Aristotle, and as per the standard explanation by Ptolemy. It came to be understood that at they see, hear, taste or feel, and which least the outermost sphere (marked "Primũ Mobile") has its own intellect, intelligence or also allow them to start reasoning. nous - a cosmic equivalent to the human mind. These basic understandings are often felt to at least include such things as understandings of geometrical and logical basics, and also an ability to generalize properly into correct categories or universals, setting definitions. This mental step between perception and reasoning has sometimes been discussed as an aspect of perception or an aspect of reasoning, as will be seen below.

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The question then also arose of whether there can really be any source of such basic understanding other than the accumulation of perceptions. Somehow the human mind sets definitions in a consistent way, because people perceive the same things and can discuss them. So the argument goes, as will be shown below, that people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same things the same ways. And in addition to this it has also been argued that this possibility must require help of a spiritual and divine type. The question of where understanding comes from, is therefore related to the question of what knowledge is, and how things can and should be defined or classified. Another important philosophical discussion concerning nous stemming from these, involves not only human thinking, but the nature of the cosmos itself. As mentioned above, some philosophers proposed that the human mind must have an ability to understand which is divine, and independent of normal sense experience and physics. This ordering of the individual human mind, it is then argued, must be somehow derived from a cosmic mind which orders nature just like the human mind orders its understanding of nature. This was claimed from an early time, by Greek philosophers such as Anaxagoras. By this type of account, it came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it. Such explanations were influential in the development of medieval accounts of God, the immortality of the soul, and even the motions of the stars, in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, amongst both eclectic philosophers and authors representing all the major faiths of their times.

Pre-Socratic usage In early Greek uses, Homer used nous to signify mental activities of both mortals and immortals, for example what they really have on their mind as opposed to what they say aloud. It was one of several words related to thought, thinking, and perceiving with the mind. Amongst pre-Socratic philosophers it became increasingly distinguished as a source of knowledge and reasoning and opposed to mere sense perception, or thinking influenced by the body such as emotion. For example Heraclitus complained that "much learning does not teach nous".[6] Among some Greek authors a faculty of intelligence, a "higher mind", came to be considered to be a property of the cosmos as a whole.

The first use of the word nous in the Iliad. Agamemnon says to Achilles: "Do not thus, mighty though you are, godlike Achilles, seek to deceive me with your wit (nous); for you will not [5] get by me nor persuade me."

The work of Parmenides of Elea set the scene for Greek philosophy to come and the concept of nous was central to his radical proposals. He claimed that reality as the senses perceive it is not a world of truth at all, because sense perception is so unreliable, and what is perceived is so uncertain and changeable. Instead he argued for a dualism wherein nous and related words (the verb for thinking which describes its mental perceiving activity, noein, and the unchanging and eternal objects of this perception noēta) describe a form of perception which is not physical, but intellectual only, distinct from sense perception and the objects of sense perception. These eternal immaterial objects which people perceive in their mind are the equivalent of the forms or ideas, in the later philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.

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Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, born about 500 BC, is the first person who is definitely known to have explained the concept of a nous (mind), which arranged all other things in the cosmos in their proper order, started them in a rotating motion, and continuing to control them to some extent, having an especially strong connection with living things. (However Aristotle reports an earlier philosopher from Clezomenae named of Hermotimus who had taken a similar position.[7]) Amongst Pre-Socratic philosophers before Anaxagoras, other philosophers had proposed a similar ordering human-like principle causing life and the rotation of the heavens. For example Empedocles, like Hesiod much earlier, described cosmic order and living things as caused by a cosmic version of love,[8] and Pythagoras and Heraclitus, attributed the cosmos with "reason" (logos).[9] According to Anaxagoras the cosmos is made of infinitely divisible matter, every bit of which can inherently become anything, except Anaxagoras of Clezomenae Mind (nous), which is also matter, but which can only be found separated from this general mixture, or else mixed in to living things, or in other words in the Greek terminology of the time, things with a soul (psuchē).[10] Anaxagoras wrote: All other things partake in a portion of everything, while nous is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself. For if it were not by itself, but were mixed with anything else, it would partake in all things if it were mixed with any; for in everything there is a portion of everything, as has been said by me in what goes before, and the things mixed with it would hinder it, so that it would have power over nothing in the same way that it has now being alone by itself. For it is the thinnest of all things and the purest, and it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest strength; and nous has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have soul [psuchē].[11] Concerning cosmology, Anaxagoras, like some Greek philosophers already before him, believed the cosmos was revolving, and had formed into its visible order as a result of such revolving causing a separating and mixing of different types of elements. Nous, in his system, originally caused this revolving motion to start, but it does not necessarily continue to play a role once the mechanical motion has started. His description was in other words (shockingly for the time) corporeal or mechanical, with the moon made of earth, the sun and stars made of red hot metal (beliefs Socrates was later accused of holding during his trial) and nous itself being a physical fine type of matter which also gathered and concentrated with the development of the cosmos. This nous (mind) is not incorporeal; it is the thinnest of all things. The distinction between nous and other things nevertheless causes his scheme to sometimes be described as a peculiar kind of dualism.[10] Anaxagoras' concept of nous was distinct from later platonic and neoplatonic cosmologies in many ways, which were also influenced by Eleatic, Pythagorean and other pre Socratic ideas, as well as the Socratics themselves. In ancient Indian Philosophy also, a "higher mind", came to be considered to be a property of the cosmos as a whole.[12]

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Socratic philosophy Xenophon Xenophon, the less famous of the two students of Socrates whose written accounts of him have survived, recorded that he taught his students a kind of teleological justification of piety and respect for divine order in nature. This has been described as an "intelligent design" argument for the existence of God, in which nature has its own nous. For example in his Memorabilia 1.4.8 he describes Socrates asking a friend sceptical of religion "Are you, then, of the opinion that intelligence (nous) alone exists nowhere and that you by some good chance seized hold of it, while - as you think - those surpassingly large and infinitely numerous things [all the earth and water] are in such orderly condition through some senselessness?" and later in the same discussion he compares the nous which directs each person's body, to the good sense (phronēsis) of the god which is in everything, arranging things to its pleasure. (1.4.17).[13] Plato describes Socrates making the same argument in his Philebus 28d, using the same words nous and phronēsis.[14]

Plato Plato used the word nous in many ways which were not unusual in the everyday Greek of the time, and often simply meant "good sense".[15] On the other hand, in some of his dialogues it is described by key characters in a higher sense, which was apparently already common. In his Philebus 28c he has Socrates say that "all philosophers agree—whereby they really exalt themselves—that mind (nous) is king of heaven and earth. Perhaps they are right." and later states that the ensuing discussion "confirms the utterances of those who declared of old that mind (nous) always rules the universe".[16] In his Cratylus, Plato gives the etymology of Athena's name, the goddess of wisdom, from Atheonóa (Ἀθεονόα) from god's (theos) mind (nous). In his Phaedo, Plato's teacher Socrates is made to say just before dying that his discovery of Anaxagoras' concept of a cosmic nous as the cause of the order of things, was an important turning point for him. But he also expressed disagreement with Anaxagoras' understanding of the implications of his own doctrine, because of Anaxagoras' materialist understanding of causation. Socrates said that Anaxagoras would "give voice and air and hearing and countless other things of the sort as causes for our talking with each other, and should fail to mention the real causes, which are, that the Athenians decided that it was best to condemn me".[17] On the other hand Socrates seems to suggest that he also failed to develop a fully satisfactory teleological and dualistic understanding of a mind of nature, whose aims represent the good things which all parts of nature aim at. Concerning the nous of individuals, the source of understanding, in opposition to Anaxagoras Plato is also widely understood to have accepted ideas from Parmenides which affect his explanation of nous. Like Parmenides, Plato argued that relying on sense perception can never lead to true knowledge, only opinion. Instead, Plato's more philosophical characters argue that nous must somehow perceive truth directly in the ways gods and daimons perceive. What our mind sees directly in order to really understand things must not be the constantly changing material things, but unchanging entities that exist in a different way, the so-called "forms" or "ideas". However he knew that contemporary philosophers often argued (as in modern science) that nous and perception are just two aspects of one physical activity, and that perception is the source of knowledge and understanding (not the other way around). Just exactly how Plato believed that the nous of people lets them come to understand things in any way which improves upon sense perception is a subject of long running discussion and debate. On the one hand, in the Republic Plato's Socrates, in the so-called "metaphor of the sun", and "allegory of the cave" sections describe people as being able to see more clearly because of something from outside themselves, something like when sun shines, helping eyesight. This illumination of the intellect shines from the Form of the Good. On the other hand, in the Meno for example, Plato's Socrates explains the theory of anamnesis whereby people are born with ideas already in their soul, which they somehow remember from previous lives. Both theories were to be highly influential.

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As in Xenophon, and apparently based upon Socrates, Plato frequently describes the soul in a political way, with ruling parts, and parts which are by nature meant to be ruled. Nous is associated with the rational (logistikon) part of the individual human soul, which by nature should rule. In his Republic, in the so-called "analogy of the divided line", it has a special function within this rational part. Plato tended to treat nous as the only immortal part of the soul. Concerning the cosmos, in the Timaeus, the title character also tells a likely story in which nous is responsible for the creative work of the demiurge or maker who brought rational order to our universe. This craftsman imitated what he perceived in the world of eternal Forms. In the Philebus Socrates argues that nous in individual humans must share in a cosmic nous, in the same way that human bodies are made up of small parts of the elements found in the rest of the universe. And this nous must be in the genos of being a cause of all particular things as particular things.[18]

Aristotle Like Plato, Aristotle saw the nous or intellect of an individual as an intuitive understanding, distinguished from sense perception.[19] Like Plato, Aristotle linked nous to logos (reason) as uniquely human, but he also distinguished nous from logos, thereby distinguishing the faculty for setting definitions from the faculty which uses them to reason with.[20] In his Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI Aristotle divides the soul (psuchē) into two parts, one which has reason and one which does not, but then divides the part which has reason into the reasoning (logistikos) part itself which is lower, and the higher "knowing" (epistēmonikos) part which contemplates general principles (archai). Nous, he states, is the source of the first principles or sources (archai) of definitions, and it develops naturally as people get older. This he explains after first comparing the four other truth revealing capacities of soul: technical know how (technē), logically deduced knowledge (epistēmē, sometimes translated as "scientific knowledge"), practical wisdom (phronēsis), and lastly theoretical wisdom (sophia), which is defined by Aristotle as the combination of nous and epistēmē. All of these others apart from nous involve reason (logos). And intellect [nous] is directed at what is ultimate on both sides, since it is intellect and not reason [logos] that is directed at both the first terms [horoi] and the ultimate particulars, on the one side at the changeless first terms in demonstrations, and on the other side, in thinking about action, at the other sort of premise, the variable particular; for these particulars are the sources [archai] from which one discerns that for the sake of which an action is, since the universals are derived from the particulars. Hence intellect is both a beginning and an end, since the demonstrations that are derived from these particulars are also about these. And of these one must have perception, and this perception is intellect.[21] Aristotle's philosophical works continue many of the same Socratic themes as his teacher Plato. Amongst the new proposals he made was a way of explaining causality, and nous is an important part of his explanation. As mentioned above, Plato criticized Anaxagoras' materialism, or understanding that the intellect of nature only set the cosmos in motion, but is no longer seen as the cause of physical events. Aristotle explained that the changes of things can be described in terms of four causes at the same time. Two of these four causes are similar to the materialist understanding: each thing has a material which causes it to be how it is, and some other thing which set in motion or initiated some process of change. But at the same time according to Aristotle each thing is also caused by the natural forms they are tending to become, and the natural ends or aims, which somehow exist in nature as causes, even in cases where human plans and aims are not involved. These latter two causes, are concepts no longer used in modern science, encompassing the continuing effect of the ordering principle of nature itself. Aristotle's special description of causality is especially apparent in the natural development of living things. It leads to a method whereby Aristotle analyses causation and motion in terms of the potentialities and actualities of all things, whereby all matter possesses various possibilities or potentialities of form and end, and these possibilities become more fully real as their potential forms become actual or active reality (something they will do on their own, by nature, unless stopped because of other natural things happening). For example a stone has in its nature the potentiality of falling to the earth and it will do so, and actualize this natural tendency, if nothing is in the way.

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Aristotle analyzed thinking in the same way. For him, the possibility of understanding rests on the relationship of intellect and sense perception. Aristotle's remarks on the concept of what came to be called the "active intellect" and "passive intellect" (along with various other terms) are amongst "the most intensely studied sentences in the history of philosophy".[22] The terms are derived from a single passage in Aristotle's De Anima, Book III. Following is the translation of one of those passages[23] with some key Greek words shown in square brackets. ...since in nature one thing is the material [hulē] for each kind [genos] (this is what is in potency all the particular things of that kind) but it is something else that is the causal and productive thing by which all of them are formed, as is the case with an art in relation to its material, it is necessary in the soul [psuchē] too that these distinct aspects be present; the one sort is intellect [nous] by becoming all things, the other sort by forming all things, in the way an active condition [hexis] like light too makes the colors that are in potency be at work as colors [to phōs poiei ta dunamei onta chrōmata energeiai chrōmata]. This sort of intellect [which is like light in the way it makes potential things work as what they are] is separate, as well as being without attributes and unmixed, since it is by its thinghood a being-at-work [energeia], for what acts is always distinguished in stature above what is acted upon, as a governing source is above the material it works on. Knowledge [epistēmē], in its being-at-work, is the same as the thing it knows, and while knowledge in potency comes first in time in any one knower, in the whole of things it does not take precedence even in time. This does not mean that at one time it thinks but at another time it does not think, but when separated it is just exactly what it is, and this alone is deathless and everlasting (though we have no memory, because this sort of intellect is not acted upon, while the sort that is acted upon is destructible), and without this nothing thinks. The passage tries to explain "how the human intellect passes from its original state, in which it does not think, to a subsequent state, in which it does" according to his distinction between potentiality and actuality.[22] Aristotle says that the passive intellect receives the intelligible forms of things, but that the active intellect is required to make the potential knowledge into actual knowledge, in the same way that light makes potential colors into actual colors. As Davidson remarks: Just what Aristotle meant by potential intellect and active intellect - terms not even explicit in the De anima and at best implied - and just how he understood the interaction between them remains moot. Students of the history of philosophy continue to debate Aristotle's intent, particularly the question whether he considered the active intellect to be an aspect of the human soul or an entity existing independently of man.[22] The passage is often read together with Metaphysics, Book XII, ch.7-10, where Aristotle makes nous as an actuality a central subject within a discussion of the cause of being and the cosmos. In that book, Aristotle equates active nous, when people think and their nous becomes what they think about, with the "unmoved mover" of the universe, and God: "For the actuality of thought (nous) is life, and God is that actuality; and the essential actuality of God is life most good and eternal."[24] Alexander of Aphrodisias, for example, equated this active intellect which is God with the one explained in De Anima, while Themistius thought they could not be simply equated. (See below.) Like Plato before him, Aristotle believes Anaxagoras' cosmic nous implies and requires the cosmos to have intentions or ends: "Anaxagoras makes the Good a principle as causing motion; for Mind (nous) moves things, but moves them for some end, and therefore there must be some other Good—unless it is as we say; for on our view the art of medicine is in a sense health."[25] In the philosophy of Aristotle the soul (psyche) of a body is what makes it alive, and is its actualized form; thus, every living thing, including plant life, has a soul. The mind or intellect (nous) can be described variously as a

Nous power, faculty, part, or aspect of the human soul. It should be noted that for Aristotle soul and intellect are not the same. He did not rule out the possibility that intellect might survive without the rest of the soul, as in Plato, but plants have a 'nutritive' soul without a nous. In his Generation of Animals Aristotle specifically says that while other parts of the soul come from the parents, physically, the nous, must come from outside, into the body, because it is divine or godly, and it has nothing in common with the energeia of the body.[26] This was yet another passage which Alexander of Aphrodisias would link to those mentioned above from De Anima and the Metaphysics in order to understand Aristotle's intentions.

Post Aristotelian classical theories Until the early modern era, much of the discussion which has survived today concerning nous or intellect, in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, concerned how to correctly interpret Aristotle and Plato. However, at least during the classical period, materialist philosophies, more similar to modern science, such as Epicureanism, were still relatively common also. The Epicureans believed that the bodily senses themselves were not the cause of error, but the interpretations can be. The term prolepsis was used by Epicureans to describe the way the mind forms general concepts from sense perceptions. To the Stoics, more like Heraclitus than Anaxagoras, order in the cosmos comes from an entity called logos, the cosmic reason. But as in Anaxagoras this cosmic reason, like human reason but higher, is connected to the reason of individual humans. The Stoics however, did not invoke incorporeal causation, but attempted to explain physics and human thinking in terms of matter and forces. As in Aristotelianism, they explained the interpretation of sense data requiring the mind to be stamped or formed with ideas. However, they did not propose any in-born or acquired equivalent of the "active intellect" in order to explain how people could know understand things. Nous for them is soul "somehow disposed" (pôs echon), the soul being somehow disposed pneuma, which is fire or air or a mixture. As in Plato, they treated nous as the ruling part of the soul.[27] Plutarch criticized the Stoic idea of nous being corporeal, and agreed with Plato that the soul is more divine than the body while nous (mind) is more divine than the soul.[27] The mix of soul and body produces pleasure and pain; the conjunction of mind and soul produces reason which is the cause or the source of virtue and vice. (From: “On the Face in the Moon”) [28] Albinus was one of the earliest authors to equate Aristotle's nous as prime mover of the Universe, with Plato's Form of the Good.[27] Alexander of Aphrodisias Alexander of Aphrodisias was a Peripatetic (Aristotelian) and his On the Soul (referred to as De anima in its traditional Latin title), explained that by his interpretation of Aristotle, potential intellect in man, that which has no nature but receives on from the active intellect, is material, and also called the "material intellect" (nous hulikos) and it is inseparable from the body, being "only a disposition" of it.[29] He argued strongly against the doctrine of immortality. On the other hand, he identified the active intellect (nous poietikos), through whose agency the potential intellect in man becomes actual, not with anything from within people, but with the divine creator itself. In the early Renaissance his doctrine of the soul's mortality was adopted by Pietro Pomponazzi against the Thomists and the Averroists. For him, the only possible human immortality is an immortality of a detached human thought, more specifically when the nous has as the object of its thought the active intellect itself, or another incorporeal intelligible form.[30] Alexander was also responsible for influencing the development of several more technical terms concerning the intellect, which became very influential amongst the great Islamic philosophers, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. • The intellect in habitu is a stage in which the human intellect has taken possession of a repertoire of thoughts, and so is potentially able to think those thoughts, but is not yet thinking these thoughts.

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Nous • The intellect from outside, which became the "acquired intellect" in Islamic philosophy, describes the incorporeal active intellect which comes from outside man, and becomes an object thought, making the material intellect actual and active. This term may have come from a particularly expressive translation of Alexander into Arabic. Plotinus also used such a term.[31] In any case, in Al-Farabi and Avicenna, the term took on a new meaning, distinguishing it from the active intellect in any simple sense - an ultimate stage of the human intellect where the a kind of close relationship (a "conjunction") is made between a person's active intellect and the transcendental nous itself. Themistius Themistius, another influential commentator on this matter, understood Aristotle differently, stating that the passive or material intellect does "not employ a bodily organ for its activity, is wholly unmixed with the body, impassive, and separate [from matter]".[32] This means the human potential intellect, and not only the active intellect, is an incorporeal substance, or a disposition of incorporeal substance. For Themistius, the human soul becomes immortal "as soon as the active intellect intertwines with it at the outset of human thought".[30] This understanding of the intellect was also very influential for Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, and "virtually all Islamic and Jewish philosophers".[33] On the other hand concerning the active intellect, like Alexander and Plotinus, he saw this as a transcendent being existing above and outside man. Differently from Alexander, he did not equate this being with the first cause of the Universe itself, but something lower.[34] However he equated it with Plato's Idea of the Good.[35]

Plotinus and neoplatonism Of the later Greek and Roman writers Plotinus, the intiator of neoplatonism, is particularly significant. Like Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, he saw himself as a commentator explaining the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle. But in his Enneads he went further than those authors, often working from passages which had been presented more tentatively, possibly inspired partly by earlier authors such as the neopythagorean Numenius of Apamea. Neoplatonism provided a major inspiration to discussion concerning the intellect in late classical and medieval philosophy, theology and cosmology. In neoplatonism there exists several levels or hypostases of being, including the natural and visible world as a lower part. • The Monad or "the One" sometimes also described as "the Good", based on the concept as it is found in Plato. This is the dunamis or possibility of existence. It causes the other levels by emanation. • The Nous (usually translated as "Intellect", or "Intelligence" in this context, or sometimes "mind" or "reason") is described as God, or more precisely an image of God, often referred to as the Demiurge. It thinks its own contents, which are thoughts, equated to the Platonic ideas or forms (eide). The thinking of this Intellect is the highest activity of life. The actualization (energeia) of this thinking is the being of the forms. This Intellect is the first principle or foundation of existence. The One is prior to it, but not in the sense that a normal cause is prior to an effect, but instead Intellect is called an emanation of the One. The One is the possibility of this foundation of existence. • Soul (psuchē). The soul is also an energeia: it acts upon or actualizes its own thoughts and creates "a separate, material cosmos that is the living image of the spiritual or noetic Cosmos contained as a unified thought within the Intelligence". So it is the soul which perceives things in nature physically, which it understands to be reality. Soul in Plotinus plays a role similar to the potential intellect in Aristotelian terminology.[27] • Lowest is matter. This was based largely upon Plotinus' reading of Plato, but also incorporated many Aristotelian concepts, including the Unmoved Mover as energeia.[36] They also incorporated a theory of anamnesis, or knowledge coming from the past lives of our immortal souls, like that found in some of Plato's dialogues.

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Later Platonists distinguished a hierarchy of three separate manifestations of nous, like Numenius of Apamea had.[37] Notable later neoplatonists include Porphyry and Proclus.

Gnosticism Part of a series on

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Gnosticism was a late classical movement which incorporated ideas inspired by neoplatonism and neopythagoreanism, but which was more syncretic religious movement than an accepted philosophical movement.

Valentinus In the Valentinian system, Nous is the first male Aeon. Together with his conjugate female Aeon, Aletheia (truth), he emanates from the Propator Bythos and his coeternal Ennoia or Sige; and these four form the primordial Tetrad. Like the other male Aeons he is sometimes regarded as androgynous, including in himself the female Aeon who is paired with him. He is the Only Begotten; and is styled the Father, the Beginning of all, inasmuch as from him are derived immediately or mediately the remaining Aeons who complete the Ogdoad (eight), thence the Decad (ten), and thence the Dodecad (twenty); in all thirty, Aeons constituting the Pleroma. He alone is capable of knowing the Propator; but when he desired to impart like knowledge to the other Aeons, was withheld from so doing by Sige. When Sophia (wisdom), youngest Aeon of the thirty, was brought into peril by her yearning after this knowledge, Nous was foremost of the Aeons in interceding for her. From him, or through him from the Propator, Horos was sent to restore her. After her restoration, Nous, according to the providence of the Propator, produced another pair, Christ and the Holy Spirit, "in order to give fixity and steadfastness (eis pēxin kai stērigmon) to the Pleroma." For this Christ teaches the Aeons to be content to know that the Propator is in himself incomprehensible, and can be

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perceived only through the Only Begotten (Nous).[38]

Basilides A similar conception of Nous appears in the later teaching of the Basilidean School, according to which he is the first begotten of the Unbegotten Father, and himself the parent of Logos, from whom emanate successively Phronesis, Sophia, and Dunamis. But in this teaching Nous is identified with Christ, is named Jesus, is sent to save those that believe, and returns to Him who sent him, after a passion which is apparent only,—Simon the Cyrenian being substituted for him on the cross.[39] It is probable, however, that Nous had a place in the original system of Basilides himself; for his Ogdoad, "the great Archon of the universe, the ineffable"[40] is apparently made up of the five members named by Irenaeus (as above), together with two whom we find in Clement,[41] Dikaiosyne and Eirene,—added to the originating Father.

Simon Magus The antecedent of these systems is that of Simon Magus,[42] of whose six "roots" emanating from the Unbegotten Fire, Nous is first. The correspondence of these "roots" with the first six Aeons which Valentinus derives from Bythos, is noted by Hippolytus.[43] Simon says in his Apophasis Megalē,[44] There are two offshoots of the entire ages, having neither beginning nor end.... Of these the one appears from above, the great power, the Nous of the universe, administering all things, male; the other from beneath, the great Epinoia, female, bringing forth all things. To Nous and Epinoia correspond Heaven and Earth, in the list given by Simon of the six material counterparts of his six emanations. The identity of this list with the six material objects alleged by Herodotus[45] to be worshipped by the Persians, together with the supreme place given by Simon to Fire as the primordial power, leads us to look to Persia for the origin of these systems in one aspect. In another, they connect themselves with the teaching of Pythagoras and of Plato.

Gospel of Mary According to the Gospel of Mary Magdelene, Jesus himself articulates the essence of Nous: "There where is the nous, lies the treasure." Then I said to him: "Lord, when someone meets you in a Moment of Vision, is it through the soul [psuchē] that they see, or is it through the spirit [pneuma]?" The Teacher answered: "It is neither through the soul nor the spirit, but the nous between the two which sees the vision..." —The Gospel of Mary Magdelene, p. 10

Medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Averroist philosophy During the middle ages, philosophy itself was in many places seen as opposed to the prevailing monotheistic religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The strongest philosophical tradition for some centuries was amongst Islamic philosophers, who later came to strongly influence the late medieval philosophers of western Christendom, and the Jewish diaspora in the Mediterranean area. While there were earlier Muslim philosophers such as Al Kindi, chronologically the three most influential concerning the intellect were Al Farabi, Avicenna, and finally Averroes, a westerner who lived in Spain and was highly influential in the late middle ages amongst Jewish and Christian philosophers.

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Al Farabi The exact precedents of Al Farabi's influential philosophical scheme, in which nous (Arabic 'aql) plays an important role, are no longer perfectly clear because of the great loss of texts in the middle ages which he would have had access to. He was apparently innovative in at least some points. He was clearly influenced by the same late classical world as neoplatonism, neopythagoreanism, but exactly how is less clear. Plotinus, Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias are generally accepted to have been influences. However while these three all placed the active intellect "at or near the top of the hierarchy of being", Al Farabi was clear in making it the lowest ranking in a series of distinct transcendental intelligences. He is the first known person to have done this in a clear way.[46] He was also the first philosopher known to have assumed the existence of a causal hierarchy of celestial spheres, and the incorporeal intelligences parallel to those spheres.[47] Al Farabi also fitted an explanation of prophecy into this scheme, in two levels. According to Davidson (p. 59): The lower of the two levels, labeled specifically as "prophecy" (nubuwwa), is enjoyed by men who have not yet perfected their intellect, whereas the higher, which Alfarabi sometimes specifically names "revelation" (w-ḥ-y), comes exclusively to those who stand at the stage of acquired intellect. This happens in the imagination (Arabic mutakhayyila; Greek phantasia), a faculty of the mind already described by Aristotle, which Al Farabi described as serving the rational part of the soul (Arabic 'aql; Greek nous). This faculty of imagination stores sense perceptions (maḥsūsāt), disassembles or recombines them, creates figurative or symbolic images (muḥākāt) of them which then appear in dreams, visualizes present and predicted events in a way different from conscious deliberation (rawiyya). This is under the influence, according to Al Farabi, of the active intellect. Theoretical truth can only be received by this faculty in a figurative or symbolic form, because the imagination is a physical capability and can not receive theoretical information in a proper abstract form. This rarely comes in a waking state, but more often in dreams. The lower type of philosophy is the best possible for the imaginative faculty, but the higher type of prophecy requires not only a receptive imagination, but also the condition of an "acquired intellect", where the human nous is in "conjunction" with the active intellect in the sense of God. Such a prophet is also a philosopher. When a philosopher-prophet has the necessary leadership qualities, he becomes philosopher-king.[48]

Avicenna In terms of cosmology, according to Davidson (p. 82) "Avicenna's universe has a structure virtually identical with the structure of Alfarabi's" but there are differences in details. As in Al Farabi, there are several levels of intellect, intelligence or nous, each of the higher ones being associated with a celestial sphere. Avicenna however details three different types of effect which each of these higher intellects has, each "thinks" both the necessary existence and the possible being of the intelligence one level higher. And each "emanates" downwards the body and soul of its own celestial sphere, and also the intellect at the next lowest level. The active intellect, as in Alfarabi, is the last in the chain. Avicenna sees active intellect as the cause not only of intelligible thought and the forms in the "sublunar" world we people live, but also the matter. (In other words, three effects.)[49] Concerning the workings of the human soul, Avicenna, like Al Farabi, sees the "material intellect" or potential intellect as something that is not material. He believed the soul was incorporeal, and the potential intellect was a disposition of it which was in the soul from birth. As in Al Farabi there are two further stages of potential for thinking, which are not yet actual thinking, first the mind acquires the most basic intelligible thoughts which we can not think in any other way, such as "the whole is greater than the part", then comes a second level of derivative intelligible thoughts which could be thought.[49] Concerning the actualization of thought, Avicenna applies the term "to two different things, to actual human thought, irrespective of of the intellectual progress a man has made, and to actual thought when human intellectual development is complete", as in Al Farabi.[50] When reasoning in the sense of deriving conclusions from syllogisms, Avicenna says people are using a physical "cogitative" faculty (mufakkira, fikra) of the soul, which can err. The human cogitative faculty is the same as the

Nous "compositive imaginative faculty (mutakhayyila) in reference to the animal soul".[51] But some people can use "insight" to avoid this step and derive conclusions directly by conjoining with the active intellect.[52] Once a thought has been learned in a soul, the physical faculties of sense perception and imagination become unnecessary, and as a person acquires more thoughts, their soul becomes less connected to their body.[53] For Avicenna, differently to the normal Aristotelian position, all of the soul is by nature immortal. But the level of intellectual development does affect the type of afterlife that the soul can have. Only a soul which has reached the highest type of conjunction with the active intellect can form a perfect conjunction with it after the death of the body, and this is a supreme eudaimonia. Lesser intellectual achievement means a less happy or even painful afterlife.[54] Concerning prophecy, Avicenna identifies a broader range of possibilities which fit into this model, which is still similar to that of Al Farabi.[55]

Averroes Averroes came to be regarded even in Europe as "the Commentator" to "the Philosopher", Aristotle, and his study of the questions surrounding the nous were very influential amongst Jewish and Christian philosophers, with some aspects being quite controversial. According to Herbert Davidson, Averroes' doctrine concerning nous can be divided into two periods. In the first, neoplatonic emanationism, not found in the original works of Aristotle, was combined with a naturalistic explanation of the human material intellect. "It also insists on the material intellect's having an active intellect as a direct object of thought and conjoining with the active intellect, notions never expressed in the Aristotelian canon." It was this presentation which Jewish philosophers such as Moses Narboni and Gersonides understood to be Averroes'. In the later model of the universe, which was transmitted to Christian philosophers, Averroes "dismisses emanationism and explains the generation of living beings in the sublunar world naturalistically, all in the name of a more genuine Aristotelianism. Yet it abandons the earlier naturalistic conception of the human material intellect and transforms the material intellect into something wholly un-Aristotelian, a single transcendent entity serving all mankind. It nominally salvages human conjunction with the active intellect, but in words that have little content."[56] This position, that humankind shares one active intellect, was taken up by Parisian philosophers such as Siger of Brabant, but also widely rejected by philosophers such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Ramon Lull, and Duns Scotus. Despite being widely considered heretical, the position was later defended by many more European philosophers including John of Jandun, who was the primary link bringing this doctrine from Paris to Bologna. After him this position continued to be defended and also rejected by various writers in northern Italy. In the 16th century it finally became a less common position after the renewal of an "Alexandrian" position based on that of Alexander of Aphrodisias, associated with Pietro Pomponazzi.[57]

Christianity The Christian New Testament makes mention of the nous or noos in Romans  7:23, 12:2; Corinthians 1 14:14, 14:19; Ephesians  4:17, 4:23; Thessalonians 2 2:2; and Revelation  17:9. In the writings of the Christian fathers a sound or pure nous is considered essential to the cultivation of wisdom.[58]

Philosophers influencing western Christianity While philosophical works were not commonly read or taught in the early middle ages in most of Europe, the works of authors like Boethius and Augustine of Hippo formed an important exception. Both were influenced by neoplatonism, and were amongst the older works that were still known in the time of the Carolingian Renaissance, and the beginnings of Scholasticism. In his early years Augustine was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus.[59] After his conversion to Christianity and baptism (387), he developed his own approach to philosophy

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Nous and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and different perspectives.[60] Augustine used neoplatonism selectively. He used both the neoplatonic Nous, and the Platonic Form of the Good (or "The Idea of the Good") as equivalent terms for the Christian God, or at least for one particular aspect of God. For example, God, nous, can act directly upon matter, and not only through souls, and concerning the souls through which it works upon the world experienced by humanity, some are treated as angels.[27] Scholasticism becomes more clearly defined much later, as the peculiar native type of philosophy in medieval catholic Europe. In this period, Aristotle became "the Philosopher", and scholastic philosophers, like their Jewish and Muslim contemporaries, studied the concept of the intellectus on the basis not only of Aristotle, but also late classical interpreters like Augustine and Boethius. A European tradition of new and direct interpretations of Aristotle developed which was eventually strong enough to argue with partial success against some of the interpretations of Aristotle from the Islamic world, most notably Averroes' doctrine of their being one "active intellect" for all humanity. Notable "Catholic" (as opposed to Averroist) Aristotelians included Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, the founder Thomism, which exists to this day in various forms. Concerning the nous, Thomism agrees with those Aristotelians who insist that the intellect is immaterial and separate from any bodily organs, but as per Christian doctrine, the whole of the human soul is immortal, not only the intellect.

Eastern Orthodox The human nous in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the "eye of the heart or soul" or the "mind of the heart".[61][62][63][64] The soul of man, is created by God in His image, man's soul is intelligent and noetic. Saint Thalassios wrote that God created beings "with a capacity to receive the Spirit and to attain knowledge of Himself; He has brought into existence the senses and sensory perception to serve such beings". Eastern Orthodox Christians hold that God did this by creating mankind with intelligence and noetic faculties.[65] Human reasoning is not enough: there will always remain an "irrational residue" which escapes analysis and which can not be expressed in concepts: it is this unknowable depth of things, that which constitutes their true, indefinable essence that also reflects the origin of things in God. In Eastern Christianity it is by faith or intuitive truth that this component of an objects existence is grasped.[66] Though God through his energies draws us to him, his essence remains inaccessible.[66] The operation of faith being the means of free will by which mankind faces the future or unknown, these noetic operations contained in the concept of insight or noesis.[67] Faith (pistis) is therefore sometimes used interchangeably with noesis in Eastern Christianity. Angels have intelligence and nous, whereas men have reason, both logos and dianoia, nous and sensory perception. This follows the idea that man is a microcosm and an expression of the whole creation or macrocosmos. The human nous was darkened after the Fall of Man (which was the result of the rebellion of reason against the nous),[68] but after the purification (healing or correction) of the nous (achieved through ascetic practices like hesychasm), the human nous (the "eye of the heart") will see God's uncreated Light (and feel God's uncreated love and beauty, at which point the nous will start the unceasing prayer of the heart) and become illuminated, allowing the person to become an orthodox theologian.[61][69][70] In this belief, the soul is created in the image of God. Since God is Trinitarian, Mankind is Nous, reason, both logos and dianoia, and Spirit. The same is held true of the soul (or heart): it has nous, word and spirit. To understand this better first an understanding of Saint Gregory Palamas's teaching that man is a representation of the trinitarian mystery should be addressed. This holds that God is not meant in the sense that the Trinity should be understood anthropomorphically, but man is to be understood in a triune way. Or, that the Trinitarian God is not to be interpreted from the point of view of individual man, but man is interpreted on the basis of the Trinitarian God. And this interpretation is revelatory not merely psychological and human. This means that it is only when a person is within the revelation, as all the saints lived, that he can grasp this understanding completely (see theoria). The second presupposition is that mankind has and is composed of nous, word and spirit like the trinitarian mode of being. Man's nous, word and spirit are not hypostases or individual existences or realities, but activities or energies of the soul -

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Nous whereas in the case with God or the Persons of the Holy Trinity, each are indeed hypostases. So these three components of each individual man are 'inseparable from one another' but they do not have a personal character" when in speaking of the being or ontology that is mankind. The nous as the eye of the soul, which some Fathers also call the heart, is the center of man and is where true (spiritual) knowledge is validated. This is seen as true knowledge which is "implanted in the nous as always co-existing with it".[71]

Early modern philosophy The so-called "early modern" philosophers of western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries established arguments which led to the establishment of modern science as a methodical approach to improve the welfare of humanity by learning to control nature. As such, speculation about metaphysics, which can not be used for anything practical, and which can never be confirmed against the reality we experience, started to be deliberately avoided, especially according to the so-called "empiricist" arguments of philosophers such as Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and Hume. The Latin motto "nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu" (nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses) has been described as the "guiding principle of empiricism" in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.[72] (This was in fact an old Aristotelian doctrine, which they took up, but as discussed above Aristotelians still believed that the senses on their own were not enough to explain the mind.) These philosophers explain the intellect as something developed from experience of sensations, being interpreted by the brain in a physical way, and nothing else, which means that absolute knowledge is impossible. For Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, who wrote in both English and Latin, "intellectus" was translated as "understanding".[73] Far from seeing it as secure way to perceive the truth about reality, Bacon, for example, actually named the intellectus in his Novum Organum, and the proœmium to his Great Instauration, as a major source of wrong conclusions, because it is biased in many ways, for example towards over-generalizing. For this reason, modern science should be methodical, in order not to be misled by the weak human intellect. He felt that lesser known Greek philosophers such as Democritus "who did not suppose a mind or reason in the frame of things", have been arrogantly dismissed because of Aristotelianism leading to a situation in his time wherein "the search of the physical causes hath been neglected, and passed in silence".[74] The intellect or understanding was the subject of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.[75] These philosophers also tended not to emphasize the distinction between reason and intellect, describing the peculiar universal or abstract definitions of human understanding as being man-made and resulting from reason itself.[76] Hume even questioned the distinctness or peculiarity of human understanding and reason, compared to other types of associative or imaginative thinking found in some other animals.[77] In modern science during this time, Newton is sometimes described as more empiricist compared to Leibniz. On the other hand, into modern times some philosophers have continued to propose that the human mind has an in-born ("a priori") ability to know the truth conclusively, and these philosophers needed to argue that the human mind has direct and intuitive ideas about nature, and this means it can not be limited entirely to what can be known from sense perception. Amongst the early modern philosophers, some such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, tend to be distinguished from the empiricists as rationalists, and to some extent at least some of them are called idealists, and their writings on the intellect or understanding present various doubts about empiricism, and in some cases they argued for positions which appear more similar to those of medieval and classical philosophers. The first in this series of modern rationalists, Descartes, is credited with defining a "mind-body problem" which is a major subject of discussion for university philosophy courses. According to the presentation his 2nd Meditation, the human mind and body are different in kind, and while the human body works like a clockwork mechanism, and its workings include memory and imagination, the real human is the thinking being, a soul. Descartes explicitly refused to divide this soul into its traditional parts such as intellect and reason, saying that these things were indivisible aspects of the soul. Descartes was therefore a dualist, but very much in opposition to traditional Aristotelian dualism. In his 6th Meditation he deliberately uses traditional terms and states that his active faculty of giving ideas to his

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Nous thought must be corporeal, because the things perceived are clearly external to his own thinking and corporeal, while his passive faculty must be incorporeal (unless God is deliberately deceiving us, and then in this case the active faculty would be from God). This is the opposite of the traditional explanation found for example in Alexander of Aphrodisias and discussed above, for whom the passive intellect is material, while the active intellect is not. One result is that in many Aristotelian conceptions of the nous, for example that of Thomas Aquinas, the senses are still a source of all the intellect's conceptions. However, with the strict separation of mind and body proposed by Descartes, it becomes possible to propose that there can be thought about objects never perceived with the body's senses, such as a thousand sided geometrical figure. Gassendi objected to this distinction between the imagination and the intellect in Descartes.[78] Hobbes also objected, and according to his own philosophical approach asserted that the "triangle in the mind comes from the triangle we have seen" and "essence in so far as it is distinguished from existence is nothing else than a union of names by means of the verb is". Descartes, in his reply to this objection insisted that this traditional distinction between essence and existence is "known to all".[79] His contemporary Blaise Pascal, criticised him in similar words to those used by Plato's Socrates concerning Anaxagoras, discussed above, saying that "I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, Descartes did his best to dispense with God. But Descartes could not avoid prodding God to set the world in motion with a snap of his lordly fingers; after that, he had no more use for God."[80] Descartes argued that when the intellect does a job of helping people interpret what they perceive, not with the help of an intellect which enters from outside, but because each human mind comes into being with innate God-given ideas, more similar then, to Plato's theory of anamnesis, only not requiring reincarnation. Apart from such examples as the geometrical definition of a triangle, another example is the idea of God, according to the 3rd Meditation. Error, according to the 4th Meditation, comes about because people make judgments about things which are not in the intellect or understanding. This is possible because the human will, being free, is not limited like the human intellect. Spinoza, though considered a Cartesian and a rationalist, rejected Cartesian dualism and idealism. In his "pantheistic" approach, explained for example in his Ethics, God is the same as nature, the human intellect is just the same as the human will. The divine intellect of nature is quite different from human intellect, because it is finite, but Spinoza does accept that the human intellect is a part of the infinite divine intellect. Leibniz, in comparison to the guiding principle of the empiricists described above, added some words ""nihil in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectus ipsi" (nothing in the intellect without first being in the senses except the intellect itself).[72] Despite being at the forefront of modern science, and modernist philosophy, in his writings he still referred to the active and passive intellect, a divine intellect, and the immortality of the active intellect. Berkeley, partly in reaction to Locke, also attempted to reintroduce an "immaterialism" into early modern philosophy (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). He argued that individuals can only know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as "matter", and that ideas depend on perceiving minds for their very existence. This belief later became immortalized in the dictum, "esse est percipi" ("to be is to be perceived"). As in classical and medieval philosophy, Berkeley believed understanding had to be explained by divine intervention, and that all our ideas are put in our mind by God. Hume accepted some of Berkeley's corrections of Locke, but in answer insisted, as had Bacon and Hobbes, that absolute knowledge is not possible, and that all attempts to show how it could be possible have logical problems. Hume's writings remain highly influential on all philosophy afterwards, and for example considered by Kant to have shaken him from an intellectual slumber. Kant, a turning point in modern philosophy, agreed with some classical philosophers and Leibniz that the intellect itself, although it needed sensory experience for understanding to begin, needs something else in order to make sense of the incoming sense information. In his formulation the intellect (Verstand) has "a priori" or innate principles which it has before thinking even starts. Kant represents the starting point of German idealism and a new phase of

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Nous modernity, while empiricist philosophy has also continued beyond Hume to the present day.

More recent modern philosophy and science One of the results of the early modern philosophy has been the increasing creation of specialist fields of science, in areas that were once considered part of philosophy, and infant cognitive development and perception now tend to be discussed now more within the sciences of psychology and neuroscience than in philosophy. Modern mainstream thinking on the mind is not dualist, and sees anything innate in the mind as being a result of genetic and developmental factors which allow the mind to develop. Overall it accepts far less innate "knowledge" (or clear pre-dispositions to particular types of knowledge) than most of the classical and medieval theories derived from philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Al Farabi. Apart from discussions about the history of philosophical discussion on this subject, contemporary philosophical discussion concerning this point has continued concerning what the ethical implications are of the different alternatives still considered likely.

References [1] The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (3 ed.), Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 1417 [2] Rorty, Richard (1979), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press page 38. [3] See entry for νόος (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 04. 0057:entry=no/ os) in Liddell & Scott, on the Perseus Project. [4] See entry for intellectus (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 04. 0059:entry=intellectus2) in Lewis & Short, on the Perseus Project. [5] This is from I.130 (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0134:book=1:card=130), the translation is by A.T. Murray, 1924. [6] Long, A.A. (1998), Nous (http:/ / www. muslimphilosophy. com/ ip/ rep/ A075. htm), Routledge, [7] Metaphysics I.4. 984b (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Aristot. + Met. + 1. 984b). [8] Kirk; Raven; Schofield (1983), The Presocratic Philosophers (second ed.), Cambridge University Press Chapter X. [9] Kirk; Raven; Schofield (1983), The Presocratic Philosophers (second ed.), Cambridge University Press. See pages 204 and 235. [10] Kirk; Raven; Schofield (1983), The Presocratic Philosophers (second ed.), Cambridge University Press Chapter XII. [11] Anaxagoras, DK B 12 (http:/ / www. ellopos. net/ elpenor/ greek-texts/ ancient-greece/ anaxagoras-nous. asp), trans. by J. Burnet [12] So, for example, in the Sankhya philosophy, the faculty of higher intellect (buddhi) is equated with the cosmic principle of differentiation of the world-soul (hiranyagarbha) from the formless and unmanifest Brahman. This outer principle that is equated with buddhi is called mahat (see Wikipedia entry on Sankhya) [13] The translation quoted is from Amy Bonnette. Xenophon (1994), Memorabilia, Cornell University Press [14] On the Perseus Project: 28d (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0174:text=Phileb. :section=28d) [15] Kalkavage (2001), "Glossary", Plato's Timaeus, Focus Publishing [16] 28c (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0174:text=Phileb. :page=28) and 30d (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0174:text=Phileb. :page=30). Translation by Fowler. [17] Fowler translation of the Phaedo as on the Perseus webpage: 97 (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0170:text=Phaedo:page=97)- 98 (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0170:text=Phaedo:page=98). [18] Philebus on the Perseus Project: 23b (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0174:text=Phileb. :page=23)- 30e (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0174:text=Phileb. :page=30). Translation is by Fowler. [19] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aristotle's Ethics, Glossary of terms (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ aristotle-ethics/ #Glo) [20] "Intelligence (nous) apprehend each definition (horos meaning "boundary"), which cannot be proved by reasoning". Nicomachean Ethics 1142a (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0053:bekker page=1142a& highlight=nou=s,nw=), Rackham translation. [21] Nicomachean Ethics VI.xi. 1143a (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0053:bekker page=1143a& highlight=nou=s,nou=n)- 1143b (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0053:bekker page=1143b& highlight=nou=s,nou=n). Translation by Joe Sachs, p. 114, 2002 Focus publishing. The second last sentence is placed in different places by different modern editors and translators. [22] Davidson, Herbert (1992), Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect, Oxford University Press [23] De Anima, Bk. III, ch. 5, 430a10-25 translated by Joe Sachs, Aristotle's On the Soul and On Memory and Recollection, Green Lion Books [24] See Metaphysics 1072b (http:/ / perseus. mpiwg-berlin. mpg. de/ cgi-bin/ ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0052& layout=& loc=12. 1072b).

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Nous [25] 1075 (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 01. 0051:book=12:section=1075b) [26] Generation of Animals II.iii.736b. [27] Menn, Stephen (1998), Descartes and Augustine, University of Cambridge Press [28] Lacus Curtius online text: On the Face in the Moon par. 28 (http:/ / penelope. uchicago. edu/ Thayer/ E/ Roman/ Texts/ Plutarch/ Moralia/ The_Face_in_the_Moon*/ D. html#28) [29] De anima 84, cited in Davidson, page 9, who translated the quoted words. [30] Davidson p.43 [31] Davidson page 12. [32] Translation and citation by Davidson again, from Themistius' paraphrase of Aristotle's De Anima. [33] Davidson page 13. [34] Davidson page 14. [35] Davidson p.18 [36] See Moore, Edward, "Plotinus" (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ plotinus/ ), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Gerson, Lloyd, "Plotinus" (http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ plotinus/ ), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, . The direct quote above comes from Moore. [37] Encyclopedia of The Study in Philosophy (1969), Vol. 5, article on subject "Nous", article author: G.B. Kerferd [38] Iren. Haeres. I. i. 1-5; Hippol. Ref. vi. 29-31; Theod. Haer. Fab. i. 7. [39] Iren. I. xxiv. 4; Theod. H. E. i. 4. [40] Hipp. vi. 25. [41] Clement of Alexandria, Strom. iv. 25. [42] Hipp. vi. 12 ff.; Theod. I. i. [43] Hipp. vi. 20. [44] Ap. Hipp. vi. 18. [45] Herodotus, i. [46] Davidson pp.12-14. One possible inspiration mentioned in a commentary of Aristotle's De Anima attributed to John Philoponus is a philosopher named Marinus, who was probably a student of Proclus. He in any case designated the active intellect to be angelic or daimonic, rather than the creator itself. [47] Davidson p.18 and p.45, which states "Within the translunar region, Aristotle recognized no causal relationship in what we may call the vertical plane; he did not recognize a causality that runs down through the series of incorporeal movers. And in the horizontal plane, that is, from each intelligence to the corresponding sphere, he recognized causality only in respect to motion, not in respect to existence." [48] Davidson pp.58-61. [49] Davidson ch. 4. [50] Davidson p.86 [51] From Shifā': De Anima 45, translation by Davidson p.96. [52] Davidson pp.102 [53] Davidson p.104 [54] Davidson pp.111-115. [55] Davidson p.123. [56] Davidson p.356 [57] Davidson ch.7 [58] See, for example, the many references to nous and the necessity of its purification in the writings of the Philokalia [59] Cross, Frank L. and Livingstone, Elizabeth, ed. (2005). "Platonism". The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280290-9. [60] TeSelle, Eugene (1970). Augustine the Theologian. London. pp. 347–349. ISBN 0-223-97728-4. March 2002 edition: ISBN 1-57910-918-7. [61] Neptic Monasticism (http:/ / www. greekorthodoxchurch. org/ neptic_monasticism. html) [62] "What is the Human Nous?" (http:/ / www. orthodoxinfo. com/ phronema/ patristic-theology-romanides-chapter-1-what-is-the-human-nous. aspx) by John Romanides [63] "Before embarking on this study, the reader is asked to absorb a few Greek terms for which there is no English word that would not be imprecise or misleading. Chief among these is NOUS, which refers to the `eye of the heart' and is often translated as mind or intellect. Here we keep the Greek word NOUS throughout. The adjective related to it is NOETIC (noeros)." Orthodox Psychotherapy Section The Knowledge of God according to St. Gregory Palamas (http:/ / www. pelagia. org/ htm/ b02. en. orthodox_psychotherapy. 06. htm#2k) by Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos published by Birth of Theotokos Monastery,Greece (January 1, 2005) ISBN 978-960-7070-27-2 [64] The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, SVS Press, 1997. (ISBN 0-913836-31-1) James Clarke & Co Ltd, 1991. (ISBN 0-227-67919-9) pgs 200-201 [65] G.E.H; Sherrard, Philip; Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Philokalia, Vol. 4 Pg432 Nous the highest facility in man, through which - provided it is purified - he knows God or the inner essences or principles (q.v.) of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception. Unlike the dianoia or reason (q.v.), from which it must be carefully distinguished, the intellect does not function by formulating abstract concepts and then arguing on this basis to a conclusion reached through deductive reasoning, but it understands divine truth by means of immediate experience, intuition or 'simple cognition' (the term used by St Isaac the Syrian).The intellect dwells in the 'depths of the soul'; it constitutes the innermost aspect of the heart (St Diadochos, 79, 88: in our translation, vol. i, pp.. 280, 287). The intellect is the organ of

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Nous contemplation (q.v.), the 'eye of the heart' (Makarian Homilies). [66] The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, by Vladimir Lossky SVS Press, 1997, pg 33 (ISBN 0-913836-31-1). James Clarke & Co Ltd, 1991, pg 71 (ISBN 0-227-67919-9). [67] ANTHROPOLOGICAL TURN IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY: AN ORTHODOX PERSPECTIVE by Sergey S. Horujy [synergia-isa.ru/english/download/lib/Eng12-ChicLect.doc] (http:/ / www. hn. psu. edu/ Academics/ past_lectures. html#Sergei_Horujy_Literary_Scholar) [68] "THE ILLNESS AND CURE OF THE SOUL" (http:/ / www. pelagia. org/ htm/ b05. en. the_illness_and_cure_of_the_soul. 02. htm#Fall) Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos [69] The Relationship between Prayer and Theology (http:/ / www. acrod. org/ sn/ sn4a. shtml) [70] "JESUS CHRIST - THE LIFE OF THE WORLD", John S. Romanides (http:/ / romanity. org/ htm/ rom. 19. en. jesus_christ_the_life_of_the_world. 01. htm) [71] Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos (2005), Orthodox Psychotherapy (http:/ / www. pelagia. org/ htm/ b02. en. orthodox_psychotherapy. 03. htm#in1), Tr. Esther E. Cunningham Williams (Birth of Theotokos Monastery, Greece), ISBN 978-960-7070-27-2 [72] , http:/ / books. google. be/ books?id=WHILCw0hDA4C& pg=PA253 [73] Martinich, Aloysius (1995), A Hobbes Dictionary, Blackwell, p. 305 [74] Bacon Advancement of Learning II.VII.7 (http:/ / www. archive. org/ stream/ advancementlea00bacouoft#page/ 90/ mode/ 2up/ search/ democritus) [75] Nidditch, Peter, "Foreward", An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford University Press, p. xxii [76] Hobbes, Thomas, "II. Of Imagination" (http:/ / oll. libertyfund. org/ ?option=com_staticxt& staticfile=show. php?title=585& chapter=89820& layout=html& Itemid=27), The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 3 (Leviathan), and also see De Homine X. [77] Hume, David, "I.III.VII (footnote) Of the Nature of the Idea Or Belief" (http:/ / oll. libertyfund. org/ ?option=com_staticxt& staticfile=show. php?title=342& chapter=55095& layout=html& Itemid=27#lf0213_footnote_nt018), A Treatise of Human Nature, [78] The Philosophical Works of Descartes Vol. II, 1968, translated by Haldane and Ross, p.190 [79] The Philosophical Works of Descartes Vol. II, 1968, translated by Haldane and Ross, p.77 [80] Think Exist on Blaise Pascal (http:/ / thinkexist. com/ quotation/ i_cannot_forgive_descartes-in_all_his_philosophy/ 153298. html). Retrieved 12 Feb. 2009.

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. • This article uses text from Volume IV of A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines by William Smith and Henry Wace.

External links • Definition of nous (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph.jsp?l=noos&la=greek#lexicon) on Perseus Project website. • Aristotle's Psychology (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/) from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy • What is the Human Nous? (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/phronema/ patristic-theology-romanides-chapter-1-what-is-the-human-nous.aspx) by John Romanides

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Noema Noema (plural: noemata) derives from the Greek word νόημα meaning thought or what is thought about.[1] Edmund Husserl used noema as a technical term in phenomenology to stand for the object or content of a thought, judgment, or perception, but its precise meaning in his work has remained a matter of controversy.

Husserl's Noema In Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913), Husserl introduced the terms "noema" and "noesis" to designate correlated elements of the structure of any intentional act - for example, an act of perceiving, or judging, or remembering (see Intentionality): "Corresponding to all points to the manifold data of the real (reelle) noetic content, there is a variety of data displayable in really pure (wirklicher reiner) intuition, and in a correlative 'noematic content,' or briefly 'noema' terms which we shall henceforth be continually using."[2] Every intentional act has noetic content (or a noesis - from the Greek nous, "mind"). This noetic content, to which the noema corresponds, is that which gives meaning or sense to an intentional act.[3] Every act also has a noema, which is the object of the act - that which is meant by it.[4] In other words, every intentional act has an "I-pole (or noesis)" and an "object-pole (or noema)."[5] Husserl also refers to the noema as the Sinn or sense (meaning) of the act, and sometimes appears to use the terms interchangeably. Nevertheless, the Sinn does not represent what Husserl calls the "full noema": Sinn belongs to the noema, but the full noema is the object of the act as meant in the act, the perceived object as perceived, the judged object as judged, and so on.[6]. In other words, the noema seems to be whatever is intended by acts of perception or judgement in general, whether it be "a material object, a picture, a word, a mathematical entity, another person" precisely as being perceived, judged or otherwise thought about.[7]

Interpreting Husserl In fact, commentators have been unable to achieve consensus on exactly what a noema is. In a recent survey, David Woodruff Smith distinguished four different schools of thought. On one view, to say that the noema is the intentional object of an act of consciousness is to mean that it quite literally is an object. Husserl’s student Roman Ingarden, for example, held that both ordinary objects, like chairs and trees, and intentional objects, like a chair precisely as it appears to me, or even a fictional tree, actually exist, but have different "modes" of existence.[8]. An alternative view, developed primarily by Aron Gurwitsch, emphasizes the noema of perceptual experience. Most ordinary objects can be perceived in different ways and from different perspectives (consider looking at a tree from several different positions). For Gurwitsch, what is perceived in each such act is a noema, and the object itself – the tree, say – is to be understood as the collection or system of noemata associated with it. This view has similarities with phenomenalism.[9] Sokolowski, alternatively, holds that a noema is just the actual object of perception or judgment itself, considered phenomenologically. In other words, the noema of the judgment that “this chair is uncomfortable” is neither an entity (the chair considered as uncomfortable) which exists in addition to the chair itself (but with a different mode of existence) – the Ingarden view; but nor is the noema of such a judgment identified with a particular tactile perception of the chair – which along with other perceptions constitutes the chair as such – the Gurwitsch view. For Sokolowski, the noema is not a separate entity at all, but the chair itself as in this instance perceived or judged. This seems consistent with Husserl’s emphasis on the noema as the "perceived as such…remembered as such…judged as such…"[10]

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An analytic philosopher, Dagfinn Føllesdal, in an influential 1969 paper,[11] proposed a Fregean interpretation of the noema, which has been developed extensively by Ronald McIntyre and David Woodruff Smith.[12] This school of thought agrees that the noema is not a separate entity, but rather than identifying it with the actual object of the act, phenomenologically understood, this view suggests that it is a mediating component of the act (of perceiving, judging, etc) itself. It is what gives the act the sense it has.[13] Indeed, Føllesdal and his followers suggest that the noema is a generalized version of Frege’s account of linguistic meaning, and in particular of his concept of sense (Sinn). Just as Frege held that a linguistic expression picks out its reference by means of its sense, so Husserl believed that conscious acts generally – not merely acts of meaning but also acts of perception, judgment, etc. – are intentionally directed toward objects by means of their noemata. On this view, the noema is not an object, but an abstract component of certain types of acts.[14] Sokolowski has continued to reject this approach, arguing that "(t)o equate sense and noema would be to equate propositional and phenomenological reflection. It would take philosophy simply as the critical reflection on our meanings or senses; it would equate philosophy with linguistic analysis." [15] Robert C. Solomon attempted to reconcile the perception-based interpretation of the Gurwitsch school with the Fregean interpretation of noema as sense, suggesting that while "(i)t has now become virtually axiomatic among phenomenologists that the Sinne [senses] of experience stand independent of the Bedeutungen [meanings] of linguistic expressions. It has become all but axiomatic among analytic philosophers that there is no meaning apart from language. It is the concept of the noema that provides the link between them. The noema embodies both the changing phases of experience and the organizing sense of our experience. But these two 'components' are not separable, for all experience requires meaning, not as an after-the-fact luxury in reflective judgements but in order for it to be experience of anything.”[16]

Other uses Noema is in the OED, which has shown its use for more than three centuries. It first was used in English in the field of rhetoric to denote "a figure of speech whereby something stated obscurely is nevertheless intended to be understood or worked out." In other words, a noema in rhetoric is obscure speech or speech that only yields meaning upon detailed reflection. Peacham's 1577 Garden of Eloquence [17] used it this way, "Noema, when we doe signify some thing so privily that the hearers must be fayne to seeke out the meaning by long consideration."

References [1] Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu (ed.s) The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, p. 473 [2] Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (also known as Ideas I), trans. W. Boyce Gibson, Collier Books, 1962, p. 238 [3] Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl: founder of phenomenology Polity, 2005, p133 [4] Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (also known as Ideas I), trans. W. Boyce Gibson, Collier Books, 1962, p229 [5] Jean-Francois Lyotard, Phenomenology, trans. Brian Beakley, SUNY Press, 1991, p55 [6] Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl: founder of phenomenology Polity, 2005, p135; see also Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (also known as Ideas I), trans. W. Boyce Gibson, Collier Books, 1962, p. 238 [7] Robert Solokowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 59 [8] David Woodruff Smith, Husserl, Routledge, 2007, pp. 304-305 [9] David Woodruff Smith, Husserl, Routledge, 2007, pp. 305-306 [10] Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (also known as Ideas I), trans. W. Boyce Gibson, Collier Books, 1962, p. 238 [11] Dagfinn Føllesdal, "Husserl’s Notion of Noema" Journal of Philosophy LXVI:20, 1969, pp. 680-687 [12] David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre, "Intentionality via Intensions" Journal of Philosophy LXVIII:18, 1971, pp541-561; Ronald McIntyre and David Woodruff Smith, "Theory of Intentionality" in J.N. Mohanty and William R. McKenna (eds) Husserl’s Phenomenology: a Textbook, Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1989, pp. 147-179; see also David Woodruff

Noema Smith, Husserl, Routledge, 2007, especially chapter six. [13] David Woodruff Smith, Husserl, Routledge, 2007, pp. 306-307 [14] David Woodruff Smith and Ronald McIntyre, "Intentionality via Intensions" Journal of Philosophy LXVIII:18, 1971, pp. 541-542 [15] Robert Solokowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 194 [16] Robert C. Solomon, "Husserl’s Concept of the Noema" in Frederick Elliston and Peter McCormick (eds) Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals University of Notre Dame Press, 1977, pp. 168-181; see p. 179 [17] Peacham's 1577 Garden of Eloquence - Publications from Stockholm University (http:/ / www. diva-portal. org/ su/ abstract. xsql?dbid=6663)

Solipsism Solipsism ( i/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/) is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from the Latin solus (alone) and ipse (self). Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not exist outside the mind. As a metaphysical position, solipsism goes further to the conclusion that the world and other minds do not exist. As such it is the only epistemological position that, by its own postulate, is both irrefutable and yet indefensible in the same manner. Although the number of individuals sincerely espousing solipsism has been small, it is not uncommon for one philosopher to accuse another's arguments of entailing solipsism as an unwanted consequence, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum. In the history of philosophy, solipsism has served as a skeptical hypothesis.

Varieties There are varying degrees of solipsism that parallel the varying degrees of serious skepticism.

Metaphysical solipsism Metaphysical solipsism is the "strongest" variety of solipsism. Based on a philosophy of subjective idealism, metaphysical solipsists maintain that the self is the only existing reality and that all other reality, including the external world and other persons, are representations of that self, and have no independent existence.

Epistemological solipsism Further information: Epistemological solipsism Epistemological solipsism is the variety of idealism according to which only the directly accessible mental contents of the solipsistic philosopher can be known. The existence of an external world is regarded as an unresolvable question, or an unnecessary hypothesis rather than actually false. Epistemological solipsists claim that realism begs the question: assuming there is a universe that is independent of the agent's mind, the agent can only ever know of this universe through its senses. How is the existence of the independent universe to be scientifically studied? If a person sets up a camera to photograph the moon when they are not looking at it, then at best they determine that there is an image of the moon in the camera when they eventually look at it. Logically, this does not assure that the moon itself (or even the camera) existed at the time the photograph is supposed to have been taken. To establish that it is an image of an independent moon requires many other assumptions that amount to begging the question. (Mind over Matter)

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Methodological solipsism Methodological solipsism may be a sort of weak agnostic (meaning "missing knowledge") solipsism. It is a consequence of strict epistemological requirements for "Knowledge" (e.g. the requirement that knowledge must be certain). They still entertain the points that any induction is fallible and that we may be brains in vats. However there are those who say that even what we perceive as the brain is actually part of the external world, for it is only through our senses that we can see or feel the brain. There are thoughts, but that's all that's known for certain. Importantly, they do not intend to conclude that the stronger forms of solipsism are actually true. Methodological solipsists simply emphasize that justifications of an external world must be founded on indisputable facts about their own Brain in a vat. consciousness. The Methodological solipsist believes that subjective impressions (Empiricism) or innate knowledge (Rationalism) are the sole possible or proper starting point for philosophical construction (Wood, 295). Often methodological solipsism is not held as a belief system, but rather used as a thought experiment to assist skepticism (e.g. Descartes' cartesian skepticism).

Main points See also: Solipsism: Relation to other ideas (below) Denial of materialistic existence, in itself, does not constitute solipsism. Possibly the most controversial feature of the solipsistic worldview is the denial of the existence of other minds. Since personal experiences are private and ineffable, another being's experience can be known only by analogy. Philosophers try to build knowledge on more than an inference or analogy. The failure of Descartes' epistemological enterprise brought to popularity the idea that all certain knowledge may go no further than "I think; therefore I exist"[1] without providing any real details about the nature of the "I" that has been proven to exist. The theory of solipsism also merits close examination because it relates to three widely-held philosophical presuppositions, each itself fundamental and wide-ranging in importance: 1. my most certain knowledge is the content of my own mind—my thoughts, experiences, affects, etc. 2. there is no conceptual or logically necessary link between mental and physical—between, say, the occurrence of certain conscious experience or mental states and the 'possession' and behavioral dispositions of a 'body' of a particular kind (see the brain in a vat) 3. the experience of a given person is necessarily private to that person. Solipsism is not a single concept but instead refers to several worldviews whose common element is some form of denial of the existence of a universe independent from the mind of the agent.

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History Gorgias (of Leontini) Solipsism is first recorded with the Greek presocratic sophist, Gorgias (c. 483–375 BC) who is quoted by the Roman skeptic Sextus Empiricus as having stated:[2] 1. Nothing exists; 2. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and 3. Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others. Much of the point of the Sophists was to show that "objective" knowledge was a literal impossibility. (See also comments credited to Protagoras of Abdera).

Descartes The foundations of solipsism are in turn the foundations of the view that the individual's understanding of any and all psychological concepts (thinking, willing, perceiving, etc.) is accomplished by making analogy with his or her own mental states; i.e., by abstraction from inner experience. And this view, or some variant of it, has been influential in philosophy since Descartes elevated the search for incontrovertible certainty to the status of the primary goal of epistemology, whilst also elevating epistemology to "first philosophy".

Berkeley George Berkeley's arguments against materialism in favor of idealism provide the solipsist with a number of arguments not found in Descartes. While the latter defends ontological dualism, thus accepting the existence of a material world (res extensa) as well as immaterial minds (res cogitans) and God, Berkeley denies the existence of matter but not minds, of which God is one.[3]

René Descartes. Portrait by Frans Hals, 1648.

Psychology and psychiatry Solipsism is often introduced in the context of relating it to pathological psychological conditions. Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud stated that other minds are not known, but only inferred to exist, he stated "consciousness makes each of us aware only of his own states of mind, that other people, too, possess a consciousness is an inference which we draw by analogy from their observable utterances and actions, in order to make this behavior of theirs intelligible to us. (It would no doubt be psychologically more correct to put it in this way: that without any special reflection we attribute to everyone else our own constitution and therefore our consciousness as well, and that this identification is a sine qua non of understanding)." [4]

Solipsism

Solipsism syndrome Solipsism syndrome is a dissociative mental state. It is only incidentally related to philosophical solipsism. Solipsists assert that the lack of ability to prove the existence of other minds does not, in itself, cause the psychiatric condition of detachment from reality.

Infant solipsism Developmental psychologists commonly believe that infants are solipsist,[5] and that eventually children infer that others have experiences much like theirs and reject solipsism (see Infant metaphysics).

Consequences To discuss consequences clearly, an alternative is required: solipsism as opposed to what? Solipsism is opposed to all forms of realism and many forms of idealism (insofar as they claim that there is something outside the idealist's mind, which is itself another mind, or mental in nature). Realism in a minimal sense, that there is an external universe is most likely not observationally distinct from solipsism. The objections to solipsism therefore have a theoretical rather than an empirical thrust. Solipsists may view their own pro-social behaviors as having a more solid foundation than the incoherent pro-sociality of other philosophies. Indeed, they may be more pro-social because they view other individuals as actually being a part of themselves. Furthermore, the joy and suffering arising from empathy is just as real as the joy and suffering arising from physical sensation. They view their own existence as human beings to be just as speculative as the existence of anyone else as a human being. Epistemological solipsists may argue that these philosophical distinctions are irrelevant since the professed pro-social knowledge of others is an illusion. The British philosopher Alan Watts wrote extensively about this subject.

Last surviving person Would the last person left alive be a solipsist? Not necessarily. The last surviving person would of course have to confront and accept that his or her consciousness is the only local human consciousness in existence (subject to verification that all other humans have not survived), whereas a solipsist believes that his or her consciousness is the only one in existence regardless of who else, if anyone, is living. If the last surviving person is a solipsist, he or she will believe that even when others were alive, there never had been another thought, experience or emotion other than his or her own.

Relation to other ideas Idealism and materialism One of the most fundamental debates in philosophy concerns the "true" nature of the world—whether it is some ethereal plane of ideas, or a reality of atomic particles and energy. Materialism[6] posits a real 'world out there,' as well as in and through us, that can be sensed—seen, heard, tasted, touched and felt, sometimes with prosthetic technologies corresponding to human sensing organs. (Materialists do not claim that human senses or even their prosthetics can, even when collected, sense the totality of the 'universe'; simply that what they cannot collectively sense is not in any way known to us.) Materialists do not find this a useful way of thinking about the ontology and ontogeny of ideas, but we might say that from a materialist perspective pushed to a logical extreme communicable to an idealist (an "Away Team" perspective), ideas are ultimately reducible to a physically communicated, organically, socially and environmentally embedded 'brain-state'. While reflexive existence is not considered by materialists to be experienced on the atomic level, the individual's physical and mental experiences are ultimately reducible to the unique tripartite combination of environmentally determined, genetically determined, and randomly determined

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Solipsism interactions of firing neurons and atomic collisions. As a correlative, the only thing that dreams and hallucinations prove are that some neurons can reorganize and 'clean house' 'on break' (often reforming around emergent, prominent or uncanny cultural themes), misfire, and malfunction. But for materialists, ideas have no primary reality as essences separate from our physical existence. From a materialist "Home Team" perspective, ideas are also social (rather than purely biological), and formed and transmitted and modified through the interactions between social organisms and their social and physical environments. This materialist perspective informs scientific methodology, insofar as that methodology assumes that humans have no access to omniscience and that therefore human knowledge is an ongoing, collective enterprise that is best produced via scientific and logical conventions adjusted specifically for material human capacities and limitations. Modern Idealists, on the other hand, believe that the mind and its thoughts are the only true things that exist. This is the reverse of what is sometimes called classical idealism or, somewhat confusingly, Platonic idealism due to the influence of Plato's Theory of Forms (εἶδος eidos or ἰδέα idea) which were not products of our thinking.[7] The material world is ephemeral, but a perfect triangle or "beauty" is eternal. Religious thinking tends to be some form of idealism, as God usually becomes the highest ideal (such as Neoplatonism).[6][8][9] On this scale, solipsism can be classed as idealism. Thoughts and concepts are all that exist, and furthermore, only the solipsist's own thoughts and consciousness exist. The so-called "reality" is nothing more than an idea that the solipsist has (perhaps unconsciously) created.

Cartesian dualism There is another option: the belief that both ideals and "reality" exist. Dualists commonly argue that the distinction between the mind (or 'ideas') and matter can be proven by employing Leibniz' principle of the identity of indiscernibles which states that if two things share all exactly the same qualities, then they must be identical, as in indistinguishable from each other and therefore one and the same thing. Dualists then attempt to identify attributes of mind that are lacked by matter (such as privacy or intentionality) or vice versa (such as having a certain temperature or electrical charge).[10][11] One notable application of the identity of indiscernibles was by René Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes concluded that he could not doubt the existence of himself (the famous cogito ergo sum argument), but that he could doubt the (separate) existence of his body. From this he inferred that the person Descartes must not be identical to the Descartes body, since one possessed a characteristic that the other did not: namely, it could be known to exist. Solipsism agrees with Descartes in this aspect, and goes further: only things that can be known to exist for sure should be considered to exist. The Descartes body could only exist as an idea in the mind of the person Descartes.[12][13] Descartes and dualism aim to prove the actual existence of reality as opposed to a phantom existence (as well as the existence of God in Descartes' case), using the realm of ideas merely as a starting point, but solipsism usually finds those further arguments unconvincing. The solipsist instead proposes that his/her own unconscious is the author of all seemingly "external" events from "reality".

Philosophy of Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation is the central work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer saw the human will as our one window to the world behind the representation, the Kantian thing-in-itself. He believed, therefore, that we could gain knowledge about the thing-in-itself, something Kant said was impossible, since the rest of the relationship between representation and thing-in-itself could be understood by analogy to the relationship between human will and human body.

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Radical empiricism The idealist philosopher George Berkeley argued that physical objects do not exist independently of the mind that perceives them. An item truly exists only so long as it is observed; otherwise, it is not only meaningless, but simply nonexistent. The observer and the observed are one. Berkeley does attempt to show things can and do exist apart from the human mind and our perception, but only because there is an all-encompassing Mind in which all "ideas" are perceived – in other words, God, who observes all. Solipsism agrees that nothing exists outside of perception, but would argue that Berkeley falls prey to the egocentric predicament – he can only make his own observations, and can't be truly sure that this God or other people exist to observe "reality". The solipsist would say it is better to disregard the unreliable observations of alleged other people and rely upon the immediate certainty of one's own perceptions.[14]

Rationalism Rationalism is the philosophical position that truth is best discovered by the use of reasoning and logic rather than by the use of the senses (see Plato's theory of Forms). Solipsism, is also skeptical of sense-data.

Philosophical zombie The theory of solipsism crosses over with the theory of the philosophical zombie in that all other seemingly conscious beings actually lack true consciousness, instead they only display traits of consciousness to the observer, who is the only conscious being there is.

Falsifiability and testability Solipsism is not a falsifiable hypothesis as described by Karl Popper or Imre Lakatos: there does not seem to be an imaginable disproof. Not even the complete death of the solipsist could falsify his belief in solipsism because he could not analyze that observation. One critical test is nevertheless to consider the induction from experience that the externally observable world does not seem, at first approach, to be directly manipulable purely by mental energies alone. One can indirectly manipulate the world through the medium of the physical body, but it seems impossible to do so through pure thought (e.g. via psychokinesis). It might be argued that if the external world were merely a construct of a single consciousness, i.e. the self, it could then follow that the external world should be somehow directly manipulable by that consciousness, and if it is not, then solipsism is false. An argument against this states the notion that such manipulation may be possible but barred from the conscious self via the subconscious self, a 'locked' portion of the mind that is still nevertheless the same mind. Lucid dreaming might be considered an example of when these locked portions of the subconscious become accessible. An argument against this might be brought up in asking why the subconscious of the mind would be locked. The method of the typical scientist is materialist: they first assume that the external world exists and can be known. But the scientific method, in the sense of a predict-observe-modify loop, does not require the assumption of an external world. A solipsist may perform a psychological test on themselves, to discern the nature of the reality in their mind (David Deutsch uses this fact to counter-argue below). This investigation may not be proper science, however, since it would not include the co-operative and communitarian aspects of scientific inquiry that normally serve to diminish bias.

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Minimalism Solipsism is a form of logical minimalism. Many people are intuitively unconvinced of the nonexistence of the external world from the basic arguments of solipsism, but a solid proof of its existence is not available at present. The central assertion of solipsism rests on the nonexistence of such a proof, and strong solipsism (as opposed to weak solipsism) asserts that no such proof can be made. In this sense, solipsism is logically related to agnosticism in religion: the distinction between believing you do not know, and believing you could not have known. However, minimality (or parsimony) is not the only logical virtue. A common misapprehension of Occam's Razor has it that the simpler theory is always the best. In fact, the principle is that the simpler of two theories of equal explanatory power is to be preferred. In other words: additional "entities" can pay their way with enhanced explanatory power. So the realist can claim that, while his world view is more complex, it is more satisfying as an explanation.

Samsara Many ancient Indian philosophies advocate the notion that all matter (and thus humans) is subtly interconnected with not only one's immediate surroundings, but with everything in the universe. They claim that the perception of absolutely independent beings and things is an illusion that leads to confusion and dissatisfaction—Samsara. The solipsist, however, would be more likely to put one's self (or merely their own mind) in the center, as the only item of reality, with all other beings (and perhaps even their own body) in reality illusions.

Eastern philosophies Some solipsists believe that some tenets of eastern philosophies are similar to solipsism. Taoism and several interpretations of Buddhism, especially Zen, teach that the distinction between self and universe is arbitrary, merely a habit of perception and an artifact of language. This view identifies the unity of self and universe as the ultimate reality. Zen holds that each individual has 'Buddha Mind': an all-pervading awareness that fills their entire existence, including the 'external' world. This need not imply that one's mind is all that exists, as with solipsism, but rather that the distinction between "I am" and "it is" is ultimately unnecessary, and a burden that, paradoxically, gives rise to an illusory sense of permanence and independence—that "separate" self which suffers and dies. In this sense, Zen reflects Meister Eckhart's "The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love." Zen works across both divisions of inside "me" and outside "me", with meditation practice unravelling the very notion of binary oppositions, which ultimately are seen as the source of any "problem" of solipsism. Hinduism Earliest reference to Solipsism in Hindu philosophy is found in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, dated to early 1st millennium BCE.[15] The Upanishad holds the mind to be the only god and all actions in the universe are thought to be a result of the mind assuming infinite forms.[16] After the development of distinct schools of Indian philosophy, Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya schools are thought to have originated concepts similar to solipsism. Advaita Vedanta Advaita is one of the six most-known Hindu philosophical systems, and literally means "non-duality". Its first great consolidator was Adi Shankaracharya, who continued the work of some of the Upanishadic teachers, and that of his teacher's teacher Gaudapada. By using various arguments, such as the analysis of the three states of experience—wakefulness, dream, and deep sleep, he established the singular reality of Brahman, in which Brahman, the universe and the Atman or the Self, were one and the same. One who sees everything as nothing but the Self, and the Self in everything one sees, such a seer withdraws from nothing. For the enlightened, all that exists is nothing but the Self, so how could any suffering or

Solipsism

264 delusion continue for those who know this oneness? — Ishopanishad: sloka 6, 7

The concept of the Self in the philosophy of Advaita, could be interpreted as solipsism. However, the transhuman, theological implications of the Self in Advaita protect it from true solipsism as is found in the west. Similarly, the Vedantic text Yogavasistha, escapes charge of solipsism because the real "I" is thought to be nothing but the absolute whole looked at through a particular unique point of interest.[17] Advaita is also thought to strongly diverge from solipsism in that, the former is a system of exploration of one's mind in order to finally understand the nature of the self and attain complete knowledge. The unity of existence is said to be directly experienced and understood at the end as a part of complete knowledge. On the other hand solipsism posits the non-existence of the external void right at the beginning, and says that no further inquiry is possible. Samkhya and Yoga Samkhya philosophy, which is sometimes seen as the basis of Yogic thought,[18] adopts a view that matter exists independently of individual minds. Representation of an object in an individual mind is held to be a mental approximation of the object in the external world.[19] Therefore, Samkhya chooses representational realism over epistemological solipsism. Having established this distinction between the external world and the mind, Samkhya posits the existence of two metaphysical realities Prakriti (matter) and Purusha (consciousness). Buddhism Buddhism asserts that external reality is an illusion, and sometimes this position is misunderstood as Solipsism. Buddhist doctrine, though, holds that both the mind and external phenomena are both equally transient, and that they arise from each other. The mind cannot exist without external phenomena, nor can external phenomena exist without the mind. This is a process known as Pratītyasamutpāda, or "co-dependent origination." The Buddha stated, "Within this fathom long body is the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world and the path leading to the cessation of the world".[20] Whilst not rejecting the occurrence of external phenomena, the Buddha focused on the illusion created within the mind of the perceiver by the process of ascribing permanence to impermanent phenomena, satisfaction to unsatisfying experiences, and a sense of reality to things that were effectively insubstantial. Mahayana Buddhism also challenged as illusion the idea that one can experience an 'objective' reality independent of individual perceiving minds. According to the Sutra Prasangika view, external objects do exist, just not inherently: "Just as objects of mind do not exist [inherently], mind also does not exist [inherently]".[21] In other words, even though a chair may physically exist, individuals can only experience it through the medium of their own mind, each with their own literal point-of-view. Therefore, an independent purely 'objective' reality could never be experienced. Some later representatives of one Yogacara subschool (Prajnakaragupta, Ratnakirti) were proponents of extreme illusionism and solipsism (as well as of solipsism of this moment). The best example of such extreme ideas was the treatise of Ratnakirti (11th century) "Refutation of the existence of other minds" (Santanantara dusana). Note: It is important to note that all mentioned Yogacara trends are not purely philosophical but religious–philosophical. All Yogacara discourse takes place within the religious and doctrinal dimension of Buddhism. It is also determined by the fundamental Buddhist problem, that is the living being and its liberation from the bondage of Samsara.

Solipsism

Responses There are a number of critiques of, and responses to, solipsism.

Death The person dies, but the solipsist themself is not dead. If somebody else dies, the supposed being who has supposedly "died" is only a phantom of the solipsist's imagination anyway, and the elimination of that phantom proves nothing. For the solipsist, death can only ever be "the death of the other". He/she never believed in the existence of those other solipsists in the first place. Note however that a sentence reflecting a supposed understanding of the actions of others, such as one that contains a statement like "he or she never believed..." or "those others" is already stepping outside of the solipsist's subjective viewpoint, and so misleading when used to illustrate a solipsistic view of death. For the solipsist, death is like the end of a dream. The dream itself, the setting, and any characters within that dream would not be thought to continue after waking. Ergo, if waking life is like a dream, why should the setting or characters perceived within it continue on after the death of the subject from that dream either? Because they were illusions to begin with. A character can be imagined but when they are not being imagined it's like they died—until they are imagined again. In the same sense an illusion can die and live after death in the same way that an image of imagination can be re-imagined.

Learning Some might argue that to exist in complete unity with reality would mean to be unable to learn—one would have to have awareness of all things. The solipsist would probably not appeal to such knowledge being contained in their subconscious, since the existence of a world of information outside consciousness is exactly what the solipsist disavows. Instead the solipsist might suggest that the world that exists is always restricted to his/her field of vision—the way no world exists behind the walls of a stage's set, video game environment, or in a dream.

Applicability of the past The fact that an individual may find a statement such as "I think, therefore I am" applicable to them, yet not originating in their mind indicates that others have had a comparable degree of insight into their own mental processes, and that these are similar enough to the subject's. The metaphysical solipsist would respond that, much like other people are products of his own mind, so, too, is "the past" and its attendant information. Thus, "I think, therefore I am" would indeed have originated in their mind.

Life is imperfect Why would a solipsist create things such as pain and loss for himself or herself? More generally, it might be asked "If the world is completely in my head, how come I don't live the most fantastic life imaginable?" One response would be to simply plead ignorance and note that there may be some reason which was forgotten on purpose. Perhaps this is all out of a desire to avoid being bored, or perhaps even that the solipsist is in fact living the most perfect life he or she could imagine. Another response is that categories such as 'pain' are perceptions assumed with all of the other socio-cultural human values that the solipsist has created for himself—a package deal, so to speak. A third response is to say that, like a dream, the solipsist's subconscious mind creates a world which the solipsist's conscious mind might not have chosen but has no control over changing. This issue is somewhat related to theodicy, the "problem of evil", except that the solipsist himself is the all-powerful God who has somehow allowed imperfection into his world. A solipsist may also counter that since he never made himself he never had a choice in the way his mind operates and appears to have only limited control over how his experiences evolve. He could also conclude that the world of his own mind's creation is the exact total of all his

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Solipsism desires, conscious and otherwise and that each moment is always perfect in the sense that it would not be other than as his own mind in total had made.[14] The imperfection of life can also be explained through the belief that only through pain, both physical and emotional, can one move to a higher state of existence. Thus, it could be theorized that the imperfect present for a solipsist is the direct result of his subconscious compulsion to experience perfection. A variant of this problem questions the existence of other people's skills the solipsist lacks. If the solipsist created a famous poet in his mind, why doesn't the solipsist have the capacity to imitate their skill? Similar to pain, there is some reason that the solipsist has denied himself this ability, but it may not be knowable or explainable. The claim that the solipsist's mind is the only thing with certain existence for him (epistemological solipsism) does not inherently address the question of control over the content of that mind. Solipsism asserts that the mind of the agent is the only thing with assured existence; it need not assert any specific structure to that mind—any more or less than materialism—in and of itself, and requires a specific cosmology. However, any convincing philosophy needs to cohere with what is observed, and metaphysical solipsism needs to credit certain mental contents with the same stubborn indifference to human wishes that material objects display in other philosophies. If the world is in the mind of a solipsist, then why doesn't a perfect world exist? For the same reason that people are able to have nightmares even though they also come from the mind.

Solipsism undercuts morality If solipsism is true, then practically all standards for moral behavior would seem to be meaningless. According to this argument there is no "creator", no deity, so that an external, "objective" basis for morality is gone. Other forms of morality that do not rely on the existence of an infallible deity, such as secular humanism, also become meaningless because there are no such things as other humans. Everything and everyone else is just a figment of imagination, so there's no particular reason not to make these figments disappear by, say, mass annihilation. The problem with this argument is that it falls prey to the Appeal to Consequences Fallacy; whether or not solipsism is true does not depend on its implications. A solipsist may also understand that everything being a part of himself would also mean that harming anything would be harming himself with associated negative consequences such as pain (although the solipsist must be harming himself already, since "life is imperfect"). Or an exponent of a weak form of solipsism might say that harming others is imprudent because the solipsist can only be uncertain of their real existence rather than certain of their non-existence. Another expression of this point is in noting the strong feelings that a human can have for a non-existent character in a movie, or for a car or boat which is admitted to be completely non sentient. There is no logical or psychological reason to prevent a solipsist caring for observed people, even if the solipsist is completely convinced of their non-existence.

The solipsist needs a language The practical solipsist needs a language to formulate his or her thoughts about solipsism. Language is an essential tool to communicate with other minds. Why does a solipsist need to communicate with other minds when, to the solipsist, those "other minds" don't exist? So why does a solipsist universe need a language? Indeed, some might even say, solipsism is necessarily incoherent, a self-refuting idea, for to make an appeal to logical rules or empirical evidence the solipsist would implicitly have to affirm the very thing in which he or she purportedly refuses to believe: the 'reality' of intersubjectively valid criteria, and/or of a public, extra-mental world.[22] Solipsism does not deny the possibility of a systemically orderly world, it denies the existence of other consciousness apart from the solipsist. The concept of the world having being created by a solipsist is not inherently against the concept of said world having rules. Appealing to empirical knowledge could be interpreted as the creator appealing to rules it itself created, why the solipsist would do this in turn goes to further unrelated topics mentioned below. Another variant of solipsism is indeed against this, considering said variants could state that what is not

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Solipsism observed does not exist. Leading to further possible answers both inclusive and exclusive of empiricism as its logical basis, possibly ranging into a different logical system or, due to the characteristics of solipsism itself, to an original logic. As for the necessity to appeal to an intersubjective reality, a solipsist could say that there can be no intersubjectivity because there is not subjectivity at all, it could be said that no one is truly real, therefore they have no subjectivity whatsoever. Instead appealing to others could be interpreted as the solipsist fulfilling its own rules it itself created (this leads to interesting questions as to why the solipsist's rules would require it to reach agreements in a code the solipsist made with agents the solipsist created for the personal gratification of the solipsist). One famous argument along these lines is the private language argument of Wittgenstein. In brief, this states that since language is for communication, and communication requires two participants, the existence of language in the mind of the thinker means the existence of another mind to communicate with. This argument does not refute solipsism as it might even appear that one using it doesn't really understand the private language argument. Wittgenstein's argument says there's no such thing as a language that is both meaningful and understandable by one person but which is impossible for any other person to understand. If, for example, the solipsist's language is English then that alone makes the Private Language Argument useless against solipsism because English is a language that CAN theoretically be understood by multiple people. So for solipsism if we assume there's only one human in the universe, no languages are private unless no theoretical second person can comprehend it. You don't actually need a second person but just theory. A solipsist might also argue that there never was anyone to begin with, so all the details of the perceived world including language are completely irrelevant (as say, English, could not ever be understood by anyone as there was never truly someone to do so. Instead the other alleged recipients of the language could just be means the solipsist itself created to reach a language of its own creation, the same would apply with all philosophy and physical laws, which are imperfect at that point). As mentioned previously the solipsist can state that everything including physics, evolution and language are mere constructs made for one reason or another while in a state of higher intelligence. Alternate explications could lead to a different conclusions: Either the laws of physics are constantly created by the solipsist to permit its own existence; or everything ranging from thought itself to physics were created by the solipsist for a particular instance. In which case a question is opened, can a solipsist have possibly existed without physics, or physics are coverups for some constant primal quality of the solipsist's own existence? This leaves another question in turn, can the solipsist claim that his current consciousness is limited in comparison with its full potential, in which case, why would the available intellectual potential be limited to begin with? Whatever triggered this arbitrary decision could be the creative property of the solipsist itself. That would reduce the solipsist to an impersonal force that by either pure chance or something else managed to create the laws that could in turn accidentally developed the life that gives said force the ability to have thoughts occupying the consciousness. By said logic at some point the solipsist may have either evolved into a thinking being, or the solipsist created the laws that permit the solipsist's primal attributes to be explained to begin with.

Philosophical poverty Some philosophers, notably Bertrand Russell, hold the viewpoint that solipsism is entirely empty and without content. Like a 'faith' argument, it seems sterile, i.e., allows no further argument, nor can it be falsified. The world remains absolutely the same—so where could a solipsist go from there? Viewed in this way, solipsism seems only to have found a facile way to avoid the more difficult task of a critical analysis of what is 'real' and what isn't, and what 'reality' means. The solipsist might hold in response that further argument is meaningless. He might explain that, granting only the most basic laws of thought, he has identified the real limits of what can be truly known about 'reality': cogito ergo sum.

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Solipsism amounts to realism An objection, raised by David Deutsch[23] (among others), is that since the solipsist has no control over the "universe" she is creating for herself, there must be some part of her mind, of which she is not conscious, that is doing the creating. If the solipsist makes her unconscious mind the object of scientific study (e.g. by conducting experiments), she will find that it behaves with the same complexity as the universe described by a realist. Thus what realism calls "the universe", solipsism calls "one's unconscious mind." Understood this way, the distinction between realism and solipsism collapses and amounts to different ways of describing the same thing: a massively complex process that causes all of the solipsist's experiences, but is not identical to the solipsist's conscious mind. However despite this the solipsist could still maintain that, unlike Deutsch's views, that which causes his experiences are still a part of his mind. Presumably having made the case that the solipsist scientist is actually a realist scientist, Deutsch next argues in favor of the more common understanding of reality. He applies Occam's Razor, and suggests that it prefers the standard external 'reality' over something like a brain in a vat. This is because the standard 'reality' fits all the data available to the scientist, rendering superfluous the other more complicated possibilities. If seeking to avoid rejecting the laws of thought, the solipsist may easily appeal to the Problem of Induction. With this he could nullify the use of Occam's Razor and even Deutsch's first premises on the solipsists mind, since they are arguments made using inductive reasoning. The Realist Society of Canada has a religious holiday dedicated to the knowledge of self existence called IKIE (pronounced \ˈīk\) celebrated on the third Friday in March each year.[24]

Belief in God and Solipsism Some forms of Solipsism can co exist with the belief in God, unrelated to the belief that the world is in the mind of the solipsist and that he is the sole creator of the world. The Solipsist who believes in God is aware of the creator and has no relation to the belief that he himself is God. He believes that multiple consciousness is part of the realm of impossibility, perceiving God's creations can only be perceived by one. This also results in the belief that God is unconscious as well and that consciousness is not needed to perform actions such as creating life. Consciousness only provides the ability of being aware of the actions that are performed.

Notes [1] Thornton, Stephen P. (24 October 2004). "Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds" (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ s/ solipsis. htm#H1). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . [2] Edward Craig; Routledge (Firm) (1998). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Genealogy to Iqbal (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=5m5z_ca-qDkC& pg=PA146). Taylor & Francis US. pp. 146–. ISBN 978-0-415-18709-1. . Retrieved 16 October 2010. [3] Jones, N.; Berkeley, G. (2009). Starting with Berkeley (http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=G6ukEYxbW5UC& lpg=PA105& pg=PA105). Starting with. Continuum. p. 105. ISBN 978-1-84706-186-7. LCCN 2008053026. . [4] Freud, Sigmund Gay, Peter edit. The Freud Reader 1995 New York WW Norton page 575 [5] Flanagan, Owen J. (1991). The Science of the Mind (http:/ / books. google. com/ ?id=80HIwMz3bvwC& printsec=frontcover& dq=infant+ solipsism). MIT Press. pp. 144. ISBN 0-262-56056-9, 9780262560566. . Retrieved 2008-10-22. [6] "Materialism". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. [7] "Idealism". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. [8] Loflin, Lewis. "Notes on Neoplatonism and the relation to Christianity and Gnosticism" (http:/ / www. sullivan-county. com/ id3/ neoplatonism. htm). . [9] "German Idealism" (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ g/ germidea. htm). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 16 April 2001. . [10] DePoe, John M. "A Defense of Dualism" (http:/ / www. newdualism. org/ papers/ J. DePoe/ dualism. htm). New Dualism Archive. . [11] "Dualism". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. [12] Calef, Scott (9 June 2005). "Dualism and Mind" (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ d/ dualism. htm). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . [13] Thornton, Stephen P. (24 October 2004). "Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds" (http:/ / www. iep. utm. edu/ s/ solipsis. htm). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . [14] Khashaba, D.R. (28 July 2002). "Subjectivism and Solipsism" (http:/ / www. philosophypathways. com/ newsletter/ issue37. html). Philosophy Pathways (37). .

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Solipsism [15] King, Richard; Ācārya, Gauḍapāda (1995), Early Advaita Vedānta and Buddhism: the Mahāyāna context of the Gauḍapādīya-kārikā, SUNY Press, p. 52, ISBN 978-0-7914-2513-8 [16] Krishnananda, (Swami). The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (http:/ / www. swami-krishnananda. org/ brdup/ brhad_III-01a. html). Divine Life Society, Rishikesh. P. 248. [17] O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (http:/ / books. google. co. in/ books?id=vhNNrX3bmo4C& pg=PA121& dq=solipsism+ hinduism& hl=en& sa=X& ei=pv_4T6KxLIX4rQfIn_jVBg& ved=0CEIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage& q=solipsism hinduism& f=false). Universoty of Chicago, 1984. pp. 120–1. ISBN 0-226-61855-2. [18] Radhankrishnan, Indian Philosophy, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1971 edition, Volume II, p. 342. [19] Isaac, J. R.; Dangwal, Ritu; Chakraborty, C. Proceedings. International conference on cognitive systmes (1997) (http:/ / books. google. co. in/ books?id=V9Z0dFN3DN0C& pg=PA339& dq=Consciousness+ matter+ dualism+ sankhya& hl=en& sa=X& ei=kmLnT_2sLtDMrQeN-_D3CA& ved=0CFAQ6AEwBA#v=onepage& q=Consciousness matter dualism sankhya& f=false). Allied Publishers Ltd. pp. 341–2. ISBN 81-7023-746-7. [20] Rohitassa Sutta: To Rohitassa (http:/ / www. accesstoinsight. org/ tipitaka/ an/ an04/ an04. 045. than. html) [21] Chandrakirti, Guide to the Middle Way 6:71cd, translation in Ocean of Nectar: Wisdom and Compassion in Mahayana Buddhism, London: Tharpa Publications, p. 253. [22] Jacquette, Dale (1994). "Wittgenstein on private language and private mental objects" (http:/ / sammelpunkt. philo. at:8080/ 399/ ). Wittgenstein Studies (1). . [23] Deutsch, David. "David Deutsch on Solipsism" (http:/ / www. freivald. org/ ~jake/ deutschOnSolipsism. html). The Free Woods. . [24] "The Realist Society of Canada Religious Holidays" http:/ / www. realistsocietyofcanada. com/ realism-holidays

References • Carus, Titus Lucretius (c. 50 BC). De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things]. ISBN 84-85708-46-6. • Khashaba, D.R. (28 July 2002). "Subjectivism and Solipsism" (http://www.philosophypathways.com/ newsletter/issue37.html). Philosophy Pathways (37). • Peake, Anthony (2006). Is There Life After Death?. Arcturus–Foulsham (Europe), Chartwell Books (USA). ISBN 0-7858-2162-7. This book presents an intriguing and scientifically based updating of solipsism involving the latest findings in quantum physics, neurology and consciousness studies. • Popper, K.R.; Eccles, J.C. (1977). The Self and Its Brain. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-08307-3. • Russell, Bertrand (1988) [1912]. The Problems of Philosophy. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-7546-1210-4. • Russell, Bertrand (1995) [1921]. The Analysis of Mind. London, UK: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-09097-0. • von Schubert Soldern, Richard (1982). Über Transcendenz des Objects und Subjects. Leipzig. • Thornton, Stephen P. (24 October 2004). "Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds" (http://www.iep.utm. edu/s/solipsis.htm). In Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. • Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1974). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19064-3. • Wood, Ledger (1962). "Solipsism". In Runes. Dictionary of Philosophy. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, and Company. p. 295.

Reference works • Runes, Dagobert D., ed. (1962). Dictionary of Philosophy. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, and Company. • Neilson, W.A.; Knott, T.A.; Carhart, P.W., eds. (1950). Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language (Second, Unabridged ed.). Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam Company. • Mish, Frederick C., ed. (1983). Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam–Webster.

External links • Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds (http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/solipsis.htm) • Solipsism experienced as a dissociative symptom of mental illness (http://www.geometricvisions.com/ Madness/schizoaffective-disorder/dissociation.html)

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Transcendence (philosophy)

Transcendence (philosophy) In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning (from Latin), of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages. This article covers the topic from a Western and Islamic perspective by epoch: Ancient, Medieval, and modern, primarily Continental philosophy.

Original definition The first meaning, as part of the concept pair transcendence/immanence, is used primarily with reference to God's relation to the world and is particularly important in theology. Here transcendent means that God is completely outside of and beyond the world, as contrasted with the notion that God is manifested in the world. This meaning originates both in the Aristotelian view of God as the prime mover, a non-material self-consciousness that is outside of the world. Philosophies and philosophers of immanence such as stoicism or pantheism, Spinoza or Deleuze maintain that God is manifested in and fully present in the world and the things in the world.

Medieval usage In the second meaning, which originated in Medieval philosophy, concepts are transcendental if they are broader than what falls within the Aristotelian categories that were used to organize reality conceptually. The prevailing notion of transcendental is that of a quality of being which can be predicated on any actually existing thing insofar as it exists. Primary examples of the transcendental are the existent (ens) and the characteristics, designated transcendentals, of unity, truth, and goodness.

Transcendent theosophy Transcendent theosophy or al-hikmah al-muta’aliyah (Arabic: ‫ﺍﻟﺤﻜﻤﺔ ﺍﻟﻤﺘﻌﺎﻟﻴﺔ‬, Persian: ‫)ﺣﮑﻤﺖ ﻣﺘﻌﺎﻟﯿﻪ‬, the doctrine and philosophy that has been developed by Persian Islamic philosopher Mulla Sadra is one of two main disciplines of Islamic philosophy which is active today.

Kant (and modern philosophy) Further information: Transcendental idealism and Transcendental arguments In modern philosophy, Kant introduced a new term - transcendental, thus instituting a new, third meaning. In his theory of knowledge, this concept is concerned with the conditions of possibility of knowledge itself. He also opposed the term transcendental to the term transcendent, the latter meaning "that, which goes beyond" (transcends) any possible knowledge of a human being.[1] For him transcendental meant knowledge about our cognitive faculty with regard to how objects are possible a priori. "I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied, not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them."[2] He also equated transcendental with that which is "...in respect of the subject's faculty of cognition."[3] Something is transcendental if it plays a role in the way in which the mind "constitutes" objects and makes it possible for us to experience them as objects in the first place. Ordinary knowledge is knowledge of objects; transcendental knowledge is knowledge of how it is possible for us to experience those objects as objects. This is based on Kant's acceptance of David Hume's argument that certain general features of objects (e.g. persistence, causal relationships) cannot derive from the sense impressions we have of them. Kant argues that the mind must contribute those features and make it possible for us to experience objects as objects. In the central part of his Critique of Pure Reason, the "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories", Kant argues for a deep interconnection between the ability to have self-consciousness and the ability to experience a world of objects. Through a process of synthesis, the mind generates both the structure of objects and

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Transcendence (philosophy) its own unity. A metaphilosophical question discussed by many Kantian scholars is how transcendental reflection is itself possible. Stephen Palmquist interprets Kant's appeal to faith as his most effective solution to this problem.[4] For Kant, the "transcendent", as opposed to the "transcendental", is that which lies beyond what our faculty of knowledge can legitimately know. Hegel's counter-argument to Kant was that to know a boundary is also to be aware of what it bounds and as such what lies beyond it – in other words, to have already transcended it. In phenomenology, the "transcendent" is that which transcends our own consciousness - that which is objective rather than only a phenomenon of consciousness. Noema is employed in phenomenology to refer to the terminus of an intention as given for consciousness. Jean-Paul Sartre also speaks of transcendence in his works. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre utilizes transcendence to describe the relation of the self to the object oriented world, as well as our concrete relations with others. For Sartre, the for-itself is sometimes called a transcendence. Additionally if the other is viewed strictly as an object, much like any other object, then the other is, for the for-itself, a transcendence-transcended. When the for-itself grasps the other in the others world, and grasps the subjectivity that the other has, it is referred to as transcending-transcendence. Thus, Sartre defines relations with others in terms of transcendence.[5]

Colloquial usage In everyday language, "transcendence" means "going beyond", and "self-transcendence" means going beyond a prior form or state of oneself. Mystical experience is thought of as a particularly advanced state of self-transcendence, in which the sense of a separate self is abandoned. "Self-transcendence" is believed to be psychometrically measurable, and (at least partially) inherited, and has been incorporated as a personality dimension in the Temperament and Character Inventory.[6] The discovery of this is described in the book "The God Gene" by Dean Hamer, although this has been criticized by commentators such as Carl Zimmer.

Notes [1] [2] [3] [4]

cf. Critique of Pure Reason or Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Critique of Pure Reason, A12 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, Introduction, V Stephen Palmquist, "Faith as Kant's Key to the Justification of Transcendental Reflection", The Heythrop Journal 25:4 (October 1984), pp.442-455. A revised version of this paper appeared as Chapter V in Palmquist's book, Kant's System of Perspectives (http:/ / www. hkbu. edu. hk/ ~ppp/ ksp1) (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993). [5] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1956. [6] Cloninger, C.R.; Svrakic, DM; Przybeck, TR (December 1993). "A psychobiological model of temperament and character". Archives of General Psychiatry 50 (12): 975–90. doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1993.01820240059008. PMID 8250684.

References • Kluger, Jeffrey (2004-10-17). "Is God in Our Genes?" (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,1101041025-725072,00.html). Time (Time Inc.). Retrieved 2007-05-29. • Razavi, Mehdi Amin (1997), Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination, Routledge, ISBN 0-7007-0412-4

External links • Aldous Huxley on Self-Transcedence - The Epilog of The Devils of Loudun (http://www.psychedelic-library. org/loudun.htm) • Self Transcendence.org (http://www.selftranscendence.org/self_transcendence/what_is_self_transcendence/) What is Self Transcendence?

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• Stephen Palmquist, Kant's System of Perspectives (http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/ksp1) (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993). See especially Part Two. • Transcendental Experiences (http://urantia.us/urantia_united_summation.htm)

Commodity fetishism In Karl Marx's critique of the political economy of capitalism, commodity fetishism is the transformation of human relations, derived from the trading of commodities in the market, whereby the social relationships among people are expressed with objectified economic relationships, among the money and commodities, and the buyers and sellers. As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value.[1]

Commodity fetishism: In the marketplace, buyers and sellers perceive each other by means of the commodities that they buy and sell. (iPhone 5 iPhone, Apple)

The theory of commodity fetishism is presented in the first chapter of Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), at the conclusion of the analysis of the value-form of commodities, to explain that the social organisation of labour is mediated through market exchange, the buying and the selling of commodities (goods and services). Hence, in a capitalist society, social relations between people—who makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity, et cetera—are perceived as economic relations among objects, that is, how valuable a given commodity is when compared to another commodity. Therefore, the market exchange of commodities masks (obscures) the true economic character of the human relations of production, between the worker and the capitalist.[2] Karl Marx explained the philosophic concepts underlying commodity fetishism thus: As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1[3]

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The concept of fetishism The theory of commodity fetishism originated from Karl Marx's references to fetishes and fetishism in his analyses of religious superstition, and in the criticism of the beliefs of political economists.[4] Marx borrowed the concept of "fetishism" from The Cult of Fetish Gods (1760) by Charles de Brosses, which proposed a materialist theory of the origin of religion.[5] Moreover, in the 1840s, the philosophic discussion of fetishism by Auguste Comte, and Ludwig Feuerbach's psychological interpretation of religion also influenced Marx's development of commodity fetishism.[6][7] The first mention of fetishism appeared in 1842, in his response to a newspaper article by Karl Heinrich Hermes, which defended the Prussian state on religious grounds.[8] Hermes concorded with the German philosopher G.F.W. Hegel in regarding fetishism as the crudest form of religion. Marx dismissed that argument, and Hermes's definition of religion as that which elevates man "above sensuous appetites". Instead, Marx said that fetishism is "the religion of sensuous appetites", and that the fantasy of the appetites tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper. Therefore, the crude appetite of the fetish worshipper smashes the fetish when it ceases to be of service.[9]

Fetishism: a South African fetish figurine whose supernatural powers protect the owner and kin in the natural world (ca. 1900)

The next mention of fetishism was in the 1842 Rheinische Zeitung newspaper articles about the "Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood", wherein Marx spoke of the Spanish fetishism of gold and the German fetishism of wood as commodities: [10] The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it, and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders' fetish? But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in order to save the human beings. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx spoke of the European fetish of precious-metal money:

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The nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous glitter of precious metals, and are, therefore, still fetish-worshippers of metal money, are not yet fully developed money-nations. [Note the] contrast of France and England. The extent to which the solution of theoretical riddles is the task of practice, and is effected through practice, the extent to which true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory, is shown, for example, in fetishism. The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-worshipper is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is different. The abstract enmity between sense and spirit is necessary so long as the human feeling for nature, the human sense of nature, and, therefore, also the natural sense of man, are not yet produced by man's own labour.[11]

Metal money fetishism: A political poster shows gold coin as the basis of prosperity. (ca. 1896)

In the ethnological notebooks, he commented upon the archæological reportage of The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and Social conditions of Savages (1870), by John Lubbock.[12] In the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse, 1859), he criticized the statist, anti-socialist arguments of the French economist Frédéric Bastiat; and about fetishes and fetishism Marx said: In real history, wage labour arises out of the dissolution of slavery and serfdom — or of the decay of communal property, as with Oriental and Slavonic peoples — and, in its adequate, epoch-making form, the form which takes possession of the entire social being of labour, out of the decline and fall of the guild economy, of the system of Estates, of labour and income in kind, of industry carried on as rural subsidiary occupation, of small-scale feudal agriculture, etc. In all these real historic transitions, wage labour appears as the dissolution, the annihilation of relations in which labour was fixed on all sides, in its income, its content, its location, its scope, etc. Hence, as negation of the stability of labour and of its remuneration. The direct transition from the African's fetish to Voltaire's "Supreme Being", or from the hunting gear of a North American savage to the capital of the Bank of England, is not so absurdly contrary to history, as is the transition from Bastiat's fisherman to the wage labourer.[13] In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx referred to A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy (1825), by John Ramsay McCulloch, who said that "In its natural state, matter . . . is always destitute of value", with which Marx concurred, saying that "this shows how high even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German 'thinkers' who assert that 'material', and half a dozen similar irrelevancies are elements of value". Furthermore, in the manuscript of "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" (ca. 1864), an appendix to Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867), Marx said that:

Commodity fetishism . . . we find in the capitalist process of production [an] indissoluble fusion of use-values in which capital subsists [as] means of production and objects defined as capital, when what we are really faced with is a definite social relationship of production. In consequence, the product embedded in this mode of production is equated with the commodity, by those who have to deal with it. It is this that forms the foundation for the fetishism of the political economists.[14] Hence did Karl Marx apply the concepts of fetish and fetishism, derived from economic and ethnologic studies, to the development of the theory of commodity fetishism, wherein an economic abstraction (value) is psychologically transformed (reified) into an object, which people choose to believe has an intrinsic value, in and of itself.[15]

The theory of commodity fetishism In the critique of political economy Karl Marx proposed that, in a society where independent, private producers trade their products with each other, of their own volition and initiative, and without much co-ordination of market exchange, the volumes of production and commercial activities are adjusted in accordance with the fluctuating values of the products (goods and services) as they are bought and sold, and in accordance with the fluctuations of supply and demand. Because their social co-existence, and its meaning, is expressed through market exchange (trade and transaction), people have no other relations with each other. Therefore, social relations are continually mediated and expressed with objects (commodities and money). How the traded commodities relate will depend upon the costs of production, which are reducible to quantities of human labour, although the worker has no control over what happens to the commodities that he or she produces. (See: Entfremdung, Marx's theory of alienation) Commodity fetishism, the socio-economic reification of a commodity into a fetish, an object with intrinsic value and an independent economic reality, is a five-fold transformation —

The domination of things The concept of the "intrinsic value" of commodities (goods and services) determines and dominates the economic (business) relationships among people, to the extent that buyers and sellers continually adjust their beliefs (financial expectations) about the value of things — either consciously or unconsciously — to the proportionate price changes (market-value) of the commodities over which buyers and sellers believe they have no true control. That psychologic perception transforms the trading-value of a commodity into an independent entity (an object), to the degree that the social value of the goods and services appears to be a natural property of the commodity, itself. Thence objectified, "the market" appears as if self-regulated (by fluctuating supply and demand) because, in pursuit of profit, the consumers of the products ceased to perceive the human co-operation among capitalists that is the true engine of the market where commodities are bought and sold; such is the domination of things in the market.

Objectified value The value of a commodity originates from the human being's intellectual and perceptual capacity to consciously (subjectively) ascribe a relative value (importance) to a commodity, the goods and services manufactured by the labour of a worker. Therefore, in the course of the economic transactions (buying and selling) that constitute market exchange, people ascribe subjective values to the commodities (goods and services), which the buyers and the sellers then perceive as objective values, the market-exchange prices that people will pay for the commodities.

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Naturalisation of market behaviour In a capitalist society, the human perception that "the market" is an independent, sentient entity, is how buyers, sellers, and producers naturalise market exchange (the human choices and decisions that constitute commerce) as a series of "natural phenomena . . . that . . . happen of their own accord". Such were the political-economy arguments of the economists whom Karl Marx criticized when they spoke of the "natural equilibria" of markets, as if the price (value) of a commodity were independent of the volition and initiative of the capitalist producers, buyers, and sellers of commodities.

The "natural behaviour" of the market: During an economic bubble, speculators presume that capital appreciation is an inherent economic property of their investments.

In the 18th century, the Scottish social philosopher and political economist Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776) proposed that the "truck, barter, and exchange" activities of the market were corresponding economic representations of human nature, that is, the buying and selling of commodities were activities intrinsic to the market, and thus are the "natural behaviour" of the market. Hence, Smith proposed that a market economy was a self-regulating entity that "naturally" tended towards economic equilibrium, wherein the relative prices (the value of) a commodity ensured that the buyers and sellers obtained what they wanted for and from their goods and services.[16] In the 19th century, Karl Marx contradicted the artifice of Adam Smith's "naturalisation of the market's behaviour" as a politico-ideologic apology — by and for the capitalists — which allowed human economic choices and decisions to be misrepresented as fixed "facts of life", rather than as the human actions that resulted from the will of the producers, the buyers, and the sellers of the commodities traded at market. Such "immutable economic laws" are what Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) revealed about the functioning of the capitalist mode of production, how goods and services (commodities) are circulated among a society; and thus explain the psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent, objective value and reality to a thing that has no inherent value — other than the value given to it by the producer, the seller, and the buyer of the commodity.

Masking In a capitalist economy, a character mask (Charactermaske) is the functional role with which a man or a woman relates and is related to in a society composed of stratified social classes, especially in relationships and market-exchange transactions; thus, in the course of buying and selling, the commodities (goods and services) usually appear other than they are, because they are masked (obscured) by the role-playing of the buyer and the seller. Moreover, because the capitalist economy of a class society is an intrinsically contradictory system, the masking of the true socio-economic character of the transaction is an integral feature of its function and operation as market exchange. In the course of business competition among themselves, buyers, sellers, and producers cannot do business (compete) without obscurity — confidentiality and secrecy — thus the necessity of the character masks that obscure true economic motive. Central to the Marxist critique of political economy is the obscurantism of the juridical labour contract, between the worker and the capitalist, that masks the true, exploitive nature of their economic relationship — that the worker does not sell his and her labour, but that the worker sells individual labour power, the human capacity to perform work and manufacture commodities (goods and services) that yield a profit to the producer. The work contract is the mask that obscures the economic exploitation of the difference between the wages paid for the labour of the worker, and the new value created by the labour of the worker. Karl Marx thus established that, in a capitalist society, the creation of wealth is based upon "the paid and unpaid portions of labour [that] are inseparably mixed up with each other, and the nature of the whole transaction is

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completely masked by the intervention of a contract, and the pay received at the end of the week"; and that:[17] Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than to interpret, to systematize and turn into apologetics — in a doctrinaire way — the ideas of the agents who are trapped within bourgeois relations of production. So it should not surprise us that, precisely within the estranged form of appearance of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and complete contradictions occur — and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence — that precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, and that these relationships appear all the more self-evident to it, the more their inner interconnection remains hidden to it, even though these relationships are comprehensible to the popular mind. — Capital Volume 3.[18]

The opacity of economic relations The primary valuation of the trading-value of goods and services (commodities) is expressed as money-prices. The buyers and the sellers determine and establish the economic and financial relationships; and afterwards compare the prices in and the price trends of the market. Moreover, because of the masking of true economic motive, neither the buyer, nor the seller, nor the producer perceive and understand every human labour-activity required to deliver the commodities (goods and services), nor do they perceive the workers whose labour facilitated the purchase of commodities. The economic results of such collective human labour are expressed as the values and the prices of the commodities; the value-relations between the amount of human labour and the value of the supplied commodity.

Applications Cultural theory Since the 19th century, when Karl Marx presented the theory of commodity fetishism, in Section 4, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof", of the first chapter of Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), the constituent concepts of the theory, and their sociologic and economic explanations, have proved intellectually fertile propositions that permit the application of the theory (interpretation, development, adaptation) to the study, examination, and analysis of other cultural aspects of the political economy of capitalism, such as: • Sublimated sexuality The theory of sexual fetishism, which Alfred Binet presented in the essay Le fétichisme dans l'amour: la vie psychique des micro-organismes, l'intensité des images mentales, etc. (Fetishism in Love: the Psychic Life of György Lukács developed Karl Marx's Micro-organisms, the Intensity of Mental Images, etc., 1887), was applied theory of commodity fetishism to develop to interpret commodity fetishism as types of sexually-charged economic reification theory. relationships, between a person and a commodity (goods and services), as in the case of advertising, which is a commercial enterprise that ascribes human qualities (values) to a commodity, to persuade the buyer to purchase the adverised goods and services.[19] • Reification

Commodity fetishism

In History and Class Consciousness (1923), György Lukács started from the theory of commodity fetishism for his development of reification (the psychological transformation of an abstraction into a concrete object) as the principal obstacle to class consciousness. About which Lukács said: "Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully, and more definitively into the consciousness of Man" — hence, commodification pervaded every conscious human activity, as the growth of capitalism commodified every sphere of human activity into a product that can be bought and sold in the market.[20] (See: Verdinglichung, Marx's theory of reification.) • Industrialised culture Commodity fetishism is theoretically central to the Frankfurt School Thorstein Veblen proposed the conspicuous philososphy, especially in the work of the sociologist Theodor W. Adorno, consumption of commodities as the pursuit of which describes how the forms of commerce invade the human psyche; social prestige. how commerce casts a person into a role not of his or her making; and how commercial forces affect the development of the psyche. In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Max Horkheimer presented the Theory of the Culture Industry to describe how the human imagination (artistic, spiritual, intellectual activity) becomes commodified when subordinated to the "natural commercial laws" of the market. To the consumer, the cultural goods and services sold in the market appear to offer the promise of a richly developed and creative individuality, yet the inherent commodification severely restricts and stunts the human psyche, so that the man and the woman consumer has little "time for myself", because of the continual personification of cultural roles over which he and she exercise little control. In personifying such cultural identities, the person is a passive consumer, not the active creator, of his or her life; the promised life of individualistic creativity is incompatible with the collectivist, commercial norms of bourgeois culture. • Commodity narcissism In the study From Commodity Fetishism to Commodity Narcissism (2012) the investigators applied the Marxist theory of commodity fetishism to psychologically analyse the economic behaviour (buying and selling) of the contemporary consumer. With the concept of commodity narcissism, the psychologists Stephen Dunne and Robert Cluley proposed that consumers who claim to be ethically concerned about the manufacturing origin of commodities, nonetheless behaved as if ignorant of the exploitative labour conditions under which the workers produced the goods and services, bought by the "concerned consumer"; that, within the culture of consumerism, narcissistic men and women have established shopping (economic consumption) as a socially acceptable way to express aggression.[21] • Social prestige In the 19th and in the 21st centuries, Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, 1899) and Alain de Botton (Status Anxiety, 2004) respectively developed the social status (prestige) relationship between the producer of consumer goods and the aspirations to prestige of the consumer. To avoid the status anxiety of not being of or belonging to "the right social class", the consumer establishes a personal identity (social, economic, cultural) that is defined and expressed by the commodities (goods and services) that he or she buys, owns, and uses; the domination of things that communicate the "correct signals" of social prestige, of belonging. (See: Conspicuous consumption.) • Social alienation

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Commodity fetishism In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord presented the theory of "du spectacle" — the systematic conflation of advanced capitalism, the mass communications media, and a government amenable to exploiting those factors. The spectacle transforms human relations into objectified relations among images, and vice versa; the exemplar spectacle is television, the communications medium wherein people passively allow (cultural) representations of themselves to become the active agents of their beliefs. The spectacle is the form that society assumes when the Arts, the instruments of cultural production, have been commodified as commercial activities that render an æsthetic value into a commercial value (a commodity). Whereby artistic expression then is shaped by the person's ability to sell it as a commodity, that is, as artistic goods and services. Capitalism reorganises personal consumption to conform to the commercial principles of market exchange; commodity fetishism transforms a cultural commodity into a product with an economic "life of its own" that is independent of the volition and initiative of the artist, the producer of the commodity. What Karl Marx critically anticipated in the 19th century, with "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof", Guy Debord interpreted and developed for the 20th century — that in modern society, the psychologic intimacies of intersubjectivity and personal self-relation are commodified into and as discrete "experiences" that can be bought and sold. The Society of the Spectacle is the ultimate form of social alienation that occurs when a person views his or her being (self) as a commodity that can be bought and sold, because he or she regards every human relation as a (potential) business transaction. (See: Entfremdung, Marx's theory of alienation) • The semiotic sign Jean Baudrillard applied commodity fetishism to explain the subjective feelings of men and women towards consumer goods in the "realm of circulation"; that is, the cultural mystique (mystification) that advertising ascribed to the commodities (goods and services) in order to encourage the buyer to purchase the goods and services as aids to the construction of his and her cultural identity. In the book For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), Baudrillard developed the semiotic theory of "the Sign" (sign value) as a development of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism and of the exchange-value vs. use-value dichotomy of capitalism.

Intellectual property In the 21st century, the political economy of capitalism reified the abstract objects that are information and knowledge into the tangible commodities of intellectual property, which are produced by and derived from the labours of the intellectual and the white collar workers. • Philosophic base The Marxist economist Michael Perelman critically examined the belief systems from which arose intellectual property rights, the field of law that commodified knowledge and information. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis critically reviewed the belief systems of the theory of human capital [22]. Knowledge, as the philosophic means to a better life, is contrasted with capitalist knowledge (as commodity and capital), produced to generate income and profit. Such commodification detaches knowledge and information from the (user) person, because, as intellectual property, they are independent, economic entities. • Knowledge: authentic and counterfeit In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), the Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson linked the reification of information and knowledge to the post-modern distinction between authentic knowledge (experience) and counterfeit knowledge (vicarious experience), which usually is acquired through the mass communications media. That in such a pseudo-world, counterfeit experience eventually substitutes authentic experience. In Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society (1986), the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug presents a "critique of commodity aesthetics" that examines how human needs and desires are manipulated and reshaped for commercial gain.[23] • Financial risk management

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Commodity fetishism The sociologists Frank Furedi and Ulrich Beck studied the development of commodified types of knowledge in the business culture of "risk prevention" in the management of money. The Post–World War II economic expansion (ca. 1945–73) created very much money (capital and savings), while the dominant bourgeois ideology of money favoured the risk-management philosophy of the managers of investment funds and financial assets. From such administration of investment money, manipulated to create new capital, arose the preoccupation with risk calculations, which subsequently was followed by the "economic science" of risk prevention management.[24][25] In light of which, the commodification of money as "financial investment funds" allows an ordinary person to pose as a rich person, as an economic risk-taker able to risk losing money invested to the market. Hence, the fetishization of financial risk as "a sum of money" is a reification that distorts the social perception of the true nature of financial risk, as experienced by ordinary people.[26] Moreover, the valuation of financial risk is susceptible to ideological bias; that contemporary fortunes are achieved from the insight of experts in financial management, who study the relationship between "known" and "unknown" economic factors, by which human fears about money can be manipulated and exploited. • Commodified art The cultural critics Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin examined and described the fetishes and fetishism of Art, by means of which "artistic" commodities are produced for sale in the market, and how commodification determines and establishes the value of the artistic commodities (goods and services) derived from legitimate Art; for example, the selling of an artist's personal effects as "artistic fetishes". • Legal traducement In the field of law, the Soviet scholar Evgeny Pashukanis (The General Theory of Law and Marxism, 1924), the Austrian politician Karl Renner, the German political scientist Franz Leopold Neumann, the British socialist writer China Mieville, the labour-law attorney Marc Linder, and the American legal philosopher Duncan Kennedy (The Role of Law in Economic Theory: Essays on the Fetishism of Commodities, 1985) have respectively explored the applications of commodity fetishism in their contemporary legal systems, and reported that the reification of legal forms misrepresents social relations.[27][28]

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In other economic theory Subjective wants In Principles of Economics (1871), the capitalist economist Carl Menger, a founder of the Austrian School, said that the attribution of value (commodity fetishism) is a matter of subjective preference: The value of goods, accordingly, is a phenomenon that springs from the same source as the economic character of goods — that is, from the relationship, explained earlier, between the requirements for and the available quantities of goods. But there is a difference between the two phenomena. On the one hand, perception of this quantitative relationship stimulates our provident activity, thus causing goods, subject to this relationship, to become objects of our economizing (i.e. economic goods). On the other hand, perception of the same relationship makes us aware of the significance that [the] command of each concrete unit of the available quantities of these goods has, for our lives and well-being, thus causing it to attain value for us. Just as a penetrating investigation of mental processes makes the cognition of external things appear to be merely our consciousness of the impressions made by the Carl Menger, a founder of the Austrian School of economics, proposed that commodity fetishism is a external things upon our persons, and thus, in the final analysis, person's subjective preference. merely the cognition of states of our own persons, so too, in the final analysis, is the importance that we attribute to things of the external world only an outflow of the importance to us of our continued existence and development (life and well-being). Value is, therefore, nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs, that is, to our lives and well-being, and in consequence carry over to economic goods as the exclusive causes of the satisfaction of our needs. — Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871), chapter 3[29] Theoretically, the market tends to adjust supply to demand, for which reason, economists extrapolate a "natural tendency of markets to reach equilibrium" if there is no outside interference. The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC), in the Nicomachean Ethics, noted such "market behaviour", and said that the increased value of a commodity was relative to the buyer's demand for the commodity.[30] In the 19th century, Karl Marx's contemporary, Carl Menger (1840–1921), proposed the "Theory of Subjective Wants", wherein the behaviour of the market is explainable only in terms of the subjective wants of the buyer and the seller. The market expanded because the intensity of the buyers' want increased desires; if the market contracted, it was because of the buyers' decreased desires. That "market freedom" might be an illusion, created by buyers and sellers in order to control of the economic choices available to them, as determined by the supply and the demand for commodities (goods and services). Buyers feel unconstrained by the activities of the market because they have internalized the rules for buying and selling commodities. Although people might not buy or sell of their free choice, but because they were forced by circumstance, as in a food crisis, wherein scarcity over-prices the food supply, yet people buy it, because they must eat. In the opinion of Karl Marx, the theories of natural market-behaviour proffered by capitalist economists were products of the way the market functioned — by the volition and initiative of the buyers and sellers of commodities — not otherwise. If the market is the creation of a reified consciousness, which attributed an independent economic

Commodity fetishism value to symbols (objects) imposed by "the many" upon "the few"; or by the economic community upon its members, it would influence the economic theories that explain "natural market-behaviour" in ways that promoted the fetishization of buying and selling commodities. Ultimately, that objectification (reification) created the belief that "the economy" and "the market" are sentient entities who act independently of the actions (choices and decisions) of the buyer and of the seller.[31] Hence, although people might speak of the market acting as an entity, and the market exchange results from the volition and initiative of the buyers and the sellers, in which case, Marxist commodity fetishism had contributed to economic dumbing down. (See: Law of value)

Criticism The Marxist theory of commodity fetishism is criticised from the perspectives of: • Market logic In the book In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000), the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen said that, despite the cultural tendency to fetishes and fetishism, the human fetishization of commodities (goods and services) is an instance of anthropomorphism (ascribing personal characteristics to animals and objects), and not a philosophic feature particular to the economics of capitalism or to the collective psychology of a capitalist society. That people usually can distinguish between The Tribune of the Uffizi (1772–78), by Johann Zoffany, depicts the commercial valuations (commodities) and commodity-fetishism metamorphosis of oil paintings into culture-industry cultural valuations (objets d'art), if not, products. quotidian life would be very difficult, because people would be unable to agree upon the value and the valuation of an object; thus, if the market did not exist, it would have been impossible for the popular masses to have access to cultural objects.[32] • Marxism as religion The historian of ideas Leszek Kołakowski said that Marxism (the philosophy) and Karl Marx (the man) had become fetishized and rendered into commodities; that such a form of intellectual reductionism could be construed as a secular, materialist faith that substituted for supernatural religion.[33][34] • Capitalism as religion In the essay "Capitalism as Religion" (1921), Walter Benjamin said that the idea of whether or not people treat capitalism as a religion was a moot subject, because "One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion." That the religion of capitalism is manifest in four tenets: (i) "Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed" (ii) "The permanence of the cult" (iii) "Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement" (iv) "God must be hidden from it, and may be addressed only when guilt is at its zenith".[35][36] • Commodity iconoclasm

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Commodity fetishism In Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun, Professor Helena Sheehan said that the analogy between commodity fetishism and religion is mistaken, because people do not worship money and commodities in the spiritual sense, by attributing to them supernatural powers. That human, psychological beliefs about the value-relationships inherent to commodity fetishism are not religious beliefs, and do not possess the characteristics of spiritual beliefs. The proof of this interpretation lies in the possibility of a person's being a religious believer, despite being aware of commodity fetishism, and being critical of its manifestations; that toppling the Golden Calf might be integral to one's religiousness, that such iconoclasm would lead to opposing all manifestations of idolatry.[37]

References [1] Isaak Illich Rubin said that "The theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx's entire economic system, and, in particular, of his theory of value." — Essays on Marx's Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990, p. 5. [2] Fine, Ben; Saad-Filho, Alfredo (2004). Marx's Capital (4th ed.). London: Pluto Press. pp. 25–26. [3] Marx, Karl (1990). Capital. London: Penguin Classics. pp. 165. [4] The various references in the 'Wood Theft' articles to idols, animal masks, workship of animals, and fetishes, reflect Marx's systematic study (1841–42) of primitive religion. The notebooks indicate that Marx was especially interested in the concept of fetishism — its nature, its origins, and the difference between ancient and modern forms of fetishism. (MEGA, Vol . 1, Part 2 p. 115ff) — Sherover, Erica (1979). "The Virtue of Poverty: Marx's Transformation of Hegel's Concept of the Poor" (http:/ / www. marcuse. org/ herbert/ people/ ricky/ CanJnlRicky79. pdf). Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory / Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale 3 (1): 53–66. . [5] Du culte des dieux fétiches, ou Parallèle de l'ancienne religion de l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (1760) (http:/ / gallica. bnf. fr/ ark:/ 12148/ bpt6k106440f). The German translation was Uber den Dienst der fetischengotter oder Vergleichung der alten religion Egyptians mit den heutigen Religion Nigritiens. Ubersetzt von Christain Brandanus Hermann Pistorius. Berlin, Stralsund: Gottlieb August Lange, 1785. For a study of the conceptual origin of fetishism, see: William Pietz, "The problem of the fetish, I", Res 9 (Spring 1985), pp. 5–17; "The problem of the fetish, II: The origin of the fetish", Res 13 (Spring 1987), pp. 23–45; "The problem of the fetish, III: Bosman's Guinea and the enlightenment theory of fetishism", Res 16 (Autumn 1988), pp. 105–123. [6] The positive philosophy of Auguste Comte (1830–1842) (http:/ / socserv. mcmaster. ca/ econ/ ugcm/ 3ll3/ comte/ Philosophy3. pdf) [7] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (http:/ / www. warwick. ac. uk/ ~poseaj/ deus/ papers/ essence8. pdf) [8] http:/ / www. marxists. org/ archive/ marx/ works/ 1842/ 07/ 10. htm [9] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On religion. Atlanta: Scholars, 1982, p. 22. [10] http:/ / www. marxists. org/ archive/ marx/ works/ 1842/ 10/ 25. htm [11] Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844", in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. Moscow: Progress, 1975, p. 312 (http:/ / www. marxists. org/ archive/ marx/ works/ 1844/ manuscripts/ needs. htm)). [12] Lawrence Krader (ed.), The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx: Studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972), p. 342f. [13] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, chapter 17 (1857) (http:/ / www. marxists. org/ archive/ marx/ works/ 1857/ grundrisse/ ch17. htm) [14] Karl Marx,Results of the Immediate Process of Production, appendix in Capital Volume 1. Penguin edition, 1976, p. 983). [15] For more details, see Boer, Roland (2010). "That Hideous Pagan Idol: Marx, Fetishism and Graven Images". Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 38 (1): 93–116. doi:10.1080/03017600903454413. [16] Adam Simth, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book 1, Chapter 2 "Of the Principle which gives occasion to the Division of Labour" (http:/ / geolib. com/ smith. adam/ won1-02. html) [17] ". . . the paid and unpaid portions of labour are inseparably mixed up with each other, and the nature of the whole transaction is completely masked by the intervention of a contract and the pay received at the end of the week" — Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit, part 9. (http:/ / www. marxists. org/ archive/ marx/ works/ 1865/ value-price-profit/ ch02. htm#c7) "Since Lassalle's death, there has asserted itself in our party the scientific understanding that wages are not what they appear to be — namely, the value, or price, of labor — but only a masked form for the value, or price, of labor power". — Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), part 2 (emphases added). (http:/ / www. marxists. org/ archive/ marx/ works/ 1875/ gotha/ ch02. htm) cf. the Resultate manuscript in Capital, Volume I, Penguin edition, p. 1064, where Marx uses the word "vertuscht" (covered up). [18] Marx, Capital, Volume III, Penguin edition, p. 956 (translation corrected to the German edition). [19] (http:/ / www. artandpopularculture. com/ Du_Fétichisme_dans_l'amour) The Fetish in Love (Le fétichisme dans l'amour: la vie psychique des micro-organismes, l'intensité des images mentales, etc., 1887) [20] "Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully, and more definitively into the consciousness of Man." György Lukács, History and Class-Consciousness London: Merlin Press, 1971, p. 93. [21] Cluley, R. and Dunne, S. (2012) From Commodity Fetishism to Commodity Narcissism, Marketing Theory, 12(3) [22] http:/ / tuvalu. santafe. edu/ ~bowles/ [23] Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Introduced by Stuart Hall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

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Commodity fetishism [24] "Paying for Pensions: Affording Old Age", BBC News, 13 September 2010 (http:/ / www. bbc. co. uk/ caribbean/ news/ story/ 2010/ 09/ 100910_pensionschemes. shtml) [25] "Global financial markets: entering a new era", McKinsey Global Institute, September 2009, p. 9. [26] See further e.g. Jan Toporowski's analysis (http:/ / www. monthlyreview. org/ 100901toporowski. php) [27] Marc Linder, Reification and the consciousness of the critics of political economy. Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1975 and subsequent works. [28] "The Role of Law in Economic Theory: Essays on the Fetishism of Commodities" (1985), by Duncan Kennedy, The American University Law Review Volume 34, pp. 939–1001. (http:/ / duncankennedy. net/ documents/ The Role of Law in Econ Thought_Essays on the Fetishism of Commodities. pdf) [29] Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871), chapter 3 (http:/ / mises. org/ etexts/ menger/ three. asp) [30] See Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 5 (http:/ / virtuescience. com/ ethics5. html#5. 5) [31] Roosevelt, Frank (1975). "Cambridge Economics as Commodity Fetishism". Review of Radical Political Economics 7 (4): 1–32. doi:10.1177/048661347500700402. Reprinted in Nell, Edward J. (1980). Growth, profits, and property: essays in the revival of political economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521223962. [32] In praise of commercial culture (2000), by Tyler Cowen. Harvard University Press. [33] When he was a Marxist, Leszek Kołakowski published nine essays in the book Kultura i fetysze (Culture and Fetishism, Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwow Naukowe, 1967). The English translations of his works are Toward a Marxist Humanism, Marxism and Beyond, and A Leszek Kolakowski Reader. Afterwards, when Kołakowski quit being a Communist, he noted the many parallels between Marxism and a religious faith. [34] Louis Proyect titled his weblog "The unrepentant Marxist" (http:/ / louisproyect. wordpress. com/ ). [35] "Capitalism as Religion", by Walter Benjamin, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 1913–1926. Michael W. Jennings (ed.), Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard University Press, 2004 p. 259. [36] (http:/ / leniency. blogspot. com/ 2008/ 12/ notes-on-capitalism-as-religion. html) No Useless Leniency weblog, "Notes on Capitalism as Religion" (17 December 2008) [37] Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun, by Helena Sheehan (http:/ / webpages. dcu. ie/ ~sheehanh/ portrait. htm)

Further reading • • • • • • •

A Dictionary of Marxist Thought Tom Bottomore, Editor. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998 The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord. Black and Red, 1983 Marx's Capital. 5th ed. Ben Fine, Editor. London: Pluto, 2010 A Companion to Marx's Capital, by David Harvey. London: Verso, 2010 History and Class Consciousness, by Geörg Lukács Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972 Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, by Karl Marx. London: Penguin, 1992 The World of Goods, by Mary Douglas, with Baron Isherwood.

External links • Capital, Chapter 1, Section 4 – The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof (http://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4) • All of Chapter One – Marx's logical presentation (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ ch01.htm) • (Isaac Rubin's commentary on Marx) (http://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/rubin/) • "The Reality behind Commodity Fetishism" (http://www.sicetnon.org/modules.php?op=modload& name=PagEd&file=index&topic_id=2&page_id=77) • David Harvey, Reading Marx's Capital (http://davidharvey.org), Reading Marx's Capital – Class 2, Chapters 1–2, The Commodity (http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/marxs-capital-class-02/) (video lecture) • Biene Baumeister,Die Marxsche Kritik des Fetischismus (outline in German) (http:// seltsamer-zusammenschluss.org/downloads/Die_Marxsche_Kritik_des_Fetischismus_Handout.pdf)

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Jouissance

Jouissance In French, jouissance means pleasure or enjoyment. It has a sexual connotation (i.e., orgasm) lacking in the English word "enjoyment".[1]

In psychoanalysis The word is left untranslated in English editions of the works of Jacques Lacan.[2] In his Seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959–1960) Lacan develops his concept of the opposition of jouissance and pleasure. The pleasure principle, according to Lacan, functions as a limit to enjoyment: it is the law that commands the subject to 'enjoy as little as possible'. At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this 'painful principle' is what Lacan calls jouissance. (Dylan Evans). Thus jouissance is suffering (Ethics). In his Seminar "Encore" (1972–1973) Lacan states that jouissance is essentially phallic. That is, insofar as jouissance is sexual it is phallic, meaning that it does not relate to the Other as such. Lacan admits, however, that there is a specifically feminine jouissance, a supplementary jouissance, which is beyond the phallus, a jouissance of the Other. This feminine jouissance is ineffable, for both women and men may experience it but know nothing about it. In his seminar "The Other Side of Psychoanalysis" (1969–1970) Lacan introduced the concept of surplus-jouissance (French "plus-de-jouir") inspired by Marx's concept of surplus-value: objet petit a is the excess of jouissance which has no use value, and which persists for the mere sake of jouissance.

In philosophy and literary theory The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a known Lacanian theorist, has adopted the term in his philosophy; it may also be seen in the works, both joint and individual, of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and it plays an important role in the writing of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. In his 1973 literary theory book The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes divides the effects of texts into two: plaisir (translated as "pleasure") and jouissance. The distinction corresponds to a further distinction Barthes makes between "readerly" and "writerly" texts. The pleasure of the text corresponds to the readerly text, which does not challenge the reader's position as a subject. The writerly text provides bliss, which explodes literary codes and allows the reader to break out of his or her subject position. For Barthes plaisir is, "a pleasure... linked to cultural enjoyment and identity, to the cultural enjoyment of identity, to a homogenising movement of the ego."[3] As Richard Middleton puts it, "Plaisir results, then, from the operation of the structures of signification through which the subject knows himself or herself; jouissancefractures these structures."[4]

In feminist theory The French feminist writer Hélène Cixous uses the term jouissance to describe a form of women's pleasure or sexual rapture that combines mental, physical and spiritual aspects of female experience, bordering on mystical communion. Cixous maintains that jouissance is the source of a woman's creative power, and the suppression of jouissance prevents women from finding their own fully empowered voice.[5][6] The concept of jouissance is explored by Cixous and other authors in their writings on Écriture féminine, a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the early 1970s.

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Jouissance Other feminists have argued that Freudian "hysteria" is jouissance distorted by patriarchal culture and claim that jouissance is a transcendent state that represents freedom from oppressive linearities. In her introduction to Cixous' The Newly Born Woman, literary critic Sandra Gilbert writes: "to escape hierarchical bonds and thereby come closer to what Cixous calls jouissance, which can be defined as a virtually metaphysical fulfillment of desire that goes far beyond [mere] satisfaction... [It is a] fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political."[7]

References • The Seminars of Jacques Lacan [8] • Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis [1] "Jouissance" (http:/ / www. litencyc. com/ php/ stopics. php?rec=true& UID=602). Literary Encyclopedia. The Literary Dictionary Company Limited. . Retrieved 2012-06-10. [2] Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis [3] Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image—Music—Text. Trans. and ed. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill, 1977 [4] Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15275-9. [5] Introduction to Cixous (http:/ / www. engl. niu. edu/ wac/ cixous_intro. html) [6] J. Fiske (1989). Understanding Popular Culture. Routledge. [7] Gilbert, Sandra M. Introduction. The Newly Born Woman. By Hilhne Cixous and Catherine Clement 1975. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 [8] http:/ / www. lacan. com/ seminars1a. htm

External links • • • •

Chronology of Jacques Lacan (http://www.lacan.com/rolleyes.htm) Lacan Dot Com (http://www.lacan.com/lacan1.htm) Slavoj Zizek: Lacan's Formulas of Sexuation (http://www.lacan.com/zizwoman) Josefina Ayerza: Comme des garçons (http://www.lacan.com/frameXIV7.htm)

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Pleasure principle (psychology)

Pleasure principle (psychology) In Freudian psychology, the pleasure principle is the psychoanalytic concept describing people seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering (pain) in order to satisfy their biological and psychological needs.[1] Specifically, pleasure principle is a driven force of id. [2] Furthermore, the counterpart concept, the reality principle, describes people choosing to defer gratification of a desire when circumstantial reality disallows its immediate gratification. In infancy and early childhood, the id rules behavior by obeying only the pleasure principle. People in that age would only seek for immediate gratification in order to reduce their urges such as hunger, thirst or even sex.[3] Maturity is learning to endure the pain of deferred gratification, when reality requires it; thus, the Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud proposes that “an ego thus educated has become ‘reasonable’; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also, at bottom, seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished”.[4] Sigmund Freud discusses this idea, pleasure principle, and its limits in more details in his book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1921. In his discussion of the opposition between Eros, the life instinct, and the Thanatos, the death instinct, he examines the role of the repetition compulsion caused by the pleasure principle and of the sexual instincts.

References [1] Snyder, C. R.; Lopez, Shane J. (2007). Positive Psychology. Sage Publications, Inc.. pp. 147. ISBN 0-7619-2633-X. [2] Carlson, Neil R.; C. Donald Heth (2007). Psychology - the science of behaviour. Pearson Education Canada. pp. 700. ISBN 978-0-205-64524-4. [3] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures 16.357. [4] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures 16.357.

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Id, ego and super-ego

Id, ego and super-ego Id, ego and super-ego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus defined in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche; they are the three theoretical constructs in terms of whose activity and interaction mental life is described. According to this model of the psyche, the id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the ego is the organized, realistic part; and the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role.[1] Even though the model is structural and makes reference to an apparatus, the id, ego and super-ego are functions of the mind rather than parts of the brain and do not correspond one-to-one with actual somatic structures of the kind dealt with by neuroscience. The concepts themselves arose at a late stage in the development of Freud's thought: the "structural model" (which succeeded his "economic model" and "topographical model") was first discussed in his 1920 essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and was formalised and elaborated upon three years later in his "The Ego and the Id". Freud's proposal was influenced by the ambiguity of the term "unconscious" and its many conflicting uses.

Id The id is the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains a human's basic, instinctual drives. Id is the only component of personality that is present from birth[2]. The id contains the libido, which is the primary source of instinctual force that is unresponsive to the demands of reality.[3] The id acts according to the "pleasure principle", seeking to avoid pain or unpleasure (not 'displeasure') aroused by increases in instinctual tension.[4] The id is unconscious by definition: "It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality, what little we know of it we have learned from our study of the Dreamwork and of the construction of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character and can be described only as a contrast to the ego. We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations.... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle."[5] In the id, "contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other out.... There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation ... nothing in the id which corresponds to the idea of time."[6] Developmentally, the id precedes the ego; i.e. the psychic apparatus begins, at birth, as an undifferentiated id, part of which then develops into a structured ego. Thus, the id: "... contains everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, is laid down in the constitution — above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate from the somatic organization, and which find a first psychical expression here (in the id) in forms unknown to us." [7] The mind of a newborn child is regarded as completely "id-ridden", in the sense that it is a mass of instinctive drives and impulses, and needs immediate satisfaction, a view which equates a newborn child with an id-ridden individual—often humorously—with this analogy: an alimentary tract with no sense of responsibility at either end, paraphrasing a quip made by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan during his 1965 campaign for Governor of California in which he compared government to a baby.[8] The id "knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality.... Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge — that, in our view, is all there is in the id."[9] It is regarded as "the great reservoir of libido",[10] the instinctive drive to create — the life instincts that are crucial to pleasurable survival. Alongside the life instincts came the death instincts — the death drive which Freud articulated relatively late in his career in "the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state."[11] For Freud, "the death instinct would thus seem to

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Id, ego and super-ego express itself — though probably only in part — as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms":[12] through aggression. Freud considered that "the id, the whole person ... originally includes all the instinctual impulses ... the destructive instinct as well."[13] as Eros or the life instincts.

Ego The ego acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bring grief.[14] At the same time, Freud concedes that as the ego "attempts to mediate between id and reality, it is often obliged to cloak the Ucs. [Unconscious] commands of the id with its own Pcs. [Preconscious] rationalizations, to conceal the id's conflicts with reality, to profess ... to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding."[15] The ego comprises the organized part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. Conscious awareness resides in the ego, although not all of the operations of the ego are conscious. Originally, Freud used the word ego to mean a sense of self, but later revised it to mean a set of psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing, control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory.[1] The ego separates out what is real. It helps us to organize our thoughts and make sense of them and the world around us.[1]"The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces."[16] Still worse, "it serves three severe masters ... the external world, the super-ego and the id."[15] Its task is to find a balance between primitive drives and reality while satisfying the id and super-ego. Its main concern is with the individual's safety and allows some of the id's desires to be expressed, but only when consequences of these actions are marginal. "Thus the ego, driven by the id, confined by the super-ego, repulsed by reality, struggles ... [in] bringing about harmony among the forces and influences working in and upon it," and readily "breaks out in anxiety — realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the super-ego, and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id."[17] It has to do its best to suit all three, thus is constantly feeling hemmed by the danger of causing discontent on two other sides. It is said, however, that the ego seems to be more loyal to the id, preferring to gloss over the finer details of reality to minimize conflicts while pretending to have a regard for reality. But the super-ego is constantly watching every one of the ego's moves and punishes it with feelings of guilt, anxiety, and inferiority. To overcome this the ego employs defense mechanisms. The defense mechanisms are not done so directly or consciously. They lessen the tension by covering up our impulses that are threatening.[18] Ego defense mechanisms are often used by the ego when id behavior conflicts with reality and either society's morals, norms, and taboos or the individual's expectations as a result of the internalization of these morals, norms, and their taboos. Denial, displacement, intellectualisation, fantasy, compensation, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, and sublimation were the defense mechanisms Freud identified. However, his daughter Anna Freud clarified and identified the concepts of undoing, suppression, dissociation, idealization, identification, introjection, inversion, somatisation, splitting, and substitution.

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Id, ego and super-ego

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In a diagram of the Structural and Topographical Models of Mind, the ego is depicted to be half in the consciousness, while a quarter is in the preconscious and the other quarter lies in the unconscious. In modern English, ego has many meanings. It could mean one’s self-esteem, an inflated sense of self-worth, or in philosophical terms, one’s self. Ego development is known as the development of multiple processes, cognitive function, defenses, and interpersonal skills or to early adolescence when ego processes are emerged.[14]

Super-ego

"The ego is not sharply separated from the id; its lower portion merges into it.... But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id." (Sigmund Freud, 1923)

Freud developed his concept of the super-ego from an earlier combination of the ego ideal and the "special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured ... what we call our 'conscience'."[19] For him "the installation of the super-ego can be described as a successful instance of identification with the parental agency," while as development proceeds "the super-ego also takes on the influence of those who have stepped into the place of parents — educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models."[20] The super-ego aims for perfection.[18] It comprises that organized part of the personality structure, mainly but not entirely unconscious, that includes the individual's ego ideals, spiritual goals, and the psychic agency (commonly called "conscience") that criticizes and prohibits his or her drives, fantasies, feelings, and actions. "The Super-ego can be thought of as a type of conscience that punishes misbehavior with feelings of guilt. For example, for having extra-marital affairs."[21] Taken in this sense, the super-ego is the precedent for the conceptualization of the inner critic as it appears in contemporary therapies such as IFS and Voice Dialogue. The super-ego works in contradiction to the id. The super-ego strives to act in a socially appropriate manner, whereas the id just wants instant self-gratification. The super-ego controls our sense of right and wrong and guilt. It helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways.[1] The super-ego's demands often oppose the id’s, so the ego sometimes has a hard time in reconciling the two.[18] Freud's theory implies that the super-ego is a symbolic internalisation of the father figure and cultural regulations. The super-ego tends to stand in opposition to the desires of the id because of their conflicting objectives, and its aggressiveness towards the ego. The super-ego acts as the conscience, maintaining our sense of morality and proscription from taboos. The super-ego and the ego are the product of two key factors: the state of helplessness of the child and the Oedipus complex.[22] Its formation takes place during the dissolution of the Oedipus complex and is formed by an identification with and internalisation of the father figure after the little boy cannot successfully hold the mother as a love-object out of fear of castration. "The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more powerful the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of authority, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the stricter will be the domination of the super-ego over the ego later on—in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt." —Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923) The concept of super-ego and the Oedipus complex is subject to criticism for its perceived sexism. Women, who are considered to be already castrated, do not identify with the father, and therefore, for Freud, "their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men ... they are often

Id, ego and super-ego more influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility."[23] However, Freud went on to modify his position to the effect "that the majority of men are also far behind the masculine ideal and that all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics."[24] In Sigmund Freud's work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he also discusses the concept of a "cultural super-ego". Freud suggested that the demands of the super-ego "coincide with the precepts of the prevailing cultural super-ego. At this point the two processes, that of the cultural development of the group and that of the cultural development of the individual, are, as it were, always interlocked."[25] Ethics are a central element in the demands of the cultural super-ego, but Freud (as analytic moralist) protested against what he called "the unpsychological proceedings of the cultural super-ego ... the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego. It does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings."[26]

Advantages of the structural model Freud's earlier, topographical model of the mind had divided the mind into the three elements of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The conscious contains events that we are aware of, preconscious is events that are in the process of becoming conscious, and unconscious include events that we are not aware of.[27] At its heart was "the dialectic of unconscious traumatic memory versus consciousness ... which soon became a conflict between System Ucs versus System Cs."[28] With what Freud called the "disagreeable discovery that on the one hand (super-)ego and conscious and on the other hand repressed and unconscious are far from coinciding,"[29] Freud took the step in the structural model to "no longer use the term 'unconscious' in the systematic sense," and to rename "the mental region that is foreign to the ego ... [and] in future call it the 'id'."[30] The partition of the psyche defined in the structural model is thus one that cuts across the topographical model's partition of "conscious vs. unconscious". "The new terminology which he introduced has a highly clarifying effect and so made further clinical advances possible."[31] Its value lies in the increased degree of precision and diversification made possible: Although the id is unconscious by definition, the ego and the super-ego are both partly conscious and partly unconscious. What is more, with this new model Freud achieved a more systematic classification of mental disorder than had been available previously: "Transference neuroses correspond to a conflict between the ego and the id; narcissistic neuroses, to a conflict between the ego and the superego; and psychoses, to one between the ego and the external world." —Freud, Neurosis and Psychosis (1923) It is important to realise however, that "the three newly presented entities, the id, the ego and the superego, all had lengthy past histories (two of them under other names)"[32] — the id as the systematic unconscious, the super-ego as conscience/ego ideal. Equally, Freud never abandoned the topographical division of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious, though as he noted ruefully "the three qualities of consciousness and the three provinces of the mental apparatus do not fall together into three peaceful couples ... we had no right to expect any such smooth arrangement."[33] The iceberg metaphor is a commonly used visual when attempting to relate the ego, id and superego with the conscious and unconscious mind. In the iceberg metaphor the entire id and part of both the superego and the ego would be submerged in the underwater portion representing the unconscious mind. The remaining portions of the ego and superego would be displayed above water in the conscious mind area. [3]

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Translation The terms "id", "ego", and "super-ego" are not Freud's own. They are latinisations by his translator James Strachey. Freud himself wrote of "das Es," "das Ich," and "das Über-Ich"—respectively, "the It", "the I", and the "Over-I" (or "I above"); thus to the German reader, Freud's original terms are more or less self-explanatory. Freud borrowed the term "das Es" from Georg Groddeck, a German physician to whose unconventional ideas Freud was much attracted (Groddeck's translators render the term in English as "the It").[34] The word ego is taken directly from Latin, where it is the nominative of the first person singular personal pronoun and is translated as "I myself" to express emphasis. Figures like Bruno Bettelheim have criticized the way "the English translations impeded students' efforts to gain a true understanding of Freud."[35] by substituting the formalised language of the elaborated code for the homely immediacy of Freud's own language.

References [1] Snowden, Ruth (2006). Teach Yourself Freud. McGraw-Hill. pp. 105–107. ISBN 978-0-07-147274-6. [2] http:/ / psychology. about. com/ od/ theoriesofpersonality/ a/ personalityelem. htm [3] Carlson, N. R. (19992000). Personality. Psychology: the science of behaviour (Canandian ed., p. 453). Scarborough, Ont.: Allyn and Bacon Canada. [4] Rycroft, Charles (1968). A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Basic Books. [5] Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis[1933] (Penguin Freud Library 2) p. 105-6 [6] Freud, New Introductory Lectures p. 106 [7] Freud, An Outline of Psycho-analysis (1940) [8] The New York Times, November 14, 1965, p. 174 [9] Freud, New Introductory Lectures p. 107 [10] Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the Id", On Metapsychology (Penguin Freud Library 11)p. 369n [11] Freud, On Metapsychology p. 380 [12] Freud, On Metapsychology p. 381 [13] Freud, New Introductory Lectures p. 138 [14] Noam, Gil G; Hauser, Stuart T.; Santostefano, Sebastiano; Garrison, William; Jacobson, Alan M.; Powers, Sally I.; Mead, Merrill (February 1984). "Ego Development and Psychopathology: A Study of Hospitalized Adolescents". Child Development (Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Society for Research in Child Development) 55 (1): 189–194. [15] Freud, New Introductory Lectures p. 110 [16] Freud,The Ego and the Id, On Metapsychology p. 363-4 [17] Freud, New Introductory Lectures p. 110-1 [18] Meyers, David G. (2007). "Module 44 The Psychoanalytic Perspective". Psychology Eighth Edition in Modules. Worth Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7167-7927-8. [19] Freud, On Metapsychology p. 89-90 [20] Freud, New Introductory Lectures p. 95-6 [21] Arthur S. Reber, The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (1985) [22] Sédat, Jacques (2000). "Freud". Collection Synthèse (Armand Colin) 109. ISBN 978-2-200-21997-0, 1590510062. [23] Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality (Penguin Freud Library 7) p. 342 [24] Freud, On Sexuality p. 342 [25] Sigmund Freud, Civilization, Society and Religion (Penguin Freud Library 12) p. 336 [26] Freud, Civilization p. 337 [27] Carlson, Neil R. (2010). Psychology the science of behaviour: The psychodynamic approach. USA: Pearson Canada. pp. 453. ISBN 978-0-205-64524-4. [28] James S. Grotstein, in Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (London 2003) p. x [29] Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Penguin Freud Library 2) p. 101 [30] Freud, New Introductory Lectures p. 104 [31] Angela Richards "Editor's Introduction" Freud, On Metapsychology p. 344-5 [32] Angela Richards, "Editor's Introduction" in On Metapsychology p. 345 [33] Freud, New Introductory Lectures p. 104-5 [34] Groddeck, Georg (1928). "The Book of the It". Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (49). [35] Quoted in Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (London 1996) p. 10

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Further reading • Freud, Sigmund (1910), "The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis", American Journal of Psychology 21(2), 196–218. • Freud, Sigmund (1920), Beyond the Pleasure Principle. • Freud, Sigmund (1923), Das Ich und das Es, Internationaler Psycho-analytischer Verlag, Leipzig, Vienna, and Zurich. English translation, The Ego and the Id, Joan Riviere (trans.), Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-analysis, London, UK, 1927. Revised for The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey (ed.), W.W. Norton and Company, New York, NY, 1961. • Freud, Sigmund (1923), "Neurosis and Psychosis". The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923–1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, 147-154 • Gay, Peter (ed., 1989), The Freud Reader. W.W. Norton. • Rangjung Dorje (root text): Venerable Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche (commentary), Peter Roberts (translator) (2001) Transcending Ego: Distinguishing Consciousness from Wisdom, (Wylie: rnam shes ye shes ‘byed pa) (http://www.rinpoche.com/teachings/conwisdom.pdf) • Kurt R. Eissler: The effect of the structure of the ego on psychoanalytic technique (1953) / republished by Psychomedia (http://www.psychomedia.it/pm/modther/probpsiter/eiss53-2.htm)

External links • American Psychological Association (http://apa.org/) • Sigmund Freud and the Freud Archives (http://users.rcn.com/brill/freudarc.html) • Section 5: Freud's Structural and Topographical Model (http://allpsych.com/psychology101/ego.html), Chapter 3: Personality Development Psychology 101. • An introduction to psychology: Measuring the unmeasurable (http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/ learning_modules/psychology/02.TU.04/?section=11) • Splash26 (http://lacan.com/), Lacanian Ink • Sigmund Freud (http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/freud.html) • Sigmund Freud's theory (Russian) (http://www.psystatus.ru/) • Education portal's lesson on the id, ego, and superego (http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/ id-ego-and-superego.html) • Information on Charcot, Freud's teacher and mentor (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhchar. html) • Background information on Freud (http://www.freudfile.org/childhood.html)

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Thanatos

294

Thanatos Thanatos

Thanatos as a winged and sword-girt youth. Sculptured marble column drum from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos, c. 325–300 BC. Personification of Death Abode

Underworld

Symbol

Theta, Poppy, Butterfly, Sword, Inverted Torch

Parents

Nyx, Erebus

Siblings

Hypnos, Nemesis, Eris, Keres, Oneiroi, and many others

Roman equivalent

Mors

Greek deities series Primordial deities Titans and Olympians Aquatic deities Chthonic deities Other deities Personified concepts •

Apate

•

Kratos

•

Atë

•

Metis

•

Bia

•

Mnemosyne

•

Charites

•

Moirai

•

Eris

•

Morpheus

•

Eros

•

Nemesis

•

Harmonia •

Nike

•

Horae

•

Thanatos

•

Hypnos

•

Themis

•

Zelos

In Greek mythology, Thanatos (Greek: Θάνατος (Thánatos), "Death,"[1] from θνῄσκω - thnēskō, "to die, be dying"[2]) was the daemon personification of death. He was a minor figure in Greek mythology, often referred to but rarely appearing in person. His name is transliterated in Latin as Thanatus, but his equivalent in Roman mythology is Mors or Letus/Letum, and he is sometimes identified erroneously with Orcus (Orcus himself had a Greek equivalent in the form of Horkos, God of the Oath).

Thanatos

295

In myth and poetry The Greek poet Hesiod established in his Theogony that Thánatos is a son of Nyx (Night) and Erebos (Darkness) and twin of Hypnos (Sleep). "And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams, neither as he goes up into heaven, nor as he comes down from heaven. And the former of them roams peacefully over the earth and the sea's broad back and is kindly to men; but the other has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful even to the deathless gods." [3] Homer also confirmed Hypnos and Thanatos as twin brothers in his epic poem, the Iliad, where they were charged by Zeus via Apollo with the swift delivery of the slain hero Sarpedon to his homeland of Lycia. "Then (Apollon) gave him [Sarpedon] into the charge of swift messengers to carry him, of Hypnos and Thanatos, who are twin brothers, and these two presently laid him down within the rich countryside of broad Lycia." [4] Counted among Thanatos' siblings were other negative personifications such as Geras (Old Age), Oizys (Suffering), Moros (Doom), Apate (Deception), Momus (Blame), Eris (Strife), Nemesis (Retribution) and even the Acherousian/Stygian boatman Kharon. Thanatos was loosely associated with the three Moirai (for Hesiod, also daughters of Night), particularly Atropos, who was a goddess of death in her own right. He is also occasionally specified as being exclusive to peaceful death, while the bloodthirsty Keres embodied violent death. His duties as a Guide of the Dead were sometimes superseded by Hermes Psychopompos. Conversely, Thanatos may have originated as a mere aspect of Hermes before later becoming distinct from him. Thanatos was regarded as merciless and indiscriminate, hated by—and hateful towards—mortals and the deathless gods. But in myths which feature him, Thanatos could occasionally be outwitted, a feat that the sly King Sisyphus of Korinth twice accomplished. When it came time for Sisyphus to die, Zeus ordered Thanatos to chain Sisyphus up in Tartarus. Sisyphus cheated death by tricking Thanatos into his own shackles, thereby prohibiting the demise of any mortal while Thanatos was so enchained.

Hypnos and Thanatos carrying dead Sarpedon, while Hermes watches. Inscriptions in ancient Greek: HVPNOS-HERMES-θΑΝΑΤΟS (here written vice versa). Attic red-figured calyx-krater, 515 BC.

Eventually Ares, the bloodthirsty god of war, grew frustrated with the battles he incited since neither side suffered any casualties. He released Thanatos and handed his captor over to the god. Sisyphus would evade Death a second time by convincing Persephone to allow him to return to his wife stating that she never gave him a proper funeral. This time, Sisyphus was forcefully dragged back to the Underworld by Hermes when Sisyphus refused to accept his death. Sisyphus was sentenced to an eternity of frustration in Tartarus where he rolled a boulder up a hill and it would roll back down when he got close to the top. A fragment of Alcaeus, a Greek lyric poet of the 6th century BC, refers to this episode: "King Sisyphos, son of Aiolos, wisest of men, supposed that he was master of Thanatos; but despite his cunning he crossed eddying Akheron twice at fate's command." [5]

Thanatos

296

Sisyphus, son of Aiolos was a more than mortal figure: for mortals Thanatos usually presents an inexorable fate, but he was only once successfully overpowered, by the mythical hero Herakles. Thanatos was consigned to take the soul of Alkestis, who had offered her life in exchange for the continued life of her husband, King Admetos of Pherai. Herakles was an honored guest in the House of Admetos at the time, and he offered to repay the king's hospitality by contending with Death itself for Alkestis' life. When Thanatos ascended from Hades to claim Alkestis, Herakles sprung upon the god and overpowered him, winning the right to have Alkestis revived. Thanatos fled, cheated of his quarry. Euripides, in Alcestis: "Thanatos: Much talk. Talking will win you nothing. All the same, the woman goes with me to Hades' house. I go to take her now, and dedicate her with my sword, for all whose hair is cut in consecration by this blade's edge are devoted to the gods below." [6]

In art and sculpture An Orphic Hymn invoked Thanatos: "To Thanatos, Fumigation from Manna. Hear me, O Death, whose empire unconfin'd extends to mortal tribes of ev'ry kind. On thee, the portion of our time depends, whose absence lengthens life, whose presence ends. Thy sleep perpetual bursts the vivid folds by which the soul, attracting body holds : common to all, of ev'ry sex and age, for nought escapes thy all-destructive rage. Not youth itself thy clemency can gain, vigorous and strong, by thee untimely slain. In thee the end of nature’s works is known, in thee all judgment is absolved alone. No suppliant arts thy dreadful rage control, no vows revoke the purpose of thy soul. O blessed power, regard my ardent prayer, and human life to age abundant spare.[7]

Winged Eros Thanatos, with reversed torch and crossed legs (3rd century BC, Stoa of Attalus, Athens)

In later eras, as the transition from life to death in Elysium became a more attractive option, Thanatos came to be seen as a beautiful Ephebe. He became associated more with a gentle passing than a woeful demise. Many Roman sarcophagi depict him as a winged boy, very much akin to Cupid: "Eros with crossed legs and torch reversed became the commonest of all symbols for Death", observes Arthur Bernard Cook.[8] Thanatos has also been portrayed as a slumbering infant in the arms of his mother Nyx, or as a youth carrying a butterfly (the ancient Greek word "ψυχή" can mean soul or butterfly, or life, amongst other things) or a wreath of poppies (poppies were associated with Hypnos and Thanatos because of their hypnogogic traits and the eventual death engendered by overexposure to them). He is often shown carrying an inverted torch (holding it upside down in his hands), representing a life extinguished. He is usually described as winged and with a sword sheathed at his belt. In Euripides' Alcestis (438 BCE), he is depicted dressed in black and carrying a sword. Thanatos was rarely portrayed in art without his twin brother Hypnos.

Thanatos

In psychology and medicine According to Sigmund Freud, humans have a life instinct—which he named "Eros"—and a death drive, which is commonly called (though not by Freud himself) "Thanatos". This postulated death drive allegedly compels humans to engage in risky and self-destructive acts that could lead to their own death. Behaviors such as thrill seeking and aggression are viewed as actions which stem from this Thanatos instinct. However, some scientists argue that there is little evidence that most people have a specific drive toward self-destruction. According to them, the behaviors Hypnos and Thanatos: Sleep and His Half-Brother Death, by John Freud studied can be explained by simpler, known William Waterhouse, 1874. processes, such as salience biases (e.g., a person abuses drugs because the promise of immediate pleasure is more compelling than the intellectual knowledge of harm sometime in the future) and risk calculations (e.g., a person drives recklessly or plays dangerous sports because the increases in status and reproductive success outweigh the risk of injury or death). Thanatophobia is the fear of things associated with or reminiscent of death and mortality, such as corpses or graveyards. It is related to necrophobia, although the latter term typically refers to a specific fear of dead bodies rather than a fear of death in general. Thanatology is the academic and scientific study of death among human beings. It investigates the circumstances surrounding a person's death, the grief experienced by the deceased's loved ones, and larger social attitudes towards death such as ritual and memorialization. It is primarily an interdisciplinary study, frequently undertaken by professionals in nursing, psychology, sociology, psychiatry, social work and veterinary science. It also describes bodily changes that accompany death and the after-death period. Thanatophoric dysplasia, so named because of its lethality at birth, is the most common lethal congenital skeletal dysplasia with an estimated prevalence of one in 6,400 to one in 16,700 births. Its name Thanatophoros, means "death-bearing" in Greek. Euthanasia, "good death" in Greek, is the act or practice of ending the life of an individual who would otherwise experience severe, incurable suffering or disability. It typically involves lethal injection or the suspension of extraordinary medical treatment. Doctor Jack Kevorkian named his euthanasia device the Thanatron.

References [1] θάνατος (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 04. 0057:entry=qa/ natos), Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus [2] θνῄσκω (http:/ / www. perseus. tufts. edu/ hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999. 04. 0057:entry=qnh/ |skw), Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus [3] Hesiod, Theogony 758 ff, trans. Evelyn-White, Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C. [4] Homer, Iliad 16. 681 ff, trans. Lattimore ,Greek epic C8th B.C. [5] Alcaeus, Fragment 38a, trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric I, . [6] Euripides, Alcestis 19 ff, trans. Vellacott, Greek tragedy ca 5th century BC. [7] Orphic Hymn 86 trans. Thomas Taylor, trans. The Hymns of Orpheus, 1792. [8] Cook, Zeus: A study in ancient religion, 1940:1045., citing Adolf Furtwängler, in Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der grieschischen und römischen Mythologie.

297

Thanatos

External links • • • •

Thanatos at Theoi.com (http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Thanatos.html) Thanatos at the Greek Mythology link (http://www.maicar.com/GML/Thanatos.html) Mythography : The Greek God Thanatos in Myth and Art (http://www.loggia.com/myth/thanatos.html) Stewart, Michael. "Thanatos" Greek Mythology: From the Iliad to the Fall of the Last Tyrant (http://messagenet. com/myths/bios/thanatos.html) • Thanatos (http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0229824/) at the Internet Movie Database

298

Article Sources and Contributors

Article Sources and Contributors Existentialism  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=525555537  Contributors: *nondescript*, 11614soup, 157.178.1.xxx, 1fine89, 212.116.178.xxx, 271828182, 2help, 95jamie, A E Francis, A Nobody, A-moll9, A.J.Chesswas, A.R., A.slothy, A3RO, Aaaaalias, Aaronb1232, Abce2, Abdullais4u, Abu badali, Academic Challenger, Adamdesautel, AdjustShift, Adrianedawn, Advanced Hominid, Aedeck, Aeko, Aexapo, Agamemnon117, Aherunar, Ahoerstemeier, Aillema, Airplaneman, Aitias, Ajterry, AlanUS, Alansohn, Aldhil, Aldy, Ale jrb, AleBZ, Aletheon, AlexanderWinston, AlexiusHoratius, Alexjohnc3, Alkan, Allens, Allstarecho, AllyD, Alonelymuffin, Altenmann, Amaurea, Amphytrite, Anand011892, Andaleeb Purba, Andav, Anders Feder, Andersmusician, Andland, Andrewpmk, Androg, AndyTheGrump, Andycjp, Ankurdave, Anna Lincoln, Anneman, Anomalocaris, Antandrus, Ante Aikio, AnthonyBurgess, Aphid360, Archer47, Archibald Fitzchesterfield, Arctic Night, ArglebargleIV, Ari Rahikkala, Aristeo, Aristides, Arjun024, Art LaPella, Arthena, Arwel Parry, Atavi, Athex50, Atlas10, AutoFire, Avengerx, Avillia, Avraham, Awcga, Awenty, Awiseman, Axeman89, Azaziel, B9 hummingbird hovering, BD2412, Badreligion, Bagatelle, Banno, Barneca, Barticus88, Bayang, Bbb23, Bcorr, Beland, Bender235, Benlisquare, BennyQuixote, Benw, Bernardvanommeren, Bestiarosa, Betacommand, Bhuston, Bifgis, Billca42, Bkwillwm, Black and White, Bletch, Blue520, Bluee Mountain, Bmeacham, Bo99, BoNoMoJo (old), Bobbykennedy1705, Bobo192, BohemianWikipedian, Bonshaniqua, Bookcrazyword, Boothy443, Bora Nesic, BorisFromStockdale, Bowei Huang 2, Brancron, Brander Merton, BrettAllen, Brianga, Brianlucas, Brobbins, Brona, Bshea, Burn the asylum, Butterhead, Byelf2007, C6541, C70707, CAdude1, CIreland, CWatchman, Cacciatore, Caiaffa, Calabe1992, Callmarcus, Calvin 1998, Cam9976, Can't sleep, clown will eat me, CanDo, Canadian-Bacon, Cantaire87, Carharttjimmy, Carlon, Catgut, Cdg1072, Cek, Centrx, Chaica, Chain27, Chairman S., Charibdis, Charles Matthews, Charles01, Charlesjustice, Chealer, Chgwheeler, Chris Mitchell, ChrisGualtieri, Chrisminter, Chriss.2, Christopher Parham, Ciphergoth, Civis sum, Cjfsyntropy, Closedmouth, Clungemcgee, Cmeik, Cmichael, Cognition, Collabi, Colonies Chris, Comics, Common Man, CommonsDelinker, Concombre Masqué, Connelly, Connor.fowler, Contrebast, Conversion script, Cosmic Latte, Courcelles, Cpt. 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Article Sources and Contributors Existential phenomenology  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=483669996  Contributors: Carlo.Ierna, DanielCD, Drphilharmonic, Finlay McWalter, Gregbard, JoaoRicardo, Karol Langner, Koavf, Matthew Fennell, Mrevan, Raven1977, Reg25, Sea.wolf4, Spoonriver, Thecheesykid, Themfromspace, Tmyrm, Wandering Courier, 12 anonymous edits List of existentialists  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=517855737  Contributors: Darrlead, Der Zeitgeist, Gregbard, J04n, J36miles, Jevansen, KConWiki, Koavf, Moonriddengirl, Nayakprakash, TheOldJacobite, UnitedStatesian, Vanisheduser12345, Wandering Courier, Wittgendegger, Woland1234, 15 anonymous edits Authenticity (philosophy)  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=523797186  Contributors: Andries, AngChenrui, Banno, Beland, Bodhi dharma, Byelf2007, Camprobby76, CanisRufus, Ceyockey, Cogiati, DMG413, Delirium, DocPsych, Docu, Freeagentxiii, Gregbard, GregorB, Hit bull, win steak, Hoof Hearted, Hugh Mason, Hyacinth, Ihcoyc, Ikiwi, InnocuousPseudonym, Jafeluv, Jermanyw, JoeSmack, Jschnur, Just Another Dan, Karada, Koavf, Larklight, Lowellian, M asim, M4gnum0n, Matthew Fennell, Md219, MeltBanana, Mladifilozof, Mydogategodshat, OnBeyondZebrax, Orogneru, PPdd, Patrick, Paul Stansifer, Pjacobi, Pmadrid, Pollinosisss, Queenmomcat, RedWolf, SSBDelphiki, Sanfr53, Scope creep, Stagis, TWaye, Tabletop, Tomisti, TonyClarke, Twas Now, UtherSRG, W, Warhorus, WikipedianMarlith, Woohookitty, Youtensil, 48 anonymous edits Essence  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=520632981  Contributors: 20040302, Abisbakbaby4872, Allicat916, Andrei Stroe, Andres, Andrew Lancaster, Andyjsmith, Anypodetos, Arco de Rayne, Aristobulitos, BLUE, Banno, Beland, Belovedfreak, Bkwillwm, CBM, Ca$e, Cacahuate, Caesura, Callirgosito, Chaos, Charles Matthews, Christofurio, Cincinatti3, Cirasino, Cojuditis, Coolgamer, DanielCD, Dorftrottel, Dorvaq, Drilnoth, Dzforman, Epbr123, FloodSpectre, Fokion, Foxj, Frau Holle, Fruktis, Furius, Geogre, Gigglio, Greatestrowerever, Gregbard, Grewich, Hladnikm, IHRH209, Isis07, Isokrates, Jasmine912, Jmabel, Jmundo, Jojocool117, JoseREMY, Jujutacular, K0hlrabi, Kaisershatner, Kalki, Kendrick7, KnightRider, Kubigula, Lestrade, Linforest, Lotje, LoveMonkey, Machine Elf 1735, Mark J, Mebden, Melsaran, Michael Devore, Michael Hardy, Moskvax, Mr.Z-man, Nat Krause, Newbyguesses, Nkocharh, Olegalexandrov, Omnipaedista, Oyejorge, Paul Barlow, Persian Poet Gal, Peter Damian (old), Peterdjones, Ppntori, Prunesqualer, R'n'B, Radgeek, Renamed user 4, Res2216firestar, Robertvan1, Sam Hocevar, Sasha.sidorkin, Seewolf, Spencerk, Stwalkersock, Szwedzki, The Thing That Should Not Be, Tomisti, Trimp, Trusilver, UkPaolo, Utkusarioglu, WikiEditor 09111, WikiPedant, Wikiain, Wilhelmina Will, Woohookitty, Wprlh, 122 anonymous edits Existence precedes essence  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=525282836  Contributors: 271828182, A. Parrot, AleBZ, Andyroo g, Anna Lincoln, BD2412, Bkwillwm, Buster7, Byelf2007, Cantaire87, Ceoil, Certainlyear, Cybercobra, Dance With The Devil, Delicious carbuncle, EagleFan, Edward, Erolos, Fokion, Frozenport, GoingBatty, Gregbard, Iridescent, Jagged 85, Jeff3000, Jfraatz, JimWae, JohnChrysostom, Jwdb, Kencf0618, Kivic01, Koavf, Mikael Häggström, Nagelfar, Naumz, Newbyguesses, Obiwanjacoby, Paine Ellsworth, Peter Damian (old), Polisher of Cobwebs, Poor Yorick, Reyk, Rjwilmsi, Rudimae, Rursus, Sa.vakilian, Satori Son, Scarpy, Spencerk, Syncategoremata, Temp07, The Baroness of Morden, Theo10011, Twas Now, Versus22, WikHead, Wolfdog, Yopienso, 39 anonymous edits Absurdism  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=520908619  Contributors: 11614soup, A bit iffy, Abdullais4u, Absurdity77, Acroterion, Aeternus, Aindriahhn, Alex.g, Alexhard, AlphaEta, Altenmann, Anarchia, Anna Lincoln, Aristophanes68, Artiste-extraordinaire, Ashenai, Atallkid7, Augurar, Avjoska, Azkhiri, Backslash Forwardslash, Banno, Bansp, Barticus88, Blade Hirato, Bobo192, Bryan P. 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Article Sources and Contributors Willtron, Wjkiely, Wojtekr, Wolfdog, Woohookitty, Woz2, WraithM, Xdvr, Xxglennxx, Xzuiko, YH1975, Yamara, Yom, Ype, Zar, ZarkOmicron, Zenbullets, Zenohockey, Žiga, 811 anonymous edits Otherness  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=412181249  Contributors: Arthena, Ary29, Charles Matthews, Dommccas, JHunterJ, William M. 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Hoevekamp, Tomisti, Tony Narlock, TonyClarke, Tonyzhangnan, Traveler100, Tresoldi, Trust Is All You Need, Universitytruth, Varada, Veronica Mars fanatic, Vojvodaen, Volunteer Marek, Wandering Courier, West Brom 4ever, Whosyourjudas, Willardo, Woohookitty, YWGonzalez, Yerpo, Δ, €pa, 137 anonymous edits Intersubjectivity  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=524760516  Contributors: Alai, Byelf2007, Collectivewisdom1, Der Zeitgeist, Dialecticas, Fjodorii, Gaius Cornelius, George100, Gregbard, Gulpen, Hyacinth, Ilikeliljon, Iridescent, JaGa, Jacobisq, Jnikola, Jon Awbrey, Jpbowen, K, Kilmer-san, Knotwork, Kriegman, Laboratorio.Ricerche.Evolutive, Lemieu, Lx, Malcolma, Meclee, Neo-Jay, Pablo-flores, Penbat, Peter Isotalo, Robrodie, SchreiberBike, Skotten, Steinsky, Steve Bob, Thewolf37, Tigmic, Welsh, Woohookitty, 62 anonymous edits The Symbolic  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=503857412  Contributors: Bacchiad, Bobbyperou, CharlotteWebb, DionysosProteus, 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Connolley, Winterlongone, Winterst, Woga000, Wolfdog, Woohookitty, Wran, Wrathkind, Zaptastic, Zhar, Zharradan.angelfire, ZimZalaBim, Zr6374, Éiginnte, Ζήτα, Тиверополник, Ὁ οἶστρος, 705 anonymous edits Transcendence (philosophy)  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=524499195  Contributors: Access Denied, Anarchia, AstroHurricane001, BlueNovember, CallidusUlixes, Ckatz, Coblin, Coelacan, Crowsnest, Cybercobra, Czar, Dialectric, Doug Coldwell, Dv82matt, E. Ripley, Editor2020, Eduardo Corrêa, Flo98, Friendlystar, Gaius Cornelius, Glenn, Goethean, GoingBatty, Gracefool, Grantsky, Gregbard, Grim Revenant, Heah, Hinio, I'd Buy That for a Dollar, Iamthedeus, Icarus78, Ikant, JaGa, Jagged 85, Jfdwolff, Jjshapiro, Jon Awbrey, Kaliz, Karol Langner, Keenan Pepper, Kirchlichedogmatik, Lapaz, Leo44, Lestrade, Loremaster, Lukas.S, Lycurgus, Lynxmb, Males, Maurice Carbonaro, Mel Etitis, Michael Hardy, Michael93555, Michaelhogan73, Mladifilozof, Mohsens, NickBush24, Onias, Otto S. 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Article Sources and Contributors Shinju, Silverthorn, Simon Peter Hughes, Slothroplopez, Smellyk, Snowolf, Soulxlight, Spearhead, Stenvenhe, Suzumebachisecret, T@nn, TUF-KAT, Takusa, Tanthalas39, Tanuki Z, Tbhotch, Teknocrat123, TexasAndroid, Thanatos necrium, Thanatos666, Thanos6, The Thing That Should Not Be, TheFarix, TheOldJacobite, Thecowflys, Thend, Thesis4Eva, Throwaway85, Tregoweth, Tremor99, Troglo, Ttonyb1, Tucci528, Veinor, Visor, WadeSimMiser, Wetman, Wickethewok, Woohookitty, Woudloper, Wretched wraith, XavierGreen, Ye Olde Luke, Youandme, Κασσανδρα, 553 anonymous edits

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Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors

Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors File:Kierkegaard-Dostoyevsky-Nietzsche-Sartre.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Kierkegaard-Dostoyevsky-Nietzsche-Sartre.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Kierkegaard.jpg: Neils Christian Kierkegaard Fyodor_Mikahailovich_Dostoyevsky_1876.jpg: unknown Nietzsche.later.years.jpg: Jean-Paul_Sartre_FP.JPG: unknow derivative work: Jbarta File:Sartre and de Beauvoir at Balzac Memorial.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Sartre_and_de_Beauvoir_at_Balzac_Memorial.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Unknown. Copyright holder is Archives Gallimard at Paris, Archives Gallimard no longer exists File:Albert Camus, gagnant de prix Nobel, portrait en buste, posé au bureau, faisant face à gauche, cigarette de tabagisme.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Albert_Camus,_gagnant_de_prix_Nobel,_portrait_en_buste,_posé_au_bureau,_faisant_face_à_gauche,_cigarette_de_tabagisme.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, see http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/130_nyw.html, where the New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection considers all of its photographs public domain Image:Kierkegaard.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Kierkegaard.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Neils Christian Kierkegaard File:FourExistentialPrecursors.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:FourExistentialPrecursors.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Various File:Johnny Hodges edit.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Johnny_Hodges_edit.jpg  License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0  Contributors: Jafeluv File:The Thinker close.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:The_Thinker_close.jpg  License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported  Contributors: Bibi Saint-Pol, Bohème, CJ, Diego pmc, Natl1, Paris 16, 5 anonymous edits File:Willow path.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Willow_path.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Javaman2000 File:Iimatyas.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Iimatyas.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: 17th century coin designer File:JuliusOttoGrimm-Sculpture.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:JuliusOttoGrimm-Sculpture.jpg  License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5  Contributors: Gerardus, Knoe, Mutter Erde, STBR, 1 anonymous edits File:Using Mobile Phone 0251.JPG  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Using_Mobile_Phone_0251.JPG  License: GNU Free Documentation License  Contributors: Biswarup Ganguly File:DeterminismXFreeWill.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:DeterminismXFreeWill.jpg  License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0  Contributors: Tesseract2 File:Gospers glider gun.gif  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Gospers_glider_gun.gif  License: GNU Free Documentation License  Contributors: Kieff File:Double-slit experiment results Tanamura 2.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Double-slit_experiment_results_Tanamura_2.jpg  License: GNU Free Documentation License  Contributors: user:Belsazar File:HEUraniumC.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:HEUraniumC.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Original uploader was Zxctypo at en.wikipedia File:The Scream.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:The_Scream.jpg  License: unknown  Contributors: Edvard Munch (1863–1944) File:Marl Gerdes.JPG  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Marl_Gerdes.JPG  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Gerardus Image:Emperor Traianus Decius (Mary Harrsch).jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Emperor_Traianus_Decius_(Mary_Harrsch).jpg  License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0  Contributors: Mary Harrsch File:Los Angeles, California. Lockheed Employment. A worried applicant waiting to be interviewed - NARA - 532210.tif  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Los_Angeles,_California._Lockheed_Employment._A_worried_applicant_waiting_to_be_interviewed_-_NARA_-_532210.tif  License: Public Domain  Contributors: INeverCry, JMiall, Túrelio, 1 anonymous edits File:Nervous.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Nervous.jpg  License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0  Contributors: Maxwell GS on Flickr File:Toppledominos.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Toppledominos.jpg  License: GNU Free Documentation License  Contributors: Gerbilo, Magog the Ogre, McZusatz, Mysid File:DeterminismXFreeWill.svg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:DeterminismXFreeWill.svg  License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0  Contributors: DeterminismXFreeWill.jpg: Tesseract2 derivative work: Richardbrucebaxter (talk) File:Luther46c.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Luther46c.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Aavindraa, CTSWyneken, David Levy, Hahnchen, Ixfd64, Jdcollins13, Joakao, M0tty, Rosenzweig, Schmelzle, Shakko, Shizhao, Wst, 3 anonymous edits File:FreewillConceptsBasedUponPhilosophyOfMindCausationViews.svg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:FreewillConceptsBasedUponPhilosophyOfMindCausationViews.svg  License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0  Contributors: Richardbrucebaxter. Original uploader was Richardbrucebaxter at en.wikipedia File:Thomas Hobbes (portrait).jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Thomas_Hobbes_(portrait).jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Brainmachine, Daniel (de), Dcoetzee, Diomede, FranksValli, Kelson, Mathonius, Mattbr, PKM, Pieter Kuiper, QWerk, Sonphan10, Svencb, Victuallers, 1 anonymous edits File:Spinoza.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Spinoza.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: AndreasPraefcke, Arie Inbar, Dodo78, Dzlinker, Ingolfson, Tholme, Tomisti, Vincent Steenberg, Wouterhagens, 3 anonymous edits File:Schopenhauer.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Schopenhauer.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Abigor, Agostino64, Bibi Saint-Pol, Gabor, Jcornelius, Mogelzahn, Paribanú Freitas, SSS, Thuresson, 3 anonymous edits File:Frans Hals - Portret van René Descartes.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Frans_Hals_-_Portret_van_René_Descartes.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Beria, Bohème, Dedden, Ecummenic, Kigsz, Kilom691, Mcke, Miniwark, Serge Lachinov, Shakko, Vincent Steenberg, 1 anonymous edits File:Some brain areas.png  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Some_brain_areas.png  License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0  Contributors: User:Brews ohare File:Quantum Cloud, Bugsby's Reach - geograph.org.uk - 691469.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Quantum_Cloud,_Bugsby's_Reach_-_geograph.org.uk_-_691469.jpg  License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic  Contributors: File:Hieronymus Bosch 052.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Hieronymus_Bosch_052.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: AndreasPraefcke, EDUCA33E, Mattes, PKM, Vincent Steenberg Image:Gericault Insane.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Gericault_Insane.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Original uploader was Dysprosia at en.wikipedia File:Haitian Revolution.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Haitian_Revolution.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Benchill, Daniel jorge marques F, Kresspahl, 1 anonymous edits File:Kierkegaard.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Kierkegaard.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Neils Christian Kierkegaard File:Abraham.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Abraham.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: AnonMoos, Auntof6, Butko, Croquant, Electron, Garitan, Goldfritha, Johnbod, Kalelofkrypton, Kilom691, Léna, Maksim, Mattes, Mogelzahn, Shakko, Steven Walling, Tancrède, Túrelio, Zolo, 4 anonymous edits File:Hegel.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Hegel.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Alex beta, AndreasPraefcke, Gabor, Infrogmation, Kelson, Trele Morele, Wolfmann, Андрей Романенко File:Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.png  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Friedrich_Wilhelm_Joseph_von_Schelling.png  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Diwas, Frank C. Müller, Mutter Erde, Saulyte, Tianxiaozhang, TommyBee File:Also sprach Zarathustra.GIF  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Also_sprach_Zarathustra.GIF  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Original uploader was Glyphonhart at en.wikipedia File:Nietzsche1882.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Nietzsche1882.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Gustav-Adolf Schultze File:Eh-dm-27.JPG  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Eh-dm-27.JPG  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Chef, FSII, Flominator, Maksim File:Johann Gottlieb Fichte.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte.jpg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: EugeneZelenko, FA2010, Gabor, Kjetil r, Mutter Erde, Nuliukas, Paulae, Yone Fernandes

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