Existentialism Essay, Research Paper

Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Jaspers write of many important issues

concerning our existence and society in general, but the one that interests me

the most is the belief in the ignorance and stupidity of the majority of the

human race. We are so narrow-minded, so asleep, so afraid of exploring ourselves

and what is beyond this all-encompassing story we have created and in which we

live (and ironically hate). These four philosophers all seem to see the big

picture. Some wish they never had, others feel born again and superior to the

rest of mankind. Regardless, until the entire world understands, there is no

hope for man’s survival. I will begin with Mr. Nietzsche who speaks with a very

vicious and pointed attitude. He is quite angry with people in general for being

shallow, for falling asleep to the cultural drone humming in the back of all our

heads. It is so easy to live day-to-day like dead bodies, doing what you are

told, working constantly to avoid thinking too much. (That’s why I love work!).

We fear what is inside. We are afraid to exist as our souls and our minds.

Society, science, and even academic philosophy avoid looking inward, or

paradoxically, seeing the big picture. The entire world is putting us to sleep.

They "attempt to understand this canvas and these colors, but not the

image"(Nietzsche in Kaufman, 124). Only the true philosopher, the true

understander of existence, can reveal that place where material can no longer

corrupt you. There are so many obstacles (we refer to them as culture and

custom) in this world that obstruct our path to higher consciousness where we

will realize the oneness of everything and achieve conscious love. As soon as we

realize we are all bubbles floating on the same ocean, we become completely free

from these obstacles and have nothing to fear, not even death. This is heaven on

earth. Nietzsche recognized religion as perhaps the greatest obstacle of them

all. It supposedly was created to help overcome all the other obstacles, but now

further disorients us and almost leads us in the opposite direction.

Interestingly, Nietzsche sees as the root of growing nihilism not societal or

psychological corruption, but Christian interpretation. I’m not quite sure I

understand this, but the way I see it is Christianity (along with many

religions) – the one institution created to salvage and give meaning to life -

is, through its current and growing hypocrisy, taking meaning away from life.

Jesus was a great teacher. His key message was that if we love one another and

do not allow ourselves to get caught up in the mundane aspects of life, we can

achieve a higher level of being and find true happiness. Christianity developed

out of Jesus’ teaching as a sort of stepping-stone to help people understand

Jesus and get to the place he was talking about. Christianity is like a set of

guidelines to lead us to higher consciousness. But we have made a complete

mockery of Christ and his teaching. Christianity has lost sight of its original

goal and become totally preoccupied with rules and regulations. We do not need

religion; it is just here to help us. But instead of higher consciousness

becoming the goal, religion is now the goal. As long as you follow the rules and

regulations of the church, as long as you have faith, you are a good person.

Wrong! You are a nihilist. In The Antichrist Nietzsche brutally attacks the

priests and theologians who advocate this fictitious world of God, the devil,

sin, redemption, free will, etc, which "falsifies, devalues, and negates

reality" because we cannot stand the sight of it (Nietzsche, 533). The

church has pronounced holy precisely what the Jesus the evangel felt to be

beneath and behind himself (Nietzsche, 536). The kingdom of heaven is not a

place we go after we die. It is a state of the heart and we can be there right

now, here on earth, if we follow Jesus’ true message. But what is Jesus’ true

message? If nothing else it is to be yourself, love your neighbor, and avoid the

crowd at all costs (nice segue, right?). Soren Kierkergaard has a big problem

with "the crowd" of which so many humans seem to be a part. This mass

of people existing in the state of consciousness called waking sleep is the

wheels of our civilization yet have no thought of where they are going.

Kierkegaard is awake, and therefore superior to everyone around him. His time

was one of technological pioneering, society blindly moving forward looking for

ways to make like easier. Many boarded the bandwagon of change, following the

technological revolution for no good reason. Kierkegaard went out into the

streets of Copenhagen and tried to trick people into seeing the truth by

criticizing society when he had no right to, because he was a lunatic idler (in

disguise, of course). His main problem with the crowd is that is a refuge for

all who fear individuality and the decision-making that comes with it. He speaks

repeatedly of how the journalist can write anything he wants (things he would

never say speaking one-on-one with another person) and his words will touch

thousands upon thousands of ears and be taken seriously, but because of the

anonymity of both the author and the public reader, responsibility for things

said can be totally avoided. The crowd is weakness. The crowd is untruth.

Nietzsche says the same thing: people are afraid to look inward. They seek

refuge from their minds in work and constant activity. Jesus would have no

association with the crowd. Truth, individuality, and higher consciousness

radiated from him. Jesus could only be "what He is, the truth, which

relates itself to the individual"(Kierkegaard in Kaufman, 96). That is why

so many feared Him, and still do. That is why he was killed. Kierkegaard

continues to explain why so many turn their backs on higher consciousness with

his concept of dread. Dread is a feeling that befalls us when we realize

potential or possibility in ourselves, when we learn something new that forces

us to make a choice or decision, or simply to think in a new way. People fear

freedom. They fear choice because once one is confronted with opportunity he is

expected to take advantage of it. If you learn something that brings you out of

ignorance you can never go back to living in that ignorant manner with a clean

conscience because now you know better than to live like that. If you do not

modify your existence based on what you have learned, you are looked down upon.

Some people appreciate possibility (ie. of becoming less ignorant) because they

are willing to change or they like the option to choose. Most people would much

rather have never been told that the entire human race originated from a single

population in Africa 200,000 years ago. They wallow in their ignorance and hate

being pressured to change. The Underground Man must be the most amazing example

of dread one could imagine. He is the manifestation of dread. His entire mind

exists inside the realm of dread, and dread in the worst way. He is faced with

an incredible amount of potential and opportunity because of his heightened

consciousness yet more than anyone is unable to make the "qualitative

leap" simply because he is drowning in choices, in freedom as it would

seem. Kierkegaard is also very concerned with what it means to become a

Christian. What is the individual’s relationship to Christianity? He questions

why anyone would base their eternal happiness on something about which they

cannot be certain (like historical Christian documentation), but then goes on to

say that faith and passion are certainty, and they are what make you a true

Christian. By the end of Kierkegaard’s selection I have decided that he greatly

admires the true Christian, but looks down upon religious doctrine in that it is

a crutch for those who are not truly passionate about God. He raises the very

important contrast between objective truth and subjective truth. Which is truer?

A thing certainly is not true simply because you believe it is true, but I do

believe that subjective truth is the more important of the two. There is more

merit in the man who prays with entire passion to and idol than there is in the

man who prays to the true God but with a false spirit. I have a great respect

for passion, but infinite passion with no objective foundation does not work

(like the example that blacks were born from the devil). Kierkegaard puts it

best in saying "The truth is precisely the venture which chooses an

objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite"(Kierkegarrd in

Kaufman, 117). So it is a combination of the intellect and emotion that makes us

a "true" Christian. This ties in with Nietzsche’s ideas of

Christianity in that many so-called Christians strictly rely on the objective,

exoteric aspects of religion for comfort and totally lack the passion required

to become a true Christian. Kierkegaard is right. We are Christians as a matter

of course (Kierkegaard in Kaufman, 120). Nearly everyone I know calls himself or

herself a Christian, but I have met only two or three of them who took the title

seriously and were truly passionate and had great faith. People are afraid, or

maybe just unwilling, to take the risk. Passionately believing in something that

is uncertain to you is dangerous. As civilization thrusts forward and reliance

on reason and objective truths become more and more fundamental, our need for

God to explain life continues to decrease. Hence, being a Christian with

infinite passion in today’s world is both shameful and foolish. We have killed

God, says Nietzsche. I like Dostoevsky very much because I understand the though

process of the Underground Man. Last year, in fact, I was sure I was on my way

to becoming what I can now term the Underground Man (thanks to this class!).

That was when I was overly conscious, hyper-aware, and very insecure. I was far

from the state of the Underground Man, but surely in the initial stages of

paranoid-schizophrenia! My thoughts seemed diseased. Not that consciousness

itself was a disease, but that my heightened awareness was in some way poisoned.

Thus I feel Dostoevsky (when I say Dostoevsky I am speaking of his Underground

Man) is wrong to call consciousness a disease. His disgusting thoughts are not

the product of higher consciousness but of a diseased mind. His thoughts are not

normal; this is what I believe. Dostoevsky admits right away that he is more

intelligent than anyone else around him. However, he also admits that this is

his downfall: an intelligent man is bound to be an essentially characterless

creature, while a man of character, a man of action, is inevitably a limited

creature (Dostoevsky in Kaufman, 4). So in one sense he looks down upon the

stupid, unconscious, average man who exists without thinking, yet in the other

he severely envies (to the point of loathing, he adds) the average man precisely

because he is unconscious (his absence of excessive thought enables him to be a

man of action). In rereading Notes from Underground I realize that Dostoevsky is

an absolute genius. I am in awe at his depth of understanding of heightened

consciousness. I will take his mouse example and apply it to myself. I, at one

point, for about three years, thought too much. I became very self-conscious,

analyzing everything I said and everything said to me. I became ashamed. I

became immobile, and it was most acute when I smoked marijuana. I was so

immobile when high that I was afraid to speak. I would want to converse and

retort, felt compelled to, knew exactly when something should be said and what

its content should be, but could not because I was surrounded by a

"vileness in the form of questions and doubts . . .caught up in a fatal

morass"(Dostoevsky in Kaufman, 11). And when I did speak, I crumbled, and

my insecurity was revealed, and hence I thought of myself as worthless, a mouse.

No one called me worthless but myself, but I was convinced that, objectively

speaking, I was worthless. I was a person who did nothing, entertained nothing,

and benefited no one in any way. Only God knows why I was alive. There are

others in the world who are worthless but are not conscious of it. This puts me

all the more at fault because I realize my worthlessness and therefore should be

able to change. But I cannot change; it is impossible. Thanks to modern

medicine, this is where I stop and the Underground Man picks up. He, realizing

he cannot change himself, crawls into the black hole of despair and drowns

himself in remembering every time he was humiliated. Then he drowns himself in

his own sick feelings about himself. After many, many years he begins to accept

his seriously flawed character. He takes pride in his disease and becomes

masochistic. He defiles and degrades himself in the face of others, welcomes the

"poison of unfulfilled desires turned inward," and in the end feels a

strange pleasure in it all. Forgive my digression. I think the lesson Dostoevsky

provides is ignorance is bliss. His alienation is accentuated by the social

standards of his time. The decisive "man of action" is the one who

achieves and becomes something. Unfortunately in this world, you need to think

quick, act fast, and be sure in order to survive. You have to know how to live

on the surface, to interact with others’ personalities (masks). Dostoevsky only

knows how to exist as his internal being, his true being. Perhaps due to his

lonely upbringing he never learned how to interact as the world interacts, on an

external level. And since he could not do this he was alienated from the start,

and continued to be alienated and to have his true self corrupted by mixing

essence and persona with out distinguishing between the two, producing his

current contorted being: a paranoid and a schizophrenic. You see, many people

possess some degree of higher consciousness, but they also know how to interact

on the level on which our society is founded – the level of the mundane. These

people possess being (ability to act and choose) and knowledge (emotion,

intellect) and are on their way to understanding (being awake). Dostoevsky

possessed tremendous knowledge, but very little being. Therefore, he had

understanding (and maybe had even reached the "self consciousness"

level a step above the "awake" level) but it was manifested in a

negative way because of his lack of being. (This is my best and final attempt at

explaining Dostoevsky position!) Carl Jaspers: the final chapter. Unlike our

other three philosophers, Jaspers, at least as it appears to me, is less

concerned with the specific. (He is much nicer also!) He tries to conceptualize

and project consciousness and being in their broadest sense. He focuses less on

the individual, the crowd, God, higher consciousness as a destination, and more

on how these things exist inside and outside our consciousness. Jaspers’ story

is the most complex yet, but fortunately he goes to great pains to explain

himself. Still, I had a difficult time working through his philosophy, so bear

with me. We humans live and think in horizons, but the fact that we have

horizons indicates there is something beyond them, surrounding the given horizon

(Jaspers in Kaufman, 211). Jaspers now introduces the Encompassing, its two

modes – Being itself and the Encompassing which we are – and the three

manifestations of the latter mode: empirical existence, consciousness as such,

and spirit. Jaspers makes a distinction between the consciousness of living

beings and consciousness in general, or empirical existence versus the

Encompassing of empirical existence (aka. Being itself, or existenz). He calls

the first an actuality and the second an inactuality. Right now, as I think, I

am conscious but enclosed in my own individuality. In my self-awareness I exist

as only an actualization of truth, as a mere reflection of my true self. My

existence, my conscious existence, that is, is a result of the intersection of

timelessness with the temporal. This reminds me of two things: Kant’s noumena

and phenomena, and the ocean analogy. Empirical existence sounds like Kant’s

Phenomena in that it is the point at which non-physical things and ideas like

life, consciousness, and the soul become objectively accessible to us. We grasp,

analyze, and understand these things. Then we see past this place, where unknown

meets the mind, to the unknown where we (and everything) exist in pure essence.

This we cannot grasp. Another way to view the situation is that we are all

bubbles on the surface of the ocean. Everyone comes from and returns to the same

place: the ocean. Realizing this, we reach a higher level of consciousness

similar to conscious love. So the way we exist normally (in the matrix, haha) is

an Empirical existence as an indirect manifestation of our true selves (Being

itself), in other words, as a reflection. We achieve consciousness as such when

we realize these limitations of our consciousness, when we realize that nothing

we see is in its true form, but rather something created from our own mind.

Spirit is recognizing that everyone is everything because we are all part of the

same whole (the ocean). "The individual as spirit is not himself, but the

unity of contingent individuals and of the necessary universal"(Jaspers in

Kaufman, 220). Kant hit a dead end and decided we will never be able to step

outside our conscious to see things as they really are. Jaspers, however, takes

us further. He says we can surpass the Encompassing which we are; we can become

our genuine selves. We can Be, in the most fundamental yet most absolute way.

This is existenz, where everything appears to everything else in its true form,

as if one were looking down upon the Encompassing. This I achieve existenz

through transcendence. "Transcendence is the power through which I am

genuinely myself" (Jaspers in Kaufman, 219). Existenz is eternity in time.

This is where no boundary of any sort can be found. This is where pure

communication occurs. This is absolute truth. This is God. Existenz is

experiencing the noumena. Jaspers goes on to talk about reason and existenz

being contingent upon one another, but I will not get into that. My

interpretation of Jaspers is convoluted enough, and for that I apologize. If I

had more time I would explain myself better. The bottom line for me is that

Jaspers has combined the power of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche with his own and has

explained quite convincingly that we can experience God, that there is hope for

mankind, and it begins with paying a bit more attention. I can do that. I was

conscious once, but it was a bad sort of conscious, like Dostoevsky’s. I was in

horror of the terrible thoughts passing thru my head. That’s when I was

convinced I had a diseased mind. Prozac has nearly cured me of that poisoned

consciousness, and I’m now beginning to see bits and pieces of the higher

consciousness I think these philosophers understand. There is so much

bull*censored* in this world (for example, why do we have first impressions?).

That’s why I chose the theme of narrow-minded, sleeping humans. Because the way

we live is ridiculous, and although I enjoy mundane life a great deal, I know

existence runs much deeper than this, and I would like to know those depths and

how to get there. What can man do? A hell of a lot. We have just been reading

the question the wrong way.

Kaufman, Walter. "Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sarte"

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. "Notes from the Underground"