Posts Tagged ‘existentialism’
free . to . choose
November 30th, 2008
free . to . choose, originally uploaded by s t e r n f a h r e r.
free . to . choose, originally uploaded by s t e r n f a h r e r.
There’s a hum in the air. I’m sure I can hear it. I can feel it. It’s so loud, it hurts my mind. I’m numb, I can’t take my mind off it, I don’t know what to do about it. No one can help me. No one else can even hear it. I’m writing this down. In the middle of nowhere, in the middle of notime, with no thought in my head. Only the humming in the air around me, and footsteps approaching.
Who is it? I can’t see. It’s dark. “Who is it!?”, I shout. The darkness laughs back in silence. Am I awake, or is this a dream? What does it mean, to be awake, if this is being awake? What does it mean to be dreaming, if this is a dream? If this is a dream, whose dream is it? It can’t be mine. It must be someone else’s dream. But how can that be? Can you be awake, can you be aware, in someone else’s dream?
The mind shudders to accept what should not be.
A light approaches. No. It’s not approaching. It’s fading away. Should I follow? I’m afraid. Being in the darkness for so long I now fear the light. Do I stay here and wait? Do I follow the light?
I move towards it. The hum grows stronger. Am I doing the right thing? The hum reverberates in my head. The light dancing on my eyes breathes new horror with each flicker. But it’s all in my mind. I’m sure I have to follow this light. I walk.
There’s a door, made of blinding light. I walk through. It’s light everywhere. Bright, white, blinding light. I keep walking. I look around, I look back. There’s nothing there. It’s all light now. Only a speck of darkness in all of it. The dark door from which I emerged.
The humming starts again. It dawns on me then. I am lost.
Tags: dostoevsky, existentialism, Friedman, ideas, life, Lovecraft, nature of choice, Nietzsche, philosophy
Posted in Politics/Ideas, reflections | Comments (4)
the existentialist’s burden November 7th, 2008
I must confess, that U2′s Pop album has always been my favorite. It had the panache of Achtung Baby and Zooropa, tempered with the memory of the innocence of The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum. Pop was genius, it was also a spectacular show. The fault lines of the self, only glimpsed in early U2 were laid bare in Pop. It was an almost Nietzschean rejection of all that came before, and in that sense, probably a catharsis that the late ’90s demanded, before they rebooted, with All that you can’t leave behind and How to dismantle an atomic bomb.
Within that record however, Please has always been my favorite. I like to call it the existentialist’s burden. How does one become an existentialist? Most of us are engendered into some religious way of thinking, long before we ever engage with Sartre or Camus or Heidegger or Kierkegaard.
Please raises an interesting question, in that; whether you take Camus’ endless dances of master-slave relationships, or go back to Nietzsche’s unflinching embrace of life; you more-or-less do away with the notion of ‘faith’. The Lion of “I Will” defying the Dragon of “thou shalt”.
Love on the other hand, is best explained with a grounding in faith of some form, faith being integral to its constitution. On the one hand, Camus didn’t see a problem with it; on the other, Sartre did, and went along a rather destructive path of the unflinching deconstruction of the various forms of it.
Nothing profound, just an observation.
lyrics:
Please stop fighting, please
Let’s talk, please
So you never knew love
Until you’d crossed the line of grace
And you never felt wanted
Till you’d someone slap your face
And you never felt alive
Until you’d almost wasted away
You had to win, you couldn’t just pass
The smartest ass at the top of the class
Your flying colours, your family tree
And all your lessons in history
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please, please
Leave it out
So you never knew how low you’d stoop
To make that call
And you never knew what was on the ground
Until they made you crawl
So you never knew that the heaven you keep
You stole
Your Catholic blues, your convent shoes
Your stick-on tattoos, now they’re making the news
Your holy war, your northern star
Your sermon on the mount from the boot of your car
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please, please
Leave it out
‘Cause love is big and love is tough
But love is not what you’re thinking of
September, streets capsizing
Spilling over and down the drain
Shards of glass, splinters like rain
But you could only feel your own pain
October, talk getting nowhere
November, December
Remember, are we just starting again
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please
‘Cause love is big, it’s bigger than us
But love is not what you’re thinking of
It’s what lovers deal, it’s what lovers steal
You know I found it hard to recieve
‘Cause you, my love, I could never believe
Please, please, please
Get up off your knees now
Please, please, please
Please, please, please
Please
Tags: existentialism, faith, life, logic, love, Music, philosophy, please, U2
Posted in Music, Politics/Ideas | Comments (0)
on the american dream
May 20th, 2008
A period in Paris, just after the war brought Bellow in touch with existentialism and post-war American writing is the subject of some ironic reflections in a famous essay Bellow published in 1963, “Some Thoughts on Recent American Fiction”. (The piece was written just as he was about to publish Herzog.) Here he reflects on the current appeal of new American fiction for European intellectuals; recalling the title of Wylie Sypher’s brilliant and then influential study of modernism, ‘Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art’, he observes that a literature of the lost and inauthentic self has become a staple of contemporary writing. In Europe, in the work of writers like Gide, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus, this arises from the crises of contemporary history, and the breakdown of Enlightenment thought, and has clear origins in philosophical theories of the human condition. ‘American writers, when they are moved by a similar spirit to reject and despise the Self,’ Bellow then adds ironically, ‘are seldom encumbered by such intellectual baggage, and this fact pleases their European contemporaries, who find in them a natural, that is, a brutal and violent acceptance of the new universal truth by minds free from intellectual preconceptions.’ In European writers he sees a nerveless collapse of humanism, a sacrifice to history or necessity or logic. In post-war American writing the violence of being, the absurdity of existence, the state of alienation are presented as plain and brute empiricism, a view of the way things just are.
- Malcolm Bradbury
A period in Paris, just after the war brought Bellow in touch with existentialism and post-war American writing is the subject of some ironic reflections in a famous essay Bellow published in 1963, “Some Thoughts on Recent American Fiction”. (The piece was written just as he was about to publish Herzog.) Here he reflects on the current appeal of new American fiction for European intellectuals; recalling the title of Wylie Sypher’s brilliant and then influential study of modernism, ‘Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art’, he observes that a literature of the lost and inauthentic self has become a staple of contemporary writing. In Europe, in the work of writers like Gide, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus, this arises from the crises of contemporary history, and the breakdown of Enlightenment thought, and has clear origins in philosophical theories of the human condition. ‘American writers, when they are moved by a similar spirit to reject and despise the Self,’ Bellow then adds ironically, ‘are seldom encumbered by such intellectual baggage, and this fact pleases their European contemporaries, who find in them a natural, that is, a brutal and violent acceptance of the new universal truth by minds free from intellectual preconceptions.’ In European writers he sees a nerveless collapse of humanism, a sacrifice to history or necessity or logic. In post-war American writing the violence of being, the absurdity of existence, the state of alienation are presented as plain and brute empiricism, a view of the way things just are.
- Malcolm Bradbury
I don’t know if it is post-war or if it actually started before the war.
Of the European philosophers, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Derrida and Baudrillard would be my greatest influences. Thoreau and Paine are the Americans I am reasonably familiar with.
Thoreau and Paine and Baudrillard have always seemed the “Free-est” of the lot — Thoreau and Paine by virtue of, as Bellow points out, having a natural (if brutal — not comfortable with the flavor of this word, unless understood in an exact intent) outlook, Baudrillard by virtue of having ripped apart (or rather, progressed to the next logical stage) of contemporary thought, with his precession of simulacra and the hyperreal.
Nietzsche tried to break free of the shackles, and succeeds somewhat, but he, like Sartre, I think, is encumbered by the baggage of prevailing politics — which for Sartre was his movement towards communism.
Camus is the odd one out here, somewhere between Thoreau and Derrida, I think sometimes, scraping against the outer arc of the idea, the event horizon of contemporary thought (I’d like to call this event horizon The Theater of the Absurd) without really breaking free of it.
Still, the tools these thinkers set into place have great value. One I haven’t mentioned, since I am still getting acquainted with his work, is of course Wittgenstein.
Anyways. I found this piece rather interesting, and, having now been immersed in these ideas for a while, I can’t help but thinking of Friedrich Holderlin’s words…
“We are in the period of darkness
between the Gods that have vanished
and the God that has not yet come,
between Matthew Arnold’s two worlds,
‘one dead, the other powerless to be born’”
Those thinkers are all gone, Baudrillard was the last. But their work remains incomplete.
Tags: america, Baudrillard, Camus, Derrida, existentialism, freedom, Holderlin, ideas, inhibitions, intellect, liberty, Nietzsche, Paine, philosophy, Sarte, slavery, Thoreau
Posted in Books, Opinion, Politics/Ideas | Comments (0)
