Existentialism
I’m reading through many existentialist philosophers: Nietzsche (in so far as he was one), Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Kafka, Heidegger, and more. Although I’m gaining great insight, I find it difficult to stand their obscurity and occasional incomprehensibility. I would think that their apologists would point to the enigmatic nature of their subject, but I wonder if that’s all that is.
I don’t think that they were using intentionally opaque language to hide their lack of understanding—most of them fully admit the enigma of Being, Existenz, the Encompassing… I think the problem with philosophy as a whole is that its practitioners, almost exclusively it seems like, think verbally. As a visual thinker, I find it incredibly difficult to follow the diatribes of verbal reasoning in these unquestioningly great philosophers. It’s a paradox that verbal thinkers make poor writers, but they do.
In as much as I can, I’m trying to build my visual understanding of their ideas. I’m trying to distill their thoughts into my comprehensive (and probably limited) understanding.
One thing that I’m working on is a systematic approach to building your own personal philosophy.
Very simply—most existentialists believe that in order to live an authentic, meaningful life, we should have some comprehension of our own personal Encompassing—our own philosophy about our Being. I’m starting to sound as opaque as them. Let me try again. We should build our own views on our broad existence to develop a consciousness and awareness of our total experience. By broad existence, I mean our current interpretation of our past, present, and potential (future). This is complex in itself but not entirely incomprehensible to visual thinkers like me.
One of the reasons for the obscurity of existentialism is the paradox that we should all attempt the impossible. We should try to contemplate our all-encompassing being with its infinite interpretations of our past, present, and future. As an example of this infinite, we can think of some single “point” in our past (which is much easier to contemplate than the obscurity of our future selves), and we can contemplate our interpretation of that moment with all the new knowledge, values, and understanding we possess today, point P. So we think of this point X, and now, we might have a different interpretation of it than we did then. But we can also try to remember the understanding we had of point X at point X. We can then jump to any other point in our past timeline, X+n, and try to remember and conceive of our interpretation of that point X. All the while, you need to know that our interpretation of our understanding of X from any perspective (X, and X+n) is tainted by our current bias, point P. This is all just in the service of one “point” in our historical timeline—not to even mention the complexity of what we mean by “point.” Is that point one second, one day, or one year? In this way, there is an infinite set of “points” to contemplate in our past, with an infinite set of interpretation of it. Then we can bring in contemplating the infinite possibilities of future points (P+n) with that same infinite set of interpretations from an infinite set of vantage points (X-n, X, X+n, P, P+n). In this way, all the existentialists point to the impossibility of conceiving our all-encompassing Being.
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For the above and following paragraphs, here is a quick summary of all the notation:
P : Present “point”
P + n : Some “point” in the future after some time, n. After some decisions we make to get there
X : Some arbitrary point in our history
X - n : Some time, n, prior to X “point”
X + n : Some time, n, after X “point”
This brings me to G-d. It’s incredibly remarkable how all the existentialists (and existentialism is the right way to think about Being, in my opinion) who did not lean on G-d, fell into a deep sense of nihilism; perhaps Nietzsche was the only “atheistic” existentialist who (barely) dug himself out of nihilism, but even he admitted that the “death of [G-d]” will lead to profound despair in nihilism. Theist existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger were somewhat spared from this abyss.
There’s a lot more that I could write about existentialism and Being, but I’ll leave off on this note: what do we mean by contemplating any of the “points” in our life? Existentialism already presented us with several problems of the infinite: the temporal problem (time can be divided into an infinite many “points”), the infinite interpretations from an inexhaustible set of perspectives, and an endless set of possible decisions to contemplate future perspectives (P+n). Another complication includes near-infinite ways to contemplate each “point” of Being. I will try to address that in a future article.
For now, I just hope I make it a little clearer why existentialists feel so lost in their own obscurity and the genuine danger of falling into nihilism. My interpretations are simplistic but intentionally so. I can’t understand anything unless I can first bring it into simple, visual terms. We can always layer more complexity as we increase the resolution of our insight.
