American Journalism, late 20th Century: This saw the inception of the 'Penny Papers' in America and in turn American Journalism - though at the time this was ran b politicians and or merchants who were pretty subjective and bias. This did mean that the public people could write news and mid 19th century objectivity became a factor in journalism because of the creation of wire service. The associated press believed news should be objective and neutral - to please the highest number of people.
Developed along this line was the Yellow Press and this had the idea of shaking up the papers, adding sensationalism* and pictures - going for the shock and awe approach - to reel people in. This sparked a circulation war between two rival papers - the first owned by William Randolph Hearst and the second by Joseph Pulitzer. Hearst focused on drama, romance, crimes which is really the inception of tabloids.
*Sensationalism - huge, emotive headlines =, massive, striking images. This was the Yellow Press and the first wave of real journalism. Yellow journalism focused on sin, sex and violence but there was also good journalism; investigative for example tried to route out all corruption.
Journalism is very formulaic, insofar as we are constricted to the facts, a story must have so many paragraphs, the top line must be 20 words and so on. New Journalism was an attempt to record events by mirroring the language and style of the way the events happened - this was referred to as 'letting it bleed into the copy'.
Political and cultural scene: America in the 1960's and 70's was a highly bad time There was a great deal of social and political upheaval because this was the time of the highly unpopular Vietnam War and President JFK was assassinated. He was a man who embodied the American dream and was outstandingly popular with everyone - to quote Forrest Gump: "Then one day, for no particular reason, somebody shot that nice young man"
The Vietnam war happened by proxy pretty much - America had beef with Russia and they were allied and this meant that people were being conscripted into the army without any choice. Also during this time period there was a huge change to the demographic of America - the baby bomb. So many children were being born and this in turn created a youth culture that had access to political powers and the state had to keep in check - young people of this time were the voice of radical political change - free love, hippies and so on; this created an age clash like you wouldn't believe, it was very much young against the uptight old and this did not sit well.
Sexual revolution: This was all about sexual freedom - in the mid 1960's women had the access to, and the choice to use, birth control and regulation. This is exceedingly important to existentialists as I have mentioned previously - choice to them is everything, no matter what you do you must choose, you must have the freedom to do so. For example, you could choose to have a sexual partner who you didn't end up marrying; this is what Reichman was talking about with free love - you must constantly satisfy the ID - said that Freud had it wrong, we should always express ourselves and not bottle it up, bottling it up made things so much worse - we need to let it all hang loose. This was our way to happiness, by having great sexual experiences.
The student movement: This movement was highly militant and radical. University's became the center of radical politics, so much so that the police conducted raids on schools and tried to quell these ideas by bashing some skulls in. This movement saw women and black people marching vehemently for political rights - groups like the Black Panthers or Malcolm X. This is when LSD was created by the CIA and distributed around in an attempt to try and control the minds of young people and radicals - getting a bit 1984 on us there, guys. All these attempts at control and the general upheaval created underground sub-cultures such as hippies and so on, the general feeling was that all sub-cultures were deviant.
Music played a vital role in counter-cultures and according to Sartre music like Jazz was highly authentic and if you choose to listen to it you are not living in bad faith. The music of the time was an outright attack on the establishment, for example iconic bands such as The Doors - their music was all about being against the state and Bob Dylan was massively influential and popular for his anti-establishment songs. This type of music was fuel for the movement, it fed the people and was political.
Influence of Existentialism: Heidegger's authenticity, Sartre's bad faith and the key ideas that came with them - freedom and choice. Fanon held the view that in order to walk a path to freedom and happiness was attained through choice - our choices create our life. Think of an existentialist x-ray machine, you go through the machine and the data that will come up will be every single choice you have made in your life. Fanon believed that the act of violence is essentially the extreme expression of choice - this being choice that had a real and immediate impact, put simply violence always gets us to the point faster. Gotta love violence.
New Journalism: The anti-establishment feeling came into journalism and this was the feeling that "there is a police officer inside your head and he must be destroyed". Journalists question whether writing stories that had come from press releases, official statements and conferences was objective or not. This paved a way for new forms of journalism to emerge.
Journalists, being formulaic, always looked towards the setting, plot, feelings. quotes and images and had to take into account all the facts and the truth. Writers like Truman Capote, a favorite of mine, were new breads of journalists. Capote's phenomenal book In Cold Blood is still on of my favorite books of all time - I love the way it's written, presenting the facts and telling a story in the form of fiction, the personal accounts, and the overall journey. But most importantly, to me at least, the sympathy that Capote demonstrates throughout the book is both terrifying and enthralling.
New Journalism's 'objectivity' is pretty much trashed in subjunctive experience, for example Tom Wolfe wrote an article about a bunch of big time fat cats inviting members of the Black Panthers to a fancy shindig and simply observing the situation. Wolfe admired the writer Emile Zola - he thought that the way he wrote was the correct way to write - you observe people and describe how they act, Dickens also used this style. Zola was exceedingly descriptive, like a Sherlock Holmes level of perception, spending many many pages explaining every individual part of a person - the way they walk, the watch they wear, the shoes and so on.
Wolfe describes Zola: "Zola crowned himself as a first scientific novelist, a naturalist to use his term, studying the human form"
Dialog became increasingly popular and people started to use this - Dickens and Zola's technique of writing and description seeped it's way into feature writing. For example there was a feature which depicted a boxer, well past his prime, and he has just stepped off a plane to meet his wife - then conversations ensue and this is the dialog - the key is to attempt to reciprocate exactly what they said and how they say it onto a page, every single detail. This is a very time costly process and can take days, weeks even years to accomplish. There are four stages according to Wolfe about how features should be. He claims that features should be done:
1) Scene by scene, you need to be there and you need to make the reader feel like they're there.
2) They must reflect the realistic dialog - this allows us to read into the people but capturing the dialog perfectly is wicked difficult
3) You must get into their minds, learn everything you can about them - their thoughts and emotions and more importantly the reader should be able to as well.
4) Attention to the fine details - their whole world, their characteristics - how they walk and so on. You gain insight through attention to the detail.
Showing posts with label Existentialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Existentialism. Show all posts
Monday, 13 May 2013
Totalitarianism
Origins of Totalitarianism: It is important to understand how such regimes can come to fruition - for example the control of language (Orwell and propaganda) can make a huge difference as well as restraints such as prohibition. I personally believe that humans are inherently and unavoidably evil, all things we do are for some sort of person gain.
It is widely believed that we all have a personal responsibility to speak out again dictatorships and strike away from following forced orders - but then again look at some people, they would not make a choice (and from an existentialist point of view would therefore be living in bad faith, a false life) and just go along with the regime because they don't want to die or risk anything happening to them.
People would probably say that they would not conform to such things, to refuse an oppressive authority and actively say what's happening is full on wrong but to me this is exceptionally idealistic - if your own life is on the line you will do whatever you can to preserve it, in this case it would be following any order given.
Pre-WW1 and 2 we had 100 years of relative 'peace' these being the years following the Napoleonic war. Humanity had sorted all the majority of crap that was hindering progressions and became more sophisticated, in a manner of speaking. For example, Germany had some damn fine intellectual minds they were bounding forward in terms of culture, science and so on, sometimes colloquially referred to the German century.
Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism: Totalitarianism literally means controlling every single aspect of life: Hobbes touched upon a near totalitarian state explained in his writings - life is nasty, brutish and short - people are bad and will always try to have more, regardless of who they have to hurt to get it. This meant that the state had to have some control over how much freedom people had, but this was a social contract and would never encroach on their freedom totally, so there would never be absolute control.
Hannah Arendt claims that totalitarians regimes are a complete and utter break away from all of our traditions, she then goes on to say that dictatorships and oppressive regimes can happen because of imperialism in the 19th century and this created grounds for it to happen - imperialism was established by race.
However people such as Mussolini believed that outside of the state there can be no individuals or groups of people - the state is everything and if you live in the state you are part of it - it should be everywhere, in your house and fully encompass all of your life. You must always think in a way that is consistent in the state anything else is a rebellion against the state.
The emphasis on race and not merit is a recurring theme in dictatorships - once this has been established it became very easy for dictatorships to take it up and make it their own and from this is just gets worse, always seeing one particular race as better than the other, where is the line in the sand drawn? If at all.
Following this train of thought of building on what was already there and making it your own - The Boer War and General Kitchener; this brought about the inception of concentration camps and the Nazi regime took this idea and adapted it. For a dictatorship to succeed there must be no individual. Us being individual makes it very hard to be controlled - so that we can be part of the state, not away from it, and from this the state tells us what we need to think.
Hannah Arendt says that destroying the individual will cause a state of terror. The aim is not to kill people but to break them down like dogs - the terror is not just murdering vast numbers of people it is the act of isolating people, making them feel like they have no say, right or ability to question the government. George Orwell demonstrates this in his novel 1984 - big brother, you are always being watched, the thought police will catch you at any sight of rebellion - this feeling of always being under observation, a police state, creates mass paranoia.
This creates an ideology - people start to believe that this is the way, why not speak out against this? well because this is how things are, this is the natural order. This is drilled into the heads of people under a dictatorship and goes hand in hand with the terror and removes the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves - this provides somewhat of a defense for these people, for example well it's not my fault I was just following orders, they would've killed me otherwise, a highly weak attempt at absolution - personally I think if you make the choice then stick to your guns, don't be such a coward.
This leads to a breakdown of the stable human world and means a loss of the institutional and psychological barriers that we would not normally cross - an example is becoming numb to seeing utter devastation and strife which was frequent among concentration camp workers; one man arrived and broke down into tears at the sight and later would see it as normal and just became numb to it.
There is a certain frailty within civilisation which I agree with. It is shocking how quickly people will turn on each other if they are threatened, people go into a survival mode and will do anything they can to make sure they survive - my example would be from the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (though satirically done) it provides a decent setting - two people in a small rubber dingy lost out at sea with one source of food, a leg of meat soaked in rum. The food gets thrown overboard and they start to become paranoid of the other one eating the other in order to survive, going so far as to try and kill the other in order to eat him.
Control Language - George Orwell: Mind control is highly possible if you have control over language - what words people can and can't use, which words are prohibited and so on. Language is exceedingly important because the language you use daily is what defines you really, the words you choose and so on.
The Eichmann Trial: This was a highly important trial which concerned a German bureaucrat Eichmann whose job it was, during the Nazi regime, to make sure that the trains carrying hosts of Jewish prisoners ran efficiently and made sure they were on time. This trial served three key purposes:
1) to try him for his crimes
2) educate the population with what happened
3) to legitimise the Jewish state
Hannah Arendt was shocked by Eichmann because he was just a regular Joe, nothing exceptional or odd about him, who was following orders for the sake of self preservation. She concluded that it was not necessary to possess some sort of great wickedness to commit great crimes, simple put; if you are in danger you will do what you will to make sure you live, regardless of what this is - this is the *Banality of Evil.
Arendt takes an existentialist stance with this and says that Eichmann's biggest crime was not thinking. Thoughts and choice is crucial to existentialists because no matter what you do you have to make a choice - otherwise Sartre will accuse you of living in bad faith. In Eichmann's case he was mindlessly following and used the defense that he was abiding the law (whilst breaking the law at the same time) claiming it was his duty. When really he should have made a decision for himself
*Banality = Ordinary, can happen to literally anyone
It is widely believed that we all have a personal responsibility to speak out again dictatorships and strike away from following forced orders - but then again look at some people, they would not make a choice (and from an existentialist point of view would therefore be living in bad faith, a false life) and just go along with the regime because they don't want to die or risk anything happening to them.
People would probably say that they would not conform to such things, to refuse an oppressive authority and actively say what's happening is full on wrong but to me this is exceptionally idealistic - if your own life is on the line you will do whatever you can to preserve it, in this case it would be following any order given.
Pre-WW1 and 2 we had 100 years of relative 'peace' these being the years following the Napoleonic war. Humanity had sorted all the majority of crap that was hindering progressions and became more sophisticated, in a manner of speaking. For example, Germany had some damn fine intellectual minds they were bounding forward in terms of culture, science and so on, sometimes colloquially referred to the German century.
Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism: Totalitarianism literally means controlling every single aspect of life: Hobbes touched upon a near totalitarian state explained in his writings - life is nasty, brutish and short - people are bad and will always try to have more, regardless of who they have to hurt to get it. This meant that the state had to have some control over how much freedom people had, but this was a social contract and would never encroach on their freedom totally, so there would never be absolute control.
Hannah Arendt claims that totalitarians regimes are a complete and utter break away from all of our traditions, she then goes on to say that dictatorships and oppressive regimes can happen because of imperialism in the 19th century and this created grounds for it to happen - imperialism was established by race.
However people such as Mussolini believed that outside of the state there can be no individuals or groups of people - the state is everything and if you live in the state you are part of it - it should be everywhere, in your house and fully encompass all of your life. You must always think in a way that is consistent in the state anything else is a rebellion against the state.
The emphasis on race and not merit is a recurring theme in dictatorships - once this has been established it became very easy for dictatorships to take it up and make it their own and from this is just gets worse, always seeing one particular race as better than the other, where is the line in the sand drawn? If at all.
Following this train of thought of building on what was already there and making it your own - The Boer War and General Kitchener; this brought about the inception of concentration camps and the Nazi regime took this idea and adapted it. For a dictatorship to succeed there must be no individual. Us being individual makes it very hard to be controlled - so that we can be part of the state, not away from it, and from this the state tells us what we need to think.
Hannah Arendt says that destroying the individual will cause a state of terror. The aim is not to kill people but to break them down like dogs - the terror is not just murdering vast numbers of people it is the act of isolating people, making them feel like they have no say, right or ability to question the government. George Orwell demonstrates this in his novel 1984 - big brother, you are always being watched, the thought police will catch you at any sight of rebellion - this feeling of always being under observation, a police state, creates mass paranoia.
This creates an ideology - people start to believe that this is the way, why not speak out against this? well because this is how things are, this is the natural order. This is drilled into the heads of people under a dictatorship and goes hand in hand with the terror and removes the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves - this provides somewhat of a defense for these people, for example well it's not my fault I was just following orders, they would've killed me otherwise, a highly weak attempt at absolution - personally I think if you make the choice then stick to your guns, don't be such a coward.
This leads to a breakdown of the stable human world and means a loss of the institutional and psychological barriers that we would not normally cross - an example is becoming numb to seeing utter devastation and strife which was frequent among concentration camp workers; one man arrived and broke down into tears at the sight and later would see it as normal and just became numb to it.
There is a certain frailty within civilisation which I agree with. It is shocking how quickly people will turn on each other if they are threatened, people go into a survival mode and will do anything they can to make sure they survive - my example would be from the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (though satirically done) it provides a decent setting - two people in a small rubber dingy lost out at sea with one source of food, a leg of meat soaked in rum. The food gets thrown overboard and they start to become paranoid of the other one eating the other in order to survive, going so far as to try and kill the other in order to eat him.
Control Language - George Orwell: Mind control is highly possible if you have control over language - what words people can and can't use, which words are prohibited and so on. Language is exceedingly important because the language you use daily is what defines you really, the words you choose and so on.
The Eichmann Trial: This was a highly important trial which concerned a German bureaucrat Eichmann whose job it was, during the Nazi regime, to make sure that the trains carrying hosts of Jewish prisoners ran efficiently and made sure they were on time. This trial served three key purposes:
1) to try him for his crimes
2) educate the population with what happened
3) to legitimise the Jewish state
Hannah Arendt was shocked by Eichmann because he was just a regular Joe, nothing exceptional or odd about him, who was following orders for the sake of self preservation. She concluded that it was not necessary to possess some sort of great wickedness to commit great crimes, simple put; if you are in danger you will do what you will to make sure you live, regardless of what this is - this is the *Banality of Evil.
Arendt takes an existentialist stance with this and says that Eichmann's biggest crime was not thinking. Thoughts and choice is crucial to existentialists because no matter what you do you have to make a choice - otherwise Sartre will accuse you of living in bad faith. In Eichmann's case he was mindlessly following and used the defense that he was abiding the law (whilst breaking the law at the same time) claiming it was his duty. When really he should have made a decision for himself
*Banality = Ordinary, can happen to literally anyone
Friday, 10 May 2013
Existentialism continued - Frege and mathematics
Logic and mathematics: Frege believes there are natural numbers; used to count things, these natural numbers are just concepts, many things, more than one thing etc. Counting creates an abstract category or group - for example with plurals - you can have a pride of lions, a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens (natural numbers, abstract concepts) This is used to refer to a number of things where you cannot physically count them all out, like trying to count the number of people in a football stadium, you just know there is a hell of a lot of people there.
There are three attitudes to language, most importantly numbers:
1) they are natural and can be empirically observed
2) they are intuitions of a harmonic, platonic other world - you can never find the noumena, the essence of a number
3) they are abstract logical objects constructed purely from syntax*
*Syntax - results of modifying the meaning of one object to another. For example, verbs and adjectives - house can be syntactically altered to blue house.
Numerical naturalism / Evolutionary psychology: Apes and Neanderthal tribes appeared to be able to judge simple empirical plurality, typically for example, the absence of a banana or something else of importance.
Noam Chomsky: People are born with an innate understanding on syntax and language, he argues otherwise how do we know this? Contra John Locke who thought we are born with a blank slate - we have nothing innate.
Pythagorean-ism / Platonism: Numbers have heavily influenced Christianity, for them numbers are like an insight into God (prime numbers) the belief behind this is that 7 essentially cannot be thought up, primes can't be divided. Numbers are believed to have like special powers, people hold them in high regard like choosing numbers for the lottery, you, for some obscure reason, believe picking certain numbers that you believe to be special from the others increases your chances of winning when really it doesn't work like that - pretty much superstitious nonsense.
There is a religious significance regarding the number 3. Three is apparently the magic number - three acts in a play, three movements in a symphony and in a waltz, the big three in religion being the father, the son and the holy ghost. This also creeps into journalism, with terms like rule of thirds.
Primes are held in high regard by Islamic believers, Islam exhibits cults around plural primes four, five and seven. Babylonians exhibit a similar obsession with numbers - the 12 Zodiacs, each representing a month of the year, commonly known as star signs.
Pythagoras regarded plurals as the only real natural numbers, starting numerically at 2 because a number that is 1, not one or nothing are completely different categories. Odyssey telling the tale of Odysseus & the Cyclops; the cyclops asks if there is anyone there to which the reply is there is no-one there. This utterly confuses the cyclops because nothing being there is a fully ineffable concept - the process of there being nothing there is flawed, there cannot be nothing as the nothing is something. Used again in this example which perhaps illustrate the point more - there is nothing on the road, well yes there is because the road is there and also nothing, being something, is present. This does not mean the same thing as the road being empty, or clear of obstructions.
Problem of zero and nothing: Zero came from India, later via Islam. Whole Arabic numerical systems were introduced in the middle ages after the fall of Rome. Zero is an intrinsically difficult concept, as expressed earlier; zero = nothing but nothing = something.
Contra to Aristotle's law of contradiction solved by Leibniz's monads - an object can contain it's own negation. Modern philosophers of mathematics assert that zero is a natural number. This is because if you have: zero + one = one, making something out of nothing.
Common sense view of numbers: There are logical objects according to Frege, his book the Grundlagen is a philosophy of the logic of numbers. For Frege, maths is just a language and all the same analytically.
- Languages have three things:
1) vocabulary of objects (words and numbers)
2) syntax - modify the meaning comb-grammar
3) grammar
Frege's work was adapted - Bertrand & Whitehead - Principia Mathematica - going to assume this is the principle of mathematics
Frege's Method: Axiom - all things identical are equal to themselves, this is asserted apriori; deductive, true by definition. Follows all things which are pairs are identical to all other pairs (regardless of what they are pairs of) they are still pairs nonetheless. The class of all things which are pairs - logically can call it two, it does not matter. Large numbers can be built as logical constructs as along the lines of 'the class of all things which are pairs of pairs' - we can attach any symbol we like, for example four. Furthermore, one is the class of all things that are not in a pair, eg, lost sock = not a pair, just a single sock.
There are three attitudes to language, most importantly numbers:
1) they are natural and can be empirically observed
2) they are intuitions of a harmonic, platonic other world - you can never find the noumena, the essence of a number
3) they are abstract logical objects constructed purely from syntax*
*Syntax - results of modifying the meaning of one object to another. For example, verbs and adjectives - house can be syntactically altered to blue house.
Numerical naturalism / Evolutionary psychology: Apes and Neanderthal tribes appeared to be able to judge simple empirical plurality, typically for example, the absence of a banana or something else of importance.
Noam Chomsky: People are born with an innate understanding on syntax and language, he argues otherwise how do we know this? Contra John Locke who thought we are born with a blank slate - we have nothing innate.
Pythagorean-ism / Platonism: Numbers have heavily influenced Christianity, for them numbers are like an insight into God (prime numbers) the belief behind this is that 7 essentially cannot be thought up, primes can't be divided. Numbers are believed to have like special powers, people hold them in high regard like choosing numbers for the lottery, you, for some obscure reason, believe picking certain numbers that you believe to be special from the others increases your chances of winning when really it doesn't work like that - pretty much superstitious nonsense.
There is a religious significance regarding the number 3. Three is apparently the magic number - three acts in a play, three movements in a symphony and in a waltz, the big three in religion being the father, the son and the holy ghost. This also creeps into journalism, with terms like rule of thirds.
Primes are held in high regard by Islamic believers, Islam exhibits cults around plural primes four, five and seven. Babylonians exhibit a similar obsession with numbers - the 12 Zodiacs, each representing a month of the year, commonly known as star signs.
Pythagoras regarded plurals as the only real natural numbers, starting numerically at 2 because a number that is 1, not one or nothing are completely different categories. Odyssey telling the tale of Odysseus & the Cyclops; the cyclops asks if there is anyone there to which the reply is there is no-one there. This utterly confuses the cyclops because nothing being there is a fully ineffable concept - the process of there being nothing there is flawed, there cannot be nothing as the nothing is something. Used again in this example which perhaps illustrate the point more - there is nothing on the road, well yes there is because the road is there and also nothing, being something, is present. This does not mean the same thing as the road being empty, or clear of obstructions.
Problem of zero and nothing: Zero came from India, later via Islam. Whole Arabic numerical systems were introduced in the middle ages after the fall of Rome. Zero is an intrinsically difficult concept, as expressed earlier; zero = nothing but nothing = something.
Contra to Aristotle's law of contradiction solved by Leibniz's monads - an object can contain it's own negation. Modern philosophers of mathematics assert that zero is a natural number. This is because if you have: zero + one = one, making something out of nothing.
Common sense view of numbers: There are logical objects according to Frege, his book the Grundlagen is a philosophy of the logic of numbers. For Frege, maths is just a language and all the same analytically.
- Languages have three things:
1) vocabulary of objects (words and numbers)
2) syntax - modify the meaning comb-grammar
3) grammar
Frege's work was adapted - Bertrand & Whitehead - Principia Mathematica - going to assume this is the principle of mathematics
Frege's Method: Axiom - all things identical are equal to themselves, this is asserted apriori; deductive, true by definition. Follows all things which are pairs are identical to all other pairs (regardless of what they are pairs of) they are still pairs nonetheless. The class of all things which are pairs - logically can call it two, it does not matter. Large numbers can be built as logical constructs as along the lines of 'the class of all things which are pairs of pairs' - we can attach any symbol we like, for example four. Furthermore, one is the class of all things that are not in a pair, eg, lost sock = not a pair, just a single sock.
Thursday, 31 January 2013
Seminar Paper - Existentialism, Phenomenology, Heidegger, Sartre and Husserl (Updated)
This seminar paper will take us through the workings of existentialism from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Derrida, this will include Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger and Sartre on existentialism.
Freud and Psychoanalysis: Philosophers seldom described themselves as ‘Freudians’, but all who were engaged in teaching philosophy of the mind, ethics or philosophy of religion were forced to take account of Freud's novel and proposals. He had an all encompassing theory of everything. His work casts a long shadow as it addresses the whole human condition, which is highly contested. Freud states that we are always unhappy because we are divided, even alienated from ourselves. Freud himself was a psychiatrist and claimed to find the reason we are unhappy. He claimed to have found away into the part of our brains that control us - the thing is that we don't know we are being controlled and we have no actual control over our actions. If we think that we are doing these things, for example, if I think I'm sitting in my room blogging on my own volition then I'm very mistaken, because it's actually my brain that is controlling me; basically we don't make our own decisions and we have no idea that this control is even happening. Think about when you choose what to wear, your sub-consciousness will tell you to wear blue because you associate that with looking fierce. This is explored greatly by psychoanalysis.
Freud used to use hypnosis in his treatments but he moved away from this and replaced it with a novel form of therapy which he named psychoanalysis, which was just talking between the patient and doctor. The premise of the treatment is that all people harbor these deep seated feelings or trauma that has to be addressed by talking about your feelings. The patient would typically be lying on a couch and is encouraged to talk about whatever was on their mind, which we’re usually traced back to childhood trauma or sexual issues. Freud collaborated with Josef Breuer, whose works laid the foundation of psychoanalysis and Jean-Martin Charcot is work greatly influenced the developing fields of neurology and psychology. He was the foremost neurologist of late nineteenth-century France and has been called "the Napoleon of the neuroses".
Existentialism: Nietzsche claims: "God is dead and we have killed him" this is meant in a metaphorical way and it demonstrated the ever growing aversion to religion - it means that it is an end to something to pray to, something to guide is through life and give it some meaning - this is all religion (to me) is; people being too scared to believe that we are not being guided by some higher power. This now means that we will have more choice - no more control from religions, we can make up our own minds as there is now nothing to influence or affect the choices we make, we are alone and must choose for ourselves, albeit forced - this is known as the 'Trans-valuation of all values' as we find the value in us and it in turn makes us free.
This freedom of our own choice is key to Existentialists - choosing is everything, it defines who we are and if we are not making choices for ourselves then we are living in what Sartre calls 'Bad Faith'
Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: Husserl’s phenomenology stands in opposition to naturalism, which is to be approached with natural-scientific methods, which are inclined toward empirical facts. Phenomenology turns directly to the evidence of lived experience - of first-person life - in order to provide descriptions of experiencing, rather than causal explanations.
Husserl has been likened to Freud, insofar as they both devoted a majority of their lives to a personal project that was intended to be the first really scientific study of the human mind. Where Freud was exiled due to Nazi anti-Semitism, Husserl had his books burn by German troops marching into Prague 1939. Husserl is often credited as the founder of phenomenology, and he addressed the body throughout his philosophical life, again likened to Freud. Husserl was highly influenced by Franz Brentano in Vienna between 1884 and 1886 by attending his lectures about philosophy and this is what got him interested in it. Brentano’s book, ‘Psychology from an Empirical standpoint’ brought up the data of consciousness, and this comes in two kinds - the first physical phenomenal and the second being mental phenomena. Physical phenomenal are things like colours and smells, whereas mental phenomenal is thoughts and these are characterised by having a content, or object. This feature by Brentano reintroduced the term intentionality (essentially the target of a thought) - this is the key to understanding mental acts and life.
Husserl still focused his attention on mathematics and his habilitation thesis was on the concept of numbers, and his first real book published 1891 was the ‘philosophy of arithmetic’ and this sought to explain our numerical concepts by identifying the mental acts which are our psychological origins, for example our concept of plurality, was supposed to derive from a process of ‘collective combination’ which group many items together. However, after a great deal of criticism, Husserl maintained a sharp distinction between logic and psychology , however Husserl saw the psychological side as philosophy's rightful home, as opposed to Frege who followed by the analytic tradition and placed himself on the side of logic.
The aim of phenomenology was the study of the immediate date of consciousness, without referring to anything that the consciousness may yield to us about the mental world, for example the concept of a Unicorn, the intentionality of my thought is the same, regardless of whether or not a Unicorn exists. Husserl prefaces this by saying “it makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is fictitious”
Martin Heidegger’s Existentialism: Heidegger was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most associated with phenomenology and existentialism. Heidegger's philosophical development started when he read the work of Brentano and Aristotle. The demand placed in the Metaphysics by Aristotle, the idea to know what it is that unites all interpretations of being is the question that sparked off Heidegger's philosophy, and from here he delved deeper into the work of Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Heidegger insisted that the first task of phenomenology was to greatly study the concept of Being, which was prior to the divide between consciousness and reality. To gain a clear concept of the nature of philosophy it is assumed we should go back, however Heidegger claims that simply going back to Aristotle and Plato will not yield us the answers we seek. Heidegger decided to come up with an entirely new vocabulary for philosophy and one of his coined terms was the ‘Dasein’ this literally means being there, and it is a very common word in German. It is important to note that the Dasein is always relative to the beholder and is either entirely buried or firmly grounded in subjectivity, for example it is in your mood, which opposes the earlier ideas of the Logical Positivist who believed that the truth is grounded in facts and empirical data. Being is not some abstract concept, it is concrete - it is you being at a particular time and place and being engaged in a particular task of thinking.
Heidegger believes that they only way we can be free is if we are completely absorbed in a task, such absorption does not lessen existential pain but makes existence slowly fade away, for example being really into a song or playing a game, you will be entirely focused on that one task and existence seems to be gone. If there was infinite time then there would be infinite boredom, and the perception of a ‘lack of time’ makes you throw yourself head on into your Dasein and if you are not absorbed in a task, according to Heidegger, then you will be overcome with utter boredom. Heidegger claims there are three aspects of time, the first being attunement - this is expressed as mood, a reflection on the past produces this mood. Outside of the Dasein the normal mood of attunement is a looming angst and the mood of guilt. Secondly, Dasein - this is caring about the task at hand, being ‘in the zone’ so to speak, this is essentially the present. And thirdly, directiveness, this reflection on the future produces the mood of dread a fear of the future that we try and block out.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism: Sartre (1905-1980) focuses upon the construction of a philosophy of existence (existentialism) and his early works are characterised by a development of early phenomenology, very much following the same structure as Heidegger and to a lesser extent Husserl, but he diverges from Husserl on the concept of the self, and with an interest in ethics. These differences are the foundations of Sartre’s existential phenomenology, the purpose being to understand human existence rather than the world.
Sartre’s main book ‘Being and Nothingness’ is where he defines two types of reality which are beyond our own experience: these are the being of the object of consciousness and the being of consciousness itself. The object of consciousness exists in itself, this means that it is independent and not defined in relation to anything. However, consciousness is always are of something, which means it would be defined in relation to other things. This allows us to also experience a ‘nothingness’ and this power is also at work within the self, which leads to a lack of self-identity.
Sartre goes on to set up his own idea of the individual human being. He does this by first getting rid of its grounding in a stable ego. Sartre claims that Existentialism is a Humanism, this means that to be human is characterised by existing. This was put forward in Sartre’s early that would later become ‘Being and Nothingness’. Sartre’s early works are seen as improving the material to make an existential account of being human. But Sartre’s approach to understanding human existence is formed by his interest in ethics.
Fun fact - Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote many love letters to each other and had them published after their deaths
Freud and Psychoanalysis: Philosophers seldom described themselves as ‘Freudians’, but all who were engaged in teaching philosophy of the mind, ethics or philosophy of religion were forced to take account of Freud's novel and proposals. He had an all encompassing theory of everything. His work casts a long shadow as it addresses the whole human condition, which is highly contested. Freud states that we are always unhappy because we are divided, even alienated from ourselves. Freud himself was a psychiatrist and claimed to find the reason we are unhappy. He claimed to have found away into the part of our brains that control us - the thing is that we don't know we are being controlled and we have no actual control over our actions. If we think that we are doing these things, for example, if I think I'm sitting in my room blogging on my own volition then I'm very mistaken, because it's actually my brain that is controlling me; basically we don't make our own decisions and we have no idea that this control is even happening. Think about when you choose what to wear, your sub-consciousness will tell you to wear blue because you associate that with looking fierce. This is explored greatly by psychoanalysis.
Freud used to use hypnosis in his treatments but he moved away from this and replaced it with a novel form of therapy which he named psychoanalysis, which was just talking between the patient and doctor. The premise of the treatment is that all people harbor these deep seated feelings or trauma that has to be addressed by talking about your feelings. The patient would typically be lying on a couch and is encouraged to talk about whatever was on their mind, which we’re usually traced back to childhood trauma or sexual issues. Freud collaborated with Josef Breuer, whose works laid the foundation of psychoanalysis and Jean-Martin Charcot is work greatly influenced the developing fields of neurology and psychology. He was the foremost neurologist of late nineteenth-century France and has been called "the Napoleon of the neuroses".
Existentialism: Nietzsche claims: "God is dead and we have killed him" this is meant in a metaphorical way and it demonstrated the ever growing aversion to religion - it means that it is an end to something to pray to, something to guide is through life and give it some meaning - this is all religion (to me) is; people being too scared to believe that we are not being guided by some higher power. This now means that we will have more choice - no more control from religions, we can make up our own minds as there is now nothing to influence or affect the choices we make, we are alone and must choose for ourselves, albeit forced - this is known as the 'Trans-valuation of all values' as we find the value in us and it in turn makes us free.
This freedom of our own choice is key to Existentialists - choosing is everything, it defines who we are and if we are not making choices for ourselves then we are living in what Sartre calls 'Bad Faith'
Husserl has been likened to Freud, insofar as they both devoted a majority of their lives to a personal project that was intended to be the first really scientific study of the human mind. Where Freud was exiled due to Nazi anti-Semitism, Husserl had his books burn by German troops marching into Prague 1939. Husserl is often credited as the founder of phenomenology, and he addressed the body throughout his philosophical life, again likened to Freud. Husserl was highly influenced by Franz Brentano in Vienna between 1884 and 1886 by attending his lectures about philosophy and this is what got him interested in it. Brentano’s book, ‘Psychology from an Empirical standpoint’ brought up the data of consciousness, and this comes in two kinds - the first physical phenomenal and the second being mental phenomena. Physical phenomenal are things like colours and smells, whereas mental phenomenal is thoughts and these are characterised by having a content, or object. This feature by Brentano reintroduced the term intentionality (essentially the target of a thought) - this is the key to understanding mental acts and life.
Husserl still focused his attention on mathematics and his habilitation thesis was on the concept of numbers, and his first real book published 1891 was the ‘philosophy of arithmetic’ and this sought to explain our numerical concepts by identifying the mental acts which are our psychological origins, for example our concept of plurality, was supposed to derive from a process of ‘collective combination’ which group many items together. However, after a great deal of criticism, Husserl maintained a sharp distinction between logic and psychology , however Husserl saw the psychological side as philosophy's rightful home, as opposed to Frege who followed by the analytic tradition and placed himself on the side of logic.
The aim of phenomenology was the study of the immediate date of consciousness, without referring to anything that the consciousness may yield to us about the mental world, for example the concept of a Unicorn, the intentionality of my thought is the same, regardless of whether or not a Unicorn exists. Husserl prefaces this by saying “it makes no essential difference to an object presented and given to consciousness whether it exists, or is fictitious”
Martin Heidegger’s Existentialism: Heidegger was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most associated with phenomenology and existentialism. Heidegger's philosophical development started when he read the work of Brentano and Aristotle. The demand placed in the Metaphysics by Aristotle, the idea to know what it is that unites all interpretations of being is the question that sparked off Heidegger's philosophy, and from here he delved deeper into the work of Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Heidegger insisted that the first task of phenomenology was to greatly study the concept of Being, which was prior to the divide between consciousness and reality. To gain a clear concept of the nature of philosophy it is assumed we should go back, however Heidegger claims that simply going back to Aristotle and Plato will not yield us the answers we seek. Heidegger decided to come up with an entirely new vocabulary for philosophy and one of his coined terms was the ‘Dasein’ this literally means being there, and it is a very common word in German. It is important to note that the Dasein is always relative to the beholder and is either entirely buried or firmly grounded in subjectivity, for example it is in your mood, which opposes the earlier ideas of the Logical Positivist who believed that the truth is grounded in facts and empirical data. Being is not some abstract concept, it is concrete - it is you being at a particular time and place and being engaged in a particular task of thinking.
Heidegger believes that they only way we can be free is if we are completely absorbed in a task, such absorption does not lessen existential pain but makes existence slowly fade away, for example being really into a song or playing a game, you will be entirely focused on that one task and existence seems to be gone. If there was infinite time then there would be infinite boredom, and the perception of a ‘lack of time’ makes you throw yourself head on into your Dasein and if you are not absorbed in a task, according to Heidegger, then you will be overcome with utter boredom. Heidegger claims there are three aspects of time, the first being attunement - this is expressed as mood, a reflection on the past produces this mood. Outside of the Dasein the normal mood of attunement is a looming angst and the mood of guilt. Secondly, Dasein - this is caring about the task at hand, being ‘in the zone’ so to speak, this is essentially the present. And thirdly, directiveness, this reflection on the future produces the mood of dread a fear of the future that we try and block out.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism: Sartre (1905-1980) focuses upon the construction of a philosophy of existence (existentialism) and his early works are characterised by a development of early phenomenology, very much following the same structure as Heidegger and to a lesser extent Husserl, but he diverges from Husserl on the concept of the self, and with an interest in ethics. These differences are the foundations of Sartre’s existential phenomenology, the purpose being to understand human existence rather than the world.
Sartre’s main book ‘Being and Nothingness’ is where he defines two types of reality which are beyond our own experience: these are the being of the object of consciousness and the being of consciousness itself. The object of consciousness exists in itself, this means that it is independent and not defined in relation to anything. However, consciousness is always are of something, which means it would be defined in relation to other things. This allows us to also experience a ‘nothingness’ and this power is also at work within the self, which leads to a lack of self-identity.
Sartre goes on to set up his own idea of the individual human being. He does this by first getting rid of its grounding in a stable ego. Sartre claims that Existentialism is a Humanism, this means that to be human is characterised by existing. This was put forward in Sartre’s early that would later become ‘Being and Nothingness’. Sartre’s early works are seen as improving the material to make an existential account of being human. But Sartre’s approach to understanding human existence is formed by his interest in ethics.
Fun fact - Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote many love letters to each other and had them published after their deaths
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