And… we’re back

There’s a lot of stress in the world lately.  I feel it.  My family feels it.  My friends and colleagues feel it.  This Corona virus quarantine has been an isolating experience for nearly everyone, and it often feels like the stress of the situation is increasingly magnified by our feelings of isolation within it.  Isolation feeds the stress, stress feeds the isolation, and we spiral down the existential toilet bowl.  But being free to make our own choices within our circumstances hasn’t changed, and I think several philosophers living in WWII Europe wrestled with a similar question in the midst of a world also in turmoil.  I believe they have a lot to teach us about freedom, choices, anxiety, and authenticity that can help us maintain a healthy version of our selves in this time of high and wide uncertainty.

I had the good fortune of studying philosophy as a young man, graduating with a bachelors degree in the subject.  I attended a small Catholic college in Miami where the philosophy department faculty was made up primarily of Cuban exiles, professors and intellectuals who had fled Castro’s Cuba and landed in Miami, some as adults, a few as children.  They were deep thinkers and committed teachers and people of high integrity who provided me a challenging education that has influenced and informed me throughout my entire adult life.  My four years there fostered my intellectual curiosity and gave me a solid grounding in the history of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks through to modern times, with a particular focus in a school of thought called existential phenomenology.  They taught me to think critically, to challenge my own presuppositions, and to be precise in my use of language to properly convey an idea (I’ll leave it to the reader to determine if I learned that last lesson adequately).  I remain immensely grateful for the education I received from those people in that time at that place.

Three of the 20th century philosophers that I focused on most in my undergraduate studies significantly contributed to a school of thought called existential phenomenology. Each of these three were affected differently by the collective crisis of the rise of fascism in Europe in early 20th century. This crisis profoundly influenced their circumstances, their choices, and their ideas.  

Edmund Husserl was a philosophy professor for many decades at the University of Freiburg in Germany.  Jewish by birth, he converted to Christianity in 1886 by being baptized as a Lutheran.  Notwithstanding his conversion decades prior, the racial laws passed by the Nazi Party banned him from publishing or teaching in Germany until his death in 1938.  

Jean-Paul Sartre was a philosopher and author who had been drafted into the French army, was captured by German troops, escaped from a German POW camp and created a subversive underground group in Paris that supported the French Resistance.  For nearly early 70 years he was a leading, often controversial, intellectual in Europe, but ultimately was never able to comfortably rationalize his philosophy of individual freedom with his sympathies for communist ideology.  

Martin Heidegger, an extreme introvert and protege of Husserl, was a philosophy professor and later rector of the University of Freiburg.  He joined the Nazi Party, ostensibly in order to maintain his leadership position at the university.  But he got a taste of power and briefly embraced Nazism full on. He later appeared to question this choice, resigning as rector of the university in 1934 and withdrawing to a cabin in the Black Forrest.  He refused to discuss his brief embrace of fascism even until his death in 1976, yet he is still considered as one of the greatest philosophers in Western history.

Three men, all brilliant philosophical thinkers, each with a very different personal experience within the same crisis.  Each man contributed profoundly to 20th century thought, each man’s thought was formed and informed in myriad ways by his qualitatively different experience of the same crisis.

So what were their core ideas?

Here’s my “one paragraph” personal take on Western philosophy: prior to the 20th century Western philosophy spent over two millennia devising increasingly elaborate abstract systems designed (successfully or unsuccessfully, depending on who you like) to determine how – or even if – human beings can know objective truth.  Then the German phenomenologists arrived on the scene in the early 1900’s with the shocking idea that grand philosophical systems aren’t what matter.  What matters, said the phenomenologists, is how we consciously and intentionally interact with people/things/the world around us.  It’s the things themselves as we experience them that matter, objectively stripped of any preconceptions or presuppositions we have about those things.  Then along came the French existentialists who said sacrebleu! You Germans almost got it right but what you missed is that human consciousness can’t separate itself from its own existence, so it can’t be “objective” about anything!  Humans are conscious of the things around them, but, since consciousness can’t separate itself from the thing it’s being conscious of, there is no way for human beings to have any objective experience of anything.  Its all subjective and personal!  To which the Germans responded Geh’ kacken, Frenchies!  We will merge the method of phenomenology with the concepts of existentialism into existential phenomenology. And with this we will address the most important question of all, which is: what does it mean for a thing to be – what does it mean for me to say that I exist? – and how can the phenomenological method help me let Being and beings reveal themselves to me as they are, not how I preconceive or wish them to be.

And that is my irreverent subjective one paragraph survey of 20th century western philosophical thought.  Let’s have a slightly more serious look at Husserl, Sartre and Heidegger’s philosophy and how it can inform our lives and behavior in this time of quarantine.

Edmund Husserl is considered the father of phenomenology.  Phenomenology is more of a method than a comprehensive philosophical system.  That method is of casting aside preconceived notions and biases to experience things as they are, a method for describing experience.  Western philosophy prior to Husserl tended to lean on the “rational” nature of Man, the primacy of Man’s ability to reason and understand himself and the world around him.  “I think therefore I am” is the classic line from René Descartes that permeated centuries of philosophical thought.  But the phenomenologists kinda kicked that to the curb by pointing out that we experience reality in many, many ways, not just in thought.  We perceive it through our senses. We experience it emotionally.  We can allow reality and people and objects and events to present themselves to us without us “thinking” about them at all.  

One of my philosophy professors long ago used an example of phenomenology that sticks with me decades later: wine tasting.  Have you been to a wine tasting?  Its not a lecture on the history of winemaking, nor a workshop on contemporary theories of oenology or viticulture (couple of fancy words right there, baby!).  A wine tasting event is a pure phenomenological exercise in the experience of a glass of wine: what color do you see?  How does it smell?  What flavors do you taste?  How does it feel on your tongue when you sip it and when you swirl it around in your mouth?  What emotional reaction does the wine evoke from you as you taste it?  And most importantly: how do you use words and language to communicate your experience of this glass of wine? This is phenomenology as sure as the day is long.  This was Husserl’s contribution.  Experience the things and people and events around you as you experience them.  Don’t worry about how/why/if they have an objective truth behind your experience, or if you can fit them into a “system” of truth/knowledge/experience.  To phenomenologically experience something is to allow your consciousness to fully embrace what you are experiencing then finding a way to communicate that experience.

“To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.”  — Edmund Husserl

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Jean-Paul Sartre was the stereotypical black turtleneck wearing, black coffee drinking, chain smoking French existentialist.  His particular flavor of existentialism held that every human being has absolute freedom to make any choice within the boundaries of their circumstances, circumstances that are thrust upon them.  But with that freedom to choose comes the responsibility for the consequences and outcomes of one’s choices.  For Sartre, freedom to choose is the very core of what it means to be human.  We are free to decide how we will react to, and act upon, every situation we encounter.  And every choice we make changes us in such a way that influences and informs the next choice we make.  And the one after that.  And the one after that.  Rinse and repeat.  

For Sartre, to blame circumstances, or to blame others, for the choices we make is to fail to meet the demands of what it is to be human.  To shirk responsibility for ourselves and our actions is, as Sartre would say, a failure to live “authentically”.  Eventually, awareness of the weight of our freedom to choose – along with the burden of the outcomes of our choices – creates an anxiety that may spark a person to a self-awareness of how to be their authentic self by fully embracing this freedom and standing honestly in their choices and consequences. But if that anxiety doesn’t lead you to self-awareness and authenticity, it will just leave you freaking out and depressed.  (As an aside, the 19th century philosophy Søren Kierkegaard offered a third option to this anxiety: “take a leap of faith into the arms of God”.  In fact, it was Kierkegaard who coined the phrase “leap of faith”.). In the end, Sartre points out to us that having free will is difficult and demanding… and we have this difficult and demanding free will whether we like it or not.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.  It is up to you to give [life] meaning.”  — Jean-Paul Sartre

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Martin Heidegger was Husserl’s student, protégé, and presumed successor.  But Husserl and Heidegger had a personal and professional falling out which led to Heidegger going his own intellectual way.  Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy centered around modes of being, that is to say: what do all things have in common that make them something instead of nothing? Heady, deep (and brilliant) stuff.  One of the three “modes of being” Heidegger spends a lot of time discussing is dasein which translates literally from German as “existence” but for Heidegger meant specifically “human existence”.  Unlike, say, a tree or a hammer, people are aware that we exist and can therefore choose to examine our own existence.  Or choose to ignore it.  For Heidegger dasein refers to “the being for whom Being is a question”.  He saw this self-awareness that we exist not as a philosophy but as a precondition for even having any philosophy at all.  So while a glass of water does not spend any time pondering what it means to be a glass of water or how it can become a better, more fulfilled, more authentic glass of water, I as a human being can and do ask myself these questions about what it means to be human.  But sometimes we forget to ask these questions. We forget that we exist, we forget that that we are dasein.  We forget that all being is connected, connected by the simple fact that we exist simultaneously in the same place at the same time with other things that also exist.  

The routine of our lives, of our immediate circumstances, causes us to forget that we have the capability to ask these questions… so we forget to ask them.  We forget to be our free willed selves, which leads us to confuse the circumstances we are in with who we actually are.  For Heidegger this is almost like falling asleep, falling into an unawareness of our own consciousness.  But by remembering we are dasein we are able to reexamine these circumstances, remember that who we are is a separate something from our circumstances, then in that awareness rise above our circumstances to live as our free, authentic selves.  

Conversely, we could fall into a state Heidegger calls verfallen (“everydayness”) wherein we drift through our short lifetimes, surrendering to the insubstantial superficialities of career ambitions, social pressures, fashion trends, consumerism, gossip, and reality TV. To Heidegger it is human nature to retreat to verfallen when we are unable to cope with our existential anxiety.  He didn’t consider this good or bad, its just who we are.  But this state of everydayness is unsatisfying and empty; it is not our true selves, and it holds us back from reaching our potential.  We know it is unsatisfying and empty even as we live it.  We just sometimes forget this and need to be reminded to snap out of it.

“Asking the question of being is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the awakening of spirit[…] it is indispensable if the peril of world-darkening [Weltverdüsterung] is to be forestalled.”  — Martin Heidegger

How can this help us today?

For many months earlier this year I was waking up in the middle of the night thinking about work, unable to fall back asleep.   I’d pop awake around 3AM, my mind churning with work stuff: project timelines at risk, corporate strategy gaps, revenue shortfalls, leadership politics, people resigning, getting new hires up to speed.  All the things that happen in a company, some I could control and some I could not.  The continuous loop would just play over and over and over again until dawn.  I simply couldn’t figure out how to turn my brain off and fall back asleep.   

One day I was running on the treadmill in the basement, and my mind wandered to memories of long ago undergrad and philosophy studies.  This memory thread took me back to Husserl and Sartre and reminded me that consciousness must be conscious of something.  I remembered then that Sartre wrote I was “condemned to be free”, so… This sparked an idea.  For the next two weeks when I woke up in the wee hours, my mind gnawing away on the objects of my stress, I chose to change the mental topic.  I realized it was pointless to try to force myself back to sleep; that wasn’t going to happen.  But what I could do was chose to change the mental topic to something positive.  So I chose to lay awake and think of something else.  I mentally replayed favorite past vacations with my family.  I walked through in my head every little step it takes to smoke a perfect rack of ribs.  I thought about things and people and places that make me happy.  I was still awake, and still not getting enough sleep, but the energy was more positive.  I was making a free decision within the confines of unchosen circumstances.  And while I continued to wake up in the middle of the night stressed out, by changing the subject in my head I really was able to eventually able to start drifting back to sleep.  And then one day I wasn’t waking up in the wee hours at all.

I had reminded myself that – whether I like it or not, whether I want to or not – I have the freedom to choose every day.  Even in quarantine.  My world in these circumstances may be smaller, and nature of the choices are very different in scope than usual.  But the choices throughout the course of any given day – big and small – are mine to make. 

How can we best use our freedom to chose in these challenging times?  For me I am trying to take this as an opportunity to experience anew aspects of my life that are meaningful to me.   The opportunity is that life has slowed down with less “doing”: fewer social obligations, no dining out with friends, no staying late at an office I’m no longer going to nor the post-work activities that accompany work life, no fraternal activities or volunteer work or weekend errands to run.  It’s all slowed to a “little to none” kinda pace in quarantine, and my trips off of my property are currently infrequent and very utilitarian.  So less “doing” and more “being” has been the menu of the day, and quite honestly Husserl’s method of phenomenology has been a useful tool to help me take a look at things. 

Maybe our current quarantine circumstances are an invitation.  An invitation to reexamine and reconnect with what’s important, a reminder who we are is not the same thing as our circumstances.  This lockdown can be an opportunity to reexperience without preconception your marriage, your friendships, your career, your home, your family, your workspace, your pet, your hobbies and interests.  Yourself.  Have you created these in an intentional way that is healthy and meaningful to you?  If not, how would you change them – because you are free to change these things in any way you like.  Even in the confines of quarantine.  Indeed, there is no one except you who can make these choices.  You can chose to make them, or you can choose to wallow in the anxiety that not choosing causes.  That last thought may land harshly (in fact, I’ve typed it and deleted it three time now…), but it is truth.

Snap out of Heidegger’s “everydayness”.  Quarantine has shrunken the world for all of us.  We don’t get out as much as we would like.  Our favorite restaurants, bars, museums, music venues, coffee shops, parks, and churches are not available.   Clothes and cars and work promotions and celebrity gossip and are we going to the in-laws for dinner on Sunday and who’s sitting at the figurative “cool kids” table right now… it all feels less important.  For now.  As Heidegger would say: that’s not good or bad, its our nature.  We forget we are dasein and need to be reminded about it.  Speaking for myself, this Corona virus quarantine has been a wake up call, as it has for many people (even if their vocabulary for describing it is different from mine).  We don’t see our friends and extended families and coworkers much, and if we do it’s with social distancing and no physical contact allowed and other boundaries that feel awkward and artificial.  The comfortable and the familiar are temporarily unavailable to us, and this makes our personal worlds feel much smaller. But this is Being screaming an opportunity to “snap out of it” and re-embrace our dasein.  Make the most of it.  Choose.

Additional Reading

Mild

• Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others.  Other Press, 2017
• Sartre, Jean-Paul.  No Exit & Other Plays.  Vintage, 1989
• Watts, Michael.  Heidegger: An Essential Guide for Complete Beginners.  McGill-Queen’s University Press,  2011

Hot

• Sartre, Jean-Paul.  We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, edited by Adrian van den Hoven, Donald Aronson.  NYRB Classics, 2013
• Sartre, Jean-Paul.  Essays in Existentialism.  Citadel, 2000
• Smith, David. Husserl.  Routledge, 2013
• Wrathall, Michael.  How to Read Heidegger. Granta Books, 2014

Extra Spicy

• Heidegger, Martin.  Being and Time. Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint Edition, 2008
• Heidegger, Martin.  An Introduction to Metaphysics. Yale University Press; 2nd Edition, 2014
• Husserl, Edmund.  Logical Investigations.  Routledge, 2001
• Husserl, Edmund.  The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.  Northwestern University Press, 1970
• Sartre, Jean-Paul.  Being and Nothingness. Washington Square Press; Original ed. Edition, 1993