about "The Plague" by Albert Camus

Rats wobble out into daylight and begin dying in ones and twos. Then by the dozens. Then by the thousands. This is how The Plague begins.

 

The authorities are slow to accept the looming tragedy in 1940s Oran, a port city in French Algeria. But Dr. Bernard Rieux, with a growing sense of urgency, finally goads the medical community into action. Rieux is the main character, and most of the novel's action unfolds in the hearts of the men in Rieux's orbit. They experience fear, defiance, isolation, desperation, and resignation. And in their trials they achieve moments of shame, faith, solidarity, courage, and compassion.

Philosophy—existentialism, of course, by Albert Camus—seeps through the pages. The human condition? Weakness and suffering and the exercise of moral freedom and responsibility in the face of an absurd and indifferent universe. Camus writes a dark story in which redeeming human moments sometimes catch the light.

The Stranger is probably my all-time favorite book, but no other Camus book, including this one, has connected with me the same way. The prose here is lovely, but the characters remain distant, and I never invested in them.

 

It could be my timing: when I read it, I had just spent weeks soaking in the raw inner lives of Richard Yates's characters; Camus's men seem aloof by comparison.

Note: The Plague was published in 1947.

 

about "The Concept of Anxiety" and "The Sickness Unto Death" by Søren Kierkegaard

 
Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death were published in the 1840s. The discussion of freedom and anxiety in these works laid the foundation for existentialism. Kierkegaard was the first modern philosopher and the first person to find himself in a modern age. However, his faith and spirituality make him timeless.

Philosophy departments consider The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death to be a pair.

The Concept of Anxiety explores sin, guilt, and anxiety, which is undirected fear, a general sense of dread. Kierkegaard rebuffs the idea that anxiety is caused by original sin. Rather, innocence generates the conditions for anxiety. Consider Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; recall that God forbade Adam from eating from the tree of knowledge. God's directive makes Adam aware that he has a choice. This freedom to choose causes anxiety. Furthermore, Adam could not have known he was sinning because, being the first to sin, how would he know what sin was? Sin was real only after Adam ate from the tree of knowledge. Rejoice in your freedom.

The Sickness Unto Death explores spiritual death, which is despair. Here, Kierkegaard deals with self, or the self-concept of selfhood: the "relation's relating itself to itself in the relation." In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard delves into the binary concepts of the finite and the infinite and the possible and the necessary. Tension between these polarities results from not being right with God. And, thus, despair. Kierkegaard elaborates further that there are three kinds of despair. All this is not as interesting as The Concept of Anxiety, so I will not elaborate. However, my favorite passage in The Sickness Unto Death comes when Kierkegaard is describing the person who lives life in a religious mode, but who, in the process of becoming spiritual, has lost his self:

Such things do not create much of a stir in the world, for a self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss--an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.--is sure to be noticed.

about Heidegger's "Being and Time"

Martin Heidegger is known for his published work in existential, ontological, and phenomenological philosophy.  He consistently argued that Western philosophy had gone astray since the Greeks' initial exploration of the nature of being. Heidegger sought to return us to everyday being, re-examining it to rediscover it.

His best-known book, Being and Time, is considered one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. To learn more about Heidegger, I read the following:

• Heidegger: An Introduction by Richard Polt
• A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time" by Michael Gelven
• Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

Being and Time is reputedly difficult to read and understand because of the subject matter and because Heidegger's writing style, terminology, vocabulary, and personal creativity are so unconventional. Because Heidegger has such a reputation, I sought guidance from Richard Polt's introduction and Michael Gelven's commentary. First I read Polt, then Gelven and Heidegger's Being and Time at the same time.

Heidegger: An Introduction by Richard Polt

Richard Polt's introduction is a very high-level glance at Heidegger's philosophy. Polt begins by paraphrasing some of the German philosopher's big questions: What is being? What is the meaning of being? What is the being of abstract things, and how is abstract being different from ours? Don't expect big answers from Polt.

Polt recounts Heidegger's view that we are profoundly historical, so we're in a different philosophical time from the Greeks, which means we have different understandings and ways of conceiving. Heidegger rejects any claim that being is projected or constructed. Being is a complicated phenomenon we actually live, and we live different modes of being at various times. The modes Heidegger looks for are not perceived through the senses. No, they are intuited. For example, imagine a green apple. The question of being does not concern the color itself, but the mode of existence in which a thing is being colored. Polt moves around Heidegger's concept of being without going into any depth.

In Being and Time, Polt says, Heidegger is at least partially attempting to understand how theoretical truth is rooted in our lived existence; Heidegger is rooting an ontological theory of being out of a phenomenological examination of living. Polt offers quick takes of Being and Time but his summaries, brief and easily read though they are, offer very little of the substance of the book.

Michael Gelven's commentary and Heidegger's Being and Time

Gelven opens his commentary with a philosophical point of reference for the reader: Heidegger, Gelven explains, worked contrary to neo-Kantians (however, he was in the Kantian tradition). This is important in that neo-Kantians practiced a science-centered philosophy whereas Heidegger is using a phenomenological examination of real life for ontological ends. Now, Being and Time.

Whether or not we exist is not a question for Heidegger. At least, not in Being and Time. We know we exist. But what does it mean to be? We sense our own being. Perhaps we know of it implicitly, but seem unable to articulate what we mean when we say, I exist. Heidegger wants to make explicit that vague sense we have of being, and perhaps answer some unasked questions in the process (Is the world a reality that we're just a part of? Or are we central to our own story?). The fact of Being and the meaning of Being are the same thing.

Heidegger disagrees with modern philosophical traditions that hold being as essentially a meaningless term, so broad as to encompass everything and so nothing. There is more to be said of being than that it is merely self-evident. But this inquiry is not merely a task for Science because ontology is even more fundamental than anything within Science's purview. Being scientific is merely a mode of being (in which you, for example, study things that can be verified). Science presupposes Being. So, this is a task for philosophy. And, more specifically, it is a task for ontology. This is important: ontology comes before metaphysics, which investigates reality and asks what is. Ontology is asking what is is.

Quickly, Heidegger singles out our Being, human Being, as unique because our Being is the being which can consider and look after its own being. And he calls our Being Dasein. Only Dasein can do this. We can also consider other selves, and have a sense of the presence of other selves; to this end, we are not completely separate from others.

Heidegger breaks human Being down into its most basic parts, which he calls existentials. These parts are a priori--they are always there no matter what experience you have. Being in the world is probably about as basic as it gets. It is the first and most general awareness we have. We are always more or less aware of being in a world and relating to our surroundings; when we conceive of ourselves, we do so with some reference to time and space. And this worldly reference precedes all knowledge, for there must be a world in which objects of knowledge can occur and be encountered, and in which cause and effect can occur. The world is already there when we start down the path of metaphysics.

Our most basic relationship with this world is that we use it. We relate to the world almost always with ends in mind. The possible ends, our possibilities, precede any actuality (possibility precedes actuality). This using-the-world is what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand, and it is another crucial existential. Consider: We use the doorknob to open the door (so that we may pass through (and go get in the car (and drive to the store (to buy groceries for dinner))); we do not encounter the doorknob as an entity with its own thing-hood unless we are purposefully deliberating and complicating our world, imposing data on it. And even doing nothing is a way of relating to the world.

If you're bored out of your mind and just lie in bed, you're doing something because you have to be doing something; you are constantly making the present. Our lived existence is the possibilities before us, the next present (or the hoped-for present, two days from now); what you're doing now is for what you will have done, will own or part with, or will be doing in the future. The world is a future world for us. Our understanding allows us to (implicitly) understand that we have possibilities and act on those possibilities. So possibilities--the various ways in which we can exist--allow us all our thinkings and doings. What already is the case does not hold us back. (But we can create rules or templates of thinking that in turn limit us; for example, the rules of reasoning comes afterwards, and those rules prevent us from being able to imagine a circular triangle. Our cognitive power precedes reason, so reason is not a priori.) Being-able-to-be is part of the structure of our being.

This part is key: The experience we have being in the world, considering and working through possibilities is the stuff of being human. So Dasein--our Being--is living and thinking possibilities that are ways of relating to the world in which we have been thrown and about which we have a disposition toward. This inevitable and unavoidable disposition we have toward the world (of possibles) manifests in us what Heidegger calls Care. Care, in Heidegger's philosophy, unifies all the existentials. Care is the Being of Dasein. To care is to be ahead of yourself already involved with the world.

So all the above refers to ways of Being, but not to the meaning of Being. The meaning becomes clearer when we consider death.

Death shows us that not-being is possible. Furthermore, only the possibility of death has meaning; the actuality of death does not. The possibility of not-being--which is more philosophically important than the eventually of our not-being--reveals our temporality, which triggers an awareness of time.

So, Dasein's Being is Care; and the meaning of Care is temporality, or time. Heidegger is not asking, What is time? because that is a metaphysical question; instead, he is asking, What does it mean to be in time? Time springs from our temporality. We can only care because there is a future. And the future is not something arrived at; it is always future. Same goes for the past. The past is always past. To put it in grammatical form, you did not drive to work this morning; you are having-been-driving-to-work this morning, and therein is the meaning of the past. And the future is always the possibilities you are always toward. I am as coming toward. The present is making present, it is what you are doing. Time is not a series of nows; it all happens now. The past is meaningful because it exists. Had it passed us somehow, it would not exist, and would be meaningless. Same for the future. The meaning of the past (or any time) is not in the memory; it comes from the very conception we have of time. All this means that the content of being is mostly in the future, not in the present.

Heidegger goes to lengths to tie time back to all the existentials (and for this reason, his philosophy in "Being and Time" is sort of circular, which is by design. Our vague intuitions about Being make more sense the more you circle back and go through it all again.) But Being and Time was never really finished. So this is where we end.


Summary

Heidegger says sometime after the Greeks, the enterprise of philosophy veered off the path. All the work on metaphysics--the mind/body problem, perception and reality and what is really here--was sort of in vain. The problem is that no one ever figured out what is is. When you ask, What is?, you don't really know what is means. What does it mean to be?

Heidegger tries to tackle this question in Being and Time.

Because we probably can't get at what the being of a tree is, or what the being of a hammer is, or the being or anything besides ourselves, Heidegger focuses his inquiry on our Being, something he calls Dasein.

Now, because we do veer philosophically towards metaphysics--asking, What is?--we must have at least an intuitive understanding of being, of what is is. But before Heidegger gets at what it means to be, he accounts for all the ways we have of Being. To root out what is essential, Heidegger isolates the ways of Being that are the most basic. There are many basic ways of Being that each have their own significance. To criminally oversimply, our most basic ways of Being are being-in-the-world and ready-at-hand.

Our being-in-the-world is just our here-ness amid all this context. Our most basic way of relating to the world is to use it. What we use, we use before we posit and speculate on their thingness. And what we do stems from the fact that we have possibilities in which having already done things is possible. We have a disposition toward our surroundings and life and future. Essentially, we care. So, Being is Care. And the meaning of Care is Time, or temporality. The possibility of our own deaths shows us the way to this meaning.

This isn't revelatory, and having understood Being and Time (if that is fully possible) won't bring you enlightenment. Probably the wonder of the book is how Heidegger conceives the structure of Being and time as we live them, and how he dives beneath all the philosophy that had been done before him.

Notes

• Like Kant, Heidegger believed our way of questioning defines our understanding.

• And, interestingly, Heidegger says that reality is based on Care; reality is a mode of caring, a way of relating to the world. This means that reality is not the same thing as real things. Furthermore, truth is dependent upon our Being (Dasein); truth is not the correspondence of a proposition with reality, because those come after Being. For Heidegger, truth is when something shows itself to Dasein; truth refers to Dasein, not to things and propositions. (Heidegger's concept of truth is very Greek. His affinity for the ancient Greek philosophy is part of what makes him so difficult to read; he uses Greek words, investigates their possible meanings, and does some free-associating with the language. His affinity for the Greeks is also key to his association with the Nazis. Heidegger was a hardcore nationalist, and believed the Germans were the inheritors of Greek greatness, to put it one way.)

• Heidegger's privileging of possibilities over actualities seems to be the key to the brand of Existentialist philosophy that grew after Heidegger through Camus and Sartre, among others. For Heidegger and his successors, authenticity relates to Freedom, and Freedom to possibility. We almost naturally try to limit our choices because Freedom feels like a burden. Embracing Freedom and all the responsibility and unknowns that come with is to live authentically. To this end, feeling guilt is authentic. When we focus on actualities and facts and engage in small talk or pursue idle curiosity, we are being inauthentic. When we consider the possibilities of your lives and of not-being, we are authentic. So, if you always do what you are told and only care about what you already have, you would be inauthentic; you are more fully engaged with Being if you can consider possibilities. (Heidegger seems to bundle some value judgements in his use of authenticity, but these are not huge moral condemnations, I gather.)  Differentiating between authentic and inauthentic Being is a big part of Being and Time. I don't find it very attractive or even helpful to investigating Being, so I shortchange it here even more than I do the rest of Being and Time.

• Care is associated with another important existential called state of mind. Facts and reality influence one's state of mind. Although state of mind is tied to the actual, it is a part of both authentic and inauthentic existence because understanding the actual allows us to consider possibilities. State of mind is how and why the world matters to Dasein, it's why we care.

• History is about Dasein's worlds. Not the fact-hood of past events and people.

about "An Introduction to Metaphysics" by Martin Heidegger

Why is there something rather than nothing? So begins this intro class by Heidegger. But the real question concerning our professor isn't Why?, but What? What is "being"? Not just the physical being we try to account for through our senses, but the being that underscores everything; not, for example, the red apple, but an apple's being colored.

The thought of philosophically problematizing being might sound hackneyed. Heidegger knows this. Over time, he says we've grown alienated from this most basic of philosophical problems, and here he endeavors to reintroduce the matter seriously. His primary method for doing so is to reanimate the concepts and thoughts of the ancient Greeks; these are concepts that much influenced his own work.

Heidegger is notoriously difficult to study. This introductory lecture is no exception. Being appears vaporous and is indefinite in meaning, he admits, but, nevertheless, we know being is distinct from non-being, and so can conclude that we do intuit being in some sense everyday. Heidegger spent a considerable chunk of time and professional energy trying to catch that intuition.

More Heidegger readings to come.

another word about "Fear and Tembling" by Søren Kierkegaard

Abraham's trek to the lonely height of Mount Moriah took three days; for three days an ass jostled there, carrying Abraham and his long-wished for, unconditionally loved son. The journey would end in the father's sacrificing Isaac. What if Abraham had resigned himself to the loss, to living the rest of his life having used his own hands to saw through Isaac's throat? And, worse still, what if, having accepted and prepared himself to perform that horrific act, what if God called it off, and let Abraham keep Isaac?

Abraham would be forced to live with the child he had already sought to kill.

The amazing thing--where faith is found--is not in the fact that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son; no, it was Abraham's knowing that he would not lose Isaac, no matter what happened on Moriah.

Through faith I don't renounce anything, on the contrary in faith I receive everything ... It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole of temporality in order to win eternity ... Through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac, through his faith he received Isaac.

About "A Very Easy Death" by Simone De Beauvoir

In A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir chronicles her dying, bedridden mother's last few weeks, and through writing reconciles the difficulties of the relationship they shared. This doesn't feel quite like grieving; it's more like making sense of something elusive and mysterious, sketching the likeness of a stranger who passes in the dark. Sadness is a gentle undercurrent, never threatening to pull us under. Likewise, de Beauvoir's distaste for the medicalized experience of death is rather clear, but this is no polemic.

For an intellectual known more for her political and philosophical works--topics given to lofty abstraction--I was interested to read this very human and immediate, emotional work.

Note:

• In her telling, de Beauvoir's mother was dying, suffering death, for weeks. At the moment of passing, there was a brief, choked struggle by the patient. After the official pronouncement of death, the nurse called it an easy death, wanting de Beauvoir to take comfort in its brevity.
  
  
  
  

Something about "Whatever" by Michel Houellebecq

This novella begs comparison to Camus' The Stranger. But the 21st century is a subject in Whatever. Contrary to reviewer consensus, I imagine the story making a temporal statement more so than a generational one. In this reading, the hypothesis that unfolds is that Camus' mid-20th century model French Existentialist would today be a Nihilist, his banner of authenticity battered, beaten to shreds by the perceived ceaseless normalization of personalities and scripting of roles, the sweeping away of the work-life balance, the abandonment of intellectuality in favor of "being informed," and the overall digitizing of experience and of perspective.*

Whereas Camus' man suffered the conditions of Absurdity and Freedom and the indifference of the Universe, Houellebecq's suffers needlessness, minor inconvenience, and isolation (that is self-imposed to a degree). Here, the main character, almost subconsciously, and unconsciously, articulates in writing the need for human connection:

Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living by themselves; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance...It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, provided he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolute inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.

Camus' The Stranger is, to my mind, a work of literature, then a work of philosophy. Houellebecq's Whatever is literature, and secondly a work of social or cultural commentary. This was thoroughly enjoyable.

Notes:

• * My describing those trends doesn't quite capture the totality (or maybe lack of totality) of the Modern that Houellebecq cynically evokes.

• I felt considerable empathy reading this book.

• The prose isn't elegant—not in the traditional sense, anyway, but this is nice:

  Doubtless I have some vague existence today in a doctoral dissertation, alongside other real-life cases. The thought of having become an item in a file calms me. I imagine the volume, its cloth binding, its slightly sad cover; I gently flatten myself between the pages; I am squashed.