Self Encounter: A Study in Existentialism  

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Self Encounter: A Study in Existentialism (1962) is a television program by Hazel Barnes.

Mentioned

• Tragic Sense of Life (1912) by Miguel de Unamuno
• Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) by Eugene O'Neill
• Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) by Pirandello

Transcript

Existentialism is both a philosophy and a mood. As a mood i think we could say that it is the mood of the 20th century or at least of those people in the twentieth century who are discontent with things as they are. It expresses the feeling that somehow or other all of those systems whether they be social, psychological or scientific which have attempted to define and explain and determined man have somehow missed the living individual person. Existentialism feels that we must return to man. And in returning to the individual man and his experience we must also ask our question, "what is man?" For once again the definitions which had been provided and it seems as though in the twentieth century every one is giving definitions. Those definitions of man in terms of his physiology or psychology or the study of his social behavior, again, they're no more relation to the real individual than the printed description of the antics of a lover bares to ?inaudible? love. Existentialism is concerned especially with what the Spanish existentialist Uno Muno has called the tragic sense of life. The tragic sense of life is something which philosophers for the most part have neglected for they have been concerned above all else with providing some sort of rational explanation which would include a smoother way of everything but the existentialist feel that the old problem of evil has not been explained away but the fact that man dies has not been taken care of that the rational promises of immortality are not enough and that man suffering simply because he is man needs to be explored again. One of the best presentions of the existentialist mood, at least in my opinion, is found in the work of a non existentialist author namely Eugene O'Neill. In his play A Long Day's Journey Into Night the character Edmond speaks these words "it was a great mistake by being born a man I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish as I will always be a stranger who never feels at home who does not really want and is not really wanted and never belonged who must always be a little in love with death". But what O'Neill is expressing here is really the feeling that it is difficult to simply to be human, difficult because to be human means somehow or other to be separated, to be separated from one's environment, to have a little gap even between oneself and whatever one thinks one is. Consequently it is a little difficult to say just how one can be related to other people or to this alienated world,difficult not to feel that one is constantly overshadowed by the possibility, well, the certainty of a death which one can never quite comprehend. There are of course many facets to the existentialist mood and it would be more accurate to say that even in the philosophy there is not an existentialist philosophy but rather many existentialist philosophys. For within existentialism we have included widely different people. We might begin perhaps with the Dane ?inaudible? Kierkegaard, who lived over a hundred years ago but who wasn't really appreciated or very significant until our own day and we would have to include people like Gabriele Marcel who was a Catholic and Will Herberg who was a Jew and a controversial Paul Tillich. These are the religious side but they're the humanistic extensialists to those who deny that there's any god. The most well known of these probably is Pope John Paul's [son?] and his close associate Simone deBeauvoir is again a figure familiar to many people. I would include here Albert Camus for although Camus has said he is not an extensialist he works on the same premises as DeBeauoir and Sartre. He asks the same questions and frequently the answers that he gives are absolutely acceptable to deBeauvoir and Sartre. Sometimes I myself would say even better and entirely consistent with their premises. Perhaps the most fundamental view in existentialism whether religious or humanistic is what Sartre has declared to be the one unifying factor. The one unifying statement says Sartre which every existentialist would agree to is this, existence precedes essence. It will be very easy to shrug this off and say oh well it's an abstract [inaudible] of philosophical jargon what does it mean to me. What it means in non technical terms is this, that man is different from the rest of creation and that he is not born with an essence, that is there is no over all definition as to what man is or ought to be. For man, if he has an essence at all, has simply the essence of freedom and if his very essence is freedom this means that his being is to determine what he wants to make of himself. Therefore as Sartre puts it man exists first and as an individual strictly speaking there is no mankind except retrospectively but the individual man exists and by his life, by his actions, he determines not only his own essence but he helps to contribute to what will have been the essence of mankind. As William James would put it we will know what man was when the last man has had his last say. As early as 1921 we find at a play by the Italian Pirandello an investigation of this problem of what the reality of the human might be. I'm referring to the play called "Six Characters in Search of an Author, and the scene which concerns us we find that one of six characters has appeared to the director. He has insisted that their comedy, which is not yet been written, should be performed instead of the one which the director had in mind, and then the father raises very embarrassing questions as he talks to his director, questions which the director does not quite how to answer.[Director speaking]: I should like you who abandoned this game of art which you're accustomed to play here with your actors, to ask you again quite seriously who are you? [man speaking]: What if this fellow doen't have a nerve, a man comes here calls himself a character and asked me who I am. A character sir always ask him and who he is because a character has a real life of his own marked with special characteristics for this reason a character is always somebody but a man I'm not saying you now may very well be nobody [Director speaking]:yes but you're asking these questions of me, the director the boss, do you understand [man speaks[: but only to know of you as you really are now can see yourself as you once were with all the allusions that were yours then with all the things both inside of you and outside of you as they seem to you then. Well sir if you think of all those illusions which mean nothing to you now, of all those things which don't even seem to you to exist now whereas once they were for you. Don't you feel that the very earth under your feet is sinking away when you reflected in this same way, this you as it seems to you now, this present reality of yours is fated to save a mere allusion tomorrow [Director speaking]" well well and where does all this take us anyway? [Father]: Nowhere. It's only to show that if we characters have no reality beyond illusion then you too cannot count over much on your reality as it seems today since like that of yesterday it may prove a mere illusion tomorrow. [Director speaking]:Oh excellent next you'll be saying that you with this comedy of yours you have brought me here are more true and real than I. [man speaking]: but of course without a doubt. Oh really but I thought you understood that from the beginning more real than I.[Director speaking]" If your reality can change [Director Speaking]: but of course it can change the same as anyone else's [man speaking]" no sir not ours, look here our reality doesn't change it can't change, it can't be other than it is because it's already fixed forever. It's terrible, ours is an immutable reality that should make you shudder when you approach us if you are truly conscious of the fact that your reality is a transitory and fleeting illusion taking one form the today and another tomorrow, an illusion of reality in this factuous comedy of life which never ends nor can never end because if it were to end tomorrow why then all or would be nothing. [Director speaking]:Oh for gods sakes would you at least stop this philosophizing and let us try and shape this comedy which you yourself has brought us here. tou argue and philosophize a bit too much my dear sir [man speaking]: but believe me I feel what I think and I seem to be philosophizing only to those who cannot think what they feel because they blind themselves with self sentiment. I know that to many people such self blinding seems much more human but the contrary is really true for a man never reasons so much or becomes so introspective is what he suffers. It's when he suffers that he seeks to find the reasons for his suffering to find out whether it's just or unjust that he should have to suffer them, but on the other hand when a man is happy he takes his happiness as he comes and doesn't think about just as if happiness worries right. An animal suffers without reasoning about at its suffering. But take the case of a man who suffers and begins to reason about it and oh no it can't be allowed. Let him suffer as an animal suffers and then ah yes he's human. to hear your unforgettable lot of it worth and philosophizing i'm prying aloud the reason of my suffering [Woman speaking]: Pirandello seen as existentialist in two ways. In the first place Pirandello is saying that philosophy may indeed stem from the suffering of man because man finds that his very existence is somehow or other painful and this is what Uno Muno meant when he spoke of the tragic sense. And besides this Pirandello recognizes that man is not an entity or a thing not even really of being rather his becoming a constant changing a process and to be a process and to have this discrepancy at his heart means that man never quite knows who he is. Now Sartre has expressed this in far more technical term by his famous distinction of two kinds of being. All of reality he says may be divided up into being in itself and being for itself. Being in itself is the kind of being which the things have everything which is not conscious,the river, the mountain, a rock a tree or even a man created object. Such being involves no gap no separation. The acorn can't reflect upon itself and say I wonder if I want to be an acorn, I would have perhaps be more interesting to be an apple tree. In fact the acorn can't know what it is because it simply is, it can't reflect upon itself as Satre would say it's too full too dense, too much as he says just a plentitude or a mass of being. Now the other kind of being, being for itself, is the being of consciousness, the being of the human person. Sartre has startled the philosophical world in his definition of being for itself for he says that being for itself is distinguished from being in itself only by this one thing that consciousness or being for itself has the power of effecting a nothingness.This means that consciousness puts a kind of psychic distance between itself and its objects as a consciousness looks at a thing. It is a consciousness of the object as Satre says that consciousness is always consciousness of something. One cannot imagine a consciousness which would not be consciousness of something.This means that in one sense consciousness is open for my consciousness is what it's conscious of in the sense that it can't exist without things of which is conscious and yet as I am conscious of the object I'm also implicitly conscious that I am not the object and other words I have encased this object with the shell of nothingness which means that I am implicitly aware of my awareness and consequentlyI know the world I am aware of the world by knowing what I am not and by knowing that one object is not another object. On the other hand this means that consciousness has closed in on itself too. For if I am aware of not being the object then I can't escape for my own consciousness I can't get outside it. I can never know what the world would be like independently of my knowing it. This interplay of being in itself which is the being of something other than a consciousness and being for itself is very interestingly given us in a scene from deBeauvoir's novel called "She Came to Stay".

"Francois is sitting in front of one of the cafes of Paris and silently musing to herself and suddenly she remembers something from far back in her childhood and like Proust she sets out on the pursuit of time passed. She felt a sudden anguish. It was not a definite pain but she began to delve deep into the past to honor the similar pain. Then she remembered the house was empty. I was standing on the first floor a little girl holding my breath.It was funny to be there all alone.

It was funny and it was frightening. The furniture looked just as it always did but at the same time it was completely changed. It was thick and heavy and secret. My heart seemed to turn over. My old jacket was hanging over the back of a chair. It was very old and it looked very worn. It was old and worn but it could not complain and I Francois complained when I was hurt it could not say to itself I'm an old worn jacket. I tried to imagine what it might be like if I were unable to say I'm Francois. I'm six years old and I'm in grandma's house. Supposing I could say absolutely nothing. I closed my eyes and it was just as if I did not exist at all and yet other people would be coming here and they would see me and they would talk about me. I opened my eyes again. I could see now it existed yet it was not aware of itself . There was something disturbing a little frightening in all of this. What was the use of its existence it couldn't be aware of its existence. I thought it over perhaps there was a way. Since I can say I what would happen if I said it for the jacket. It was very disappointing . I could look at the jacket I could see absolutely nothing but the jacket and I could say very quickly I'm old and I'm worn but nothing happened. The jacket stayed there indifferent a complete stranger and I was still Francois and what if I became the jacket. Well then I Francois would never know it . Everything began spinning in my head and suddenly I ran downstairs and I went out into the garden. Francois emptied her coffee cup in one gulp and it was almost stone cold. She looked up at the clouded sky. She felt that the world around her was suddenly out of reach the people who were walking in the street were in insubstantial, they were shadows. The houses were nothing but painted backdrops with no debt and her friend Gilbert there was coming toward her now with a smile. He was nothing but a light and charming shadow. He could not help her recover her place in the world he would be just a pleasant companion in exile.

DeBeauvior's little girl was feeling what I suppose every one of us at some time or other has experienced and that is the frustration, the impossibility of really comprehending what the world would be like if we were not there. If we try to find out what it would be like even in our imagination if we unfamiliar scene should not have us in it or for example we had just died and people were discovering our death inevitably we find ourselves thinking of ourselves as being there and experiencing it. For we feel it's somehow or other we are positive factors and yet the whole point of the whole thing is that we are not there. All of this of course involves Satre's idea that as a force itself man has within him this power of effecting a nothingness. He introduces the image by one which is quite in keeping with a tradition of western philosophy Have you ever to think what a very important part the apple has played in human history. The first apple is of course the one that temped Adam and Eve in the garden and certainly this apple must have been a very succulent desirable kind of apple. And then there was the apple the sent the Greeks off toTroy and this one we are told was an apple made of pure gold. Sartre's image of nothingness also implies an apple. Nothingness he says lies coiled at the heart of being like a worm. I don't think it's an accident that there is a suspicion of rottenness and wormyness at the heart of being. For man according to Sartre discovers there's nothing within himself in anguish and in despair.There's another image where Sartre I think makes it a little easier to understand this difficult concept of how nothingness can somehow be real. Let us imagine, he says, that in the universe, one day, and Adam is annihilated not simply split, not transformed into some other species of energy but just absolutely annihilated. Now if such a thing could happen we can believe readily enough that the universe would never be the same again. There would be an absolute change in everything.Now in the same way being, a being in itself, without any consciousness to look at it and pronounce judgment on it is just an undifferentiated mass. It has no significance it is simply a fullness and that's why Satre can say that all we can really say about it is that in its brute reality it is there or all eternity but the moment of consciousness comes in then there can be significance and differentiation for a consciousness can balance one part against another by putting a distance between them can say this object is not that object and can also stand aloof from the world and bring it there before itself for judgment.

Sartre has given several definitions of man, one of them is this: man is the being who is what he is not and who is not what he is. I think some people have felt that really reading this sentence was sufficient cause for despair and yet it isn't hard to understand. By saying that man is the being who is what he is not and is not what he is. Sartre merely means that man has no fixed reality that he is constantly in the process of making himself something but then he never is quite the same as his particular acts.

Sartre has also said that man never is. He is always about to be and here we see the same view expressed with regard to the future for at any given moment man is living in terms of a projection of himself into the future, what Sartre calls the project. It is just as though each person carried around with himself a little shell of emptiness and of which he projected what he was about to become. Suppose we think of it this way, I make a rendezvous with myself down there in the future but who will show up at the rendezvous?

Will it be the I who made the appointment or will it be some new I which this consciousness has created out of the nothingness which it brings into the world. Another definition of Satre's is that man is the being through whom nothingness comes into the world. This like the other definitions sounds at first like something so totally abstract that it seems not to have anything to do with us as living individuals. But let's think of it as if we were trying to draw a picture of it. If one were to attempt a concrete picture of man as the existentialist and other of our contemporaries see him, I think the result would be reminiscent of one of the forms of Archipenko, a strange figure partly organic partly mechanized with a hole in the middle with bony ?expresses? jutting out into the distance. All of this set in a background of melting or disintegrating time.

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Use of the scene from "Six Characters Use of the scene from "Six Characters in Search of an Author" by Luigi Pirandello was made possible through cooperation of the Mondadori Publishing Company and the Pirandello estate. The scene from "She Came to Stay" by Simone de Beauvoir was translated by Yvonne ?Moise? and Roger ?Sendhaus? and published by the World Publishing Company. The sculpture,"Walking Woman," by Archipenko and