An Existential Inquiry: Kierkegaard’s Quest for Meaning

by John Hansen *

Søren Kierkegaard is often thought of as the originator of existentialism – which is the notion that individuals can shape their own significance, objectives, and aspirations by using their freedom. We here explore, through Kierkegaard’s thought, existentialism’s unique way of creating meaning. 

Existentialism is distinguished from other systems of thought in various ways.

• While philosophies championing freedom, such as political liberalism, individual autonomy, and rejection of determinism share many similarities with existentialist thinking, existentialist philosophy commonly explores themes of attendant anguish, apprehension, or disquiet. In its emphasis on total freedom, existentialism differs from philosophies that promote freedom yet fail to examine its existential implications fully.

• While existentialism often speaks of an absurd or chaotic world, it tends to resist nihilism and despair. Rather, it highlights the significance of persevering and taking accountability to transcend the lack of meaning in existence without falling into hopelessness. It centres on the belief that there is always purpose in life, and seeks freedom from life’s absurdities when it meets meaninglessness.

• While existentialists accept that freedom of choice is associated with anxiety and ambiguity – existential anguish often being accentuated as an integral part of human life – they acknowledge that it also allows people to choose their own values and goals. In the view of existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, all individuals are ultimately responsible for their actions and decisions.

• While existentialist philosophy often portrays the world as uncaring or lacking any predestined intention, those who choose to view their lives as purposeful may question their decisions and goals. In a process of internal reflection, they face their realities and find transcendent wisdom beyond the confines of the finite universe, even though it is often fraught with conflicting forces.

All of these characteristics contribute to a tension, or duality in existentialism – and, as a result, the existentialist must continually strive to reconcile their contradictory existence. On Kierkegaard’s theory, we are constantly in conflict with ourselves and with our societies. Adversity and paradox are inherent to the human condition.

At the same time, opposing aspects of human nature must be reconciled. A major dichotomy which Kierkegaard emphasised was that between the finite and infinite, the transient and the eternal. Based on Kierkegaard's philosophy, disparate forces engage in dialectical interactions. To uncover truth, one must actively grapple with the uncertainties of one’s being.

As a major example, in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard depicts Abraham’s unwavering determination to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, as a symbol of the struggle between faith and ethics. Abraham represents both being a father and having unwavering faith in a higher, divine authority at the same time.

As one finds in this pivotal story, Kierkegaard notes that humans try to grasp their existence and find meaning in their lives from their subjective viewpoints – through the exploration of first-person perspectives – among them ethics, principles, and liberties. A key feature of his writing is the importance which he places on the individual’s experience, authenticity, and engagement with existential issues.

The attention Kierkegaard places on the inner life of the individual contrasts with the widespread sentiments of hollowness and anguish in society today. Thus, Kierkegaard’s ideas still matter today – as is witnessed, for example, by a series of articles published in The Guardian in 2010, by Clare Carlisle – one such being titled, “Kierkegaard and the Pursuit of Meaning.” Duality entails an existential conflict that must be accepted for one to discover oneself.

Kierkegaard's systematic questions enable us to discover conflicting forces and go beyond the finite world in a way that cannot be achieved otherwise. His discussion of duality illuminates the fundamental inconsistencies of human nature. The process of existential inquiry evolves from being a purely philosophical journey to being one of faith and uncertainty as a result of introspection.

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* John Hansen received a BA in English from the University of Iowa and an MA in English literature from Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared in Philosophical Investigations, Philological Review, The Summerset Review, One Sentence Poems, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Litro Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, The Banyan Review, Drunk Monkeys, Midway Journal, and elsewhere. He has presented on a variety of topics at The National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC—Regional), The American Comparative Literature Association, The Midwest Conference on British Studies, and others. He is an English Department faculty member at Mohave Community College in Arizona. Read more at johnphansen.com.

Picture Post #73 The Children's Hospital in Ukraine

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Martin Cohen

This is actually a still from a video, which is partly a matter of practicality – I was looking for a particular image to sum up the futility and horror of the Russian ‘Special Operation’ in Ukraine – but also a small aesthetic statement too. For today war-reporting, and news is seen more through moving images than still ones.

The trouble with that is that our attention is constantly distracted. We see terrible scenes but barely absorb them before (perhaps mercifully) the camera has moved on.

Anyway, this scene that creates this still image, is rather hidden in the video, which generally pans around the courtyard of the Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. Indeed, most of the photographer’s attention is on several burning wrecks of cars and this sad figure just appears to the side, walking slowly with a body in wheelbarrow. I don’t know if the body is alive or dead – I assume the former from the care being taken with the sheets, but within such a tragic scene it hardly seems to matter.

Picture Post #70: Civilisation!

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Rooftop Madrid. 2021. 

The last two picture posts did regard a certain idea of decay, and as a threesome, this picture might enhance that subtle fascination that surrounds those layered surfaces.

The abstract has often been criticized as either easy art or difficult thinking. Even when we became used to abstract ideas and turned them into what is called: rational thinking. Do we not mostly accept what is convenient in some way or other, no matter how illusory things are, and all the rest we prefer to discard? 

We overlap thoughts with actions and emotions; overlapping is our strength and our misery. Continuous overlapping sketches the picture we live in, and so, rather unawares, we shake a cocktail that we define as ‘our life’. 

What we can apprehend simply by viewing even trash, so complicated by its nature for refuse(d), and often wished unseen, is that everything traces into something else, and transforms. 

Symbolically, when we look at ourselves, we might find a trashy landscape far worse than this rooftop. Although the terror of seeing the veritable junkyard from within also shows the many forgotten things that we touched and related to during our life. And we’re all that, not just a part. 

The picture we prefer to see cannot match the reality we imagine. How real can we truly be?

Picture Post #61: Outside the Image

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Picture credit: Robert Saltzman ‘La Fe’, 2017.

It might take a while to see that the creative feeling in this picture moves beyond the representation of a worshiper who touches the depiction of a Maria. The movement within the sobriety of this picture is of such subtlety that it exposes itself as a feeling rather than a seeing.

The eye immediately selects the strong vertical upward movement of the man with his arm against the painting, accentuated by the stick that the worshiper keeps in his right hand. Instead, the upper left of the frame of the painting, to the lowest forms one diagonal. Repetitive diagonals in opposed direction are drawn by the lower point of the angles of the pews' end-panels to the highest, with the upper right angle of the painting in its midst. In the picture, the vanishing point is to the left (imagine the benches as the floor), which brings us outside of the picture.

Within this classical framework of more- and less-visible lines, exalts the shadow of the man that is cast directly below the Maria. It is this shadow which accentuates the ascendance of the depicted Maria, visually and symbolically.

When one imagines this picture just with the man and the painting, without the shadow, and not in this room, the ‘inexplicable’, the ‘something more’ to life does not show. The eye focuses on a specific form, which the mind elaborates, and hands existence to the selected subject. Though it is not in the main subject but in the space, through the tension and the affinities between things of the surroundings, a subject receives empathy.

The unnoticed is deeply rooted in human being. The synthesis of every creative process is to verify this transpersonal union with the personal, within the contingent, transitory reality in which everything would become insignificant, remaining only personal or only eternal.

If in this picture we would see solely a religious man in a church, we would harm ourselves. Being moved is through the transformation of what we see and feel, and depends on an intrinsic secret of invisible images.

Is Technology ‘What Makes us Human’?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Technology and human behaviour have historically always been intertwined, defining us as the species we are. Today, technology’s ubiquity means that our lives’ ever-faster turn toward it and its multiplicity of forms have given it stealth-like properties. Increasingly, for many people, technology seems just to happen, and the human agency behind it appears veiled. Yet at the same time, perhaps counterintuitively, what appears to us to happen ‘behind the curtain’ hints that technology is fundamentally rooted in human nature. 

Certainly, there is a delicate affinity between science and technology: the former uncovers how the world happens to be, while the latter helps science to convert those realities into artefacts. As science changes, technologists see opportunities: through invention, design, engineering, and application. This restlessly visionary process is not just incidental, I suggest, but rather is intrinsic to us.

 

Our species comprises enthusiastic toolmakers. The coupling of science and technology has led to humanity’s rich array of transformative products, from particle accelerators to world-spanning aircraft, to magnetic-resonance imaging devices, to the space-station laboratory and universe-imaging space telescopes. The alliance has brought us gene-editing technologies and bioengineering, robotics driven by artificial intelligence, energy-generating solar panels, and multifunctional ‘smart phones’.

 

There’s an ‘everywhereness’ of many such devices in the world, reaching into our lives, increasingly creating a one-world community linked by mutual interdependence on many fronts. The role of toolmaker-cum-technologist has become integrated, metaphorically speaking, into our species’ biological motherboard. In this way, technology has becomes the tipping point of globalisation’s irrepressibility.

 

René Descartes went so far as to profess that science would enable humankind to ‘become the masters and possessors of nature’. An overreach, perhaps — the despoiling of aspects of nature, such as the air, land, and ecosystems at our over-eager hands convinces us of that — but the trend line today points in the direction Descartes declared, just as electric light frees swaths of the world’s population from dependence on daylight.

 

Technology was supercharged by the science of the Newtonian world, which saw the universe as a machine, and its subsequent vaulting to the world of digits has had obvious magnifying effects. These will next become amplified as the world of machine learning takes center stage. Yet human imagination and creativity have had a powerfully galvanizing influence over the transformation. 

 

Technology itself is morally impartial, and as such neither blameworthy nor praiseworthy. Despite how ‘clever’ it becomes, for the foreseeable future technology does not yet have agency — or preference of any kind. However, on the horizon, much cleverer, even self-optimising technology might start to exhibit moral partiality. But as to the point about responsibility and accountability, it is how technology is employed, through users, which gives rise to considerations of morality.

 

A car, for example, is a morally impartial technology. No nefarious intent can be fairly ascribed to either inventor or owner. However, as soon as someone chooses to exercise his agency and drive the car into a crowd with the intent to hurt, he turns the vehicle from its original purpose as an empowering tool for transportation into an empowering weapon of sorts. But no one wags their finger remonstratively at the car.

 

Technology influences our values and norms, prompting culture to morph — sometimes gradually, other times hurriedly. It’s what defines us, at least in large part, as human beings. At the same time, the incorporation and acceptance of technology is decidedly seductive. Witness the new Digital Revolution. Technology’s sway is hard to discount, and even harder to rebuff, especially once it has established roots deep into culture’s rich subsurface soil. But this sway can also be overstated.

 

To that last point, despite technology’s ubiquity, it has not entirely pulled the rug from under other values, like those around community, spirituality, integrity, loyalty, respect, leadership, generosity, and accountability, among others. Indeed, technology might be construed as serving as a multiplier of opportunities for development and improvement, empowering individuals, communities, and institutions alike. How the fifteenth-century printing press democratised access to knowledge, became a tool that spurred revolutions, and helped spark the Enlightenment was one instance of this influential effect.

Today, rockets satisfy our impulse to explore space; the anticipated advent of quantum computers promises dramatic advances in machine learning as well as the modeling of natural events and behaviours, unbreakable encryption, and the development of drugs; nanotechnology leads to the creation of revolutionary materials — and all the time the Internet increasingly connects the world in ways once beyond the imagination.

 

In this manner, there are cascading events that work both ways: human needs and wants drive technology; and technology drives human needs and wants. Technological change thus is a Janus figure with two faces: one looking toward the past, as we figure out what is important and which lessons to apply; and the other looking toward the future, as we innovate. Accordingly, both traditional and new values become expressed, more than just obliquely, by the technology we invent, in a cycle of generation and regeneration.

 

Despite technology’s occasional fails, few people are really prepared to live unconditionally with nature, strictly on nature’s terms. To do so remains a romanticised vision, worthy of the likes of American idealist Henry David Thoreau. Rather, whether rightly or wrongly, more often we have seen our higher interests to make life yet a bit easier, a bit more palatable. 

 

Philosopher Martin Heidegger declared, rather dismally, that we are relegated to ‘remain unfree and chained to technology’. But I think his view is an unappreciative, undeservedly dismissive view of technology’s advantages, across domains: agriculture, education, industry, medicine, business, sanitation, transportation, building, entertainment, materials, information, and communication, among others. Domains where considerations like resource sustainability, ethics, and social justice have been key.

 

For me, in its reach, technology’s pulse has a sociocultural aspect, both shaping and drawing upon social, political, and cultural values. And to get the right balance among those values is a moral, not just a pragmatic, responsibility — one that requires being vigilant in making choices from among alternative priorities and goals. 

 

In innumerable ways, it is through technology, incubated in science, that civilisation has pushed back against the Hobbesian ‘nastiness and brutishness’ of human existence. That’s the record of history. In meantime, we concede the paradox of complex technology championing a simplified, pleasanter life. And as such, our tool-making impulse toward technological solutions, despite occasional fails, will continue to animate what makes us deeply human.

 

Picture Post #53 The Courage to Stand Alone

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Tessa den Uyl

Florence Airport, January 2020

How we perceive images depends on how much we ‘cut out’ of them, or ‘cut in’ to them. When things get isolated in an image, the reading we attribute to it, changes. Still, we may want to make a distinction between an image that has a so-called ‘life of its own’ and images that purely illustrate. What is the difference?

In these current weeks, in regard to the quarantine of the COVID-19 virus, we can clearly see that the interpretation of images depends on what our mind perpetuates. We read images in regard to a situation and laugh, cry, or skip intrepidly to the next one. They serve as a momentum to a specific state of mind.

The above image of the lonely girl with a suitcase at a big airport might illustrate many situations. If we would write COVID-19 below the photo, we would grasp it. Alike the slogan: stop child-abuse, or ‘we do not leave anyone behind’, serving as a slogan for an air company. The picture of the little girl is therefore adapting to our purposes.

If we see and understand solely what we want to see, do we mostly fail to see, or understand? Maybe, for pictures and videos whose purposes cannot be exchanged, are rare. With a vast cybernetic landscape to attain to, how come the illustrative production is so high, while images that take a life of their own seem to lack?

Then are we ourselves merely illustrative, rather than unique to situations?

What Is It to Be Human?

Hello, world!

Posted by Keith Tidman

Consciousness is the mental anchor to which we attach our larger sense of reality.

We are conscious of ourselves — our minds pondering themselves in a curiously human manner — as well as being intimately conscious of other people, other species, and everything around us, near and remote.

We’re also aware that in reflecting upon ourselves and upon our surroundings, we process experiences absorbed through our senses — even if filtered and imagined imperfectly. This intrinsically empirical nature of our being is core, nourishing our experience of being human. It is our cue: to think about thinking. To ponder the past, present, and future. To deliberate upon reality. And to wonder — leaving no stone unturned: from the littlest (subatomic particles) to the cosmic whole. To inspire and be inspired. To intuit. To poke into the possible beginning, middle, and end of the cosmos. To reflect on whether we behave freely or predeterminedly. To conceptualise and pick from alternative futures. To learn from being wrong as well as from being right. To contemplate our mortality. And to tease out the possibility of purpose from it all.

Perception, memory, interpretation, imagination, emotion, logic, and reason are among our many tools for extracting order out of disorder, to quell chaos. These and other properties, collectively essential to distinguishing humanity, enable us to model reality, as best we can.

There is perhaps no more fundamental investigation than this into consciousness touching upon what it means to be human.

To translate the world in which we’re thoroughly immersed. To use our rational minds as the gateway to that understanding — to grasp the dimensions of reality. For humans, the transmission of thought, through the representational symbols of language, gestures, and expressions — representative cognition — provides a tool for chiseling out our place in the world. In the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein laconically but pointedly framed the germaneness of these ideas:

‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’.

Crucially, Wittgenstein grounds language as a tool for communication in shared experiences. 

Language provides not only an opening through which to peer into human nature but also combines  with other cognitive attributes, fueling and informing what we believe and know. Well, at least what we believe we know. The power of language — paradoxically both revered and feared, yet imperative to our success — stems from its channeling human instincts: fundamentally, what we think we need and want.

Language, to the extraordinary, singular level of complexity humankind has developed and learned to use it as a manifestation of human thought, emanates from a form of social leaning. That is, we experiment with language in utilitarian fashion, for best effect; use it to construct and contemplate what-ifs, venturing into the concrete and abstract to unspool reality; and observe, interact with, and learn from each other in associative manner. Accumulative adaptation and innovation. It’s how humanity has progressed — sometimes incrementally, sometimes by great bounds; sometimes as individuals, sometimes as elaborate networks. Calibrating and recalibrating along the way. Accomplished, deceptively simply, by humans emitting sounds and scribbling streams of symbols to drive progress — in a manner that makes us unique.

Language — sophisticated, nuanced, and elastic — enables us to meaningfully absorb what our brains take in. Language helps us to decode and make sense of the world, and recode the information for imaginatively different purposes and gain. To interpret and reinterpret the assembly of information in order to shape the mind’s new perspectives on what’s real — well, at least the glowing embers of what’s real — in ways that may be shared to benefit humankind on a global, community, and individual level. Synaptic-like, social connections of which we are an integral part.

Fittingly, we see ourselves simultaneously as points connected to others, while also as distinct identities for which language proves essential in tangibly describing how we self-identify. Human nature is such that we have individual and communal stakes. The larger scaffolding is the singularly different cultures where we dwell, find our place, and seek meaning — a dynamically frothing environment, where we both react to and shape culture, with its assortment of both durably lasting and other times shifting norms.

Picture Post #48: Gratifying Human Necessities

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.' 

Posted by Tessa Den Uyl

Florence, May 2019

Horses have been bred to gratify human necessities.  For centuries, the horse has been the vehicle for transportation of goods and people.  Above all, it has been a symbol for war.  When motors were invented, the horse retired from its often ‘inhorse’ duties, and we could advance our propensities in other ways.

The picture has something to do with tourism, expansion, and war.  More deeply, it reflects something about the human mind, which flaunts its inventiveness -- turning everything into a tool.  In the prancing horse on the Ferrari logo, we may gaze and wonder:

            what or whom is served with this kind of human resourcefulness?

Poetry: The Thought-Reader Revolution

Posted by Chengde Chen *

The Way to Root out Evil?
Thought reading: curing human nature with instinct

Why have the thousands of years of moral efforts,
– Religion, education, and the rule of law –
Not cured the human evil of harming others for gain?
Because faith, reason and justice, powerful as they are,
Cannot outdo the ultimate selfishness of human nature.
Kant said, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity,
No straight thing was ever made.’

But, what is more fundamental is human instinct –
The self-preservation based only on physiology.
As thoughts are invisible, one can deceive –
One’s evil intentions may not do harm to oneself,
Hence permitted by instinct, hence possible for evil.

If, by a ‘thought-reader’, thoughts become visible,
Any intention to harm others would harm oneself,
Hence prevented by instinct, hence impossible for evil.

Whether thoughts are visible is, in fact, a moral valve,
Controlling whether there is the possibility of evil.
The invisibility of thought = the possibility of evil;
The visibility of thought = the impossibility of evil.
To make thoughts visible makes morality an instinct,
And men “good men” who can’t be bad.

As the invisibility of thought is the cause of evil,
The truly effective way to root-out evil
Is not the moral classics from Plato to Marx,
But seeing thoughts, to cure human nature with instinct.
Instinct is water, to serve or flood depending on the river.
Only in the canal of truthfulness dredged by the machine,
Can the boat of coexistence sail freely with human dynamics.

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* Chengde Chen is the author of the philosophical poems collection: Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde.chen@hotmail.com

The Pleasures of Idle Thought?

Posted by John Hansen

What is the purpose of thought?  This was the focus of a monumental series of essays, chiefly written by the English lexicographer and essayist Dr. Samuel Johnson.  His essays, however, had a sting in the tail.

During the years 1758 to 1760, the Universal Chronicle published 103 weekly essays, of which 91 were written by Dr. Johnson.  These proved to be enormously popular.  The subject of the essays was a fictional character called The Idler, whose aspiration it was to engage in the pleasures of idle thought, to “keep the mind in a state of action but not labour”. Among other things, Dr. Johnson contemplates the many forms that idleness of thought can take – of which we describe a sample here: 

• There is the kind of Idler, Dr. Johnson begins, who carries idleness as a “silent and peaceful quality, that neither raises envy by ostentation, nor hatred by opposition”.  His life will be less dreadful and more peaceful if he refrains from any serious engagement with matters, and yet he should not “languish for want of amusement”.  He needs the beguilement of ideas.

• There is the Idler, too, who is on the point of more serious thought, yet “always in a state of preparation”.  It cannot fully be classified as idleness, since he is constantly forming plans and accumulating materials for the “main affair”.  But perhaps he fears failure, or he is simply captivated by the methods of preparation.  The main affair never arrives.

• Then there is the Idler who, in his idleness, begins to feel the stirring of a certain unease.  He fills his days with petty business, and while he does so productively, yet he does not “lie quite at rest”.  When he retires from his business to be alone, he discovers little comfort.  His thoughts “do not make him sufficiently useful to others”, and make him “weary of himself”.

• In fact, in time, there is the Idler who begins to tremble at the thought that he must go home, so that friends may sleep. At this time, “all the world agrees to shut out interruption”.  While his favourite pastime has been to shut out inner reflection, yet such inner reflection now seems to press in on him from all sides.

• As life nears its end, there is the Idler who fears the end, yet in continuing idleness of thought, he seeks to ignore the fact that each moment brings him closer to his demise.  He now finds that his idle thoughts have trapped him.  His own mortality is disconcerting, yet something which he has never known how to face before.

• In his final essay, which is written in a “solemn week” of the Church – a week of “the review of life” and “the renovation of holy purposes” – Dr. Johnson expresses the hope that “my readers are already disposed to view every incident with seriousness and improve it by meditation”.  Any other approach to thought will finally be self-defeating.

There are many, writes Dr. Johnson, who when they finally understand this, find that it is too late for them to capture the moments lost.  The last good gesture of The Idler is to warn his readers that the hour may be at hand when “probation ceases and repentance will be vain”.  Idleness of thought is not after all as innocent as it seems.  It comes back to bite you.  The purpose of thought, then, is ultimately to engage with life’s biggest questions.

It seems a remarkable achievement that Dr. Johnson apparently held an overview of about 100 essays in his head, which followed a meaningful progression over a period of three full years.  These essays continue to provoke and inspire today.  All but one – which was thought to be seditious – were bound into a single volume. An edition which is still in print and still being read by “Idlers” today is recommended below.

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Read more:

Johnson, Samuel. “The Idler.” Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Brady and W.K. Wimsatt, University of California Press, Ltd., 1977, 241-75.

By the same author:

Eastern and Western Philosophy: Personal Identity.

Poetry: BREXIT and 9/11

The City of London. Although some financiers played  a key role in the
LEAVE campaign, others fear loss of access to lucrative European markets

So Why Does BREXIT* Remind Me of 9/11?

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 A poem by Chengde Chen 

Why does BREXIT remind me of 9/11?
Because the exit is like a suicide attack.
Britain, like a plane hijacked by democracy,
With her island-shaped spirit and body,
Dives into her interdependent neighbour,
Regardless of the fatal consequences of
Isolation, recession, and dismemberment…

If an action of suicide bombing
Is to perish together with the enemy,
Brexit is to do so with friends!
But, world-shaking as it is, this isn’t 9/11 yet.
The “explosion” detonated by the referendum,
is time-consuming, procedural, and reversible.

If Britain regrets the decision, she can re-vote.
Some would cry “respecting democracy”, but
Should we democrats be so “respected”
That we’re not allowed to change our mind –
But must jump off the cliff-edge mistakenly-reached?

A U-turn would, of course, not be glorious, but
Should the UK trade her existence for pride?
Where would the pride stay, anyway?
If we must make the mistake into a full disaster,
Wouldn't democracy look crazier than al-Qaeda?

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* Editorial note. 'BREXIT' is the term used to signify the process of withdrawal from the European Union by the United Kingdom, a long-standing aim of both the extreme left and right in English politics, if rather less so in other parts of the United Kingdom.

Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Death and History

Posted by Király István

Death lays the foundations of human history. However, this is only one aspect of death.

Death does not only illuminate the historically articulated human life, so to speak 'externally' — or more precisely, from its end, from an indefinite and aleatory, 'retrospective' point of view, as a foreign and external element — but it continuously interweaves, and what is more, grounds it in its most essential aspects.

To such an extent that history probably exists precisely because there is mortal human life — which is to say, a mortal human being who relates by his life to death, to his being-like-death and mortality — also in a being-like way, and mode of being-like. In other words because there is such a life to which death — its own death — in all respects lends weight, challenge, pressure — grip! — over itself and for itself, and by this a continuous and unavoidable possibility to undertake.

So, the non-human, non-Dasein*-like life which is 'finite', and as such is always born, disappears, passes away, comes into being, extinguishes, changes and evolves ... well, this life actually does not, and cannot have a history — just as the 'inorganic' regions of being have no history in fact, only in a metaphoric sense. Which of course does not mean that this life is not in motion, in change — that it is unrelated with time, or does not 'possess' time with all the processes and 'events', necessary or incidental — in the sense of their happening and references. These of course are also in touch with human history as challenges, meanings and possibilities — which is, when and if there is a questionable meaning or a question referring to meaning. So they have a story, but do not have a history — to the extent that this story of beings devoid of history only becomes — or only can become! — a history of being by history.

In accordance with this reasoning, history exists in fact because there is human death, because there are beings who relate to death — explicitly or implicitly — in and with their being, in and with their mode of being, in a being-like way — for whom death, their own death is not a mere givenness, but — by the way they relate to it — is, in fact, a possibility.

Moreover, it is a possibility which, by its own 'substantive' happening, is dying — precisely by its dying but always beyond it. It is a possibility which derives — and constitutes and structures, articulates, permeates, colours — all of their other modes and possibilities of being. In other words, it opens them up really and truly, structures them open in — and precisely because of — its finitude. And by this, it also lends to these possibilities a well-defined importance, open towards, and from, this finitude, which also leads in fact to the articulation of these modes of being.

If the various modes and regions of human existence — as well as their birth and changes in time — can prove that their very existence, meaning and change is utterly unthinkable and 'absurd' without death, or that death plays a direct or indirect role in their coming into being or changes, then it is also proved that death grounds, originates, and constitutes history in the … essential, ontological sense.


*Dasein is a German word which literally means 'being there' or 'presence'.

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Király V. István is an Associate Professor in the Hungarian Department of Philosophy of the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. This post is an extract selected by the Editors, and slightly adjusted for the purposes of the blog,  from his new book, Death and History.

Poetry: On Nuclear Logic

Editorial note: Poetry touching on the great stories of our time, from Iran to North Korea, to Turkey to Israel, to...?

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A poem by Chengde Chen 

Dr Strangelove provided a fictional insight into something all too real

On ‘Nuclear Logic’



Hearing that nuclear control on Earth is troublesome,
God sends His envoy to investigate.
Riding down the wind and passing over countries,
the envoy is puzzled by what he sees:
in country A, nuclear missiles striding proudly ahead;
in country B, nuclear programme being openly upgraded.
but in small countries like C and D,
there are inspectors under UN flags sniffing around,
searching for traces of nuclear evidence, or intention.

The envoy can’t figure out the logic,
so he asks the Secretary General of the UN,
‘If such weapons endanger human existence,
shouldn’t those who have them destroy theirs first?
If the UN principle is that all nations are equal,
why are they treated differently over the same thing?’

The Secretary General replies, ‘Your Excellency,
nuclear logic is different from ordinary logic.
It is not something that if I can have, so can you,
but that because I have it and you don’t,
I can forbid you while you can’t stop me.
“Equality” means that we have one right each.
Since I have had the right to have,
you have to have the right to have not –
which is just as important to the world peace and order.
It is most irrational and irresponsible to think that
that I can set a fire means you can light a candle!’

The envoy is stupefied,
‘What interesting logic; no wonder you’re unique!
I’d better hurry back to report it –
let the Old Man learn something new too.’ 

---

Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Poetry: On Nuclear Logic

Editorial note: Poetry touching on the great stories of our time, from Iran to North Korea, to Turkey to Israel, to...?

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A poem by Chengde Chen 

Dr Strangelove provided a fictional insight into something all too real

On ‘Nuclear Logic’

Hearing that nuclear control on Earth is troublesome,
God sends His envoy to investigate.
Riding down the wind and passing over countries,
the envoy is puzzled by what he sees:
in country A, nuclear missiles striding proudly ahead;
in country B, nuclear programme being openly upgraded.
but in small countries like C and D,
there are inspectors under UN flags sniffing around,
searching for traces of nuclear evidence, or intention.

The envoy can’t figure out the logic,
so he asks the Secretary General of the UN,
‘If such weapons endanger human existence,
shouldn’t those who have them destroy theirs first?
If the UN principle is that all nations are equal,
why are they treated differently over the same thing?’

The Secretary General replies, ‘Your Excellency,
nuclear logic is different from ordinary logic.
It is not something that if I can have, so can you,
but that because I have it and you don’t,
I can forbid you while you can’t stop me.
“Equality” means that we have one right each.
Since I have had the right to have,
you have to have the right to have not –
which is just as important to the world peace and order.
It is most irrational and irresponsible to think that
that I can set a fire means you can light a candle!’

The envoy is stupefied,
‘What interesting logic; no wonder you’re unique!
I’d better hurry back to report it –
let the Old Man learn something new too.’ 

---

Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

Picture Post No. 9: Balloons Floating into the Philosophical Dimension

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t that what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Al-Azhar mosque, Cairo

Photo credit: AP via Guardian

Human beings have long been trying to explain the unknown. We have constructed grand theories, separated doctrines and invented names all in a bid to create systematic order out of the  unknown. In the process, we have been so enthusiastic in our examination of the mysterious and so hopeful to tame our reality within our notions of proof, that even when our logic no longer fits, we still believe it is present. After all, building edifices upon that lack of proof, just like proving stories  never happened, can be even more powerful than finding evidence for those that actually did.

In this image, perhaps the child’s innocent play shows in a single gesture the impossibility of stepping outside our essential humanity.

This girl and the balloon are so completely embedded in life itself that it is difficult not to recognise in the image this human urge to investigate. Yet, in the human search for knowledge, the tendency to  build walls has never outreached that clarity this girl and the balloon hand back to us.

When does something become intelligible?

Is there some kind of archaic intuition that determines when a relation becomes timeless within a spatial dimension? Could the girl and the balloon  have been pictured like this in front of a row of policemen,  or a church, in the desert - or even in Cairo's  busy traffic?  Instead,  the balloon seems to descend like another world that the girl is waiting to receive.

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The Power of Man

Posted by Gregory Kyle Klug
      and Thomas Scarborough

What is man?  The answers to this question vary – typically according to the scientific discipline which asks it.  Chemistry, genetics, biology, psychology, history, or religion, all yield different answers as to what man is.  

In fact all of these disciplines are in some way symptomatic of the essence of man, and none should we dare to exclude from our explorations.  And then, too, since the middle of the 20th century, linguistics has joined the inquiry into the nature of 'man' – language being what we call a semiotic code which reveals (in coded form) much about the structure and function of the mind.  With this in mind, the purpose here is to reflect on the importance of a single word in our language in revealing what man is, namely: 'power'.

'Power' has one of the highest word frequencies in English.  According to research of the University of Central Lancashire, 'power' boasts 385 occurrences per million.  This makes it a word which is weightier than love and war and the weather.  It plays a bigger part in our language than dogs and cats, and hours and minutes. Plato, in fact, implied that this is the one word which defines man.  What he (or she) does with power, he wrote, is 'the measure of a man'.

At first sight,  it might seem difficult to discern any coherence in the many variant definitions of power.  In fact sociologists David and Julia Jary present it as a prime example of an 'essentially contested word'.  We speak of the power of an earthquake, one's power of mind, colonial power, a power pitcher, the power of a performance, even the power which one has over one's own self.  How might we derive, from all these many uses of 'power', a unified insight into the nature of 'man'?

Power is a 'transformational capacity', wrote the sociologist Anthony Giddens.  'Despite resistance', wrote the sociologist Max Weber.  In fact, on closer inspection, it is the triumph of power over resistance in all our human activities which would seem most appropriately to define it.  This is a definition, too, which we can universalise: power is 'the ability to overcome significant resistance in a relatively short period of time':

• Physical power: Military power overcomes the resistance of enemy forces. 
• Social power: A popular movement overcomes the resistance of history.
• Intellectual power: A theory resists being known, until the power of mind reveals it. 
• Moral power: We have the power to choose against the resistance of pain, and pleasure.
• Power of imagination: The imagination overcomes the resistance of familiarity.  And
• Sexual power:  All resistance crumbles (need we say more)?

Contrast this with the eighteenth century French philosopher Paul d'Holbach, the first to (scandalously) suggest that the laws of Newton now applied to man: '[Man] is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control.' Yet power, if we are to believe the linguistic evidence, belongs to the very essence of man, in virtually every sphere.  In fact, it is a theme of Biblical proportions.  The opening chapters of Genesis grandly portray not only the power of God, but man's procreative power, physical power, and intellectual power. 

Power is far more than the narrow conception of it which was extolled by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: namely, the 'will to power' which drives us to achieve.  Rather, it is to be found in all the ordinary moments of life.  And this is not who we may yet become, but who we are. 

O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

–William Shakespeare

_______________________________

A single post does not permit a survey of the many aspects and examples of power.  Author Gregory Kyle Klug unfolds further thoughts on the subject at The Philosopher and at What is Power?

The Power of Man

Posted by Gregory Kyle Klug
      and Thomas Scarborough

What is man?  The answers to this question vary – typically according to the scientific discipline which asks it.  Chemistry, genetics, biology, psychology, history, or religion, all yield different answers as to what man is.  

In fact all of these disciplines are in some way symptomatic of the essence of man, and none should we dare to exclude from our explorations.  And then, too, since the middle of the 20th century, linguistics has joined the inquiry into the nature of 'man' – language being what we call a semiotic code which reveals (in coded form) much about the structure and function of the mind.  With this in mind, the purpose here is to reflect on the importance of a single word in our language in revealing what man is, namely: 'power'.




'Power' has one of the highest word frequencies in English.  According to research of the University of Central Lancashire, 'power' boasts 385 occurrences per million.  This makes it a word which is weightier than love and war and the weather.  It plays a bigger part in our language than dogs and cats, and hours and minutes. Plato, in fact, implied that this is the one word which defines man.  What he (or she) does with power, he wrote, is 'the measure of a man'.

At first sight,  it might seem difficult to discern any coherence in the many variant definitions of power.  In fact sociologists David and Julia Jary present it as a prime example of an 'essentially contested word'.  We speak of the power of an earthquake, one's power of mind, colonial power, a power pitcher, the power of a performance, even the power which one has over one's own self.  How might we derive, from all these many uses of 'power', a unified insight into the nature of 'man'?

Power is a 'transformational capacity', wrote the sociologist Anthony Giddens.  'Despite resistance', wrote the sociologist Max Weber.  In fact, on closer inspection, it is the triumph of power over resistance in all our human activities which would seem most appropriately to define it.  This is a definition, too, which we can universalise: power is 'the ability to overcome significant resistance in a relatively short period of time':

• Physical power: Military power overcomes the resistance of enemy forces. 
• Social power: A popular movement overcomes the resistance of history.
• Intellectual power: A theory resists being known, until the power of mind reveals it. 
• Moral power: We have the power to choose against the resistance of pain, and pleasure.
• Power of imagination: The imagination overcomes the resistance of familiarity.  And
• Sexual power:  All resistance crumbles (need we say more)?

Contrast this with the eighteenth century French philosopher Paul d'Holbach, the first to (scandalously) suggest that the laws of Newton now applied to man: '[Man] is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control.' Yet power, if we are to believe the linguistic evidence, belongs to the very essence of man, in virtually every sphere.  In fact, it is a theme of Biblical proportions.  The opening chapters of Genesis grandly portray not only the power of God, but man's procreative power, physical power, and intellectual power. 

Power is far more than the narrow conception of it which was extolled by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: namely, the 'will to power' which drives us to achieve.  Rather, it is to be found in all the ordinary moments of life.  And this is not who we may yet become, but who we are. 

O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

–William Shakespeare

_______________________________

A single post does not permit a survey of the many aspects and examples of power.  Author Gregory Kyle Klug unfolds further thoughts on the subject at The Philosopher and at What is Power?

We Need Animal Cognition, Not Neuroscience

Posted by Matthew Blakeway

A generation ago, it was thought that neuroscience held the promise of solving many philosophical problems. Looking back now over those lost decades, we are able to see that it failed to solve a single one, and arguably created a new one or two.

The purpose of this post is to introduce a single idea, painted with a large brush: As we see our hopes for answers from neuroscience fading, animal cognition may hold the promise of the future. 

 

Neuroscience, it was thought, would tell us many things: what a mind is, whether humans have freewill, or where in the brain we find these things. It would explain consciousness, morality, evil, or why humans tend to believe in prime-moving inter-galactic omnipotent fairies. While there are still philosophers who hold out hope for answers from neuroscience, the failure of progress is striking. An illustration reveals the way in which the arguments typically fail: in his book Freewill, cognitive neuroscientist Sam Harris argued that brain scans revealed a neural blip the moment before a subject was conscious of choosing to act. This, he considered, demonstrated that freewill is a myth, for the reason that the brain acts before we know it. Yet the argument is too easily neutralised. What was the blip? It may just as well have been one part of the brain going, 'OK, Freewill, this is one for your department.'

There are, on the contrary, significant problems that neuroscience has created. For example, its tendency to believe that the mind is nothing but the brain may open it up to a classic problem of logical systems, identified by the mathematical logician Kurt Gödel. Does Gödel's incompleteness theorem imply that the brain is unable to understand itself, so that neuroscience can have no achievable end-goal? Probably! The computer analogy of the brain is an old one, yet it is still useful. We have been inching towards a neuroscientific view that a brain is a biological computing device. Assuming that this is so, the study of the brain may reveal little about how the software works. In moving towards the view that a human mind has no animal spirits or ethereal magic in it, the consequence for neuroscience is that it is ever less in a position to solve philosophical problems – much as we would not have a hope of proving the Church-Turing thesis, or demonstrating why π is an irrational number, by shifting to a study of computer chips.

It may be more helpful for philosophers to turn to animal cognition as their primary input. This field is producing remarkable new finds, and philosophy would do well to absorb their implications. One of its most conspicuous aspects is the study of pro-social behaviour in animals – in contrast with what zoologist Robert Hinde calls 'human aggression in all its deviousness and complexity'. As a case in point, researchers demonstrated that a rat will help another rat in difficulty without needing a reward – if only humans could be relied upon to so act. While the 18th century philosophical view of humankind might be expressed (adopt a tone of pompous bloviation): 'It is the moral sense that separates men from the wild beasts which live in brutal ignorance,' humans do some pretty nasty things. My suggestion is that humans, while they, too, have inherited 'moral emotions', can out-think their own emotions and can manipulate their behaviour tactically. We need to turn the old view of humankind on its head. We don’t need to explain how we are biologically programmed. We need to understand the anomalies.

Such observations promise a rich new vein for philosophy, and it deserves our attentions. By way of illustration, now that we know that rats are compassionate, we may ask why so many bankers and politicians aren’t. Supposing that an economist should persuade bankers and politicians that everybody will become richer if they act in their own self-interest (as has been the case, starting with political philosopher Adam Smith) – then tactically, bankers and politicians may out-think their pro-social inclinations – to the detriment of the poor, and on an alarming scale at that. In this example alone, animal cognition suggests fresh explorations of morality, freewill, and belief, while the answers to the same may explain no less than why it is that our choices polarise all of humanity today.
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Study notes:

Ben-Ami Bartal, I., Decety, J., & Mason, P. “Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats”. Science. 334, 2011. pp 1427-1430.
Hamilton, W. D. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour”. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1964, 7 (1): 1–16.