Skepticism and Existentialism Again
Apr. 2nd, 2011 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apollianaYears ago when I taught Existentialism over the Summer at Tufts I emphasized the connection to external world skepticism, though I'm not quite sure what I said. Now I'm leading my sections through Nausea, asking them to try to figure out the cause of Ronquentin's nausea. On any given Friday when I ask this, someone invariably says "fear of freedom!", which is true, but not etiologically enlightening. I want them, as I did with Kierkegaard, to look at R. as a therapist, or a friend might. It's difficult, because he's slippery; the first time I read it, I wasn't sure there was a character there at all, but plenty of real people elude me just as much.
I've come to the conclusion that the problem is that he doesn't believe in his project, but isn't aware of it until 1/2-3/4 of the way through the book; and not believing in the thing he thinks justifies his existence leads to the insidious feeling that the world is coming apart. Literally coming apart: objects lose their identities, things that should be easy to do become hard, little cracks in the sense that the world is coherent appear everywhere. (One of my students has taken this and run with it. "Why can't he see that he should just stop taking things out of their contexts?" --"Because self-knowledge is hard....") Why should one unacknowledged anxiety lead to this extrapolation of anxiety into everything? Why should the fact that I could be wrong about nearly any belief lead to the worry that I could be wrong about every belief?
Perhaps it is the centrality of the original worry. One's main goal, however much one's heart is or isn't in it, is central to how one sees oneself and the world. Similarly we construct the world we think of ourselves as living in with our beliefs ("in the fulness of time produces a theory..."). If one thinks that our beliefs are our world (and, in a sense, they are) a crack in them might really seem to threaten to bring the whole structure down. The existential antihero's ominous cracks are every bit as much a paranoid extrapolation as the skeptic's are.
There is a similarity too in what the person in these predicaments dwells on: something impossible--though in a different sense than Kierkegaard's beliefs that one one both will and will not get the princess: the impossibility of imagining one's own nonexistence, fully, of imagining being dead, for the existential antihero, and the impossibility of imagining the totality of one's beliefs to be false, for the skeptic. Each of these is a paradox, since imagining one's own existence is still imagining, and thus entails that you exist to do the imagining; and imagining the totality of one's beliefs to be false cannot justifiably be done unless one holds at least one belief firm as a reason for calling the rest into doubt.
I'm not sure if it's the impossibility of fully imagining either of these that gives them their paranoia-inducing power. The mind stops (because it literally cannot go any further), and shudders, and is somehow in spite of this (or because of it?) convinced that it is something one should be concerned about. But the concern stems, probably, from a worry not about the world but about oneself--about the coherence of one's own desires and attitudes, or the reliability of one's beliefs.
It probably shouldn't be surprising that an inconsistency in or insecurity about oneself ought to manifest itself as a perceived inconsistency in or insecurity about the world.
I've come to the conclusion that the problem is that he doesn't believe in his project, but isn't aware of it until 1/2-3/4 of the way through the book; and not believing in the thing he thinks justifies his existence leads to the insidious feeling that the world is coming apart. Literally coming apart: objects lose their identities, things that should be easy to do become hard, little cracks in the sense that the world is coherent appear everywhere. (One of my students has taken this and run with it. "Why can't he see that he should just stop taking things out of their contexts?" --"Because self-knowledge is hard....") Why should one unacknowledged anxiety lead to this extrapolation of anxiety into everything? Why should the fact that I could be wrong about nearly any belief lead to the worry that I could be wrong about every belief?
Perhaps it is the centrality of the original worry. One's main goal, however much one's heart is or isn't in it, is central to how one sees oneself and the world. Similarly we construct the world we think of ourselves as living in with our beliefs ("in the fulness of time produces a theory..."). If one thinks that our beliefs are our world (and, in a sense, they are) a crack in them might really seem to threaten to bring the whole structure down. The existential antihero's ominous cracks are every bit as much a paranoid extrapolation as the skeptic's are.
There is a similarity too in what the person in these predicaments dwells on: something impossible--though in a different sense than Kierkegaard's beliefs that one one both will and will not get the princess: the impossibility of imagining one's own nonexistence, fully, of imagining being dead, for the existential antihero, and the impossibility of imagining the totality of one's beliefs to be false, for the skeptic. Each of these is a paradox, since imagining one's own existence is still imagining, and thus entails that you exist to do the imagining; and imagining the totality of one's beliefs to be false cannot justifiably be done unless one holds at least one belief firm as a reason for calling the rest into doubt.
I'm not sure if it's the impossibility of fully imagining either of these that gives them their paranoia-inducing power. The mind stops (because it literally cannot go any further), and shudders, and is somehow in spite of this (or because of it?) convinced that it is something one should be concerned about. But the concern stems, probably, from a worry not about the world but about oneself--about the coherence of one's own desires and attitudes, or the reliability of one's beliefs.
It probably shouldn't be surprising that an inconsistency in or insecurity about oneself ought to manifest itself as a perceived inconsistency in or insecurity about the world.
