What is existential philosophy?

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What is existential philosophy? is an article by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt . It first appeared in 1946 under the title What is Existence Philosophy? in the American quarterly Partisan Review . The study was first published in German in 1948 in the volume: Hannah Arendt: Six Essays in the series of publications in the magazine Die Wandlung in Heidelberg, founded by Karl Jaspers and others . It is the first book publication after Arendt's dissertation Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin from 1929.

To existential philosophy

Arendt explains that existential philosophy began with the late work of Schelling and Kierkegaard in the mid-19th century after the old world of thought had been shattered by Kant . It has been further developed by Nietzsche and Bergson and has achieved its modern form through Max Scheler , Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Arendt judges all other modern schools as epigonal , while this philosophy, like modern literature and art, reflects the “ uncanny ” of modernity . The philosophical reason for this eeriness is that although it can be explained why it is z. B. tables and chairs exist, but it can never be made understandable why this single table or chair exists independently of other chairs or tables. Even then, she took the nominalist position - in the sense of the scholastic universal dispute - that every being and every thing has its own existence independent of main categories.

"Kant's destruction of the ancient concept of being" had the "independence of man" , the "human dignity" to the target. As Kant sums up, people who are free in themselves are subject to the “causal law of nature” and thus “slave to being ” .

The self as being and nothing: Heidegger

After Arendt has presented the different existential philosophical approaches of Schelling and Kierkegaard, she continues that Heidegger developed a new ontology with its own philosophical terminology despite and against Kant . He succeeded in taking up the ancient concept of being again. However, his ontology could never really be established, as the planned second part of Being and Time never appeared. Arendt considers Heidegger's statement that the meaning of being is temporality to be incomprehensible in itself.

With the analysis of Dasein from the point of view of death, Heidegger justifies the nullity of being. According to Arendt, the fascination of “nothing” does not necessarily lead to nihilism . Rather, man can imagine that he is related to the being given to him like the Creator before the creation of the world from nothing. This is also the reason Heidegger did not admit that the nothing suddenly begins to "not" and thus takes the place of being. Man becomes god-like, not a “world-creating” being , but a “world-destroying” being.

According to Arendt, these thoughts are clearly expressed by Sartre and Camus . They form the basis of modern nihilism: “In it the hybrid attempt to try to stretch the new questions and content in the old ontological framework takes its revenge .” Heidegger said that Kant's question What is man? like no other directly connected and postulates the identity of being and thinking. Accordingly, man is absorbed in what he is. Essence and Existence are the same. It is the attempt to make man the “Lord of being” and thus to put him in the place where God stood in the old ontology. Apart from Nietzsche, Heidegger's philosophy is the first absolutely secular philosophy. Heidegger calls the being of the human being, thereby circumventing the preliminary Kantian concepts of freedom, human dignity and reason. If man is absorbed in what he is in the world (Heidegger) or in society ( Hobbes ), he is no more than his functions in the world.

Furthermore, Arendt explains that Heidegger's functionalism and Hobbes' realism ultimately only end with the design of a model of human beings in which the individual human being as “self” only achieves an existential “possibility of being ” through philosophizing (Heidegger) . This is only the reformulation of the thoughts of Aristotle and the medieval philosophers of the contemplative life. With that, Heidegger gave up the question of “meaning and being” . Arendt, on the other hand, argues that “man is not God and lives with his own kind in one world,” a thought that she will repeat many times later. She emphasizes that man did not make himself and, like Heidegger, uses the phrase that man was “thrown” into his being: “... man has not manipulated himself into being and usually does not manipulate himself out of the same. ” Despite all “ linguistic tricks and sophistries ”, being is nothing in the Heideggerian sense .

According to Camus, Arendt works out, man recognizes his nullity and that existence as such is guilty. Unlike herself, Camus always sees people as separate from others, their absolute isolation. The author states: Since Kant, the French Revolution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , it has been part of the concept of human beings that humanity can be honored or desecrated in each individual. The concept of the "self", on the other hand, asserts a person who exists independently of humanity and who only represents his nullity.

At the end of the chapter, she criticized Heidegger's “mythologizing non-concepts” such as “people” and “earth” , which he attributed to the self in lectures in the 1930s. "It is evident that such conceptions can only emerge from philosophy - and lead into some naturalistic superstition."

At the beginning of the section on Heidegger, she notes in a footnote that one can ask whether Heidegger's philosophy is being taken too seriously. She explains: "In any case, Heidegger did everything he could in his political behavior to warn us not to take him seriously." According to Arendt, this development is based on "real comedy" and the real low of political thought at German universities. She does not believe in personal " lack of character", but suspects that Heidegger is hopefully the last of the great romantics like Schlegel and Adam Müller , who behaved completely irresponsible due to "gambling addiction", "genius" and "desperation".

Indications of human existence: Jaspers

In the last section, she deals with the existential philosophy of Karl Jaspers , who made his break with all philosophical systems, with world views and "doctrines of the whole" and dealt with "borderline situations" based on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. He thus placed himself in the series of revolts against philosophy that founded modern philosophy. He dissolves philosophy into philosophies and poses the question of how the results can be communicated. It is about philosophizing together to illuminate existence. Jaspers had written to her in September 1946: "Philosophy must become concrete and practical without forgetting its origin for a moment."

According to Arendt, this method is similar to Socratic maieutics . “As with Socrates, there is no philosopher with Jaspers who (since Aristotle ) leads an existence that is distinguished from other people. But with him there is not even the Socratic priority of the one who asks; because in communication the philosopher moves in principle among his own kind, to whom he appeals just as they can appeal to him. "

For Jaspers, Arendt emphasizes, existence is not a form of being, but a form of human freedom, namely the form in which “the human being as a possibility of his spontaneity turns against his mere result” . Although man cannot dissolve the reality of the world, the unpredictability of his fellow man and the fact that he did not create himself, man's freedom can triumph on this backdrop. As an important statement by Jaspers, she emphasizes: “Being is such that this existence is possible.” Jaspers assumes that people can think in playful metaphysics, approach the limits of the thinkable and exceed them. This is what he called the «cipher of transcendence ». In contrast to Heidegger, for him philosophizing is merely the preparation for "doing" through communication on the basis of common sense. For Jaspers, thinking of transcendence is doomed to failure. The human being as existence therefore becomes aware that he did not create his existence himself, that he is powerless doomed to destruction and that his freedom is not due to himself. Arendt argues that, according to Jaspers, no ontology can make statements about what being actually is. Being as such is not recognizable. It is only understood as something “encompassing”.

According to Arendt, people will always try to think about transcendence beyond reality and will always fail. In this failure, Arendt emphasizes with Jaspers, the reality given to him as the cipher of his being. His freedom consists in deciding what to think and what not. Jasper's philosophy, the author emphasizes, lies essentially in the paths and movements of his philosophizing. Jaspers has therefore shown ways that can lead out of the "dead ends of a positivist or nihilistic fanaticism" . With this new way of thinking, Arendt continues, there is no need to explain everything on the basis of one principle. Rather, the “turmoil of being” becomes clear, the “strangeness” and “homelessness” in a world that can become home for people if being as “encompassing”, never fully explainable, in which man is “limited Freedom “ has, is seen. By reflecting on these limits, by “thinking transcending” , people always define the freedom of their “existence” in communication with other existences. He recognizes what he can and what he cannot.

History of the text

According to Barbara Hahn , Arendt wrote her treatise in German. The essay was first published in the USA in 1946 in the left-wing publication Partisan Review and appeared in 1948 in the Schriften der Wandlung in Heidelberg. Jaspers originally wanted to include the study on existential philosophy as an article in the journal Die Wandlung, which he co-founded , but received a counter-speech due to the demanding implementation of the topic, and so the text appeared in the series of this monthly magazine.

In this early work, Arendt developed her own position within existential philosophy, which she did not pursue in later works. When Uwe Johnson asked in early 1974 whether the essay could be republished in Germany, she found the text acceptable, but wanted to remove the section on Heidegger. She did not have the English version published for the first time in 1946. In a previously unpublished letter at the turn of the year 1955/56, she distanced herself from her essay, especially from her remarks on Heidegger. It was not until 1990 that the study was published again in Germany. An American translation of the German version was published in 1994.

expenditure

  • What is existential philosophy? In: Sechs Essays , Schriften der Wandlung, 3, Ed. Karl Jaspers u. a., Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1948.
  • New edition (used here): What is Existential Philosophy? Anton Hain, Frankfurt 1990, ISBN 3-445-06011-8 .
    • French: La Philosophie de l'existence. Translator Catherine Mendelsohn, in Deucalion. Cahiers de philosophy. Edited by Jean Wahl . Ed. de la Revue "Fontaine", no. 2, Paris 1947, pp. 216–245, Heidegger section, pp. 232–239.
    • New translation of La Philosophie de l'existence under the title: Qu'est-ce que la philosophie de l'existence? , translated from the German edition by Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1948, by Martin Ziegler, in this Payot edition, pp. 111–142.
    • English: What is Existence Philosophy? , Partisan Review, Winter 1946, pp. 34-56; again: What Is Existential Philosophy? (translated from German by Robert and Rita Kimber). In: Essays in Understanding. 1930-1954. Harcourt Brace, New York 1994 (original). On-line. Schocken Books, New York 1994.
    • Similar: French existentialism, in The Nation , 162, no. 8, February 23, 1946, pp. 226-228 (first edition); again in HA: Essays in Understanding. Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism 1930–1954. (Anthology) Schocken, New York, last 2005, ISBN 0805211861

literature

  • Barbara Hahn: Six Essays / The Hidden Tradition. In: Wolfgang Heuer, Bernd Heiter, Stefanie Rosenmüller (eds.): Arendt manual. Life, work, effect. JB Metzler, Stuttgart Weimar 2011, ISBN 978-3-476-02255-4 , p. 25ff.
  • Elisabeth Young-Bruehl : Hannah Arendt. Life, work and time. S. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 1986, ISBN 3-10-095802-0 , pp. 308ff.

Remarks

  1. ↑ What is Existence Philosophy? In: Partisan Review , Winter Edition (Vol. 13, No. 1), 1946, pp. 34–56.
  2. ↑ Series: Schriften der Wandlung, 3. Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1948.
  3. ↑ What is existential philosophy? , Frankfurt a. M. 1990 (WiE) pp. 8-21.
  4. ↑ WiE pp. 28–39.
  5. ↑ WiE p. 28f.
  6. ↑ Barbara Hahn: Six essays / The hidden tradition. In: Wolfgang Heuer, Bernd Heiter, Stefanie Rosenmüller (eds.): Arendt manual. Life, work, effect. Stuttgart Weimar 2011, p. 26.
  7. ↑ Correspondence 1926–1969. Munich / Zurich 1985 (here: Munich 2001), Jaspers to Arendt, September 18, 1946, p. 95.
  8. ↑ WiE pp. 41–45.
  9. ↑ Barbara Hahn: Six essays / The hidden tradition. In: Wolfgang Heuer, Bernd Heiter, Stefanie Rosenmüller (eds.): Arendt manual. Life, work, effect. Stuttgart Weimar 2011, p. 25.
  10. ^ Hannah Arendt - Uwe Johnson. The correspondence. Frankfurt a. M. 2004, p. 114.
  11. ^ HA to Calvin Schrag, December 31, 1955, archive of the Hannah Arendt Center Oldenburg, quoted in according to: Antonia Grunenberg : Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Story of a love. Munich, Zurich 2006, p. 266. Calvin Schrag was a doctoral student who did his doctorate on Heidegger under Paul Tillich .
  12. ↑ What Is Existential Philosophy? (translated by Robert and Rita Kimber). In: Essays in Understanding. 1930-1954. Harcourt Brace, New York 1994.
  13. ↑ According to the chronology it can be assumed that it was translated from English, unless Arendt had sent a German manuscript to Paris. This is followed by an essay L'existentialisme français vue de New York on pp. 247–252 , particularly on Sartre and Camus; this without "vue de New York", translated from English by Anne Damour, again in La philosophie de l'existence et autres essais. Payot, Paris 2000, ISBN 2228893390 , pp. 143-150.
  14. ^ English version of L'existentialisme français (vue de New York) , also in HA: Reflections on Literature and Culture. Stanford University Press 2007 ISBN 0804744998 excerpts from google books .