Lecture 2: Existentialism and Albert Camus' 'The Outsider'

This week’s lecture delved straight back into philosophical theories and, after such a long break from these kinds of concepts, I really struggled to piece it all together. Here is my attempt:


We started out by saying in general terms that the modern age of philosophy began with Descartes and Cartesian consciousness, the idea that individual thought is separate from the outside world, but which came first? Ideas like ‘I think therefore I am’ meant that the Ontological problem was dismissed.

However, Heidegger said that this idea of Dualism is completely wrong; there is no ‘I’, no mind. All you can say definitively is ‘there are ideas’, the fact of existence does not follow and is not proven by this. Heidegger was a student of Husserl who said that consciousness is intentional and meaning is fixed subjectively. He argued that ‘knowing’ is a structure, with some ideas having more priority than others, depending on intention.

From this it can be argued that phenomology (meaning and understanding of objects is a mental process) and literary journalism are looking at the familiar as unfamiliar, and vice versa. Heidegger said that being is making choices of what is important – this is existentialism. A new way of looking at things came about; taking things that aren’t normally in your structural understanding and looking closely at them, such as in film making, bringing the sound of a dripping tap into focus, or in writing, focusing on the way clothing falls. This translated into the Minimalism trend in literature, journalism, music, film making, art etc.

Heidegger, who had a relationship with Hannah Arendt and was a Nazi who never apologised or felt guilt, presented a reconsideration of Descartes and dualism. His ‘Cartesian reflections’ that I mentioned earlier (better ‘there are ideas’ than ‘I think therefore I am’) focused on asking ‘what are ideas?’ As with Husserl’s ‘directedness’, he emphasised that ideas depend on intention, mood, ambiguity, the act of choosing and structures of intentions. This brings up the existential problem of choosing. What is the source of our decisions? Possibilities are: social interaction and habit of mind, but the main point out of this question is that our decisions are the result of interactions with others. Other people have an influence on us and the decisions we make; therefore Heidegger argues that there is no self, only a temporary structure of decisions. In this way, it is argued that people live ‘inauthentic’ lives in that they are not the authors of their own life; it is the influence of others that guides our decisions.

This led to the intellectual abandonment of the self-possessed individual. It was no longer thought possible to have control over your own life or be your own person, because the influence of those around us is too strong. It was argued that if put into isolation, we would cease to be people, and many experiments were carried out in which people had hallucinations within minutes of going into isolation from people and senses. I will not even go into the ethical problems that I have with this kind of work, as we will be here all day! HOwever, this meant that one of the bedrock ideas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism was undermined, throwing the work of many people such as Locke, Smith, Marx’s mechanistic materialism, Freud’s subconscious, Kant’s equality of people and Nietzsche (known as ‘the last Romantic’) into question. It also resulted in the collapse of Modernism generally, with concepts of Anthropology, sociology, analytic epistemology and hermeneutics (process of seeing meaning in texts that are not obvious) being subverted by the undermining of the individual.

Heidegger said that existence/being is ‘Dasien’, aka a way of coping and ‘being’ – a structure of choices which allows us to carry on living. It is not what you do, but the way you do it (remind anyone else of a song?).

We then moved on to the ever-difficult question of time. Kant was the first to realise that it is not unified, but is different depending on what we are using it for, eg., whether it is a way to measure our lives or whether it is a way to consider the cosmos. Einstein said that it is a dimension of the universe, a ‘fourth dimension’ which we cannot conceptualise because we can only conceptualise the 3D that we live in. He agreed that time is not uniform. Heidegger saw time as ‘the structure of being’, a threefold structure consisting of the past (which you feel guilt over), the future (which is unknown so you feel fear) and the present. This is building on Einstein’s idea that time is relative, just like positioning is relative to the position of something else as there is no centre of the universe. Heidegger therefore saw time as a mental phenomenon.

Chris then went on to discuss existential morality/ existential psychotherapy, which argues that ‘existence precedes essence’ suggesting that how you came to be is unimportant, and the past should be abandoned as it only makes us feel guilt. These concepts therefore seek to reduce feelings of guilt about the past and to promote indifference towards the future. Therefore, the scope for present freedom is enlarged and you are liberated from both guilt and dread. It is also argued that guilt and dread comes from other people, as can be seen in Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ with the line “Hell is other people”. But, at the same time, WE are other people – the collective consciousness (Carl Jung) creates a world in which we are made to feel guilty for the past and apprehensive about the future.

And now on to Albert Camus, who was a resistance fighter in France in WW2, with many glamorous and fashionable friends, who died in a racing car accident. He was known for his ‘literature of revolt’ including the book that we will be studying for seminars next week; ‘The Outsider’. This book was written totally in the present tense, therefore creating a perpetual NOW with no past and no future. The main character was described by Chris Horrie as a post-romantic existential hero, who refuses to be determined by other people and seeks authenticity and control in his own life. He has no guilt about his actions and does not care about consequences.

The Romantic idea that you must ‘be yourself’ creates an existential dilemma, as according to existentialism, this is not possible and we will always be inauthentic to some extent. There is also the age-old question ‘why are we here, now?’ to consider, and Heidegger’s answer is that it is moral luck. He called it ‘thrown-ness’ and suggested that we are just thrown into the world, that there is no formal logic to it, just blind luck.

Horrie ended the lecture by saying that the Enlightenment and Western civilisation’s impeccable logic was the cause of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, that the problem is built in to Western civilisation and the way that it has developed. Existentialists say that the holocaust was fairly normal/natural in western development. This is alarming in that it produced ‘popular existentialism’ and presented humanity with a dilemma; collaborate or resist? From here on, it is all down to our strength of belief and what we are willing to sacrifice to maintain our moral standards.