Philosophy 355, Existentialism, Fall 2016, crn 42692 Course meets in Founders' Hall 232 at 4 MWF; the final essay is due at the time scheduled for our final exam, Monday Dec 12th at 3:00.
Course Description: Time. Aloneness. Dread. Being. Pointlessness. Authenticity. Consciousness. Avoiding self-deception. Concrete moment-by-moment awareness. Imagination. Alienation from the world and from ourselves. Integrity. Death (your death, my death, death of the sun). Freedom. The death of God. Nothingness. The impotence or limits of reason. The collapse of illusions on which we have built our lives. The death of objective truth and desperate thrashing to find a sub. The absurd power of chance. Guilt. Choice. The preposterous silly messiness of bodies.
That's pretty much it. Perhaps you can skip the course and just meditate on the syllabus.
Existentialism is a profoundly active and engaged school of philosophy which flourished in the last century but still influences most intellectuals who wish to grapple with the world rather than, oh, just watch from outside. The two world wars were the earth's contractions leading to its birth, and its first cries were screams [in French] requiring the world to "Do something different! PROFOUNDLY different!" If you do philosophy as a kind of playing with logic puzzles, you may find many of the Existentialists difficult to understand, because they are desperately working to make sense of human existence in a world where all the old ways of making sense have been ripped to absurd tatters. They think they are working for all the stakes there are.
They are also working, paradoxically, on some of the oldest philosophical problems. What is the meaning of life? Can anyone know the contents of another's mind? What shall we do about God? How shall we decide how to live? What is our existence? What is a human being? What relation is there between our inner life and the outer world? Can we really DO anything? Given the difficulty of these problems, what new methods might help us grapple with them? What hidden political consequences and agendas mask the work of philosophers?
Also, for some of these problems the Existentialists don't just have a contribution--they OWN the problems. The existentialists forced the problems on us, now we have them too, and the problems will not go away, and the existential views are the tests or standards against which all the other views have to be compared. Are there things philosophy cannot do that literature can? If God has abandoned us, and if other people are always impossibly far away, how can we connect with anyone else or with anything meaningful? How much of existence is purely momentary and fleeting, and how then is any durability possible or meaningful? Can we avoid lying to ourselves? How? Is there really anything meaningful or significant, or is it all just wishful thinking? If we don't live our philosophy, what's its use?
Existentialism has been attacked on various grounds, and we will consider some the most important of those attacks. There is an addiction to heroism and drama, especially internal drama, which misleads us regarding consciousness, exaggerates its importance. Because getting dressed in the morning is an act of heroism, much less my god looking in the mirror, there is a macho insistence on courage-to-be which discounts those people who just are, who exist without effort. Whether existentialism could exist (don't roll your eyes) without a Cartesian model of human beings is a grave problem. Whether existentialism leaks away entirely once arguments are admitted to be relevant to choices and decisions is a deep and corrosive question. Existentialists share with the Romantic poets a tendency to display a very wide range of emotions. If you are tired of philosophers living only in their logical heads and you yearn for violence, despair, collapse, and heroic attempts at hope, well, boy, have we got a treat for you. If you are unclear how this could be part of an attack against a school of philosophy, then walk carefully and go in pairs.
Instructor and Access: Office Hours: 11-12 MW (not F), and 11:30-1 Thurs, and by appointment.
I am in my office a lot; feel free to stop in.
Prof. J. W. Powell, 203 C SBSS, ph. 826-5753, E-mail jwp2@ etc.
My website address is
http://www.users.humboldt.edu/jwpowell.
Text and Materials: Readings will be posted on the Moodle site for the course, or handed out in class.
Moodle is being phased out but even if I put this course together as its own website, Moodle is still your main access and will be the
avenue for you to post your essays and to read the essays of other students. You
have nothing you need to buy. Existentialists include many literary types and the readings will include plays,
short stories, poetry, and some work whose genre is obscure. Prose and poetic styles tend to make
these readings engaging and interesting, but a week reading a page each day of Heidegger may more than
make up for those virtues. We are also going to look at some more antique readings, though they are short
and fairly easy. Existentialism has produced more, and more varied, good literary texts than any half dozen
other philosophical schools, and it would be easy to put together a sequence of four courses with no
repetition. A good course could also be set up with no other materials except films.
The schedule below,
though it will certainly be changed, gives enough specifics to show the general topography.
Grading: Short quizzes and in-class writing assignments may be given without warning. Students will write one- or two-paragraph reaction papers and will deliver those to the class via e-mail using Moodle forum. There will be two two-thousand-word essay midterms and a two-thousand-word final essay, each counting one-fourth of the grade for the course (with the rest coming from the quizzes, reaction papers, class participation, and discussion). Attendance is required; more than five absences drops your grade one letter grade, more than ten, two (though of course "required" is only code in this course for "another choice," like suicide or reaching down into your own intestines for the implacable and incomprehensible roots of your solitary existence). Each set of essay questions (since several have no questionmarks, let's call them prompts instead) for the midterms and final will be provided one week ahead of the exam; students will choose one out of (typically) five or six prompts, and will write on that prompt, and then turn in the resulting essay by posting it to a Moodle forum. On essays, put "355" and your last name on the subject line, and do not send attachments--paste your essay into Moodle. The discussions in class will be central to the exams. (Although it might be a good idea to do some readings too--your choice, and the consequences of not reading are your consequences.) The three-part structure to be used for all essays and the grading criteria tied to that structure is posted at http://users.humboldt.edu/jwpowell/gradingx.pdf and will be gone over in class before the first essay, and then reviewed in class until we have driven it into the ground.
Schedule: You can expect the first exam in mid-September, the second in early November. You will receive at least a week's notice. Final exam
week is 12-16 December. Our final exam is officially (which means I may change it) scheduled for Monday December 12th from 3-5. The
following list of readings and their order is only offered as an illustration of one set of possibilities; it will
be changed to accommodate our interests, and to accomodate how much we get bogged down in difficult or
interesting materials and how much we can zip through easy materials faster than planned. The list is also optimistic in scope. Remember that the course is a beginning course, introducing rather than digging deeply into controversies, although some main critiques of existentialism will be presented and will have to be dealt with in your essays. The class will probably get to choose among some alternative readings and topics for the
last two or three weeks.
For a meditation on existentialism from contemporary existentialists who use film references to illuminate brilliantly the profound insights available through drama and being hyper-conscious, see
fuckyeahexistentialism.tumblr.com/tagged/Film.
During the course, watch for possibilities for criticism. For example, Iris Murdoch's insight that Sartre is a Romantic rationalist (translation: he is caught in a contradiction between the need to affirm individual sentiment as divine and the need to figure things out, and no one can have it both ways) shows in a kind of excess and self-indulgence among existentialists. The problem of coming to terms with existentialism is seductive, profound, paradoxical, and makes you a member of a strange community of outcasts. --But instead of feeling lonely and abandoned and helpless, you stick out your chin and say, "Take that, world!" This suggests that there is a deep strain of denial and wishful thinking among the existentialists. Among philosophers, this does not seem like much of an objection--where are the statements, one of which is allegedly supported by the others and how do we evaluate the form of the series of those statements? Part of what is going on is that Existentialism raises issues about logic and about what counts as an argument--this is one source for the idea that there is an unbridgeable, black-hole gulf between analytic and Continental philosophy. But, hey, we are not yet equipped for such matters, so let us just avert our eyes and go on.
Objectives: Students will learn a range of works by existential thinkers, and will be able to describe and
critique their arguments and clarify the issues addressed by those writers. (Is that pathetic or what?) The Philosophy Department's announced major assessment goals / objectives are as following (Some courses are to involve measuring other objectives as part of their role in General Education):
1. Students will learn to define concepts and use traditional vocabulary of philosophy.
2. Students will increase their abilities to use the logical methods of analysis and to critically assess philosophical arguments.
3. Students will learn to apply methods of philosophy to specific issues and problems.
4. Students will increase their abilities to read and analyze philosophical writing.
For this semester, the objective we will track is number 3. Since all the essay assignments will in fact result in evidence for this objective, there will not need to be any separately targeted assignment.
Miscellaneous Legal and Regulatory Notices:
