“Facebook Platform presents an unprecedented opportunity to engage our generation, most of whom are on Facebook, in seizing the future and making a difference in the world around us. Our generation cares deeply, but the current system has alienated us. Causes provides the tools so that any Facebook user can leverage their network of real friends to effect positive change.

“The goal of all this is what we call ‘equal opportunity activism.’ We’re trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals to change the world.”

And in theory that all sounds great. But what happens when someone decides to start a cause called “Think: Save the World From Stupid People?” Once again, this could theoretically be a valuable development, considering that the people who run our world are often lacking in the intelligence department. And the cause has almost 50,000 members! However, this cause states the following as priorities:

Purpose: Get people to think, not borrow ideas from other people

Positions:

1) Your Opinion Doesn’t Matter

2) The Crowd is Not Always Right

3) Knowledge is Discovered Not Created

4) Truth Exists

5) Think about the causes of your actions

6) Think and Do, In that Order

Description:
-Our goal is to think.
-Our hope is that in meeting our goal, we will also improve the world.

A bunch of red flags went up in my mind after reading these lines. But since I’m a trouble maker and a smart ass, I decided to join the cause and write an inflammatory post on their discussion board. Here’s how it went:

This “cause” is highly contradictory for a few reasons:

1) The title refers to “stupid people,” but stupidity isn’t a measure of how much knowledge one has obtained; that’s called “ignorance.” A stupid person is one who is incapable of intelligence; an ignorant person is just someone who is uneducated or lacking knowledge. I think this cause should be targeting “ignorant people.” If you really want to target stupidity, you have to employ eugenics (forced sterilization, which thereby prevents pregnancy) or genocide (organized mass murder), both of which have been used throughout history — many times by governments — but neither of which are ethical (duh…) or effective. Part of the reason those plans are ineffective is because intelligence is not easily defined (not even by an IQ test), and, therefore, neither is stupidity.

2) The administrators, Chris Wonsiewicz and Alisha Ciardi, are students at the Christian Heritage School, an interdenominational K-12 school whose mission is “to assist parents in fulfilling their God-given responsibility to teach their children, and to provide its students with an education of spiritual and academic excellence with which to serve God.” It’s ironic that a “cause” started to promote free thinking is administrated by people taught to think only in God’s way.

3) The logo is an image of Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher. Plato and his mentor Socrates have both become symbols of Rationalism, which claims that logical reasoning is the primary source of knowledge and truth. However, in 19th and 20th Century literature and philosophy, Rationalism was more often viewed as an insufficient explanation of human nature, life, the world, and the universe. Especially in relation to human beings and freedom, Existentialists such as Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre rejected rationalism, as explained on the corresponding Wikipedia page:

“Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them rather than rationally. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical freedom and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard saw rationality as a mechanism humans use to counter their existential anxiety, their fear of being in the world. [...] Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of ‘bad faith’, an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena — ‘the Other’ — that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder us from finding meaning in freedom.”

Hence, the combination of psychology (particularly Freudian and Jungian) and Existential thought offer further explanation for the human race, beyond what Rationalism has provided and is capable of providing.

Other points:

1) “Get people to think, not borrow ideas from other people.” – Human knowledge is cumulative in that every generation builds on the progress and experience from throughout human history. We MUST use ideas from other people, especially philosophers, writers, and scientists. But we must be skeptical of everything we encounter, and brave enough to develop our own minds using the background and tools we determine to be useful.

2) “Your Opinion Doesn’t Matter” – Opinion does matter, but it has to be backed by fact, empirical research, previous literature, and/or sound argument. The problem is when people state their opinion as if it were fact in itself.

3) “Think about the causes of your actions. Think and Do, In that Order.” – This sounds like a Think Your Way to Success program. But I guess I can’t argue with the suggestion that people use foresight to avoid potential mistakes.

Please share your opinions/ideas/thoughts/facts/quotes/research

The first novel by Jean-Paul Sartre seems to be one of the best templates for the Existentialist fiction and philosophy that arose in the mid 1900s. The book was initially published in 1938, and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. The story concerns a man of about 30 years of age named Antoine Roquetin, who is staying in the coastal town of Bouville, France to finish researching and writing a historical nonfiction book. Suddenly he is struck by a lasting sensation which he calls “the Nausea” – in short, a feeling of terror caused by the very concept of existence, and disgust over all things that surround him, living and inanimate.

The novel itself doesn’t present a clear picture of what Sartre’s Extistentialism is really all about. But, conveniently, the introduction by Hayden Carruth does, and so that is the source I use here. Carruth starts by saying that “Existentialism is a philosophy–if a philosophy at all–that has been independently invented by millions of people simply responding to the emergency of life in a modern world” (p. vi).

(Somehow the song “This Is Our Emergency” by Pretty Girls Make Graves comes to mind…). Carruth points out that this outlook has appeared throughout history and literature, as far back Biblical mythology and ancient Greek philosophy. But modern Existentialism was cultivated primarily by Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard, with a bit of help from Dostoevski. However, Carruth claims that Sartre’s Existentialism was unique to the 20th Century, and was in direct opposition to the philosophy of Hegel:

“Hegelianism was the philosophy of history and the mass. By projecting a Final Reality toward which all history flows in a process of ever-refining synthesis, Hegel submerged the individual consciousness in a grand unity of ideal mind. [...] The Existentialist knows that the self is not submerged…and any system of thought that overrides this [individual] suffering is tyrannical [...] From this comes man’s despair, but also, if he has courage, his existential integrity” (p. viii).

Carruth suggests that philosophy is not a progression towards an end point, in the way that human life is a progression towards death. He argues that, if man were to keep on living indefinitely, his philosophy would keep on changing. “Hence his being is never fixed. He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death he would never end. Nor would his philosophy” (p. xiii).

Living this deep in philosophical literature, I can’t help but wonder why so many people take an “all or none” approach to philosophy. It seems that if one system doesn’t explain everything, people eventually pass it off as useless. Why not pick and choose from various schools of thought, in order to synthesize a working philosophy to live by? It seems that Carruth would have agreed with that notion, when he said, “Philosophical truth assumes many forms precisely because times change and men’s needs change with them” (p. vi). Although, for the record, Existentialism is the most valid philosophical realm that I have found thus far in my individual studies.

Another passage reminds me of Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown (which I’ve written about here before). “Man the thinker is a by-product, a nonessential component of reality, and he and all his works cling to existence with a hold that is tenuous and feeble” (p. ix).

“The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning–this is its self-defining cause–and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea” (p. xi).

Nausea can be considered incomplete if only because it doesn’t provide an escape for Roquetin. But if taken in conjunction with Sartre’s play “No Exit,” we could perhaps assume that there is no escape from existence, and that Roquetin’s priority is to find some way to cope. As Carruth puts it, “Sartre has said that genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out” (p. xiv). Roquetin hints at both music and writing (or art in general) as promising elements to include in his future life. And I guess that makes me feel better for being a music junkie and blogger/journalist/aspiring novelist.

It’s difficult to explain the point of the book in a short space, but these quotes might help: “It is this irrelevancy of a man’s beliefs to the fate that can overtake him that supplies the most primitive ground for Existentialism, and means that a belief in some sort of providence or destiny is the essential prerequisite of all religion and most philosophy” (p. 112).

“A man becomes an Outsider when he begins to chafe under the recognition that he is not free” (p. 113).

Unfortunately, Wilson consistently turns to the idea of religion as a way out of his dilemma. He doesn’t address the concept of God, but merely the desire to have a system of beliefs by which to live. “The necessary basis for religion is the belief that freedom can be obtained” (p. 113).

“Supposing a solution does exist somewhere, undreamed of by me, inconceivable to me, can I yet hope that it might one day force itself upon me without my committing myself to a preliminary gesture of faith which (in point of fact) I cannot make? The poet finds that he can answer this question with a ‘yes’” (p. 120).

In other words, Wilson is striving to find on outlook on live that is primarily optimistic, and the best way he can do that is to allude to a religious solution. In the meantime, he addresses some of the greatest skeptical and pessimistic literature of the past 150 years, claiming that the ultimate work of modern pessimism is T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”

Wilson built the foundation of his book on both The Stranger and Sartre’s debut novel Nausea. He then runs through some real life figures like Van Gogh and Lawrence, as well as a multitude of fictional characters and the authors who created them (Hesse, Nietzsche, etc). William Blake gets special attention from Wilson, who asserts that a visionary imagination is the pinnacle of human creativity. However, Wilson never satisfactorily solves his basic problems, and in fact keeps returning to Camus and Sartre throughout the book. He returns to the Stranger for the reason that, no matter how you spin it, life often seems too unreal — and this realization tends to overpower many other philosophies.

I too will have come back to The Stranger — and The Outsider as well — in the near future.

Now for the fun stuff. I have another quote for you. I actually started keeping a list to try and post interesting quotes or clips at least once a week. I just read the play “No Exit” by Jean-Paul Sartre, even though my better sense — and past experience — told me that I wouldn’t be able to pay attention to a play. I had no hold ups though, partly because “No Exit” is only about 45 pages long, partly because it was flippin’ awesome.

In the play, three strangers find themselves locked in a room which, as they eventually acknowledge, is in hell. In that little story, the characters have to face their past mistakes, survive the “three’s a crowd” situation, and seek salvation.

My favorite quote was from the character Inez. When Garcin says, “A man is what he wills himself to be,” she replies: “It’s what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one’s made of” (pp. 44-45). Garcin then argues that he didn’t have enough time in life to fulfill his purpose. But nobody has control over that (unless they cut their own time short, of course). All that ever really exists is the present, and it is possible that eternal judgment could come at any moment.

Whether we are measured over time or in an instant, it is pleasant to think that our actions compile into a tally, where good deeds are positive and evil deeds are negative. I’d like to think that karma is the one true measure of a person. It seems that Sartre was full of valuable ideas — but his existentialism definitely doesn’t reach far enough to answer all existential problems.