2017 Personality 11: Existentialism: Nietzsche Dostoevsky & Kierkegaard

So we started to talk a little bit about phenomenology last time and about Carl Rogers and, uh, I mentioned that the phenomenologists were interested in experiences in some sense as the ultimate reality, and that's a very complicated concept to grasp. The existentialists also adopted that viewpoint. They were concerned with the quality of subjective experience, not that they were ignoring the reality of the objective experience, but they were concerned with the reality of subjective experience and they were also more focused on action than on statement or belief.

Because here's something to think about: you can think about this for a very long time if you're trying to understand what someone believes, even if you're trying to analyze their representations of the world. Should you pay attention to how they act or what they say? That's a profound question, even from a neurological perspective or a neuropsychological perspective because the memory system that you use to represent what you say that you believe is not the same memory system that you use to embody your knowledge about action.

So, it's akin to the distinction between telling someone how to ride a bike and knowing how to ride a bike. Those are not the same things. The descriptions don't even lay very well on top of one another because you don't actually know how you ride a bike; you just know how to do it. It's built into your physiology, right? It's a skill, and that's called procedural memory. Procedural memories are the same kind of memories that basically structure your perceptions.

It's not that you can't orient your perceptions consciously; you can. But once you've oriented them consciously, let's say, some goal, it's automatic procedures that take over because you really don't know how you organize your senses so that you pay attention; you just know how to do it. Now, the existentialists believed that actions spoke louder than words and that if you were interested in belief and even if you were interested in analyzing belief, that it was better for you to look at how someone acted than what they said.

Now, one of the things you might think with regards to Rogers is that his psychotherapeutic practice would be predicated on the idea that you should bring how you act into alignment with what you say you believe so that there is no discontinuity between your body—that's one way of thinking about it—and your mind and so that there are fewer paradoxes in the way that you manifest yourself in the world.

So, the concentration on action is one of the fundamental characteristics of existentialism. Another one is the insistence upon trouble and suffering as an intrinsic element of human experience. So, you could say that we concentrate—well, we could say: "Ok, well built into that is trouble, built into that is chaos, built into that is anxiety and pain; and disease.

You can fall prey to those things without there being something wrong with you. Now, if you pin down a psychoanalyst like Jung or Freud, they would of course admit that human misery is endemic to human experience. But Freud in particular tended to look for adult psychopathology in childhood misadventure, in pathological childhood experience. He at least implicitly claimed that if you hadn't experienced childhood trauma and you had developed properly, what would happen is that you would end up healthy—roughly speaking, certainly mentally sound.

But the existentialists don't really buy that belief. In the beginning, they basically make a different claim, which is that life is so full of intrinsic misery, let’s say—but suffering is a better way of thinking about it—suffering that manifests itself as a consequence of your intrinsic vulnerability; that psychopathology is built into the human experience. There's no real way of avoiding it or at least... there's no real reason to look for extra causes—that might be a better way of thinking about it.

And you'd be surprised how often that observation is useful for clinical clients, for example. Because one of the things that is quite characteristic about people, especially if they are introverted and don't have many friends, is they don't have people to talk to if they are suffering; maybe they are depressed or anxious or they have some sets of strange symptoms like agoraphobia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. One of the things that they always presume is that the fact that they are suffering in that manner means that there is not only something wrong with them but something uniquely wrong with them so that it is their fault and no one else is like them.

And one of the things that you do as a diagnostician, you know, you'll hear a lot of rattling about how labeling is bad for people. And certainly, mislabeling is bad for people, and even an accurate label can be a box you can get out of, but it is very frequently the case that you diagnose someone, it is a relief to them that you can't believe because they come into you knowing there's something not going properly, but they think, well, they are the only person facing it, that it means that they are idiosyncratically strange in some incomprehensible way that no one else can possibly understand and there's no way that they can ever get better.

The things you do is that you point out to them that depression and anxiety don't really require any explanation, right? There is plenty of reason. I don't remember who said it, "everyone has sufficient justification for suicide." I think that was the claim. Well, the point is that you look through the experiences of the typical person unless they are very, very fortunate—and they won't be that way forever—that certainly is the case, that they can point to traumatic experiences throughout their lives: death and loss and illnesses and humiliation and all those sorts of things is sufficient to account for existence in the state of quasi-permanent negative emotion.

Now, often if you see people who are depressed and anxious by nature, they assume that everyone else is the smiling face that you see on Facebook, and so that alienates themselves from people and from themselves even more than, certainly far more than necessary. Part of the psycho-education that is going on in therapy is merely educating people to understand that a fair bit of misery is the norm and that there is plenty of genuine reason for it.

And so the existentialists basically start from that stance. It's like a 'Fall of Man' stance, you know, because it is deeply rooted in the Western tradition, roughly speaking. It's the idea that people are divorced from some early paradisal fate and that is the emergence of something like self-consciousness that produced that demolition of humanity and left us in a damaged state.

And people think they don't believe that, but they believe it all the time. And it's frequently how people experience themselves as if there is something wrong that needs to be rectified. And it seems unique in some sense to human beings. It doesn't seem all that obvious that animals think that way, but people definitely think that way.

And so all the existentialists basically take that as a given. And then, they offer another question: well, given that is your lot and that there is ample reason for misery, how is it that you should conduct yourself? Because merely saying "giving into that misery" or multiplying it doesn't seem to be doing anything other than multiply it. It doesn't seem to be doing anything other than increase it. "It is bad to begin with," you might say. Well, increasing it is something you have to regard as worse.

So how do you conduct yourself in the face of misery? Ok, how do they present that to begin with? Ok, so this is from Pascal, and this is an existential statement that describes the position of the individual in the universe, you might say, or you could say it explains a deep characteristic of individual experience, or existence. Hence, existentialism.

All he does is he spends his whole trying to make...