Casewell’s Jaspers, but meika’s Deleuzian Bergsonism. 

Self-care as salvation-- all authenticity but no responsibility

Deborah Casewell in her aeon.co essay raises some notice on Karl Jaspers’ existentialist angst-mongering, how it has been mis-categorized (by Sartre) such that Jaspers as an inventor of the word existentialism he gave it away after losing control of the branding in the marketplace of ideas, but, Casewell reminds us, the “focus on the individual, the importance of particular emotions and states, the call to decide something about oneself, and a mandate to live authentically” are key factors for an existentialist trying to develop a philosophy as “a relationship towards the world.”

The three volumes of his Philosophie each deal with different aspects of human existence and engagement in the world: orientation, existence, and metaphysical transcendence, as well as forms of knowledge associated with those aspects (objective knowledge, subjective self-reflection, and symbolic interpretation of the metaphysical). These stages of existence are continuously bound together with one another — we find ourselves in the world, we question ourselves and find we cannot ground or justify ourselves, and we look beyond ourselves to find the truth of existence.

Caswell finishes the essay with:

But then that may be the final lesson Jaspers teaches us — his philosophy can take us back to ourselves, to life, and help us live it as self-aware individuals trying to find meaning.

And in between we go through some of the detail, the detours and disputations.

There is a very big adjective to describe this type of project and that is soteriological. At least it applies where there is a particular outcome or settlement expected, or held in promise for those peeps engaged in the project. Specific examples of this are:

• Immortality in an afterlife for the righteous believer in, or practitioner of, a religion like Christianity, Mithraism, etc.
• Englightenment for Buddhists, or at least a calming of attachments/belief

More generally, one might be attempting to find meaning, authenticity or a true spiritual life, as a salve for almost every soul, in some special sub-deal of the above list -just for you:

• complete individuation (older wiser, this needs saying?)
• personal growth (is this like tree rings?)
• authenticity is its own reward (don’t be a fake unless you are a fake)
• expressive creativity (artist/guru as hero/shaman, the world is saved by them because they are so special)
• job satisfaction (various prosperity gospels I think I might mean here)

Each of these are to be found in various philosophical, artisanal or religious projects, in both shy and proud forms, as the main game, the unsaid motivation, or all of these in an inherited legacy.

As well, perhaps actually usefully, in modern practical (“clinical”) psychology (at least where professional hope is not given up in the face of empathy-less pscyhopathy). For salvation is really just an extreme version of growing up, learning something, being wrong, again, and growing old towards the wisdom of death.

And that’s life where things happen along the way, but we like to tell stories and structure stuff, build reason in the face of nothing, then saying it not the same as understanding, because data. As if this was new information. We are the data set and the algorithm. Alpha and omega. I call this mess the world. Existentialism calls this existentialism.

How many Isms are there? Only one, one might say, and it is perhaps colonialism?

Yep, but really, it’s meta-worlding, and I’ll get to that later. (There is only worlding, all ‘ism’s are world-building doubled-down into a shared or forcibly foisted 'cocoon' of doctrine and dogma.)

What we have lost in gaining paradise in a self (your self, my self) in the journey there/within and back again, is a sense of the world which is a part of us.

The ascetic, the puritan, the separatist will abjure the world they live in, either in name of a purer land, or in the name of the self as hero. They take no responsibility for a world they do not see as theirs, and so it is an obstacle, a satan, an enemy to define themselves in rejecting it, grinding the holier-than-thou figure against it. A problem to conquer. A nail to hammer. A conspiracy to feel empowered by simply being in the know.

This is fiction.

The world is 'theirs', only because it is ours to give away. We’re just not sure what in the world the world is exactly, unless our world is the argument we are having about it, it’s not readily sensed. It should be there somewhere, but where? This? That? No? Yes? Conquer what?

Casewell works their Jaspers through what I have just purpled out in that last paragraph, as follows:

The individual is within the world but not at one with the world. However, as the individual is situated in the world, we cannot entirely separate ourselves from the world. We are torn between our individuality and the wholeness that the world seems to offer. Certain situations remind us of this more than others. As before, these are boundary or limit situations, here demarcated as guilt, suffering or death. We can never avoid these situations: life is never free from suffering or feelings of guilt, and we cannot escape death. In them we come up against the antinomy between ourselves and the world. We may feel we are subjects who have an infinite capacity, who feel boundless but, when hemmed in by guilt, suffering and death, we come up decisively against the finite reality of our existence.

The “concept” of the world is one of our hardest words among all the hard words, of all our usages when we should words into worlds of our luck/fate/responsibility. We make the world as we make ourselves, but have no control over it, no wonder the separatist or puritan hates it. The pool laughs at their narcissism.

Of course life goes on, the world with or without us, and we must decide these things among us and between “me”-s. Casewell works Jaspers here as:

In these situations, we have to act. We cannot stagnate or just remain in them, we have to either transcend these situations or not. We can cement ourselves further in ‘ Dasein’ (mere existence) or transcend into ‘ Existenz ‘. That movement of transcendence, of making a decision about ourselves, then brings about a new relationship to the world in which we have found ourselves.

The narcissist never does this.

And look now- we are back looking at the self in a situation, but where there is no sense of composition here, composing the body and the world from the substance of the social terrain. There is a whiff of the dialectic here, in a negation of negation that’s not even not-wrong, a stench of an Aufhebung. And there is a similarity here too with Max Stirner’s owness. I mean, it’s not wrong… it’s not like the world should be a mirror…

That movement, which then becomes a continuous process, is what it means to exist philosophically. We have to decide something about ourselves, settle something for ourselves, and do so without any certainty or outside affirmation, or objective knowledge. To be in Existenz is to exist authentically. I either allow the course of things to ‘decide about me — vanishing as myself, since there is no real decision when everything just happens — or I deal with being originally, as myself, with the feeling that there must be a decision,’ wrote Jaspers. Grenzsituationen or limit situations offer us the opportunity to become ourselves, as when we enter them with open eyes and decide for ourselves in relation to them, then we ‘live philosophically as Existenz ‘.

Then with “what exactly do we move towards, and how do we do it?” Casewell walks with Jaspers past Kieerkegaard’s leap of faith, that anxiety among us, to a relief in this Existenz, which is just the world again, but which the self is now aware of being in, and the cycle continues. Safety, relief, ataraxia.

See, it’s the walking that builds the world, and grows our bodies into the shape they have. The body is not just a hole in the world, a hole in the whole. It is an exercise. It’s a practice. It’s the shape of your routines. The daily ritual, the seasonal rites… — the old believers always have to [MUST] bring such notices to some framework or altar in which belief matters, as they hold it dear [DEAR ME] and be dealt with, to wit:

Jaspers’s aim in relation to God is not to believe, but to have a faith that is a movement towards something in which we should believe.

Again, this “something” is the world we compose as we move ourselves in it, a world which separatists or ascetics claim is evil even as it gives them life. Anyway, back to walking with Casewell’s Jaspers dancing with the devil in the world/not-world…

His philosophy is for the individual, and his presentation of the individual reaching ever-hopefully towards an unknowable God requires more faith than a philosophy that just relates to the world. Yet, paradoxically, that focus beyond the world is what is of value — remaining in the world, and reaching only towards the world, broken and imperfect as it and we are, perhaps does more frequently lead to failure and shipwreck.

I guess I am a worldselfist, a selfworldist. (See I ‘colonize’ too, a neologism at a time. I am alive, therefore I world.) There is no self without the world, and while the world may well world along without me, and that’s fine. Well…

The idea of world and self as a substantive composition will have to be outlined at a later date. Here I’ll just give a hat tip to Delueze’s Henri Bergson, though I do not think either would have liked what I done with it. That will be the easy one, the hard problem is the world.

But walking the writing into the world, will not be a soteriological example. While salvation maybe appropriate for the self on practical nurturing occasions, the world cannot be saved, as it is not going anywhere we don’t go, but it can be recognized, acknowledged, nurtured, loved, shoulded.

We don’t need another saviour.

This is the only Jaspers I’ve read, not sure Rebecca Casewell gives me reason enough to read more directly.