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Home , Philosophical Fragments

S. M. VLADIV

DOSTOEVSKII'S "POSITIVELY BEAUTIFUL MAN" AND THE EXISTENTIALIST AUTHENTIC SELF�A COMPARISON*

Soren Kierkegaard, the father of modern and an older contemporary of Dostoevskii, established the major dif- ference between Existentialist philosophy and earlier European idealist philosophical schools, mainly , by trying to demonstrate that Existentialism was not an all-inclusive meta- physical system. Hence the tendentious titles of his most impor- tant works, Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unsci- entific Postscript (1847). Existentialism is a philosophy which explores the human sub- ject rather than nature or the universe. This human subject is an initiator of action and a centre of feeling and it is about his act of existing that Existentialism tries to philosophise. Existentialism stresses the subjective nature of knowledge, of perception and of its own process of philosophising. In the words of :

Philosophy is a product of the humanity of each philosopher, and each philosopher is a man of flesh and bone who ad- dresses himself to other men of flesh and bone like himself. And, let him do what he , he philosophises not with the rea- son only, but with the will, the feelings, with the flesh and with the bones, with the whole soul and with the whole body. It is the man that philosophises.1

* This article is based on a lecture delivered to the Existentialist Society in Melbourne on 21 May 1987. 1. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. C. Flitch (New York, 1954), p. 28. Quoted in John Macquarie, Existentialism (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), p.15. Existentialism, then, perceives man as a complex psycho-physi- cal totality of , will, feelings and physiology. Moreover, this psycho-physical totality is not seen as a static given, but as something dynamic, which becomes in time, something which can only become in the act of existing. Here is how Jean-Paul Satre expressed this central thought:

We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterwards. If man, as the existentialist sees him, is not definable, it is be- cause to begin with he is . He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself22

For the Existentialist, then, the central subject of philosophising is the as agent, the in quest of authentic selfhood. From this preoccupation with the Self, with personal , em- anate the major themes of existentialism: freedom (of the Self), decision, responsibility, finitude, , alienation, despair, death. But most importantly, Existentialism also focuses on the emotional life of man-a province neglected by philosophies of the past or else relegated to psychology. The changing feelings, moods or affects of the human personality are seen by the Exis- tentialist as the direct means of involvement in the world and in . It is no accident, then, that from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Sartre, the Existentialists have given exhaustive analyses of states of mind such as anxiety, boredom and nausea.3 Thus it is not difficult to see the interdisciplinary potential of Existential philosophy and how it might have been called upon to "supply psychology" with the underlying "philosophical frame- work," which the latter lacked as a nascent scientific discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century. These are precisely the terms in which Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist who pioneered the so-called "health-and-growth-psychology" (as opposed to the psychopathology of the Freudian school) defines the connection between Existentialist philosophy and the new "psychology of being," which developed in Europe and the USA in the 1950s and early 1960s, that is, in the wake of the major Exis-

2. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Existentialism" (1946). Quoted in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 290-91. 3. Cf. Macquarie, Existentialism, pp. 16-17.