Existential Thought in Kafka Literature

Franz Kafka was born in Prague, in what now is part of the Czech Republic, on July 3rd 1883. At the time, Prague, was a confused city. Kafka as well was confused himself. The city of Prague, at this time, was consumed with numerous languages and ethnic groups fighting for position. Kafka was a Czech born, German speaking Jewish man. It must be noted that his relationship with his father was poor. His relationship with his father can even be regarded as a motif found throughout his literature. His father viewed Kafka as a failure. He never approved of Kafka's writing.

Kafka should never be considered as a philosopher. This is to say that he never expressed a deep philosophical theory in his writings. His relationship with existentialism is complex, mainly because the label 'existentialist' by itself is rather meaningless.

Most of his works were never published during his lifetime. Three notable works include The Metamorphosis, The Trail, and The Castle.

He considered his writing has a curse from some unknown sin. He insisted that all of his unpublished manuscripts be burnt after his death. Max Brod, Kafka's colleague, saved the manuscripts, despite the author's request.

Kafka is best known for describing absurd situations with simple, cold words. Kafka did not attempt to shock readers with detailed descriptions of horrific scenes; instead, Kafka preferred blunt absurdity. As follows in The Metamorphosis: 'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.'

Sartre and Camus recognized Kafka as an existentialist.              

Post -War Development of computer technology and “Cognitive Revolution in Society”

Post -War Development of computer technology and “Cognitive Revolution in Society”

Karl Jaspers

- Born FEB. 23, 1883-FEB 26, 1969

-German philosopher, one of the most important Existentialists in Germany, who approached the subject from man’s direct concern with his own existence

-aspers was the oldest of the three children of Karl Wilhelm Jaspers and Henriette Tantzen. His ancestors on both sides were peasants, merchants, and pastors who had lived in northern Germany for generations

-Was severely handicapped in adult life. Diagnosed with Bronchiectasis as child later cardiac decompensation

-Studied law at University of Heidelberg starting in 1901; Studied medicine at Universities of Berlin, Gottingen, Heidelberg. Become doctor 1909

-Volunteered. Worked with clients of interest to learn psychiatry

When Jaspers started his research work, clinical psychiatry was considered to be empirically based but lacking any underlying systematic framework of knowledge. It dealt with different aspects of the human organism as they might affect the behaviour of human beings suffering from mental illness.

-aspects ranged from anatomical, physiological, and genetic to neurological, psychological, and sociological influences…

-aspers tried to bring the methods of Phenomenology into field of clinical psychiatry

-in 1913 entered the philosophy dept.

-Wrote Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (“Psychology of Worldviews”) He did not intend to present a philosophical work but rather one aimed at demarcating the limits of a psychological understanding of man.

-Following Max Weber, a sociologist and historian, he asserted that scientific principles also applied to both the social and humanistic sciences.

In contrast to science considered philosophy to be a subjective interpretation of Being, which—although prophetically inspired—attempted to postulate norms of value and principles of life as universally valid.

-For Jaspers man’s existence meant not mere being-in-the-world but rather man’s freedom of being. The idea of being oneself signified for Jaspers the potentiality to realize one’s freedom of being in the world. Thus, the task of philosophy was to appeal to the freedom of the individual as the subject who thinks and exists and to focus on man’s existence as the centre of all reality.

-When hitler came into power, He became enemy of state because wife was jewish

-From 1933 was excluded from higher council, allowed to teach/publish

-Friends tried to assist him to emigrate to another country. Permission was finally granted to him in 1942 to go to Switzerland, but a condition was imposed by the Nazis that required his wife to remain behind in Germany. He refused to accept this condition and decided to stay with his wife, notwithstanding the dangers. It became necessary for his friends to hide his wife. Both of them had decided, in case of an arrest, to commit suicide. In 1945 he was told by a reliable source that his deportation was scheduled to take place on April 14. On March 30, however, Heidelberg was occupied by the Americans…

- all survivors of this era bore the same responsibility and shared a collective guilt. He felt that the fact that no one could escape this collective guilt and responsibility might enable the German people to transform their society from its state of collapse into a more highly developed and morally responsible democracy

-This revision was guided mainly by the conviction that modern technology in the sphere of communication and warfare had made it imperative for mankind to strive for world unity

-At the time of his death in 1969, Jaspers had published 30 books. In addition, he had left 30,000 handwritten pages, as well as a large and important correspondence.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Jaspers

-The cognitive revolution is the name for an intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. It began in the modern context of greater interdisciplinary communication and research. The relevant areas of interchange where the combination of psychology, anthropology, and linguistics with approaches developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience.

-In his book The Blank Slate (2002), psychologist Steven Pinker identified five key ideas that made up the cognitive revolution:[12]

1. "The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback."[12]
2. "The mind cannot be a blank slate because blank slates don't do anything."[13]
3. "An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind."[14]
4. "Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures."[15]
5. "The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts."[16]

The dominant paradigm for most of the century, Behaviorism, has given way to a new, powerful synthesis known as cognitive science, which owes its impetus to the creation of the digital computer.

-In the nineteenth century, when the new field of psychology was emerging from natural philosophy, the dominant paradigm was Introspectionism. People reasoned that if they wished to explore the workings of the mind, the best way to approach this task was to reflect on the contents of what William James, founder of the first school of psychology in the United States, called the “stream of consciousness.”

-spent a lot of time reflecting on their own perceptions, sensations, intuitions, memories, habits, motives, dreams, desires, emotions, goals, and so on.

-Positive/negative reinforcement. Respond to stimuli

-describe a computer in terms of its inputs (“stimuli”) and its outputs (“behaviors”)

-Computers gave psychologists an entirely new model for their science: the brain is the machine, the wetware, that takes care of processing and storage, and the mind is the program that runs on that wetware. In Steven Pinker’s words,

-The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation . . . . This insight, first expressed by the mathematician Alan Turing, the computer scientists Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, and Marvin Minsky, and the philosophers Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, is now called the computational theory of mind.

solves one of the puzzles that make up the “mind-body problem”: how to connect the ethereal world of meaning and intention, the stuff of our mental lives, with a physical hunk of matter like the brain…

-The computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The symbols are physical states of bits of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain. They symbolize things in the world  because they are triggered by those things via our sense organs, and because of what they do once they are triggered. If the bits of matter that constitute a symbol are arranged to bump into the bits of matter constituting another symbol in just the right way, the symbols corresponding to one belief can give rise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it, which can give rise to symbols corresponding to other beliefs, and so on. Eventually the bits of matter constituting a symbol bump into bits of matter connected to the muscles, and behavior happens. -The computational theory of mind thus allows us to keep beliefs and desires in our explanations of behavior while planting them squarely in the physical universe. It allows meaning to cause and be caused. (24-25)

-Another name for the computational theory of mind is cognitive science, a discipline now almost synonymous with psychology in America and much of the rest of the world but encompassing, as well, the sciences of neurology and artificial intelligence

3 Main Points…

1. the brain does not simply take in information through the senses and store it. Instead, it processes the information in various ways that are dependent on the design of the processor….In other words….nothing is experienced as it is in itself but rather as it is as a result of a certain kind of processing that the brain was designed by natural selection to do
2. the brain is made up of interconnected modules, each with its own functions. Much as a personal computer can contain a separate math co-processor dedicated to arithmetic operations, so the brain contains separate, dedicated processors for such activities as recognizing faces
3. as one would expect of a machine, the modules of the brain were designed, but not, according to standard cognitive science theory, by an intelligent designer but rather by the blind forces of natural selection.

To summarize, the brain processes information, different parts of the brain are specialized for particular processing, and the processors that exist in the brain were designed to meet the needs of our evolutionary ancestors.

http://www.emcp.com/intro_pc/reading11.htm

Existentialist Themes in Film- Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard:

Brief biography:

·         December 3, 1980- present

·         Born in Paris, France. He was the second of four children. Became a naturalized Swiss citizen in the 1940s. His father was a doctor with his own private clinic while his mother came from a long line of Swiss bankers.

·         French / Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic.

·         His film-making approach reflected his interest in how the cinematic form intertwines with social reality.

Notable Works:

·         Breathless (1959)

o   This film is about cowardliness, foreboding, betrayal and death; on the difficulty of being who we pretend to be and of knowing ourselves.

·         Contempt (1963)

o   This film revolves around the disintegrating relationship between the screenwriter (Paul Javel) and his wife Camille. According to Godard, this is ultimately a film about filmmaking, and his own autobiography.

·         Weekend (1967)

o   An episodic odyssey of an upper-class Parisian couple’s weekend trip to visit the wife’s mother. Social values such as sex, consumerism, and family are explored in surreal ways.

Ingmar Bergman:

Brief Biography:

·         July 14, 1918 - July 30, 2007.

·         Born in Uppsala, Sweden as the son of a Lutheran pastor.

·         Influences on his works- the frequent remarks he received on the importance of his childhood helped him in the development of ideas and moral preoccupations, religious art (primitive, graphic representations of Bible stories and parables that he found in Swedish churches)

·         Swedish Film writer-director

·         Became the hallmark for existential/philosophical relationship drama. He is known to have “created his own cinematic world” through his use of recurring environments, themes, characters, stylistic devices, and more.

Notable Works:

·         Metaphysics and Man (1956-1964)

o   Bergman’s best known films are made during this period.

§  The Seventh Seal (1957)

·         Bergman’s allegory of man’s search for meaning.

§  Wild Strawberries(1957)

·         A dramatization about one man’s voyage of self-discovery

§  “Silence of God” Trilogy (1961-1963)

·         Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

o   This film presents a vision of a family’s near disintegration and a tortured psyche that is further taunted by God’s intangible presence

·         Winter Light (1962)

o   A look at the human craving for personal validation in a world that is seemingly abandoned by God.

·         The Silence (1963)

o   A disturbing and brilliant vision of emotional isolation that occurs in a spiritual void.

Simone De Beauvoir

·         January 9^th 1908 – April 14^th 1986

·         Lived in Paris, France

·         French Feminist/ Existentialist Philosopher

·         Notable Works

o   She Came to Stay (1943)

§  Fictional

§  Depicts Beauvoir and Sarte’s relationship with Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz, former students of Beauvoir.

o   The Second Sex (1949)

§  Book focused on the question of what is Woman, and the problem of female oppression

o   The Mandarins(1954)

§  Novel depicting the lives of French intellectuals post World War 2

·         Quotes

o   What is Woman?

§  “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”

§  “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”

o   Oppressed Women and the Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic

§  “The whole of feminine history has been man-made. Just as in America there is no Negro problem, but rather a white problem; just as anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, it is our problem; so the woman problem has always been a man problem.”

§  “Woman is the incidental, the inessential, as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute-she is the other."

§  “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”

§  “The advantage of the master, he says, comes from his affirmation of Spirit as against Life through the fact that he risks his own life; but in fact the conquered slave has known this same risk. Whereas woman is basically an existent who gives Life and does not risk her life, between her and the male there has been no combat.”

o   Why Do Women Remain Opressed?

§  “Woman enjoys that incomparable privilege: irresponsibility. Free from troublesome burdens and cares, she obviously has ‘the better part’. But it is disturbing that with an obstinate perversity – connected no doubt with original sin – down through the centuries and in all countries, the people who have the better part are always crying to their benefactors: ‘It is too much! I will be satisfied with yours!’ But the munificent capitalists, the generous colonists, the superb males, stick to their guns: ‘Keep the better part, hold on to it!”

Albert Camus

Born: November 7, 1913 in Algeria (North Western Africa) primarily a European region, to a Pied-Noir family.


Mother: Spanish descent, humble means (Illiterate, maid)
Father: Lucien, a poor agricultural worker. Succumbed to wounds from WWI 1914 October 11


Grew up primarily minimalist, with few material possessions

Studied: The University of Algiers 

Notable: Second-Youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature @ 44

Died: January 4, 1960 Age 46 Car accident, with train ticket to visit his 
family.

In August 2011, the Milan newspaper Corriere della Serareported a theory that the writer had been the victim of a Soviet plot, but Camus's biographer, Olivier Todd, did not consider it credible.

Primary School: Absurdism 
                Focus: Ethics, Humanity, Justice, Politics


Played football, though due to tuberculosis (1930) could not continue.

Worked odd jobs; tutor, car parts, etc. 

Married: 1934 Simone Hie 1940 Francine Faure
 Dismissed the institution of marriage as unnatural. Partook          in numerous affairs

Childeren:  Catherine and Jean, on 5 September 1945

Books: The Stranger, and The Myth of Sisyphus.
       1942 Published: The Stranger: A man living an absurd life
                       Myth of Sisyphus: A work about the Absurdity 

Does the realization of the absurd require suicide? Camus answers: "No. It requires revolt." He then outlines several approaches to the absurd life. The final chapter compares the absurdity of man's life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. The essay concludes, "The struggle itself [...] is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Timeline:

1945 One of the few French editors to publicly express opposition and disgust to the United States' dropping the atomic bombs on Japan

1949, his tuberculosis returned, whereupon he lived in seclusion for two years.

1950’s Devoted his efforts to human rights. 

1951 Published The Rebel a philosophical analysis of rebellion and revolution which expressed his rejection of communism.

Absurd:

Camus presents the reader with dualisms such as happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. He emphasizes the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality; for Camus, this is cause for a greater appreciation for life and happiness. In Le Mythe, dualism becomes a paradox: we value our own lives in spite of our mortality and in spite of the universe's silence. While we can live with a dualism (I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come), we cannot live with the paradox (I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless). In Le Mythe, Camus investigates our experience of the Absurd and asks how we live with it. Our life must have meaning for us to value it. If we accept that life has no meaning and therefore no value, should we kill ourselves?

Rejecting Labels "Once you label me you negate me." - Soren Kierkegaard

Camus regretted the continued reference to himself as a "philosopher of the absurd".

Camus did not specifically consider himself to be an existentialist despite being publicly classified as such, even in interviews he readily denied that he was an existentialist.  

Camus addressed one of the fundamental questions of existentialism: the problem of suicide. He wrote, "There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life's worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that." Camus viewed the question of suicide as arising naturally as a solution to the absurdity of life.

Novels:
1942 The Stranger (L'Étranger, often translated as The Outsider) (1942)
The titular character is Meursault, an indifferent French Algerian ("a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture"), who, after attending his mother's funeral, apathetically kills an Arab man whom he recognises in French Algiers. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative view before and after the murder, respectively.

1947 The Plague (La Peste) (1947)

1956 The Fall (La Chute) (1956)

1971 A Happy Death (La Mort heureuse) (written 1936–38, published posthumously 1971)

1995 The First Man (Le premier homme) (incomplete, published posthumously 1995)

Short story Collection
1957 Exile and the Kingdom (L'exil et le royaume) (collection) (1957)
"The Adulterous Woman" ("La Femme adultère")
"The Renegade or a Confused Spirit" ("Le Renégat ou un esprit confus")
"The Silent Men" ("Les Muets")
"The Guest" ("L'Hôte")
"Jonas or the Artist at Work" ("Jonas ou l’artiste au travail")
"The Growing Stone" ("La Pierre qui pousse")

Phenomenological Analysis- Almar, Steve and Valerie

A)
1. Real- a red Mustang (car).
2. A) Wanting it due to its high end quality. Once acquired, one would enjoy having it.
    B) Mode of transportation (useful), symbol of wealth, asset.
3. Shiny paint, seeing the Mustang Emblem, moves like a car, seeing the color red.
4. A) A red Mustang.
    B) Recollecting seeing one on the highway, imagining driving one yourself (imagining inside and out rather than just the outside), imagining how you would feel driving one.
    C) Actually experiencing driving the red Mustang.

B)
1. Ideal- Love (as an emotion).
2. A) We desire it, are comforted by it, it is judged as a good thing in most circumstances except when the love of something/someone is dangerous.
    B) Emotion, state of being, relation between two beings or between someone towards something, feeling towards one's self/world.
3. Comforting, warm, satisfying, happy, recollections of romantic times or times with family and/or friends, time with out favorite objects,  seeing heart symbols.
4. A) Love (the word itself).
    B) Hearts, couples, past relationships, family/friends.
    C) Experiencing/expressing/feeling Love and directly witnessing it.

C)
1. The discovery of a new species of tarantula.
There are several intentional objects in this process. The real, perceptual species of tarantula that has not yet been discovered is the most obvious one.  But also the ideative species of this new family of tarantula is important because actually that is what is being sought after, the knowledge of the new kind of spider.  Success is also a big intentional object in the this process of research because it takes hard work to accomplish this but it is done with the intention of achieving success.
2. Intentional Content:
   A) One could be observing, judging, comparing/ contrasting with known species and fearing it possibly.
   B) It can be categorized as a spider because it has the shape of what we know as being a spider.This can be determined through counting 8 legs and a combination of head and thorax. The swift movements of the animal and its making of a web could also help us categorize it as a spider.
3. The immanent content involves the concrete acts and the psychological states in the physical phases of the discovery process such as going through the forest, looking for a tarantula and observing the tarantula in front of you once it is found.
4. Signitive:  Given as the language related to the process of discovering a new species. The word species is defined by biologists as a group of living organisms capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding.   Each species has unique biological features such as arachnids having eight legs.  The process of discovering a new kind of tarantula involves the finding of an organism that fits under this linguistic definition of arachnid but still having its own unique features.
Imaginative: Given as the concept of a potentially new line of descent in the arachnid class.  The idea of descent leads to the process of evolution which involves the constant failing and succeeding process of natural selection.  The awareness of evolution leads one to believe that there are many families of organisms that have evolved but that have not yet been discovered.  This may provoke someone's curiosity and drive them to find these undiscovered organisms to add to the human body of knowledge.
Intuitive:  Given as the physical journey through a rain forest (common habitat for tarantulas) and the search for organisms that fit under the category of arachnids.  Once something is sighted that looks like a tarantula, it would be caught or simply observed from a distance.  Then features that distinguish the spider from other tarantula species would be sought after.  Perhaps the organism found would fit under the category of an already known species and the researcher would have to keep looking until one is found that fits under no currently known classes of tarantula.

Group Blog Post: Mike, Preston, Marissa

A.      Real Object

1.       Intentional Object- Glasses Case. It’s a black case that holds glasses.

2.       Intentional Content

a.       Intentional Quality- It’s useful: protects, preserves glasses. Expect it to perform for its design and function.

b.      Intentional Matter- thing, object, inanimate object, tool, case, glasses case

3.       Immanent Content- the object is black, it is rough and scaly to the touch.

4.       Givenness of Object- Signitive: Making a mental illustration in your brain of what this object would look like , Imaginative: If it were being described to others  , Intuitive: you can hold it and look directly at it.

B.      Ideal Object

1.       Ideal Object- pi , The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter,

2.       Ideal Content-

a.       Quality- we perceive this number through 3.14…

b.      Matter- Concept, number, irrational number, constant, pi

3.       Immanent Content- imagining a sequence of numbers beginning with 3.14, thinking of circles, think of sine waves

4.       Givenness of Object- Signitive: Imagining a constant ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, Imaginative: Recalling the symbol which brings up the immanent content of 3.14, Intuitive: Writing pi as a fraction on paper and look at it

C.      Discovery/Creation of Unfamiliar Real/Ideal Object

1.       Ideal Object- Writing a Philosophy Paper, synthesis of original and unoriginal ideas

2.       Ideal Content-

a.       Quality- There is an intention of writing it, how you feel about writing it

b.      Matter- Responsibility, assignment, essay, philosophy essay

3.       Immanent Content- Imagine ourselves typing it, thinking of concepts that you intend to include, thinking of a philosopher,

4.       Givenness of Object- Signitive: Thinking of the ideas you want to write about, Imaginative: Recalling of the original and unoriginal ideas in order to write about them , Intuitive: Reading the finished paper