Totalitarianism - Revision Notes

Totalitarianism is all about control. HANNAH ARENDT argued that the 20^th century totalitarian regimes were completely different from anything that had come before.

Everything is in the state, the state controls everything and there is nothing outside of it. The aim is to completely strip away peoples individuality and undermine their humanity. Two methods to destroying individuality:
1) State Terror – Destroys their ability to act against the government
2) Ideology – Eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience

Ideology is a type of specialist knowledge and is also used as justification for the authority of rulers. It is a way to avoid responsibility and gives people “total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future”. Ideology frees you of common sense and reality. The breakdown of a stable human world breaks the institutional and psychological barriers that normally set limit to what is possible, e.g. concentration camps. For Arendt when the Nazi’s denied the Jews citizenship it removed their humanity. Totalitarianism highlights the fragility of civilisation. If you control language you control thought.

Totalitarianism is so different from what has come before; it develops an entirely new political institution and destroys all political, legal and cultural traditions of the county. It transforms the classes into masses and destroys individuality. Because it’s so different from what has come before it’s difficult to predict their course of action.  

Some try to compare totalitarianism to tyranny, but the difference is that tyranny has no law, whereas totalitarianism believes in higher law. Totalitarianism defies all positive law (common, cultural law). Nazi Germany followed the law of nature, using biology as the basis of their laws. The race struggle and segregation of the Jews was based on DARWIN’S idea that man is a product of natural development. Whereas Stalin’s Communist Russia was based on MARX’S teleological view of history, that history is working towards something.

You do not have to be inherently evil to do evil things, Arendt calls this the banality of evil. An example of this is the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was a Nazi fugitive who stood on trial in Jerusalem. He provided transport for Jews across Europe to concentration camps. His defence was that he was just doing his job and he didn’t directly kill any Jews. Arendt takes an existentialist view to this in that he had a choice to make and as far as SARTRE is concerned, by not making a choice he is living in “bad faith”. Eichmann was just doing his duty and following the categorical imperative of KANT. But you can’t just sit back and be passive in your own life, you have to be accounted for, you have to choose.

Existentialism - Revision Notes

There is no point to anything. There is no right or wrong, no moral compass, it is all about choice. Choice is crucial to the existentialist point of view. It is the brave decision to do something even though it is utterly pointless. Existentialism is the agent for political change.

NIETZSCHE-
“God is dead and we have killed him” – this marks the end of certainty.
We are faced with a crisis and need something else to sustain us. Nietzsche thinks this crisis is a good thing because it means complete freedom!
It gives us the freedom to find value for ourselves as there is no hierarchy to tell us what is right or wrong. 

Our ships can at last be put out to sea in the face of every danger.
Human nature is not universal; people’s natures are different so they have different moralities. The Ubermensch overcomes what has so far defined us. The Ubermensch carves his own place in the world according to his will. The Ubermensch will define himself and ignore the rules.

HEIDEGGER-
Claims he isn’t an existentialist but is regarded as the father of existentialism.
Interested in what it means to exist and the problems of human life. What is being? He responds to this with “Dasein” (Being in the world).
Mainly attacks DESCARTES and his Cartesian dualism (mind and body). Heidegger thinks this is nonsense. How would these two things interact if my mind is one thing and my body another? How would I control my body and interact with the world?
Instead of consciousness, Heidegger simply talks about Dasein. This is our interaction with the world,  it denotes a certain amount of engagement. For Dasein to exist it must exist in the world, there is no Dasein without the world.
All we are is our interaction with the world, and we are defined by our choices. If you make and face your decisions then you are living an authentic life. If you follow social constructs then you are living an unauthentic life, you are a slave. You should not be defined by your facticity (your past).
We are thrown into the world, it is nothing but blind luck. There is no reason to it. You can re-create yourself, for existentialism your potential is just as important as where you are now.

SARTRE-
Existence precedes essence. We create our own purpose.
There is no guiding spirit, no teleological driving force, stuff just happens, good and bad, without reason. Heidegger’s existentialism is right wing and Sartre’s is much more left.
The life of a person is not determined in advance. The only thing I cannot escape  is my right to choose. This is frightening so people try to avoid this which is “bad faith”. We are not defined, we define ourselves.
A table is a table because it has an essence, human beings have no essence, there is no one way it has to be, as it is possible for us to change or reflect on our behaviour.

Existentialism is the reaction to the realisation there is no reason to anything.

Existentialism and Phenomenology Revision Notes

KANT-
Existence precedes essence. Consciousness is not proof of existence. Consciousness just is, it doesn’t cause anything and isn’t caused by anything.  You cannot stand outside of consciousness. This is the rejections of DESCARTES’ Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I am), consciousness is not individual, there is no “I”, so Descartes theory makes no sense.

HUSSERL-
Consciousness comes in 2 kinds:
1)Physical (colours + smells)
2)Mental ( thoughts with content)
At first tried to link maths with psychology, but this didn’t work and received a lot of criticism. E.g. FREGE criticised it stating maths is a public concept but mental events are private so maths can’t be based within the mind.
Logic cannot be derived from psychology; psychology is the home of philosophy. Science and Logic require factual enquiry.
Mental Phenomena have Intentionality; thoughts are directed to objects. Content and processor are both essential for thought. “I think of a cat” the cat is the content and I am the processor.

Husserl then took this further to draw a distinction between psychology and epistemology through a practice called “phenomenology”.
Phenomenology= To study consciousness in a purely logical way, no metaphysics.
Whether you’re thinking about a real thing or a fantasy it doesn’t matter as your intentionality is the same.
We can only speculate about the external world.
Imminent perception= immediate acquaintance with my own thoughts (basis of phenomenology)
Transcendent perception= perception of my past thoughts and other people’s minds.

Only consciousness has absolute being, everything else depends on consciousness for their existence.

HEIDEGGER-
Phenomenology is too half hearted. The terms used to describe it e.g. “content” weren’t found in consciousness but were just taken from earlier philosophy. Heidegger wanted to re-invent the philosophical vocabulary so we could discuss the term “being” without worrying about what it used to mean in previous philosophical examples.

Dasein = Being in the world.
Thinking is only one way of engaging with the world, acting on it is just as important. Dasein is not about thinking, it is about caring and is purely instinctive. It is relative to the person ad can be entirely ungrounded or even dependant on mood. It involves complete absorption within a task. Dasein is the unfolding of a life, your potential is just as important as your achievements.
Reflection on past= guilt
Reflection on future = dread
Only when you completely care and are absorbed by the task at hand do you have Dasein.
“Authenticity relies on complete absorption within a task”. You should aim towards the “authentic life”

Through his use of Dasein he became the father of existentialism.
Existentialism= we are not just members of a species bound by universal law, we are what we take ourselves to be.
This can be scary and can result in unthinking conformity, but to do so is a betrayal of your Dasein.
Existence is boredom, “the problem of being”. The opposite of boredom is Dasein. Within infinite time there would be infinite boredom.

It is all about choice.

SATRE-
Also thought that Husserl had not taken phenomenology far enough. Husserl had accepted the Cartesian Ego, but Satre says there is no thing.  The “self” belongs to the transcendent world, when I do something I do not think of myself, it’s only upon reflection that I become the object.

Being underlies all the different things we encounter in consciousness – we sort things in order of what interests us and what will be of use to us.
We are the only beings for which our being comes before our essence. E.g. an oak tree has a life plan and cannot deviate from this plan, it has no choice. But we do have this choice, it’s up to you what kind of person you want to be. Human life is not pre-determined, but this choice can be scary! So we try to hide from it by trying to adopt some pre-determined role given to use by society or religion. But Satre says that doing this is bad faith! You must embrace the freedom.

New Journalism

The Penny Papers marked the very beginning of American journalism. They were usually funded by politicians and businesses so this brought up suspicions regarding their neutrality. During the mid-nineteenth century objectivity became more of a factor. The associated press need objectivity to be profitable.

The first “new journalism” was the Yellow Press in the late nineteenth century. There was a big rival between the New York Journal and the New York World. The press used “sensationalism”  - huge emotive headlines with big striking pictures, not too dissimilar from The Sun on Sunday. They focused on exclusive, dramatic, romantic stories to really attract their audience and draw them in. Many referred to Yellow Journalism as New Journalism without a soul. All the stories were about sin, sex and violence.

The 1960s was a very turbulent time, the great hope of JFK was destroyed with his assassination in 1963. There was also the disastrous war in Vietnam and there was a lot of controversy surrounding the draft, Muhammad Ali refused to be conscripted. The baby boom also had a big effect. It created a powerful youth culture as the baby boomers hit their teens in the 1960s. It was a big period of revolution; the sexual revolution with  the pill becoming available, civil rights, and black power. LSD was introduced by the CIA and was used to access the altered thinking of the counter culture. Universities became the centre of radical politics. Music was central to the culture, it was a full frontal attack on the norms. It was drug fuelled and anti-establishment, protest songs were very popular.

The ideas of the time were informed by existentialism. Heidegger’s “authenticity” and Sartre’s “bad faith”. The key ideas are freedom and choice. For example Fanons view of a path to freedom via accelerated choice (i.e. violence). For Fanon, the act of violence is essentially an extreme expression of choice. It is choice with a real immediate impact. There is a real anti-establishment feeling, “there is a policeman inside your head, he must be destroyed”. This idea seeped into journalism. Journalists began to question whether basing stories on press releases and press conferences was really objective. Journalists began to focus on plots, quotes, settings, feelings and images, whilst still being extremely thorough with their facts. This alternative journalism was personal and expressed an individual point of view. 

Totalitarianism

How can good people do evil things?

Totalitarianism is all about control. Hannah Arendt argued that the 20^th century totalitarian regimes were utterly different from anything that had come before. “Everything we know of totalitarianism demonstrates a horrible originality”. Everything is in the state, the state controls everything and there is nothing outside of it. The aim is to completely strip away any individuality, you are all one thing. Arendt saw imperialism as a predecessor to totalitarianism because it contained so many traits that new regimes could use. One trait of imperialism was racism, undermining their individuality to undermine their humanity. The concentration camps used by the British were the model that the Nazis used.

You destroy people’s individuality as it makes them hard to control. There are two methods to destroying peoples individuality:
1) State Terror- destroys their ability to act against the government.
2) Ideology – Eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience.

Ideology is also a type of specialist knowledge and is also used a justification for the authority of rulers. It is a way to avoid responsibility and gives people “the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future”. Ideology frees you of common sense and reality. The breakdown of the stable human world means the loss of the institutional and psychological barriers that normally set a limit to what is possible.

For Arendt the first move the Nazis made on the road to the “Final Solution” was to deny Jews citizenship. Remove their rights, you remove their humanity. Nazis saw Jews as a rival master race, a model to be emulated and over taken.

Totalitarianism highlights the fragility of civilisation and how quickly groups and people can fall through the cracks, even in the heart of Europe. To be civilised human beings we need laws, freedom, rights and shared experience.

If you control language you can control thought. Thought takes place in purely linguistic terms and mind control is possible through the manipulation of language, e.g. George Orwell 1984 “newspeak”. This is demonstrated in modern day through the implementation of “PC” language which prevents negative connotations.

What is your responsibility in a totalitarian regime? Would you collaborate? An example of this is the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was a Nazi fugitive who stood on trial in Jerusalem. His main responsibility during the Holocaust was to organise the transport for millions of Jews across Europe to concentration camps. For Arendt it was a shock to see Eichmann as he was proud to be a law-abiding citizen. This just highlights the point that you don’t have to be an evil person to do evil things, Arendt called this the “banality of evil”. Arendt believed that Eichmann’s greatest crime was not thinking. She holds the existentialist view that he had a choice to make and he didn’t make it, as far is Sartre is concerned Eichmann was acting in bad faith by not choosing. Eichmann was just doing his duty and following the categorical imperative of Kant; he was just following the rules. If everyone else is doing it that’s no excuse, you have to choose, you have to think. You cannot giveaway your responsibility by following the law. Sometimes disobedience is our responsibility.

Existentialism

There is no point to anything, there is no right or wrong, there is no moral compass. It is all about choice. Choice is crucial to the existentialist point of view, you use your own internal morality to make choices. The brave decision to choose to do something even though it is ultimately pointless.

Nietzsche – “God is dead” this marks the end of certainty. We are faced with a crisis and we need something else to sustain us. Nietzsche thinks this crisis is fantastic because it means complete freedom. It gives us the freedom to find value for ourselves as there is no hierarchy to tell us what is right and wrong. “Our ships can at last put out to sea in the face of every danger”. Human nature is not universal; people’s natures are different so we all have different moralities. The Ubermensch over comes what has so far defined us. The Ubermensch will define himself and ignore the rules.  

Heidegger - Claimed he wasn’t an existentialist. His book, “Being and Time”, is all about human existence. Heidegger is interested in what it means to exist and consequently, the problems of human life. What is it to exist? What even is this “exist”? Heidegger mainly attacks Descartes and his Cartesian-Dualism (mind and body). Heidegger thinks this is nonsense, how do these two things interact? If my mind is one thing, and my body is another, how do I control my body and interact with the world? In place of consciousness and subjectivity, Heidegger simply talks about Dasein. Dasein=being in the world. It is not a spatial relationship, Dasein is our interaction in the world, it denotes a certain amount of engagement. For Dasein to exist it must exist in the world, there is no Dasein without the world. All we are is our interaction with the world, and we are defined by our choices. If you make and face your decisions then you are living an authentic life. If you follow social constructs then you are living and unauthentic life, you are a slave. You should not be defined by your facticity (your past e.g. your upbringing). We are thrown into the world, it’s nothing but blind luck. There is no reason to it. Transcendence is your reaction to your facticity, you can re-create yourself, it is your potential.

Sartre- Existence precedes essence, we create our own purpose. Simone De Beauvoir “one is not born a woman, but one becomes one”. There is no guiding spirit, no teleological driving force, stuff just happens, good and bad, without reason. Life is in its own way absurd and ridiculous. Heidegger’s existentialism is right wing, and Sartre's is much more left wing. The life of a person is not determined in advance. The only thing I cannot escape is the need to choose. This is frightening and people will try to avoid this freedom which is “bad faith”. We are not defined, we define ourselves.

Existentialism is the reaction to the realisation that there is no reason to anything.  

Phenomenology and Existentialism - Seminar Paper

Kant first marks the departure from Descartes’ metaphysical philosophy by stating that “existence is not a predicate of consciousness”, it is a pre-condition of consciousness. Consciousness is not a proof of existence, consciousness just “is”, it doesn’t cause anything and isn’t caused by anything. To ask “how does consciousness arise?” is a stupid question, how could there not be consciousness? You cannot stand outside of consciousness. Consciousness is not individual, there is no “I” as in “I think therefore I am”, Descartes’ transcendent ego no longer works as a theory.

Like Freud, Husserl was Jewish, and he also attended lectures in Vienna. He too fell subject to Nazi anti-Semitism having his books burnt by German troops in 1939.
Husserl was greatly influenced by Franz Brentano who tried to relate Aristotelian philosophy of mind to modern experiment. Brentano’s publication: “psychology from an empirical standpoint” stated that the data of consciousness comes in two kinds: physical (colours and smells) and mental phenomena (thoughts which have content or are about an imminent object).

Husserl focused his philosophical approach on mathematics and his first publication was the “philosophy of arithmetic”. Here he tried to explain that our numerical concepts were originated in mental acts. However, because of his desire to connect mathematics and psychology, he ended up drawing some undesirable conclusions, such as denying that one and zero were numbers. Frege criticised this publication stating that the mental events that are private to the individual could not be the foundation of mathematics as that is public and is the same for everyone. After much criticism, Husserl abandoned this idea.

The beginning of the twentieth century marked the start of continental traditions and saw many philosophers making the distinction between logic and psychology. Husserl was no different. In his publication “logical investigations” he argued that logic cannot be derived from psychology, and that psychology is philosophy’s rightful home. Sciences and logic require factual enquiry. However Husserl took his theories further by stating that what is characteristic of mental phenomena is that they are directed to objects. “I think OF you” “I worry ABOUT my degree” the words “of” and “about” indicate intentionality. There are two things that are essential for thought: that it has content and a possessor. For example “I think of a cat”. The cat is the content and I am the possessor. So when talking about mental phenomena the three big things are the content, the possessor, and its intentionality. Many other people may also think of a cat which Husserl explained by saying that these other mental acts belong to the same species. The concept (a cat) is just the species to which all of these acts belong.

After drawing a distinction between psychology and logic, Husserl proceeded to go further and draw a distinction between psychology and epistemology, doing so through the new discipline of “phenomenology”. Phenomenology was developed in the beginning of the twentieth century by Husserl and a group of philosophers at Munich, who coined the phrase “phenomenological movement”. The aim of phenomenology is the study of immediate items of consciousness, without referring to what that consciousness might tell us about the extra-mental world. So basically its aim is to study consciousness as a thing in itself, in a purely logical way, and to avoid any metaphysical ideas. For Husserl it makes no difference whether the concept you have is of a real thing or a hallucination because the intentionality of you thought (e.g. the OF or the ABOUT) is exactly the same regardless of whether it’s about a cat or a unicorn. Husserl gave the example that “I think of Jupiter as I think of Bismarck”, Husserl may never have seen Jupiter but that doesn’t mean he can’t have the concept of it, as his intentionality is the same.

 In his publication Husserl left open the possibility that there may be realities of non-phenomenal objects, but such objects are to be no concern of the philosopher.  He states that this is because we can only speculate about the external world. Husserl makes the distinction between imminent perception and transcendent perception. Imminent perception is my immediate acquaintance with my own mental thoughts and is the basis of phenomenology. Transcendent perception is my perception of my own past actions and mental states, and of the contents of other people’s minds. Imminent perception is self-evident whereas transcendent perception is fallible as it leaves room for interpretation and error. Husserl stated that only consciousness has “absolute being”, all other forms of being depend on consciousness for their existence. He uses the same concept to describe phenomenology in that phenomenology is the most basic of all disciplines because its subject matter provides the basis for all other philosophy and science.

Heidegger was one of Husserl’s pupils and he claimed that up to this point phenomenology had been too half hearted. Phenomenology was supposed to examine the data of consciousness, but the terms used to describe it, such as “act” and “content”, had not been discovered in consciousness, but instead were just taken from earlier philosophy.

Heidegger maintained that the concept of “being” was the first task of phenomenology. We must understand “being” before we can consider the relationship between consciousness and reality. Heidegger argued that we must go back to the theories of the pre-Socratic philosophers to talk about “being” as they pre-date the formal philosophical vocabulary and all of the presuppositions which they carry with them. Heidegger set himself the task to re-invent the philosophical vocabulary, so we could discuss “being” without the complications of what the words used mean in other philosophical examples.

The main term in Heidegger’s vocabulary that you need to remember is “Dasein” which is essentially “being in the world”. Thinking is only one way of engaging with the world, acting upon it is just as important. For example a carpenter relates to the world through the use of his hammer and this is his true engagement with reality.  The concept of Dasein goes against the work of other philosophers, such as Descartes, who try to prove the existence of an external world. For Heidegger we are not separate beings detached from the world, trying to understand it through experiences, we are ourselves elements of the world. We are beings amongst other beings.

Dasein is not about thinking, it is about caring and it is purely instinctive. Only if you care about the world will you then be able to ask questions and give knowledgeable answers. Dasein is relative to the person and can be entirely ungrounded, or can even be affected by things such as mood or emotion. Dasein is the unfolding of a life, you are not stuck to one thing, you can be something you have never been before, and your potential is just as important as your achievements. What you are aiming for in life has the ability to determine the significance of where you are now. Reflection on the past can produce guilt and reflection on the future can produce dread, it is only when you are caring about the task in hand that you have Dasein. Freedom and authenticity lies in the complete absorption within a task. To live the “authentic life” would be somewhere along the lines of living a self-sustained, simple life in the woods. Whatever your achievements or potentialities were they all terminate in death, death does not complete them.

Through his interpretation of Dasein, Heidegger became the father of “existentialism”. This is the philosophy that we are not just members of a species bound by universal laws, we are what we take ourselves to be. The idea of such freedom can be alarming and result in unthinking conformity, but to do so is a betrayal of your Dasein. To make your own life you must acknowledge that there is no greater meaning for the choices you make and that no choice you make will bring a transcendent meaning to your life.

Sartre was a pupil of Heidegger for a brief period of time and he too developed a form of existentialism. Like Heidegger, Sartre also argued that Husserl had not taken phenomenology far enough. Husserl had accepted the Cartesian ego of the thinking subject, but in fact there is no such thing. When I am absorbed in what I am thinking or doing I have not thought of myself, it’s only upon reflection that we make ourselves the object. So to be thorough phenomenologists we must say that the “self” belongs to the transcendent world.
Sartre attacked the theories of Hume that the only difference between perception and imagination are that in perception the images are more vivid than they are in imagination. Sartre maintained that imagination relates us to extra mental objects not to internal images. For example when we imagine a real person who is not actually there we are creating an object in the world. For Sartre our emotions are not passive, they are not an impartial awareness of our environment. For example when we are depressed we change our perception of the world to make all interactions with it appear pointless.

After the war Sartre moved onto more existentialist philosophy in his publication “Being and Nothingness”. For Sartre, being underlies all the different things we encounter in consciousness. We sort things in accordance with what interests us and what will be of use to us. Sartre argues that we are the only beings for whom our existence comes before our essence. For example an oak tree has to follow a particular life pattern, it has no choice, however man does not belong to a structure in the same kind of way. It is up to you to decide what kind of thing you want to be. The life of a human individual is not determined in advance by a creator or moral laws. Human freedom is absolute but it is also alarming having the responsibility of ultimate choice. We try to hide this freedom from ourselves by trying to adopt some predetermined role given to us by society or religion, but we ultimately fail at doing so and are left in a condition that Sartre calls “bad faith”. The alternative is to embrace and accept our freedom and all of the responsibilities which come with it. Other than the obvious physical constraints to what you can achieve, it is you that must make your decisions entirely on your own.