Course PHIL-1003C

Phenomenology and Existentialism

Outline

Dr. Sindhu Poudyal

 Phenomenology

• There are several approaches to understand

phenomenology
• First, Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience.
For phenomenology the ultimate source of all meaning
and value is the lived experience of human beings. All
philosophical systems, scientific theories, or aesthetic
judgments have the status of abstractions from the ebb
and flow of the lived world.
• Secondly, phenomenology as method focuses on studying the
phenomena that have impacted an individual. This approach
highlights the specifics and identifies a phenomenon as perceived
by an individual in a situation. It can also be used to study the
commonality in the behaviors of a group of people.
• Thirdly, phenomenology as a philosophical movement originating
in the 20th century, the primary objective of which is the direct
investigation and description of phenomena as consciously
experienced, without theories about their causal explanation and as
free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and
presuppositions
• Hence, Phenomenology is an approach to qualitative inquiry that is
grounded in certain traditions of philosophy and the humanities, and
that aims to reflect on pre-reflective human experience. The
phenomenological researcher attempts to recapture and express in
language experiential meanings as lived through, before we
conceptualize, abstract, or explain them.
 Types of Phenomenology
• Existential phenomenology—focuses on understanding
the audience’s experiences through their perspective.
• Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Merleau Ponty, Jean-Paul
Sartre
• Hermeneutic phenomenology—focuses on creating
meaning from experiences through the audience’s
perspective.
• Example Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology
• Transcendental phenomenology—focuses on how the
phenomenon appears in one consciousness on a broader,
scientific scale.
• Example - Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology
 Types of phenomenology and key thinkers
associated with
• Transcendental phenomenology is built on the philosophical
work of Husserl (1931) and applied specifically as a
qualitative approach by Moustakas (1994).
• It is descriptive and focuses on how experiences are structured
and organized. This approach “analyzes the essences
perceived by consciousness with regard to individual
experiences”
2. Hermeneutic phenomenology, based on the work of Heidegger
(1972) is defined as research centered on personal experiences
and requiring interpretations or descriptions of the meanings
and significance of phenomena which participants experience.
This approach requires a historical analysis of the phenomenon
and its effects on participants.

• Phenomenology hence is a versatile qualitative approach. It

can be employed to explore a single concept or to analyze that
concept as it is experienced by a group of people.
Phenomenology can assist in discovery of new facets of
experiences and phenomena that are so common as to be
considered mundane.
Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology
• Husserl’s phenomenology can be understood in relation to
phenomenological method to make possible “a descriptive account
of the essential structures of the directly given.”

• Phenomenology of Husserl hence, emphasizes the immediacy of

experience, the attempt to isolate it and set it off from all
assumptions of existence or causal influence and lay bare its
essential features.

• Husserl argued that phenomenology was the study of the very

nature of what it is to think, "the science of the essence of
consciousness" itself. Husserl's arguments ignited a heated debate
regarding the nature of consciousness and experience that has
endured throughout the twentieth and continues in the present day.
• Husserl believed that truth-in-itself has as ontological correlate being-
in-itself, just as meaning categories have formal-ontological
categories as correlates. Logic is a formal theory of judgment, that
studies the formal a priori relations among judgments using meaning
categories.
• Husserl famously defined consciousness in terms of 'intentionality,'
but he also emphasized that intentional experience has certain non-
intentional components, such as 'sensation’. In his view, we are not
intentionally directed to sensation, but rather we live it throug
• Transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, is a philosophical
approach to qualitative research methodology seeking to understand
human experience.
• Pure Transcendental Phenomenology according to Husserl is
grounded in the concept and conditioned upon setting aside all
preconceived ideas (epoché) to see phenomena through unclouded
glasses, thereby allowing the true meaning of phenomena to naturally
emerge with and within their own identity.
 Phenomenological Method
- Reduction (Epoché)
• Bracketing is the negative aspect/or element in grasping the
essence.
• It is the radical and universal elimination of any aspect of factual
existence. The factual or the existentia1 is kept in parenthesis or in
bracket.
• Things under consideration may have existence, but it has no
significance whatsoever with regard to the essence of things.
Besides the elimination of ‘existence’, to describe the phenomena
correctly, the phenomenologist too must be free from all cultural
and philosophical bias.
• It requires an ascetic neutrality in one’s attitude to the phenomenon
of one’s awareness.
• Phenomenology deals with the insight into the essences, without regard
to the empirical conditions of their perceptibility, nor even their
existence.
• It is not a question of making it appear in its factual reality or in its
existence, but in its intentional presence as transcendent to
consciousness.
• There is a similarity between Husserl’s epoché and Descartes’
methodological doubt.
• Descartes doubted everything; only the ego indubitably exists.
• In Husserl the world is not doubted, but the judgements about it are
suspended.
• The epoche demands that the philosopher takes a distance from the
various solutions, which in the course of history have been proposed for
different philosophical problems.
• It aims at eliminating the factuality, the root of all ‘contingency’. Thus,
during the ‘phenomenological period’ Husserl developed the
phenomenological method, and succeeded in reaching a reconciliation
between the subjective and the objective.
 Martin Heidegger’s Phenomenology and
Existentialism
• Phenomenology for Heidegger is a Philosophical analysis of the
nature and qualities of immediate experience, and analysis of objects
solely as we are immediately conscious of them-- not in relation to any
possible scientific understanding of them.

• Martin Heidegger's radical break with traditional philosophical

assumptions and language, and the novel themes and problems treated
in his work, reinvigorated phenomenology and existentialism and
contributed to new movements such as philosophical hermeneutics and
postmodernism.
• Heidegger's philosophical analytic focused on the human being's
existence in their world as an individual and within their social context.
From this standpoint, both world and being are viewed as inseparable
and hence its both phenomenological (subjective analysis )and
existential 9about the being in the world).
Existentialism overall is the idea that human existence is a peculiar kind
of existence “in and for itself.”
Existing things in general are determined by their own essences, by other
things, and by conditions imposed by nature and history meaning -
“Essence precedes existence.”
Human existence is open and undetermined. The essence of a human being
is shaped by the decisions and commitments made in an individual life
meaning - “Existence precedes essence.”
Heidegger’s existential spirit explores philosophy as an approach to
totalize “what is”, considering it in itself, independent of our existence. He
even sees Science more so reason represents the culmination of this
attempt, the “total submission” to “what is” as an object of neutral
contemplation by a disembodied “I”.
But the real questions of metaphysics according to Heidegger arise
precisely when we consider ourselves in relation to this “what is,” because
metaphysics must seek to “transcend” this given totality where science is
concerned with all of “what is,” and “Nothing else.”
 Fundamental Ontology
• Fundamental ontology of being of Heidegger is about that being Da-
sein who is conscious of its own being.
• Da-sein meaning ‘Being-there’, ‘being-in-the-world’, existing in
connection with things in the world instead of “being” a detached
observer.
• Metaphysical “angst” the dread that comes from sensing that, beyond
the totality of “what-is,” there is Nothing.
• “Resoluteness” is the response of an authentic character to the angst
about Nothing and the emptiness of Death.
• “Care” (Sorge) is sense of connection and responsibility instead of
mere objective observation of things
• “Community” is the group of people within which the individual
finds an identity and a common destiny. – Very essential in
understanding the socio-cultural meaning of being.
• For Heidegger, the human subject had to be reconceived in an
altogether new way, as “being-in-the-world.” Because this notion
represented the very opposite of the Cartesian “thing that
thinks,” the idea of consciousness as representing the mind's
internal awareness of its own states had to be dropped.

• Being-in -the -world means the idea of Da-sein or “being-there”,

which simply means existence, it is the experience of the human
being. The world is full of beings, but human beings are the only
ones who care about what it means to be themselves.

• Being-in-the-world is by its very nature oriented toward meaning

and growth; while it characterizes the type of being of all
humans, it is also unique for every person and can be seen to be
offering an explanation of what in other psychological traditions
might be called identity or self.
• Heidegger holds- every man is born as many men and
dies as a single one. If I take death into my life,
acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself
from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and
only then will I be free to become myself.

• Hence in his project of fundamental ontology -

Heidegger put forth a broad array of key tenets within
his phenomenological philosophy. These tenets
include the concept of being, being in the world,
encounters with entities in the world, being with,
temporality, spatiality, and the care structure.
 Ontic and Ontological
• The adjective ontological is associated with being – i.e., what
it is for a given entity or class of entities to be – in distinction
to the adjective. In other words, Heidegger uses ontological in
relation to that being for whom his own being is an issue.
• Ontic, on the other hand applies to entities as such, i.e., their
properties, their various arrangements and behaviors, whatever
can be known empirically about them.
• According to Heidegger, The ontical distinction of Dasein lies
in the fact that it is ontological” (Being and Time, 12). The
ontological refers to the Being of a particular being, while the
ontic refers to what a particular being (for example, Dasein)
can or does do in his everydayness.
• That is to say, ontically and “existentielly” you may be engaged in
reading this, but this is because ontologically and “existentially” you
are always already in a world where you have a set of involvements.
The point for Heidegger, though, is to think the difference between
the two in order to understand at the same time that you are always
both—your “care” always is filled in with “ontic” concerns.

Heidegger on the notion of Time:

Temporality gets experienced in a phenomenally primordial way in
Dasein’s authentic Being-a-whole, in the phenomenon of
anticipatory resoluteness. If temporality makes itself known
primordially in this, then we may suppose that the temporality of
anticipatory resoluteness is a distinctive mode of temporality.
(Being and Time, 1927)
 Heidegger on Technology
-Enframing and Critique of technology

• “The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more
technology threatens to slip from human control” (289).
• For Heidegger, the essence of technology is not something neutral,
as the technical trends claim, but rather the issue is related to use.
• Heidegger names these things revealed in modern technology as
“standing in reserve.” Things as standing in reserve are not
“objects”. Objects, on the one hand, are things that “stand against
us” as things with autonomy
• For Heidegger, the only way for us to understand the danger of
modern technology, and safeguard ourselves against it, was to go
beyond the “correct” definition of technology as a means to an end,
and come to think of it instead as what it truly is in essence: a mode
of being in the world.
• Heidegger’s analysis of technology in The Question Concerning
Technology consists of three main ‘claims’:
– Technology is “not an instrument”, it is a way of understanding the
world;
– Secondly, technology is “not a human activity”, but develops beyond
human control; and
– Thirdly, technology is “the highest danger”, risking us to only see the
world through technological thinking.
• According to Heidegger, modern technology too is a means to an
end. That is why the instrumental conception of technology
conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to
technology.
• He holds, everything depends on our manipulating technology in the
proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, “get” technology
“spiritually in hand.” We will master it.
• The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more
technology threatens to slip from human control and this is the
bigger challenge according to Heidegger.
• Heidegger holds –

• In contemporary society, technology shapes our

perception and understanding of the world. It refers to
the way that technology frames our experience, often
reducing everything to a resource to be used and
controlled. He calls such approach as ‘enframing’
• Enframing is the manner in which Being manifests itself
in the age of technology, which allows human being to
reveal reality as standing reserve (Bestand). In this
sense, technology is totalizing.
• For example, steel is produced to be used in such things
as the production of automobiles, and, although steel is
not the automobile, it is, nevertheless, affected by the
“coming into being” of the automobile.
 Emmanuel Levinas
• Levinas phenomenological interpretation deals with
phenomenology of lived experience with the human other.
• He theorizes that ethics starts with philosophy, and in that
philosophy is not only the love of wisdom, but also the wisdom
of love. Levinas discusses God not as a theological being but as
an ontological phenomenon beyond time and space which binds
us in the human experience.
• Levinas's central thesis is - "ethics as first philosophy“, which
means that the traditional philosophical pursuit of knowledge is
secondary to a basic ethical duty to the other.
• Hence to meet the Other it is essential to to have the idea of
Infinity. As human other is nothing but the trace of the infinite.
• For Lévinas, "Ethics is the first philosophy." Lévinas argues
that the encounter of the Other through the face reveals a
certain poverty which forbids a reduction to Sameness and,
simultaneously, installs a responsibility for the Other in the
Self.
• Levinas’ the idea of infinity is not a representation of infinity.
For he holds, infinity overflows the idea of infinity.
• The idea of infinity is an overflowing of finite thought by
infinite content. Infinity is produced by the overflowing of the
intellect.
• Levinas' theory of responsibility is an ontological or
fundamental ethics in that it asserts how things are rather than
how they should be. The most positive aspect of the theory is
the conception of subjectivity that emerges from this critique
and the argument for the possibility of transcendence it entails.
• The trace represnt to the Transcendent Being is embedded through the
face of the Other because Infinity and Transcendence can be
experienced only through the spiritual fraternity of human beings.

• Lévinas holds that the primacy of ethics over ontology is justified by

the “face of the Other.” The “alterity,” or otherness, of the Other, as
signified by the “face,” is something that one acknowledges before
using reason to form judgments or beliefs about him.

• It means that, ethically, people are responsible to one-another in the

face-to-face encounter. Specifically, Lévinas says that the human face
"orders and ordains" us.

• Levinas wanted us to look the Other in the face. In doing so, we look
upon the face of someone completely different from us. We also start to
recognise our ethical responsibility toward them, which is a really
simply one: don't kill them.
• Levinas holds, the idea of totality seeks to integrate the other and
the same into a totality, but the idea of infinity maintains the
separation between the other and the same. According to
Levinas, the idea of totality is theoretical, but the idea of infinity
is moral.
• Levinas argues that the phenomenological subject is foremost an
enjoying being, one whose enjoyment and therefore freedom of
an individual depends on an uncertain world, which can only be
overcome through the home, labor, and representation.
• Levinas’ critiques of existential and at times transcendental too
phenomenology, which he sees as mistakenly beginning with
radical freedom of Sartre when Sartre says – ‘all human beings
are condemned to be free’, reducing life and its enjoyment to
bare existence, and mistakenly assuming the priority of
representation in Husserl or labor in Heidegger.
 Levinas’ reaction to atrocity of the
twentieth century
• Emmanuel Levinas is one of the most significant
philosophers of the late twentieth century.
• Focusing on Levinas' central principle that human
existence is ethically grounded in our face-to-face
relationships one can have the religious, cultural and
political implications of this insight for modern Western
culture.
• It is not without importance to know—and this is perhaps
the European experience of the twentieth century—
whether the egalitarian and just State [and its politics] in
which the European is fulfilled … proceeds from a war of
all against all—or from the irreducible responsibility of
the one for the other.
• There are three contexts to the problem
• First is the problems about the authority of ethics and normatively faced by other
recent philosophers from the Anglo-American as well as the Continental traditions
• Secondly, Levinas’ two corpora, consisting of philosophical and Jewish writings;
and
• Thirdly, the atrocities of the twentieth century.
• The result is as helpful to newcomers as it is illuminating to those who are already
familiar with Levinas' challenging philosophy.' Paul Franks, University of Toronto
'Situating Levinas’ thought within twentieth-century debates on the sources of
normativity, The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas argues for the
originality of Levinas's position as an account of ordinary life and what it is to live
that life meaningfully and morally.
• Michael Morgan makes Levinas’ writings approachable without sacrificing their
philosophical complexity or the depth of the ethical experience they attempt to
convey. His book sharpens the terms of debate over Levinas‘ ethics, brings new and
important voices into the conversation, and challenges readers to move beyond
standard interpretations.
• More than a simple introduction, this book is a deftly guided tour of the thorniest
issues confronting those who seek to understand Levinas and his work. Morgan has
brought us a book destined to change how we read Levinas today.' Diane Perpich,
Clemson University.
• Against any other theories of the origins of culture, Levinas asserts
that the ethical demand, the possible substitution of myself for
another, in other words, that self-sacrifice or being-for-the-other is
the foundation of culture.
• For Levinas, what's essential about human beings—beyond our
rational and practical capacities—is the fact that we find ourselves
infinitely responsible in the face of the “Other.”
• The root of ethics is to be found in the immediate face-to-face
encounter with those to whom we find ourselves responsible, prior
to any other essence, articulation, language and logic.
• Alterity, or the otherness of the other, is a phenomenological term
introduced by philosopher and ethicist Emmanuel Levinas. Alterity
refers to both the quality of strangeness in the other and the fact
that the other is essentially strange.
• Saming tendency according to Levinas is totalitarian in nature and
he was against such totalitarian philosophies, culture and religion.
• Levinas holds that the primacy of ethics over ontology is justified by
the “face of the Other.” The “alterity,” or otherness, of the Other, as
signified by the “face,” is something that one acknowledges before
using reason to form judgments or beliefs about him.
• Levinas theorizes that ethics (metaphysical ethics) starts with
philosophy, and in that philosophy is not only the love of wisdom,
but also the wisdom of love. Levinas discusses God not as a
theological being but as an ontological phenomenon beyond time
and space which binds us in the human experience.
• Levinas's ethics, grounded in the originary experience of the face as
a living presence, is therefore an embodied ethics. The call of the
other—to feel responsibility for him or her—takes hold of our flesh.
• Being, Self, alterity, subjectivity, transcendence, responsibility, the
other, time and Infinity constitute the central themes in Levinas.
 Features of Existentialism
• Existentialism is a philosophical theory based on
phenomenology initiated as a method for the first
time by Husserl. This does not mean that the
existentialists merely followed Husserlian
philosophy
• Existentialist thinking is centered on existence,
which bracketed by Husserl.
• But the underling basic inspiration that guides the
type of thinking in phenomenology and
existentialism is the same. i.e finding the meaning
of the being and its essence.
• The first feature of existentialism is that it begins
philosophizing from human being, rather than from reality in
general.
• The human being that is referred to in existentialism is a
subject that exists, rather than an object that is. Formerly the
human has been submerged in the physical cosmos as just one
of the items in nature.
• The existentialist subject is not the epistemological subject—
the subject that stands apart as the knower to the known, rather
it is the ontological subject that exists. Here the term ‘to exist’
has a meaning, more comprehensive than the term ‘to be.’
• Although existentialism begins with ‘existence,’ it does not
take ‘existence’ as a notion, but as experienced by oneself.
Thus we can say that existential philosophy arose from the
existential experience of existence
• The term ‘existence’ has to be taken in the dynamic and active
sense of the ‘act of being,’ rather than the mere ‘fact of being;’
and it implies a width of meaning that includes the human as
the centre of feeling, of experience, of freedom, of actions and
thought, and thus an incarnate being-in-the-world. Such a
subject is passionately involved in the actualities of existence,
and philosophizes not merely with reason, but the whole person
with one’s feelings and emotions, with will and intellect, with
flesh and bones, philosophizes. Thus existentialism begins with
the human as existent.
• Different philosophers has had varying experience of
existence, and it is with one’s basic experience of existence that
each philosopher carries out one’s philosophizing: in Jaspers it
was an awareness of the brittleness of being, in Heidegger,
Dasein as being-towards-death, in Sartre, the experience of
existence as nauseating and superfluous, in Marcel and
Buber, the experience of the ‘I’ as necessarily related to a
‘thou’, in Levinas, the experience of the epiphany of the
other and of one’s ethical responsibility in the face of
another, etc.
• Existentialism can be described as an attempt to philosophize
from the stand point of ‘actor’ rather than of ‘spectator.’ The
attitude of Aristotle was that of a spectator, looking at the world
impersonally. Kierkegaard on the other hand philosophizes from
his own personal experience. Philosophy arises as a response to
the questions, to be met on the existential level, rather than on the
conceptual level.
• The existentialists do not stand back from the problems as an
impersonal analyst or spectator, but grapples with them as one
who is involved in them. Hence, the questions are not matters of
‘intellectual curiosity’ but of ‘vital concern.’
• Existentialism functions as a corrective to the traditional
tendency of engulfing the human in the physical cosmos. It
stands as a protest against all that threatens human’s unique
position as an ‘existent.’
• Existentialism functions as a corrective to the traditional
tendency of depersonalization and of reduction of the human in
collectivity.
• If Existentialism has been a corrective to the traditional way of
thinking, then its advent was taken as a ray of hope to the humans in
a situation of strangled thought.
• In various respects the humans have been strangled. To the
religionless human, cut off from the divine, hope is given with a
person-centred religion. To the humans who are unable to find in
themselves the answers to the problems that beset them, the message
of existentialism seems to be addressed.
Concepts discussed in existentialism:

1. Existence, Individuality, Freedom, Choice,

Creativity, Possibility
2. Finitude, Death, Guilt, Anxiety, Nothingness
3. Authenticity and Inauthenticity
4. Community, Intersubjectivity, Love, Commitment,
Faith
5. Absurdity, Homelessness, Rootlessness,
Meaninglessness
6. Depersonalization, Dehumanization, Objectification,
Functionalization
 Jean-Paul Sartre
• The philosophical career of Jean Paul Sartre primarily focuses
upon the construction of a philosophy of existence known as
existentialism.
• Sartre’s early works are characterized by a development of
classic phenomenology, but his reflection diverges from
Husserl’s on methodology, the conception of the self, and an
interest in ethics.
• The purpose of Sartre’s existential phenomenology, is to
understand human existence rather than the world as such.
Adopting and adapting the methods of phenomenology, Sartre
sets out to develop an ontological account of what it is to be
human. The main features of this ontology are the
groundlessness and radical freedom which characterize the
human condition.
• The foundation of Sartre's existentialism can be found in The
Transcendence of the Ego in which he says that the thing-in-itself is infinite
and overflowing.
• Sartre refers to any direct consciousness of the thing-in-itself as a "pre-
reflective consciousness." Any attempt to describe, understand, historicize etc.
the thing-in-itself, Sartre calls "reflective consciousness."
• There is no way for the reflective consciousness to subsume the pre-
reflective, and so reflection is fated to a form of anxiety, i.e. the human
condition.
• The reflective consciousness in all its forms, (scientific, artistic or
otherwise) can only limit the thing-in-itself by virtue of its attempt to
understand or describe it. It follows, therefore, that any attempt at self-
knowledge (self-consciousness—a reflective consciousness of an overflowing
infinite) is a construct that fails no matter how often it is attempted.
• Consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a
transcendent object.
Sartre on Condemned to be Free
• According to Sartre, the essence of man is consciousness or
nothingness.
• To fill in this emptiness, man makes free choices.
• Man is necessarily free; the only necessity of man is his
freedom. He is absolutely free: he is so free that he is not
free not to be free.
• According to Sartre, freedom is a curse, a horrible yoke, a
condemnation.
• The terrible responsibility attached to freedom fills man
with anguish. “I am responsible for everything, and I am
condemned to be so. I find myself alone with my heavy
responsibility, from which I cannot get out, nor can I throw
it onto someone else.
• Anguish is the awareness that everything is upto me.
• To evade from this responsibility of freedom man
devices ‘bad_faith’—pretending to oneself and to
others that one is bound or obliged to act in a particular
way, namely, by duty, law, or temperament.
• In bad faith, unlike in lying, truth is hidden even from
oneself.
• Even sincerity can be a form of bad faith.
• It is an impossibility to identify being and nothingness
and the source nothingness must itself be nothing.
• Sartre shows that nothingness exists, just as gap,
silence, hole, darkness, none, etc.
• Man is the oppositional unity of the in-itself and the
for-itself, body and consciousness; man is the struggle
to bridge them, which is bound to fail.
Sartre on essence precedes existence:

The conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-
knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and
a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a
definition and a formula. Thus each individual man is the realisation of a
certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding….Man possesses
a human nature; that “human nature,” which is the conception of human
being, is found in every man; which means that each man is a particular
example of a universal conception, the conception of Man.
- Existentialism is a Humanism
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no one
but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite
responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself,
with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.
- Being and Nothingness, 1943
Sartre, in Existentialism is a Humanism holds:
‘existence precedes essence’
• Existence precedes essence means - 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
because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything
until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.
• Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to
have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply
what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as
he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be
after that leap towards existence.
• Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
• Jean-Paul Sartre said "existentialism is a humanism" because it expresses
the power of human beings to make freely-willed choices, independent of
the influence of religion or society.
• Sartre’s ontology is explained in his philosophical work, Being and
Nothingness, where he defines two types of reality which lie beyond our
conscious experience: the being of the object of consciousness and that of
consciousness itself.
• The object of consciousness exists as ‘in-itself,’ that is, in an independent
and non-relational way.
• However, consciousness is always consciousness ‘of something,’ so it is
defined in relation to something else, and it is not possible to grasp it within
a conscious experience: it exists as ‘for-itself.’
• An essential feature of consciousness is its negative power, by which we
can experience ‘nothingness.’
• This power is also at work within the self, where it creates an intrinsic lack
of self-identity.
• So according to Sartre, the unity of the self is understood as a task for-itself
rather than as a given.
• Sartre maintained that the concepts of authenticity and
individuality have to be earned but not learned.
• Sartre holds, we need to experience death consciousness so as to
wake up ourselves as to what is really important; the authentic in
our lives which is life experience, not knowledge.
• Bad faith in Sartre is a philosophical concept to describe the
phenomenon wherein one denies one's freedom to choose, instead
choosing to behave without authenticity.
• It is closely related to the concepts of self deception and
resentment.
• Among all other existential themes, Sartre gave importance to
freedom and bad faith. Freedom is our ability to be in control of
our decisions, while bad faith is the belief that things have to be a
certain way and this way according to Sartre, our freedom is
limited or denied in the world. He holds we are thrown into the
world with others and living with the other is like already in hell.
He holds, Hell is the other people.
 What is Postmodernism?
Post-modernism, as it appeared in the 1970s, is
often linked with the philosophical movement
Poststructuralism, in which philosophers such
as Jacques Derrida proposed that structures
within a culture were artificial and could be
deconstructed in order to be analyzed.
 Derrida: Postmodernism and Deconstruction

• One of the highlighting and very unique feature of post modernism is the
style of writing the literature.
• Post modernists have a very specific kind of language. They believe in
deconstruction. For instance , according to Jacques Derrida
deconstruction is a literary method in which the latent meanings of the
text are exposed.
• Deconstruction forms the very significant aspect of post modernism.
This was found in the work of Jacquas Derrida.
• Deconstruction is a method of analysis based on philosophical and
literary features.
• Deconstruction doesn’t believe or support: “pure existence” or pure
presence of anything.
• According to deconstruction, nothing in the world has one and a constant
meaning. Every meaning changes in different contexts.
Deconstruction means to pursue a meaning of
a particular text to a level that all its inherent
contradictions and oppositions are exposed to
show that every form of text has not just one
meaning , but every text is a potential piece of
understand multiple truths hidden within it ,
which can be revealed by the used of the
deconstruction analysis. Language is
considered a system of signs, which is decoded
with help of deconstruction
Deconstruction is used in different areas of
humanities and social sciences like in
anthropology, law, psychoanalysis, linguistics,
feminism, histography, political theory, and
homo sexual studies. It is interesting for one to
know that, one can experience or use the
analysis of deconstruction in art, architecture
and music .deconstruction forms the crux of
the textual approach of Derrida
• One of the most important concerns of Derrida’s
deconstruction was to contribute, assert and re evaluate all
the western values. Another important concern or rather
apprehension of Derrida was not to mix deconstruction with
the dialectics by Hegel, as finding contradictions can lead to
a a stage where synthesis of contradictions take place in the
later stage , so it’s important to differentiate between
deconstruction and the dialectics.
• The term deconstruction according to Derrida was first used
in the context of structuralism. Derrida was against
deconstruction being called as method, as method is more
like a mechanical action . for Derrida , deconstruction is
neither a critique nor an analysis Literary criticism of
postmodern rejects that objective meanings and true
interpretations of the texts. All the meanings have to be
deconstructed, to understand them in a better way
 Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault, French philosopher and historian is
one of the preeminent postmodern theorists. His works
cut across the disciplinary boundaries of political
science, sociology, philosophy, history and deal with
almost all major thematic fields like psychiatry,
medicine, linguistics, penal practice, prisons, and
sexual conduct to articulate systems of thought about
human beings. He employed two complementary
methods in his works: (a) Archaeology of Knowledge
in early works; and (b) Genealogy of Power in later
ones. Archaeology focuses on a given historical
moment, while Genealogy is concerned with a
historical process.
Foucault’s Postmodernism: Analysis of Power

According to Foucault, Power is only ever

exercised through relationships (Foucault
analyzed power relations and not power in
itself); that is, power relations in their distinct
modalities, strategies, tactics, practices and
techniques.
In Foucault's own words, “Power is never
localised here or there, but rather employed
and exercised through a net-like organisation”
• All social relations are relations of power, enabling to uncover
the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are
made subjects.
• Power is fundamentally a bottom-up feature of social interaction
(micro power).
• Power is positive, productive and constitutive rather than
negative, prohibitive and repressive, even though it may
occasionally take the form of domination; that is, it brings into
being meanings, subjects, and social orders- these are its effects
rather than its material or it’s a priori.
• There are no relations of power without resistance as resistance
always means empowering oneself; one is simply reconstituting
a relationship of power.
• Knowledge and power are mutually constitutive and therefore
cannot be separated; Foucault, in fact, preferred the terminology
power / knowledge.
• Power is impersonal and flows through or insinuates
language, knowledge and institutional practices; and
(i) power and freedom are not opposites insofar as
there is no subject, and hence no freedom, outside of
power.
• Thus, he regards the notion of sovereign power as
inadequate for understanding the diverse modalities
of power at work in modern societies.
• As he puts it:
“Political theory in general has never ceased to be obsessed with
the person of sovereign. What we need, however, is a political
philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty.
We need to cut off the king’s head: in political theory that has
still to be done.”
• He also identified three instruments of disciplinary power, derived in large part
from the military model: (a) hierarchical observation, or the ability of officials
(metaphorically norms of society) to oversee all they control with a single gaze;
(b) the ability to make normalizing judgments and to punish those who violate
the norms; and (c) use of examination to observe subjects and to make
normalizing judgments about them.
• An examination is a beautiful example of the power-knowledge relationship;
those who have the power to give examinations gain additional knowledge and
thereby, more power through the imposition of examinations on subjects.
• Thus, against the enlightenment project of human liberation, progress, objective
knowledge and universal truth, Foucault argues that new disciplinary regimes of
the 19th century which, for example, sought to reform prisoners rather than
punish acts were as repressive as earlier systems and knowledge is a significant
field of power with truth inherently being political.
• In Foucault's own words,
• “Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple
forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.
 Further Reading

• A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Germany, Wiley, 2011.

• Grossmann, Reinhardt. Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
• Gellner, Ernest. Postmodernism, reason and religion. United
Kingdom, Routledge, 1992.
• Hammond, Michael, Jane Howard. Et. al. Understanding Phenomenology.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
• Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London and New
York: Routledge, 1995.
• McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. United Kingdom, Cornell
University Press, 1991.
• Phenomenology and existentialism. United Kingdom, Harper & Row, 1972.
• Sarup, Madan. An introductory guide to post-structuralism and
postmodernism. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1993.
• The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. N.p., Taylor & Francis, 2012.
• The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. United Kingdom, Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
• The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism. United States, Cambridge
University Press, 2012.
• William Spanos,“De-struction and the Question of Postmodern Literature:
Towards a Definition,”Par Rapport 2:2 -1979.
 Thank you….
Best Wishes for your Term-end!