There are some basic things we need to know about existentialism.

First of all we need to make sure we do not confuse Existentialism with Existence in the sense that I use the term which is as what is not Being. In other words there is a school of Existentialism but it is an argument between philosophers within Being, and then there is Existence which is what is beyond Being, i.e. what merely exists, and the Existentialists do not even try to go there.

I know this is very confusing. But it is signified by the fact you have asked what IS Existentialism, in other words we have not escaped from Being with your question and it is a specific school which uses the fact we have the word existence in our language. The reason we have it in our language is that it comes from the Arabs, who when they read Aristotle saw that he meant more than existence (Wajud) when he talked about Being, so they named that excess Kun (making) and when that was translated into Latin it became Existence, meaning what stands beyond Being. Only Indo-Europeans have Being in their languages so it is really only relevant to the Western tradition, but because we took over everything through colonialization it became relevant to others who speak languages without Being in them, thus truly existential languages.

Now this word existence lay dominant in our philosophical vocabulary until Kierkegaard and then Nietzsche, and then Heidegger and Sartre started taking a position which placed existence prior to essence, meaning the core of Being that just means that something is there. The way I like to talk about it is that Existence is neither aspect nor anti-aspect, where aspects are Truth, Reality, Presence and Identity. It turns out that when you go up the meta-levels of Being that at the fifth meta-level you hit a phase transition from Being to Existence. It can appear as Ultra Being, Emptiness or Void. If we think about Existence as either Emptiness or Void it is nondual, but if we think about it as Ultra Being then it is a singularity of absurdity or impossibility which just exists but we are seeing it from the outside rather than being encompassed by it.

It is really Jaspers that starts using the terminology of Existence and Heidegger adopts it, then we start seeing that this was the point of view of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky previously. Heidegger was taken up by the French and a good book to read about that is Generation Existential by Ethan Kleinberg. After the French found out that Heidegger was associated with the Nazis they began to backpedal from this whole hearted adoption after the war. Except for Gadamer and perhaps Merleau-Ponty most of the French only had a limited Idea about what Heidegger was talking about. Existentialism was championed by Sartre and Camus who fell out with each other. And now it is seen as passé. This is mainly because Sartre it was decided did not understand Heidegger and of course Heidegger wrote a Letter on Humanism to disown Sartre’s interpretation. Since Heidegger is a more profound philosopher than Sartre or Camus everyone went back to the drawing board to try to understand Heidegger. Contemporary Philosophy starts with Heidegger. Nazi or not we cannot ignore him. Everything after Heidegger has to be influenced by him even Analytical Philosophy stands against Heidegger from the beginning with Carnaps rejection of his metaphysical nonsense. Even it it is seen as nonsense there has to be a position in relation to Heidegger. I am reading Cassirer Third Volume of Symbolic Forms and he references Heidegger.

So if one is going to understand what Existentialism means we need to start with Heidegger. Heidegger makes a very simple argument for using the Existential terminology of Jaspers. That is if we are going to get to a place prior to the arising of the subject/object dichotomy, i.e. to get to Dasein, and Dasein is the projection mechanism by which we project the world and then find ourselves in it, then we have to distinguish dasein and its categories from the categories of the objects within the world, and so we will call the categories of Dasein existentials. Heidegger was very reluctant to adopt the terminology of Existentialism from Jaspers but in the final draft of Being and Time he made that change suddenly. And when we get to the heart of Dasein where the Existentials overlap called Care, or Sorge, then there Heidegger imports everything from Kierkegaard’s idea of absurdist subjectivity. So Heidegger adopts Jaspers terminology and then he adopts Kierkegaard’s authentic subject as the core of Dasein. The term Care he gets from Augustine.

So what are these Existentials:

• Befindlichkeit (foundness)
• Rede (talk, discourse)
• Verstehen (Understanding)

The opposites of all these are Fallenness which combines curiosity, ambiguity, idle-talk.

Turns out that Foundness is related to Thrownness which is related to the Past;

Understanding is related to Projection which is related to the Future, and seemingly incomprehensibly Fallingness is related to the Present. Discourse is not related to any moment of time which is unexpected. There are other Existentials like the They.

There is also the distinction of Ontological Difference between Being and beings, and the corresponding difference with respect to Dasein is Existence and Existentiells. The only Existentiell that Heidegger really talks about is Death which is the avenue to authenticity.

So from this perspective Existentialism is a way to understand human existence as a human situation in which we are interested specifically in the facticity of life beyond essences (ready-to-hand) and abstractions (present-at-hand) which are two modalities of being-along-side things in the world. When we are with others or alone with ourselves we are relating only to dasein at that is an existential relation rather than an ontological relation. Thus Being looks different from the human perspective of the one projecting the transcendences and who is encompassed by them. But this is an attempt to distance oneself from essentialist ways of looking at things, which is based as Heidegger says on Metaphysics as is ‘humanism’ as a historical approach that centers on Man rather than Being, Being is forgotten and instead we find ourselves lost among beings some of which we treat as objects even though they are other human beings.

Existentialism turned out to be somewhat of a dead-end as a Western philosophical movement. It did not escape from metaphysics and Heidegger abandoned it eventually for something he felt was deeper, i.e. Beying rather than Being in Contributions. Sartre moved on to other issues in his Critique of Dialectical reason which is his really great book no one reads. It is about how to treat the dialectic dialectically and to found it on fundamental revolutionary human relationships. Camus died in a car accident as did Merleau-Ponty. Probably the most genuine member of the Existentialist movement was Kierkegaard who embraced absurdity and paradox as the fundamental basis of subjectivity. The basic argument is that if you get rid of essence then you have gotten rid of the basis of meaning so existence is absurd or as Sartre would say that means you have to produce your own meaning in life. But all the thinkers that are lumped together under the rubric of Existentialism had very different philosophies. We should probably recognize Jaspers as the core thinker who brought the term to prominence. Heidegger found it convenient to appropriate this terminology and the work of Kierkegaard within Being and Time but then abandoned that tack. Sartre, Camus and others in France that thought of themselves as Existentialists were looking for something different from Bergson or French NeoKantianism and thus felt they found something interesting in Husserl and Heidegger’s work. They saw Heidegger’s work as compatible with their Marxist interpretations of Hegel. But later Heidegger repudiated them and they repudiated him due to his Nazism. So Existentialism of the interwar period and immediately after the WWII quickly fell apart as other Continental philosophers moved on to try to work out what Heidegger really meant. But because Heidegger did not publish Contributions that was impossible because he merely hinted at his real position which was as he thought the one to actually bring metaphysics to an end after Nietzsche the last metaphysician. But we have noticed that whoever says they have brought Metaphysics (essence and abstraction thinking) to an end actually ends up merely repeating the sins of metaphysics. Thus we get Postmodernism that lingers on.

But the actually most interesting thing about Continental Philosophy is that Merleau-Ponty goes on to discover along with Heidegger and Derrida Hyper Being, and then on his own Wild Being. Derrida explores Hyper Being as Difference (differing and deferring) and Deleuze goes on after that to explore Wild Being. These other modalities of being-in-the-world, ways of relating to non-dasein objects in the world are extremely interesting and turn out to give us the series of meta-levels of Being which we are still trying to come to terms with. Basically we are stuck trying to come to terms with Being and Time just like the French did in various waves before and after the Second World War. What Heidegger did was come up with an extremely subtle solutions to the problems of neo-Kantianism which was the pre-war status quo and this is seen in his courses leading up to Being and Time. The reason that Being and Time made such an impact was that Heidegger hand not published anything before that and only gave courses during which he tried to solve the problems of Husserl’s phenomenology and its relation to neo-Kantianism. Heidegger solved these problems in such a clever and subtle way that he unmasked a history of metaphysics that no one suspected existed prior to him that started with Aristotle. Heidegger as medievalist is going back to Aristotle and discovering that he is a phenomenologist par excellence. And so Being and Time attempts to take us back to the kinds of Knowledge that Aristotle pointed out to us which we had lost track of in our history. It turns out that these kinds of knowledge that Aristotle points out in his Ethics are isomorphic to the Divided Line of Plato. And so Heidegger is taking us back into the Core of the Western worldview and reminding us of what is there. Basically the modes of Being of Dasein relate to kinds of knowledge in Aristotle. Present-at-Hand (extant) is Episteme of Science, this is basically the Algebraic-geometrical reduction of the world discovered by Descartes but in the time of Aristotle and Plato was based on Geometry eventually written down by Euclid and which became the basis of reason within our tradition. Ready-to-hand is the Techne of Poesis which we have seem to have lost but that is found in our immersion in the technological infrastructure of the world. Finally below that is Phronesis (judgment) of praxis (action) which is a pragmatism taken from Emil Last who got it from C.S. Peirce. Heidegger tried to use Last’s NeoKantianism influenced by Husserl and Peirce to attempt to disclose the facticity of life below the level of essence, i.e. the ready-to-hand. Husserl’s big discovery was that essence perception was different from abstraction, and that is the basis for the difference between the modes of Being in Heidegger which are called by me Pure Being (Parmenides) and Process Being (Heraclitus). Heidegger is following Nietzsche and Hegel in attempting to emphasize Process Being over Pure Being. Hegel thinks that ultimately they are the same. Nietzsche says that Pure Being is an illusion and there is only Heracltian Flux which he sees as Will to Power. Heidegger however wanted to go beyond this perspective and attempt to make a formal indication of the facticity of life following in the footsteps of Dilthey and others that proposed philosophies of Life. Husserl does the same thing in Krisis which talks about the Lifeworld and its estrangement from Science. Dasein was Heidegger’s final formulation of the formal indication of life which did not disturb it but disclosed it. When Heidegger found this strand of thought in Aristotle as well, i.e. the emphasis on disclosure then he knew he could completely overturn (deconstruct) modern philosophy which had forgotten its roots in disclosure. Existentialist terminology was a way to make clear the difference between this disclosure in the human situation from everything else we layer on top of that like essences and abstractions. When Sartre and Camus latched on to the idea that Existence came before Essence they missed that essential point and were caught up with the terminology of Nothing being Nihiliated or Nullity Nullified, and so Sartre took off with that idea and actually made something very interesting of it, but that is just a small part of Heidegger’s attempt to explain the nature of Dasein and how to project Being it must go beyond Being as a whole into the Nothing and Nihilate it in order to project it as something that encompasses Dasein. This is the basic paradox of the Trinity where the Father creates the world in which the Son is ensconced as an incarnation which Kierkegaard labels an absurdity, but takes it up and makes it the core of his belief. Since Being itself is a contradiction, or even a paradox, or even an absurdity, if not an impossibility it is hard for Dasein not to embody this paradox and absurdity within itself. But actual existence not as Ultra Being but as Empty or Void is not absurd or paradoxical but is instead Supra-rational and that is why the existentialists never got beyond Being because if they had they would have recognized its non-duality. Heidegger was not interested in Sophia of Virtue or the Nous of the Numinous that Aristotle also talked about as kinds of knowledge because Heidegger saw them as a prioris and thus dead, not living and so he was not interested in them in the least and left them out of his return to Aristotle.

For Heidegger in Being and Time there are two modes of being-in-the-world: present-at-hand (extant) and ready-to-hand (handy) . Present-at-hand is the normal objective world of science. Ready-to-hand is another completely different mode of relating to beings in the world that is not objective, but rather based on use. This approach is called by Heidegger circumspective concern with a view to taking in the totality of the technological infrastructure. One difference between these two modes is the set-like approach verses a mass-like approach. Heidegger says twice that you cannot have a equipment, Equipment is a mass (non-count) term. Heidegger is saying that when we are concerned with use of the technological infrastructure then there is a different modality for relating to things than is the normal objective way of relating to things in Science. The difference is between two kinds of knowledge identified by Aristotle which were Episteme of Science verses Techne of Poiesis. Another mode that Aristotle identifies is Phronesis of Praxis which is identified at the nature of Dasein itself which is different from either the Pure Being of Objectivity of Science (Parmenides) and the Process Being of use of the technological infrastructure which is dynamic (Heraclitus) and practical with regard to building, making, and producing associated with the Readiness-to-hand of equipment.

Zen is not anti-rational. It is supra-rational which is very different. But the West being intrinsically dualistic and fascinated by Paradox and Absurdity is blind to non-duality. Supra-rational is synonymous with the nondual (meaning actually non-cardinal, i.e. Not One! Not Two! Not Many!, which is the same as the meaning of Emptiness based on the Tetralemma (A, Not A, Both or Neither). See Loy’s Book Nonduality, except he accepts Monism as Nondual which is a problem with his presentation. As I have explained in my other answers viz Buddhism, DzogChen, Taoism etc. Zen is fundamentally misunderstood in the West as being Paradoxical. Nothing could be further from the truth and in fact exactly the opposite is true. If we look at Plato’s Divided Line we see it has two limits Contradiction, Paradox, Absurdity on the one hand and Supra-rationality on the other. This is like the difference in Quantum Mechanics between Entanglement and Superposition. Supra-Rational is like Superposition. It means that two things are simultaneously true without interfering or mixing. In Contradiction, Paradox and Absurdity there is mixture. Very few Zen Koans are about Mixture. Many are about the Pure States of SupraRationality in which opposites are true simultaneously without reference to each other or mixture because there is a barrier between the two states that prevent mixture. If you can see that state of simultaneous truth, or falsehood then that is an indicator of the nondual state of emptiness or in Taoism Void. The association of Zen with anti-rationalism is a form of Orientalism in which the West sees everything foreign in its own image. It takes a lot of time and energy to get past this misconception. That is because there are very few examples of supra-rationality in our culture, and it truly is culture shock to realize that there are states for which there are few precedents in our culture to be able to relate to them, however if we go back to the core of the Western worldview which is the Divided Line of Plato we see that the other limit of that line associated with Nous of the Numinous is the Greek expression of the supra-rational. Thus the precedents are there but they are well hidden.

I found “Nature overcomes Nature, Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature contains Nature.” The Turba Philosophorum Fourty-Fifth Dictum

The key point is that the gods of Egypt are called NTR. Thus our nature is the basic unfolding of what the Egyptians took to be their gods though the eyes of the Greeks that turned from the Mythos based on Sumerian like Gods to the Kosmos in the Metaphysical Era that explored the poeiss of the phusis of NaTuRe.

These three statements are homeomorphic with Special Systems Theory. SeeSpeical Systems Theory

In graduate school I attended school in England and Australia where there are no classes. You just write your dissertation and everything rests on that passing or failing by external readers. In both cases my study strategy was to learn everything I could and master the subject in order to write my dissertation. In both cases it too quite a few years to do that more the first time than the second. In my opinion mastery is the only way to go. If you are not prepared to do that why bother? But then different people’s definition of mastery are very different from each other. Mine is to go way overboard. But when questions roamed all over the place in my first orals I was glad I did go way beyond what was required because suddenly a deeper level of competence was required than expected.  I recommend the English system of education also followed in Australia. To my mind it is a higher standard than for graduate school in the USA. But I guess I am prejudiced because that is the system I am used to from my graduate school days.

See second Ph.D. in Systems Engineering at http://emergentdesign.net

When does too liberal borrowing crossover into unacceptable plagiarism? The strange case of Terry Deacon see http://emergence.org/NYRBARTICLE.pdf

Having not read the works of  Juarrero  or Lissack and thus have no idea about the veracity of these allegations. However, it should be noted that Berkeley investigated the allegations and exonerated Deacon of the accusation of plagiarism.      Investigation Exonerates Terry Deacon

First chapter of All Things Shining by Kelly and Dreyfus

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age: Hubert Dreyfus, Sean Dorrance Kelly: 9781416596165: Amazon.com: Books

What is art? Heidegger attempts an answer in The Origin of the Work of Art.
What we find out by reading his essay is that there are very few works of art in his sense, i.e. that define a worldview. In other words, from this viewpoint most are is not really art in as much as it does not give basis for our worldview. What we see is instead the nihilistic production of a lot of non-art and almost no actual art in the sense he gives the term. He says something similar about thinking in “What is called Thinking”, i.e. there is very little real thinking going on, and most of what we call thinking is just a nihilistic form of rumination. Actual Art as well as actual thinking is something very rare. So the real question is why we are driven to engage in the production of nihilistic pseudo-art (or ratiocination) as a relentless imperative and why do we not engage in producing art (or thanking thought) that might anchor our civilization. One gets the impression that we produce ersatz art or cognition in order to suppress actual art or thinking. What we are locked into is an intensification of nihilism, in which the art or our thinking merely gets worse and worse all the time expressing our increasing desperation.

For instance, on quora we multiply questions and answers. However, how many of these questions and answers have any real significance. My answer is very few. So why do we do that? Why don’t we confront deep problems of our Civilization and attempt to solve them? Why don’t we engage in genuine dialectics instead of asking and answering random questions that leap into our pristine and almost thought free minds.

Heidegger says that Poetry and Thinking are the Same, i.e. belong together, and of course poetry is an Art. Some things you can get at in poetry that you cannot get at in thinking and vice versa. Why is there so little dialogue between poetry and thinking? Both of these disciplines are not very popular in our current culture. Art in general is not appreciated and supported widely in our society. James Hillman in one of his last books suggested we should make Art not War. But it is easier to destroy than it is to create. And of course philosophical creation is the most difficult because that actually changes the nature of our world. Literature, Poetry and other arts give us insight into our world, but when we create a philosophical fiction we actually create a different world if we actually enhance our understanding of our current world. But that world does not get captured unless we can produce actual works of art that capture the spirit of our world as it is in the present moment, or as it could be. I don’t think there is a drive to create actual art that can ground the world, but only facsimiles of art and calculation that obscure the world. These facsimiles cover up and obscure the actual possibility of deep art, or deep thought, or deep poetry. We are driven away from those deeper approaches to understanding better our existence though art of thought and the thought of art as well as its execution in literature, poetry, prose, painting, watercolors, etc. and other media of the arts that exist today which are newer.

Is there anything wrong with Western Civilization? If so, what is it, why is it there, and what can we do about it?

What is wrong with “Western Civilization”? (an Oxymoron?)

This is an interesting question. It is like the question, is there anything wrong with being a Shark?

A shark merely is what it is, a killer from the deep. There is nothing wrong with being a Shark. However, one may be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get eaten by JAWS (i.e. suffer colonization and the brunt of globalization whereby the Western Worldview destroys other worlds).

So I think the point is not that there is something wrong with Western Civilization. But it is merely what it is, and we must recognize what it issomehow. But it turns out that understanding what the Western Worldview ISis extremely difficult because ISness is unique to Indo-European languages. So when we say “Is there something wrong . . .” we are employing IS. Right there the whole question becomes problematic because we are entangled in Being from the start. Perhaps Being is one of the things that makes the Western Civilization what it IS (beyond right or wrong, or beyond good and evil).

Is there something wrong with a antibiotic resistant bacteria that kills everyone in a hospital. The bacteria is doing what it does best, make people sick and perhaps kill people. The fact that they have become stronger and more resilient due to our misuses of antibiotics implicates us in our own demise.

Similarly we are involved in a population explosion on earth which is thought to max out around 20 billion. This is probably more than the carrying capacity of the planet, but the fact that we are misusing, wasting, and defiling the planet at the same time makes us more or less like the bacteria on a planetary scale. The fact that not just our species but all the species are likely to eventually die from our activities . .  is that wrong if that is who we are in ourselves, in our Being.

But what is this Being that we have, and no one else has, that seems to make our worldview more virulent than other worldviews. This it seems to me to be a fundamental question that few are addressing. Heidegger made a start in addressing it but being within the Western worldview he attributed Being to everyone, not realizing that it was specific to  Indo-Europeans. He is asking the nature of Indo-European Dasein but thinking that this term applies to all humans because he does not realize that Being is not universal. But still it is a very good question as to the nature of Indo-European Dasein. What is it about us that generates this world dominance. Obviously it is caught up in our relation to Technology and Science. Science is based on the Pure Being (present-at-hand) and Technology on Process Being (ready-to-hand). Dasein is our ecstatic Existenz in the Human Situation that renders these various modes of being-in-the-world meaningful.

Why did this linguistic anomaly that is the ultimate basis of science and technology arise in the Indo-European worldview? Shear chance? Dumb luck? An Evil destiny? Who knows. But our job is to try to understand it and its implications. What we can do is try to understand ourselves better. That does not mean that the lemmings will not stream over the cliff. It merely means that some of the lemmings might wake up, attempt to go the other way, change the blind direction of the pack behavior of the big Other, or Das Mann (They). It is probably only with utter disaster looming that we might attempt to change some of our behavior, but probably too late to have make any relevant difference to the fate of the planet and its inhabitants. But you never can tell, there is of course pure inexplicable happenstance (maybe a virus will kill off just humans and leave the planet to other species in a kind of Deep Ecological Utopia without humans: The World Without Us: Alan Weisman: 9780312427900: Amazon.com: Books). There are is always possible but improbable scenarios like this one.

One day someone wakes up and thinks, maybe I won’t continue to go along with the Others continuing my blind non-self-conscious behaviors that are leading toward our communal suicide. Enough people do this and perhaps something will change for the better. But, we are more likely to wake up if we understand ourselves better. That means going back and trying to trace the rise of the Worldview in its cultural origins and to concentrate on what is unique in it like the diabolical connection between ‘Being’ and Science & Technological dominance that ultimately leads to our terraforming of the planet.

You start with Parmenides poem, as Zeno was defending the view of Static Being which is the only viable path according to the Goddess in the poem, the other non-viable paths being non-Being, i.e. existence, and appearance, i.e. becoming or Process Being which is full of contradictions, as Zeno pointed out.

Our way of dealing with Zeno is via the Calculus the invention of which allowed Newton to enunciate our first real Law of Nature concerning Gravity.

See also . . .
Zenoís Paradoxes: A Timely Solution
Peter Lynds
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/…