What is Existentialism? Part 2 - The Short History of Existentialism: II - Pre-existentialists

   2- Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

In my late adolescence I started reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky and I couldn't stop till I found every book and letter that were translated from Russian because every character in his books is alive, they are tormented and agonizing in the comprehension of their selves, and feeling miserable from being unable to comprehend and join the other human beings and society.

From then on I immersed in psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, anti-psychiatry and a lot of writers that look at some angles of his persona's inner conflict of their Essence and the collision with Existence with others in society.
I got to the conclusion that only Fyodor Dostoyevsky could give the feeling of that multi-angular views of a man's mind internal conflict, and the struggle with the outside.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist, journalist, and essayist, in his book Notes from Underground (1864) with the "underground man" who suffer to define himself and his needs to deal with the world, to feel a sense of belonging, and at the same time , affirm his autonomy and total freedom of choice in a big fight to exist and find himself, and trying to create the meaning of his life and make sense of Existence.

The figure of the "underground man" (that he certainly was) of the above novel, fights to understand the nature of his Being and assuming total responsibility for his acts, his existence, and the world around him.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is the main historic roots of the philosophical branch of existentialism, showing how alone we are, and the constant despair of the human condition pressed by moral, society, state, and economic institutions and as well overcome the limitations of the transcendence of God(s) determining our Fate to avoid our self-determination in the construction of our Destiny.

Dostoyevsky was an activist, maybe a radical, surely an insurrectionist, and maybe a terrorist, with connections to underground utopian groups, that wanted to transform society, and after being arrested he passed the experience of a fake firing squad execution.

After the plot made by the aristocratic power, he was sent to Siberia for a 4-year sentence and after jail, he becomes part of the nihilist generation in Russia.

Sartre and Dostoyevsky were masters of psychological profiling of individuals and their inner conflicts and constraints of the social situations, showing the perversities, perfidy, and the violence of human condition.

   3 - Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

I confess, Kierkegaard, it was always a difficult reading that I only started after my youth, because of its references to the transcendental view of God and his exacerbated Christianity that criticized the church and the religious practices of his epoch, and I refuse to accept freeborn humans, must exercise their will with a double bind of a supreme power conditioning it, beyond the human finitude of Death.

Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher was Influenced by Hegel and Kant, and he turned into one of the biggest fountains of knowledge where existentialism have rooted its philosophical concepts and references.

"The three forms of despair: not being conscious of having a self, not willing to be oneself, but also despair at willing to be oneself. Despair is "sickness unto death"." - Søren Kierkegaard Sickness Unto Death.

Kierkegaard says "Truth is subjectivity and subjectivity is the Truth", it means the denial the objectiveness of truth in terms of factuality, and this applied to the Christianity he believed in.

For Stirner, we are "An abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, chaos without light or guiding star".

I'm not a fan of Kierkegaard because of his Christian beliefs of God as a higher being beyond our true selves, and I believe that the individual must search self-emancipation to find the truth in authenticty, with all its subjectivity.

   4 - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

“Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzschean philosophy rooted Western intellectual history of the XIX century in a lot of subjects, like the truth and morality, religion and science, theory of culture and language, will for power and consciousness, in the search of a meaning for existence, bringing up the Übermensch (Superman) and proclaiming that "God is dead".

His central point of view is the will to power as the force underlying human actions that would drive the achievement of personal ambitions and to climb the human mountains of human hierarchy, to enhance the exercise of that power.

Nietzsche is considered an Existential nihilist because there is no order or objectives in the world, except the way we shape it, but there is no way or values to sustain, and that it can't be obtained by reasoning, so life is meaningless and have no purpose or goal.

A nihilist does not believe in the truth of morality, and Nietzsche believed that the order of the world was a personal construction by the destruction of the facades of reality, because life has no meaning, no values have a foundation to bear them, and rationality and reasoning is nonsense.

   5 - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer

One of the books that help my personal dialectic of the fight for freedom was no doubt, Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher I started to read when I was 22 years old, beginning with his long book The World as Will and Representation (1818), where we see his phenomenological view of the world as the product of the exercise of a blindfolded and insatiable metaphysical will of any individual.

He influenced the philosophical views of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, by showing that the world is only a representation of our own will.

For Schopenhauer, society is a representation of humanity's will, and when power solidifies suffocates people and life, and it is the struggles, obstacles, and barriers to be overcome by suffering, leading to a kind of spiritual suicidal pessimism that it does not apply to the escape of disconnecting the body to end this despair by voluntary death.

He said that a madman is the one who can't use his memory, maybe he was the first to feel that there was a darker side of consciousness, that Eduard von Hartmann materialized in the book Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), that culminated in Freud's concept of human psychic apparatus.

   6 - Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Karl Marx unveiled the economic order of the bourgeois capitalist society, the relations of production and the liaison between capital and the unequal distribution of added value created because it is pre-determined by the hierarchical structure of classes.

I never liked to confuse the economic theory of Marx, with the resulting negative praxis of Marxists that invest themselves with an infinite exercise of the power of their will, and get obsessed like many fascists did and keep doing by murdering voices and people.

In my youth times, we used to call it social fascists, because any centralized structure like individualism (liberalism) or collectivist always put too much-unscrutinized power, in the hands of a few Man and Women that always corrupt the exercise of authority into prepotency.

Also, liberalism or individualism exercised with the control of centralized authority will always muzzle free trade, free markets, and free will voices.
Any centralized hierarchic structure always awakes the addiction to unlimited will for power, revealing the worst of Mankind, generating irrecoverable human and nature collateral damages.

To finish I will leave the readers with Marx in its own prophetic words that we are now living in the actual market-war share of imperialist regimes.
Who owns the means of production, also owns the means of communication, and controls and pervert the democratic process.

This quote below shows a lot, what is going on today, with the cachectic chess piece of Trump, in the already tense international game, boiling the pan of imperialist Wars.

"..everything has become a monopoly, there are also nowadays some branches of industry which prevail over all others, and secure to the nations which especially foster them the command of the market of the world."
"If the free traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how in the same country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another. Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticizing freedom of commerce we have the least intention of defending protection. One may be opposed to constitutionalism without being in favor of absolutism. Moreover, the protective system is nothing but a means of establishing manufacture upon a large scale in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the market of the world; and from the moment that dependence upon the market of the world is established, there is more or less dependence upon free trade too. Besides this, the Free Trade protective system helps to develop free competition within a nation." - Karl Marx on Free Trade

"Protectionism is Economic war, that precedes real Belic confrontations" - charlie 777