Existentialism Engagement: A Postmodern Answer

Existentialism

Engagement: A Postmodern Answer to an Age-Old Dilemma

Enlightenment thinkers assumed that all human beings could be eventually inculcated in an ideology of perfect rationality. One example of classical Enlightenment optimism is Hegel's notion that, under ideal circumstances, all human beings could know everything. Hegel believed there was an objective standard of rationality visible to all who were willing to be trained in the process of critical, objective thinking and were intellectually engaged with the world. Through empirical observation, all would be revealed to the open mind. The optimism of this approach is perhaps best exemplified in Rousseau's ideal of the human mind as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, on which anything could be written. With the right external shaping and instruction, human beings would all come to the same, right, deductions about existence. Even some early modernist thinkers critical of Enlightenment rationality, such as Marx, still imagined an end of history, where there would be a final state of total agreement and engagement as to what was an objective 'truth,' the need for the end of private property.

Critical theorists of the Frankfurt School such as Heidegger, however, questioned the notion that all human beings could perceive the world according to the same standards of rationality, or that there was one, singular standard of rationality applicable to all human beings. To be human, for Heidegger, was not to be free, but to be limited, and quite often disengaged from one's authentic self. Every human being was to some degree trapped by his or her reality, a reality that involved the social constraints and conventions placed by other human beings. Such social learning and observation was not positive and instructive, but negative, and often inculcated the individual in falsehoods that distanced the individual from his or her authentic self.

Like the earlier Enlightenment thinkers, Heidegger did believe that human nature propelled human beings forward, to seek self-actualization, but this state of self-actualization, or authenticity, was not universal for all human beings "Not all human beings are continually oriented towards their own potential, among which are the possibilities of authentic and inauthentic existence. if, whilst moving forward, the standards and beliefs and prejudices of society are embraced, individuals may fail to differentiate themselves from the masses. This, Heidegger regarded as living an 'inauthentic' existence" (Hornsby, 2002). There was, for Heidegger, a constant tension between individual and society. The only way to resolve this tension was for the individual to unlearn some of the societal constraints placed upon his or her thinking, and find authenticity.

Postmodernism, in contrast to Heidegger, does not believe that there is an authentic self at all. Inauthenticity is not going along with social norms, for the postmodernist theorists, society produces the idea of 'the authentic self' in the first place. For a person to conceive of notions of their own individuality, the individual must be located in a particular language, historical moment, and conceptual framework. The very notion that there is an authentic self is a highly Protestant, modern notion, and so is the idea that an interior self can live in reaction to public norms of behavior is a localized, historically produced idea. One can try to react against social norms by, for example, refusing to conform to sexual norms of morality, but this reaction is in and of itself an acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of the social ideal that Heidegger called inauthentic. Perhaps the classic example of this is the teenager that reacts against his or her parents by doing everything the opposite of what they advise, and thus only shows how deeply the parent's rules have become internalized in his or her consciousness. For the postmodernist, one cannot help but be engaged with the world. Unlike existentialists like Heidegger that saw people as chronically disengaged with reality, postmodernist thought sees engagement as a given. One cannot live outside of culture and language.

For the postmodernist, by rejecting the authentic self, a greater measure of freedom is actually achieved because the individual can both eschew either total obedience to a constructed social ideal, and escape the constant trap of internalizing the ideal as a way of reacting to that ideal. This is why, for postmodernism, irony and satire rather than dropping out of society are the primary weapons with which to fight back against societal constraints. To take another example, imagine a woman who wishes to reject her culture's notions of femininity. To do so, she could try to be more masculine, but this would only confirm the masculine/feminine binary of selfhood and thus confirm her engagement with false social ideas about gender. Instead, by assuming female traits or male traits with irony, and by knowing that she can pick and choose which characteristics and traits she wished to embrace, she would evolve into a more subversive and potentially challenging figure. This would not necessarily be a 'truer' self, for there is no true self, but it would be a potentially freer self.