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Ernest Hemingway

Iceberg Theory & Existentialism

Existentialism

20th Century philosophy centered on the analysis of existence and the way humans find themselves existing in the world

Video clip about current documentary of mental illness in the Hemingway family

Iceberg Theory

Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961

His mother "twinned" him with his sister, Marcelline (1.5 years older) until he was five years old.

After the publication of his last major work, The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway explained his "iceberg" theory of fiction writing in a Paris Review interview:

Began his writing career as a newspaper reporter at age 17

He was married four times; he had extramarital affairs during each marriage.

The media knew him as a macho man who served in WWI and who liked bullfighting. During WWI, he drove an ambulance on the Italian battlefront and was wounded.

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

In his later life, he suffered from what might be known as bipolar depression or depressive paranoia. He underwent electroshock therapy. He also drank a lot.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/21/health/hemingway-film/index.html

He won the Pulitzer Prize in literature for The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. He then won Nobel prize in literature 1954

He committed suicide in 1961 by shooting himself in the head.

His posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden called into question his media image of masculinity because it depicted a female character who cropped her hair short to look like a man.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html

John Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

Iceberg Theory

image from http://faculty.frostburg.edu/phil/forum/Existentialism.htm

Existentialism & Nothingness

Consciousness contributes nothingness to being. Cafe example

Where's Waldo?

Consciousness contributes nothingness to being Mechanic Example

Nothingness and Freedom

We look for a friend in a crowded cafe, but we determine that he's not there.

A mechanic looks at a carburetor of a broken down car in order to fix the car.

Human beings are free to be anything they want or not to be anything.

Human Self-Consciousness

To fix the car, he must imagine a being that does not exist or a nothing - a functioning car.

Rocks have to fall if dropped. A dog doesn't decide to chase a squirrel; it's instinct.

Consciousness exists "for-itself," meaning that it has an idea of itself.

In order to determine that he's not there, we must nihilate or MAKE INTO NOTHING the presence of everyone and everything in the room, so they can form a background to our noticing our friend's absence.

Even if I think the chocolate cake looks good, I don't have to eat it.

His consciousness brings the functioning car, a nothing, into being. Thus, consciousness contributes nothingness to being.

Human beings are split: they don't just perceive the world, but they are also aware of themselves perceiving the world.

In Sartre's words, I can nihilate the desire to eat chocolate cake or turn it into nothing, control it or banish it.

We must also become aware of our friend as a nothing when we realize he is not there.

example: walking in a park observing a tree

Freedom is the most basic feature of the human being, and this aspect of nihilating or turning our desires into nothing is the trait of our consciousness that brings about our freedom.

Anxiety

Man's existence precedes his essence

A child's birth begins a process in which a being whose nature is undetermined and whose future is open comes into existence.

Anxiety is the key to humans discovering their true nature.

Different from worry

Object is ourselves

We have the freedom to make decisions about how to live our lives but often no rational basis for making them and no way to anticipate all of the effects.

Consciousness is both a nothingness and a being that injects nothingness into being.

The Human Being is what it is not and is not what it is

A child through decisions transforms herself from a nothingness into a being.

We can realize that consciousness is a nothingness when we take ourselves as the content of our thoughts.

Unlike God, we don't create out of nothing. We undertake our freely chosen projects within a context.

Our freedom distinguishes humans from other beings; we each have a fundamental and ongoing concern with the nature of our own existence and of how we are and how we will be.

We can undertake projects in which we seek to go beyond the given conditions only in those conditions themselves.

I may think that I would like to own a yellow Corvette. That does not mean that I have to buy a yellow Corvette. I may decide not to buy one because it costs too much or uses too much gas.

We are not what we are because we can change and make ourselves something different from what we appear to be at any time.

Therefore, I can nihilate or MAKE INTO NOTHING any content in my consciousness, which makes consciousness itself a nothing.

We are also what we are not because we can create ourselves to be in the future something we are not.

Example: Paul Gaugin, the Post Impressionist painter was a stockbroker living in Copenhagen with a wife and two children in 1884. He abandoned his family and career to devote himself exclusively to painting and ended up painting landscapes in Tahiti.

Finitude (Death)

Søren Kierkegaard 1813-1855 - the father of existentialism

Humans cannot escape the fact that they are finite beings.

The idea of death as a liberation or transformation to another world is flawed.

No division between body and soul

Death is final and an end to the being of a human being. It cannot be transcended.

Kierkegaard and Sartre agree that humans have freedom to make decisions but anxiety over making those decisions with no real basis to decide.

Kierkegaard contended that even in the most fundamental decision in our life - whether to believe in God or not - we cannot rationally justify and explain our decision. This causes us great anxiety.

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