The A to Z of Existentialism by Stephen Michelman

Author:Stephen Michelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2008-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

– I –

I AND THOU. See BUBER, MARTIN.

IDEALISM. See REALISM AND IDEALISM.

IMAGINATION. Jean-Paul Sartre devoted considerable attention to the philosophical analysis of imagination in two early works, Imagination: A Psychological Critique (1936) and The Psychology of Imagination (1940). The former book is based on Sartre’s doctoral dissertation and was originally intended as the introductory section of The Psychology of Imagination. This latter book is an original phenomenological study of “imaginative consciousness,” which anticipates many of the positions of Being and Nothingness, in particular the idea that consciousness entails a “negation” of reality, and that this negating power is the essence of human freedom. Following the analyses of Edmund Husserl, Sartre portrays the act of imagination as exemplary of the freedom of human consciousness: Through imagination I “withdraw from the world” as it is in order to imagine it as it might be. This negating power is evidence of the freedom of consciousness, for a determined consciousness would remain “engulfed by the real,” enmeshed in detailed responses to psychological stimuli and thus never capable of “withdrawing” from reality in order to re-create it. Sartre’s treatment of imagination as the power to negate provided the core of his account of consciousness as being-for-itself in Being and Nothingness.

INAUTHENTICITY. See AUTHENTICITY AND INAUTHENTICITY.

INDIRECT COMMUNICATION. Phrase applied to the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, whose goal is not to directly state a set of objective truths but to stimulate a process of self-questioning in the reader. The aim of indirect communication is explicitly Socratic: to lead one to question the foundation of one’s own beliefs, often by deflating the received view of things and so shaking the reader out of complacency. To effectively disguise his authorial position and to avoid the appearance of making direct assertions, Kierkegaard employs a variety of distancing techniques, including the use of literary pseudonyms, persistent irony, and paradox. Kierkegaard also, by and large, disguises the autobiographical origins of his work—for example, his broken engagement to Regine Olsen, his aestheticism and literary ambitions, and his relationship to his father—by integrating them into larger fictional and theoretical structures in which the reader may consider various possibilities unencumbered by an overly personal, hence limited, authorial perspective.

INDIVIDUALIZE. The process by which a person becomes an authentic self is described by existentialists as a process of becoming individualized, removed from the impersonal anonymity of everyday existence, where one acts and thinks in conformity with others, and is placed before one’s essential responsibility for oneself. For Martin Heidegger, individualization occurs through an awareness of one’s own death as a “non-relational possibility” that cannot be shared with others, thus that must be confronted alone, as an individual. Søren Kierkegaard speaks in similar fashion of the process of “becoming an individual” as the process of assuming a truly first-person perspective. For Kierkegaard, such a perspective is not simply given but must be achieved through acts of ethical commitment and religious decision.

INFINITE RESIGNATION. See KNIGHT OF FAITH AND KNIGHT OF INFINITE RESIGNATION.

INTENTIONALITY. As formulated in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl,

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