Existential Choices Research Articles

Why suicide? Elderly people who committed suicide and their experience of life in the period before their death

The objective of this study is to acquire an understanding of the suicides among a group of elderly people by studying how they experienced their existence towards the end of life. This is a psychological autopsy study based on qualitative interviews with 63 informants in relation to 23 suicides committed by persons aged over 65 in Norway. Informants who knew the deceased persons well describe what the elderly person communicated to them about their experience of life in the period before the suicide and how they as informants saw and understood this. The informants comprise relatives, family doctors and home-based care nurses. The analysis of the interviews follows the systematic text condensation method. The descriptions are divided into three main elements: the elderly persons' experiences of life, their perception of themselves, and their conceptions of death. "Experience of life" has two sub-topics: this life has been lived and life as a burden. Everything that had given value to their life had been lost and life was increasingly experienced as a burden. Their "perception of themselves" concerned losing oneself. Functional decline meant that they no longer had freedom of action and self-determination. "Conceptions of death" involve the following sub-topics: acknowledgement/acceptance and death is better than life. Life had entered into its final phase, and they seemed to accept death. For some time, many of them had expressed the wish to die. The results lead us to argue that their suicides should be considered as existential choices. The sum total of the different forms of strain had made life a burden they could no longer bear. Age meant that they were in a phase of life that entailed closeness to death, which they could also see as a relief.

“The Love of Colour in Me”: Anzia Yezierska’s <i>Bread Givers</i> and the Space of White Racial Manufacture

could beat them all if I only let loose love of colour in me. --Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (181) Philosopher Charles W. Mills's observation that race as a system has to be maintained through constant boundary policing (77) aptly speaks to phenomena of early-twentieth century when a new onrush of European migration to US threw white racial identity into chaos again and required a formidable amount of surveillance and negotiation to effect its coherence. Scholars such as Kenneth T. Jackson, George Lipsitz, Carlo Rotella, Nancy A. Denton, and Douglass S. Massey have detailed carefully how New Deal legislation such as Federal Housing Act and GI Bill provided imprimatur and material resources by which white ethnics could distance their residences from nonwhites living in American cities. Their research, however, is not as informative about subjective processes of racialization these state-sponsored segregationist initiatives advanced. (1) They explain how American institutions engineered racially homogeneous spaces, but they do not account for all psychic concessions that led particular white ethnics to accept formation of pan-European whiteness in US. Neither do they focus on extent to which these probationary white groups (Jacobson 8) saw space as key to this formation and their sense of American belonging. Critics have examined Anzia Yezierska's writing as epitome of ethnic modernism; as a sample of burgeoning, yet unrealized, urban immigrant feminism; or as a case study in modern writer's ambivalent encounter with market values of Hollywood's emerging film culture. (2) Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925) provides ideal text with which to examine consolidation of ethnic whiteness in 1920s. Such whiteness was a phenomenon that was simultaneously racial and spatial. Although spaces and places through which narrative proceeds are fictive, actual ghettoized life of Jewish immigrants on Lower East Side of 1920s New York inspired vicissitudes of tale. The enclave novel imagines proffers unique access to spatial psyche of people who served as models for Yezierska's characters. Moreover, novel's Jewish female protagonist, Sara Smolinsky, appears to be a prelapsarian immigrant subject, a character who exercises free will and makes existential choices before serendipitous production of pan-European white identity. Also, Yezierska's novel defies conventional spatial parameters of what Michael Denning describes as the ghetto pastoral. Denning posits that in these proletarian tales of communal immigrant life in New World, there is little crossing out of ghetto milieu (247), and these tales remain faithful to their regional boundaries and imagined intimate geography in which their narratives unfold. The central feature of Bread Givers, however, is ever-shifting location of female protagonist within urban space. If we heed geographer Doreen Massey's claim that mobility of subjects, institutions, or states is redolent with sociopolitical significance (150), we can see Yezierska's heroine as prototypical pre-white immigrant whose movements within and beyond fictional New York tell much about desires and psychic processes that abetted spatialization of race. Bread Givers maps its protagonist's anguished voyage from working-class immigrant girlhood to white American femininity, a voyage that necessarily passes through way station of commodity culture. As primary means by which immigrants Americanized themselves, mass culture became a source of peril and imagination for newcomer. On one hand, immigrants were vulnerable to how commodities such as fashion and cosmetics could deceive observer (the individual may not be who/what he or she appears); on other, it was precisely commodities' ability to disguise appearance of ethnic foreignness that could facilitate immigrants' acceptance by modern American mainstream. …

Aliens and existential elevators: absurdity and its shadows in Douglas Adams’s <i>Hitch hiker</i> series

According to twentieth-century existentialist philosophy, the universe as we know it is steeped in senselessness, and the only possible means of survival is the construction of subjective meaning. Douglas Adams’s fictional universe portrayed in his “Hitch hiker” series reflects the arbitrary nature of existence, and the characters dwelling in this narrative space are faced with two existential choices: the one is defiance in the face of senselessness, the other is bleak despair. This article explores the existential choices made by prominent characters in the “Hitch hiker” series. The article distinguishes between and analyses the Sisyphus characters and their polar opposites (or nihilist shadows) in Douglas Adams’s “Hitch hiker” series. Adams’s characters, be they human, alien or sentient machine, all face the same existential choice: actuate individual meaning, or resort to despondency. Characters who choose the first option are regarded as Sisyphus figures, whereas characters who choose the latter are referred to as shadows or nihilist nemeses.

Lie Stphenson: un patriote apatride

This article examines the work of Elie Stphenson, an important cultural figure in French Guiana. The first part of this essay exposes how Stphenson's poetry subverts the word pays and how the poet denounces the negative effects of departmentalisation through a rather vigorous prose. The second part of the article demonstrates how Stphenson's play entitled Massak offers a new and surprising interpretation of slavery, where slaves are viewed as individuals and as such, they too were faced with existential choices.

Time to End Mind-Brain Split

Time to End Mind-Brain Split

The Lifecycle of Evolution: Power, Progress, and Purpose in the Advance of Civilization

This paper presents a framework for understanding that rather mysterious process by which life evolved into diverse biological species, then produced humankind, founded civilization, and is now creating high-tech societies that are entering space. A macrotechnological analysis reveals that evolution fundamentally consists of seven waves of technological innovation forming a "Life Cycle of Evolution," which is roughly comparable to the ordinary life cycles of all organisms. Finally, I note that this organic process of planetary development is drawn inexorably toward heightened awareness, existential choices, and other transcendent concerns for the same reason all phases of progress have evolved-out of sheer necessity.

El cervantismo de Juan Goytisolo

Juan Goytisolo is among many contemporary writers who have reflected on Cervantes in some of their works. We find these reflections not only in his creative writing but also in his essays, where his interest in different facets of the Islamic world is evident. It is noteworthy that Goytisolo relates to Cervantes both in his own poetics and in his existential choices. On the one hand, his works aim to destroy Spain's historical and literary tradition, but on the other, thanks to Cervantes, they recover a bond with Spain and his roots. The genetic bond that links Goytisolo with Cervantes was developed in an essay in his Crónicas sarracinas (1981), chronologically contemporary with his novel Makbara (1980). In both works Goytisolo elaborates on the problematic relationship between the Islamic world and the West. The two aspects analyzed here are: the political one, in which a parallel is drawn between the “Grand Turk”/Christendom dichotomy and the two contemporary ideological blocks; and the vital one, because both Cervantes and Goytisolo have had direct experience of the Islamic world.

On Ways of Knowing in Lord Jim

L ORD JIM stands at the center of a tangled web of conjecture and belief, of sympathy and antipathy, of fact and dream. His tale defies casual understanding, for it offers to the mind a labyrinth in which meaning must be diligently pursued; stylistic deviousness, abrupt narrative shifts in time and place, and the subjection of fact to diverse ways of perceiving it frustrate the reader's attempt to know at once what must be patiently sought out. The reader's quest for meaning, moreover, often seems analogous to attempts made by characters within the tale to conceive the meaning of their experiences; Marlow laments his persistent inability to see Jim clearly, and Jim waits upon a destiny whose face is always veiled. Thus one suspects it might be fruitful to examine critical problemsl in light of the epistemological difficulties which the tale presents and embodies. The value of Jim's existential choices and of his experience in Patusan, the nature of Marlow's relationship to Jim, and other elements of the tale as well might be clarified by relating them to ways of knowing and modes of language represented in Lord Jim. For example, the tension between the mythic way of knowing