Posted in: Folk by Roger Penney on November 8th, 2007 | 0 Comments
Against a Jewish and existential background, what Leonard Cohen has to offer. Leonard Cohen and the human condition.
Developed during the thirties the German existentialists tended to support Nazism, seeing it as an expression of the human will.(As in The Triumph of the Will, film of the 1934 Nuremberg party rally by Leni Riefenstahl.)
The French existentialists were more attracted to Communism but broke with it because its authoritarian nature expected unquestioning obedience from members of the party. Existentialists believed in individual freedom and the making of choices. The also believed that once having made a choice one should live with the consequences of that choice. The thought that the universe was meaningless and ridiculous. The only reality was existence. They thought that many people lived inauthentic lives by trying to avoid choices and by trying to escape into empty pleasure or meaningless activity.
Sartre believed that we exist and that death is real. Everything was meaningless. Camus had similar ideas though with a slightly more optimistic view of freedom and of real choice.
In The Outsider, Camus questioned the nature of freedom. The outsider does exactly what he wants when he wants, even lighting up a cigarette at his mother’s funeral because he felt like it. He also shoots a man simply for the experience of doing it.
In The Plague, his chief character, Dr. Rieu reports the plague outbreak in the city of Oran but the authorities refuse to believe it because they fear panic in the city. Some people try to escape and others retreat into meaningless activities. Rieu and his friends prefer to stay and fight the plague, not because it is right, nor that it is good to do so but simply as a choice. This is unconvincing since there remains an underlying feeling of morality in spite of the failure of the priest to convince anyone in the existence of a good God.
The Myth of Sisyphus argues that, after having rolled his boulder up the mountain, as he walks down again prior to repeating the laborious process, Sisyphus is free.
B.F. Skinner believed that we are programmed and conditioned so that our ideas if freedom and of human dignity are meaningless. Conditioning is genetic and social so that we are what our culture makes us and that humans are, in fact, plastic to be moulded into the adult form. The system of thought started with Pavlov and his experiments with dogs to get them to salivate at a secondary stimulus, the primary stimulus being food. Lenin and Stalin were happy to fall in with this idea since they believed they had to remake the individual by remaking society. This debate about the nature of freedom goes on today but was important in the sixties and the early seventies during the Rock music era.
Leonard Cohen and some Musicians as Philosophers. Joan Baez, Paul Simon, bob Dylan and others were certainly on a philosophical journey of exploration through their music. Whether they actually arrived anywhere is a matter of opinion and for the student to decide. Cohen, Simon and Dylan and others as The Rolling Stones show the tension between Behaviourism and Freedom as in Existentialism. Some, as the Rolling Stones seem to give up the quest and settle for the music for its own sake and, like Hendrix, for the egotistical manipulation of the audience and their fans. Others like Elton John remain as popular entertainers with nothing much to say.
