The Philosophy of Ang Lee

It's Existential: Negative Space and Nothingness in The Ice Storm

243 It’s exIstentIal Negative Space and Nothingness in The Ice Storm David Koepsell A Universe Devoid Two of the most important philosophical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are also the least understood. Phenomenology and existentialism mark, in many ways, the cultural move from modernism to postmodernism and serve as the context for much of the twentieth century’s significant and lasting contributions to our present world. Ang Lee’s critically acclaimed film, The Ice Storm (1997), based on Rick Moody’s 1994 novel of the same name, is an existential masterpiece, depicting the crossroads at which humanity stands through a story about a New England family in Nixon’s America. In light of the successes of science and technology, the emergence of the modern era is marked by a slow, though not always articulate, suspicion that we live in a universe devoid of theistic teleology and meaning. The feeling among some is that the universe does not care for us at all, and except for the meaning that we create through our myths and languages, there is no particular meaning or purpose to our existences, either individually or collectively .1 Nevertheless, for French existential philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), this is not cause for a terminal state of angst, but rather is the root of our freedom and humanity. Existence Precedes Essence Sartre’s existentialism embraces the lack of inherent meaning or essence in existence, describes existence as preceding essence, and makes it thus the project of our life’s work to create meaning. The meaninglessness and lack of 244 David Koepsell essence to bare existence forces us into a state of freedom. We are so utterly free that we become nauseous when facing our bare, meaningless, existence: the “no-thing-ness” (of Being and Nothingness). We are thus much more responsible—in a broader political, moral, and aesthetic sense—for what comes of our lives than previous philosophies could accept. Sartre views many of us as living inauthentic existences, escaping the no-thing-ness we face by playing roles rather than being in the world and of it, facing existence with our freedom and making conscious authentic choices. He terms this condition bad faith. Living inauthentically, or in bad faith, is perhaps the worst sin for Sartre, and the existential project is, more than anything, to be authentic.2 Sartre’s ontology makes the interaction of consciousness with existence the crux of the existential conundrum. But his project is a humanistic one, concerned not at all with describing the essences of the phenomenal world, but rather with the problem of how to live. While Sartre undermines traditional idealistic dualism in favor of a unity of being, being comes in several forms. Being in itself refers to being apart from consciousness, such as the being of a chair or any other nonconscious entity. The being of persons exists in a state of tension between being-for-itself (oneself) and being for others. Being in itself cannot be attained by persons, though we often fall into bad faith or inauthenticity in seeking it, which is essentially the same thing as seeking to be god. Being for itself is conscious being undirected toward any other. Only this type of being is capable of detachment from anything else, and thus of no-thing-ness. This is the consciousness of the cogito. Being for others causes us an eternal war of selves, as each self makes an object out of the other in order to recover its own being. The objectification of the other is necessary. The other objectifies us even as we objectify the other. The responsibility of freedom, given our no-thing-ness, is to avoid objectification of the other, to regard the other as a being for itself, to avoid alienation and inauthenticity. Our freedom is both limitless and a limit as we must acknowledge it, and respect it, and define from it our essence. Thus, essence follows existence, and we are free to create our essence.3 Sartre’s philosophy is complex and evolves over the course of decades, but his role in defining modern existentialism is clear. Existentialism is a postmodern philosophy that extends humanity’s godless, meaningless existence into an all-encompassing political, cultural, ontological, and personal way of living. Immersed as we are in existence, and faced with no-thingness , we have as our overriding challenge the responsibility to define our [3.23.127.197] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 19...