Existentialism

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EXISTENTIALISM

EXISTENTIALISM is a type of philosophy difficult to define because it does not have any agreed body of doctrine; it is rather a way of doing philosophy in which life and thought are closely related to each other. Thus, while some existentialists have been theists and others atheists, they have arrived at their different results by rather similar processes of thought. The existentialist who believes in God does so not as a result of intellectual demonstration—he or she is more likely to say that the attempts to prove God's existence are a waste of time, or even harmful—but on the grounds of passionate inward conviction; likewise the atheistic existentialist rejects God not because of being persuaded by argument but because the very idea of God poses a threat to the freedom and autonomy of the human being, and so to the integrity of humanity. But if such nonrational factors are allowed their say, is it not a departure from philosophy altogether? Perhaps not, if one thinks that reason has become so ambitious that it ceases to perceive its own limitations and so becomes misleading. The all-embracing rational system of Hegel provoked not only Kierkegaard's existentialism but also the skepticism of the left-wing Hegelians and neo-Kantian positivism. The existentialists of the twentieth century emerged about the same time as the logical positivists, and both groups shared doubts about the omnicompetence of reason. The existentialist would still claim to be a philosopher, in the sense of a thinker, but, in Kierkegaard's expression, an "existing thinker," that is, a thinker who is always involved in the reality being thought about, so that the thinker cannot take up the purely objective attitude of a spectator; also, the thinker is always on the way from one matter to another, so that as long as the thinker exists he or she never has a complete picture. So existentialism stands opposed to all those grand metaphysical systems that profess to give a comprehensive and objective account of all that is. Significantly, Kierkegaard titles two of his most important writings Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and these titles implicitly contrast his work with that of philosophers who aim at a comprehensive system.

Though some earlier writers, such as Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), who criticized the theistic proofs and contrasted the God of the philosophers with the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, have been seen in retrospect as forerunners of existentialism, the movement belongs essentially to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is usually regarded as its founder. His philosophy is inextricably entangled with his struggle over what it means to become a Christian. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is in many ways at the opposite extreme from Kierkegaard, but his proclamation of the death of God was just as passionate as Kierkegaard's fascination with the God-man paradox. Some Russian thinkers of the same period showed similar existentialist tendencies, notably Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and Vladimir Solovʾev (1853–1900). All of these profoundly influenced the existentialists of the twentieth century, among whom may be counted Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), though it should be noted that the term existentialist had, in popular usage, become so widely applied and covered so many differences that most of the philosophers mentioned were unwilling to accept it. The Jewish thinker Martin Buber (1878–1965) had existentialist affinities but criticized the individualism of the typical existentialist. Nevertheless, all the philosophers mentioned above share a number of "family resemblances" that make them existentialists in a broad sense.

It is sometimes suggested that existentialism is a thing of the past, that it was a phenomenon called into being by the specific events of the times in which these thinkers lived but that humanity has now moved into new times with new problems. Up to a point, this may be true. The very fact that the existentialist is an existing thinker means that he or she has a concrete relation to the events of his or her own time. Yet there are some characteristics of the human condition that seem to belong to all times or to recur at different times, and some of the insights of the existential philosophers into what it means to be human have a permanent value and are likely to provoke new thought and new investigations in the future.

Some Distinguishing Characteristics

As the name implies, existentialism is a philosophy of existence. It should be noted, however, that the word existence is used in a restricted sense. In ordinary speech, one says that stars exist, trees exist, cows exist, men and women exist, and so on of everything that has a place in the spatiotemporal world. The existentialist restricts the term to the human existent. By doing this, there is no intention to suggest that stars, trees, cows and the like are unreal. The existentialist only wants to draw attention to the fact that their being is quite different from the being of a human person. When an existentialist speaks of a human being as "existing," he or she is taking the word in what may be supposed to be the original etymological sense of "standing out." Stars and the like have their being simply by lying around, so to speak. Their nature or essence is already given to them. The human being exists actively, by standing out or emerging through the decisions and acts that make this person the unique being that he or she is. In Sartre's famous definition, existence means that the human person begins as nothing, and only afterward does that being become something and form its essence through its chosen policies of action.

Although existentialists use the word existence in the sense just explained, it retains something of its traditional meaning. In the history of philosophy, existence (referring to the fact that something is) has usually been contrasted with essence (referring to what something is or the basic properties of that thing). Philosophies of essence (Platonism is the great example) concentrate attention on the universal properties of things, properties which remain the same in all circumstances and at all times. These universals are amenable to the operations of thinking, so that the essentialist tends to end up as an idealist, holding that thought and reality coincide. The philosopher of existence, on the other hand, concentrates attention on the concrete, individually existing reality, but this has a particularity and contingency that make it much more resistant to the systematizing tendencies of thought, so that, for such a thinker, reality does not conform to thought, and there are always loose ends that refuse to be accommodated in some tidy intellectual construction.

It should be noticed too that the existentialist finds room for dimensions of human existence other than thinking. For several centuries, Western philosophy has been deeply influenced by Descartes's famous pronouncement, "I think, therefore I am." The existentialist would claim that this accords too much preeminence to thinking. Humans are also beings who experience emotion, and these emotions are not just transient inner moods but rather ways of relating to the world and becoming aware of some of its properties that do not reveal themselves to rational observation. Equally important is the will. One learns about the world not just by beholding it and reflecting upon it but rather by acting in it and encountering its resistances.

It follows from this that existentialism is also a philosophy of the subject. Kierkegaard declared that truth is subjectivity. At first sight, this seems a subversive statement, one which might even imply the abolition of truth. But what Kierkegaard meant was that the most important truths of life are not to be achieved by observation and cannot be set down in textbooks to be looked up when required. They are the kind of truths that can be won only through inward and perhaps painful appropriation. The truths of religion are the most obvious case—they cannot be learned from books of theology but only by following the way of faith that is one with the truth and the life (John 14:6).

Implications for Religion

The existentialist recognition of the distinctiveness of human existence as over against the world of nature, together with the claim that the truth of human existence is to be reached by the way of subjectivity, is significant for the philosophy of religion. The tendency in modern times has been to treat the human person as one more natural phenomenon, to be understood objectively through human sciences which model their methods on that of the natural sciences. Existentialists, however, believe that human nature can be understood only from the inside, as it were, through one's own participation in it. The phenomenological analysis of consciousness, developed by Husserl, has been adopted by existentialist philosophers, but long before Husserl similar methods were being used, for instance, by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety.

One obvious result of the application of such methods of inquiry to the human person is the claim that freedom is essential to being human. Decision, conscience, and responsibility are major themes in existentialist writers, in opposition to the determinism or near-determinism characteristic of supposedly scientific views of humanity. Perhaps it would not be going too far to say that freedom is the supreme value among the existentialists. Human existence is said to be "authentic" when the individual freely chooses who and what he or she will become. The freedom to choose and decide is, of course, never absolute. The human being is finite, inserted at a given position in space and time and therefore subject to all the constraints and influences that operate at that point. Thus one's freedom is always threatened. One may simply reflect the values of one's culture, without ever deciding one's relation to those values, or one may be caught up in the race for money or pleasure, though these may be inimical to the development of one's finest potentialities.

Thus all human existence is lived in the tension between finitude and freedom. This tension can also be expressed as that between freedom (the areas that are still open for choice) and facticity (those elements in existence which are simply given and reduce the area of free decision). It is because of this tension that freedom is always accompanied by anxiety. Existentialists, from Kierkegaard on, have laid great stress on anxiety as a basic emotion or state of mind which illuminates the human condition. In the case of Kierkegaard and other Christian existentialists, the experience of anxiety may predispose toward the life of faith by awakening the need for salvation; but among atheistic existentialists, anxiety points rather to despair, for the inner contradiction in the human being is taken to be incapable of resolution, so that human existence is always on the verge of absurdity. Part of human finitude is the fact that existence will in any case come to an end in death. But here too there are differences in interpretation. Heidegger believes that the fact of death, by closing off the future of existence, makes it possible to achieve a unifying and meaningful pattern in that existence. Sartre, on the other hand, thinks that death, by canceling out all achievement, is the ultimate indication of the absurdity of existence.

The criticism is sometimes made that there is something morbid in the existentialists' preoccupation with anxiety and death, and this criticism also impinges on those Christian theologians who have used these ideas to urge the need for faith and dependence on God. But it should be noted that there is another and more affirmative side to existentialism. Many writers of the school speak also of "transcendence," and by this they do not mean the transcendence of God, as commonly understood in theology, but the transcendence of the human existent moving constantly beyond itself into new situations. Those who stress transcendence believe that the goal of human life is to realize more and more one's authentic possibilities. Whereas the early Heidegger believed that this is to be achieved by human effort, by a steady "resoluteness" in the face of facticity and death, Christian writers such as Gabriel Marcel have thought of human transcendence as a transcendence toward God, and have taught that this is to be achieved not just through human effort but through the assistance of divine grace.

Most existentialists have had a bias toward individualism. This was true of Kierkegaard, who was alarmed by the tendencies toward collectivism in Hegel's philosophy. It is also true of Sartre, who depicts interpersonal relations as essentially frustrating. On the other hand, Marcel claims that a relation to others is essential to an authentic human existence, while Heidegger sees "being-with-others" as an inescapable dimension of the human being. Critics of existentialism have reckoned its individualism as a defect, on the ground that it prevents the development of a political philosophy, but others have praised the stress on the individual as a defense of human freedom in face of the totalitarian pretensions of the modern state. Nietzsche and Heidegger have both sought to go beyond the biography of the individual to the outlines of a philosophy of history. In this, they oppose the so-called scientific history that seeks to establish objective facts. Nietzsche speaks scornfully of the "antiquarian" type of historian who seeks to reconstruct the past. He prefers the "monumental" historian who goes to some great creative event of the past in order to discover its power and to learn its lessons for the present and future. Heidegger likewise is uninterested in the history that confines itself to the analysis of past events. History, he claims, is oriented to the future. The historian goes to the past only in order to learn about such authentic possibilities of human existence as may be repeatable in the present. This view of history was very influential for Rudolf Bultmann's existential interpretation of the "saving events" of the New Testament, an interpretation succinctly expressed as "making Christ's cross one's own."

The stress on human freedom together with the bias toward individualism raises the question of the significance of existentialism for ethics. The existentialist has no use for an ethic of law, for the requirement of a universal law ignores the unique individual and conforms everyone to the same pattern. So one finds Kierkegaard defending Abraham's decision to sacrifice Isaac, for although this meant the "suspension" of ethics, only so could Abraham be true to his own self and be "authentic." Similary Nietzsche is found claiming that the "superman" must create his own values to supersede traditional values, while Heidegger claims that what is ordinarily called "conscience" is only the voice of the mediocre values of society and that the true conscience is the deep inward summons of the authentic self. In each case, the value of an action is judged not by its content but by the intensity and freedom with which it is done. Such an ethic is too formless for human society and represents an overreaction against the cramping restraints of legalism. Nevertheless, this extremely permissive ethic has seemed to some Christian thinkers to be compatible with Jesus' teaching that love rather than law must guide one's conduct, and it is reflected in the various types of "situation ethics" that flourished for a short time.

Finally, although existentialism turns away from the attempt to formulate any detailed and inclusive metaphysic, its adherents seem to find it impossible to avoid assenting to some ontology or theory of being. Kierkegaard and other Christian existentialists assume (but do not seek to prove) a theistic view of the world as the setting of human existence; Sartre is frankly dualistic in opposing the free but fragile being of humankind (the pour soi) to the massive unintelligent being (the en soi) of the physical world; there are mystical elements both in Heidegger's talk of "being" and Jaspers's of "transcendence." Existentialist theologians have also found that the reconstruction of Christian theology in terms of human possibilities is inadequate and needs the supplementation of a theistic philosophy.

Bibliography

An introduction to existentialism is provided in my book Existentialism (Baltimore, 1973). Major existentialist texts include Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, translated by David F. Swenson (Princeton, N. J., 1936); Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, translated by me and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962); Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New York, 1956); and Fritz Buri's Theology of Existence, translated by Harold H. Oliver and Gerhard Onder (Greenwood, S.C., 1965).