Existentialism

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EXISTENTIALISM.

EXISTENCE AND ESSENCE
HEIDEGGER AND THE QUESTION OF BEING
SARTRE, CAMUS, AND THE QUESTION
OF FREEDOM
RELIGIOUS, PSYCHOANALYTIC, AND FEMINIST EXISTENTIALISM
EXISTENTIALISM AND ETHICS
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Existentialism began as an obscure philosophical movement and ended up as a way of life. The term existentialism now embraces thinkers who did not necessarily see themselves as members of a common enterprise. That makes identifying a core set of beliefs difficult. But there is no doubt at all about the identity of its best-known champion or about the moment of its greatest recognition. Although forever linked with the Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and his famous intellectual coterie just after World War II, when the themes of existentialism, and the term itself, entered global consciousness, the philosophy had begun its history long before.

EXISTENCE AND ESSENCE

The name existentialism referred to the movement's radical new position on the long-standing opposition between essence and existence. Ancient philosophers and their medieval heirs defended the priority of essences. A thing, they argued, is what it is independent of any transformations it undergoes. Like ordinary things, human beings have an essence. That premise allowed the ancients a robust (and highly restrictive) theory of human virtues and vices supposed to follow from man's unchanging nature. Monotheistic religion found a compromise with this view by holding that it is God, the creator, who bestows an essence on each thing (including human beings). Existentialists argued, quite simply, that the ancient and monotheistic thesis was false. Humans have no essence, whether naturally appointed or God-given, and therefore no foreordained purpose, no matter how profoundly they may desire one: in Sartre's famous formula from his central text, Being and Nothingness (1943), "man is a useless passion" (p. 784). Human beings, at least, are wholly defined by their choices, acts, and transformations, and therefore by their ongoing existence. For this reason, existentialism, like no other philosophical movement before or since, stressed the temporality of human consciousness and action. Few failed to notice that the existentialist destruction of the ancient and monotheistic position on human nature also endangered traditional ethical—and political—teachings.

No text better captures both the apparently demobilizing implications of existentialism, which seemed to undermine the basis for any commitment, and the simultaneous desire to find some grounds for action, than the memorable concluding passage of Sartre's Being and Nothingness: "All human activities are equivalent … and all are destined in principle to fail. So it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or leads nations. If one of these activities is superior to the other, it is not because of its objective in the world, but because of the degree of consciousness involved in its adoption; in this sense, it is possible that the quietism of the solitary drunk will take precedence over the vain agitation of the leader of nations.… The ontology [of this work] cannot allow the formulation of moral prescriptions by itself. It nevertheless allows one to imagine what an ethics will be that rethinks responsibility in light of human reality in situation. … But we will return to these problems in a future work" (L'être et le néant: Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique [Paris, 1943], pp. 690–692; author's translation). In spite of writing many pages of "notebooks" for a prospective work on ethics, no sequel to Being and Nothingness ever appeared in Sartre's lifetime.

HEIDEGGER AND THE QUESTION OF BEING

Existentialists often claimed that the lineage of their movement stretched far back in the annals of philosophy. Its history, they said, ran through the decisive nineteenth-century figures of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), thinkers who were, however, ciphers in their own time and owe their present renown to existentialism itself. But by common consent, the founder of existentialism is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). In his masterpiece, Being and Time (1927), Heidegger embarked on a clarification of the "question of being," a philosophical subject he thought had been recognized by the ancients but since forgotten. But this investigation, Heidegger said, admitted of a strategy that placed humanity at the center, since the problem of being in general could be addressed through an "existential" analysis of human being in particular. The most famous parts of the book gave memorable analyses of various "existential" states and created, almost overnight, a new style of philosophical inquiry. What emerges from Being and Time is the groundlessness and relativity of human beings' inherited systems of value and purpose, leading to an abyss of meaning, a frightening situation to be remedied, if at all, only by a decisive or "resolute" affiliation with reactivated elements of the past. Scandalously, when Heidegger chose to affiliate himself with the Nazi Party six years later, in 1933, he claimed that the Germans were doing exactly what his text dictated.

SARTRE, CAMUS, AND THE QUESTION
OF FREEDOM

Sartre, who drank deep at Heidegger's well and anticipated his existential philosophy in brilliant pieces of fiction such as his famous Nausea (1938), separated Heidegger's focus on human being from its larger justifying framework. Sartre's analyses were intended to illustrate the truth that there are no safe or certain values and that the anguished fate of humans is to make choices without any self-evident criteria for doing so. Unlike Heidegger, Sartre was a gifted prose stylist. In his conclusion to Being and Nothingness, he bitterly suggested that "it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or leads nations." The emotionally numb hero of The Stranger (1942)—by Albert Camus (1913–1960), the other star French existentialist, and, like Sartre, a Nobel Prize winner for literature—draws the implication that if there is no authority governing action in the world, then none exists to enforce traditional prohibitions either, and therefore he shoots an Arab for no reason at all. Of particular interest in existentialism, not surprisingly, was its internal debate about the status of other people, the relation of the wayward human being to his fellows. For Heidegger, community seemed both the disease—the source of false reassurance about the existence of stable values—but also potentially the cure. For Sartre, other people appeared only as threats, lures. The act of submitting to them or of loving them might provide comfort, but it would be an inauthentic escape from freedom. As he put it in his drama No Exit (1944), "hell is other people" (p. 45).

The freedom depicted in existentialism, then, is not triumphant but anguished. No doubt it was Sartre's friend Camus who most vividly illustrated the "absurd" predicament of freedom. The two alternatives for human beings, he declared, were clarity and escape. Camus advocated staring unflinchingly at the painful truth—embracing "a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest)" (p. 31). Escape, Camus argued in his Myth of Sisyphus (1942), amounted to metaphorical suicide. Existentialists had to be strong enough to surf on a "dizzying crest" (p. 31) from which others might take the leap of faith to a suicidal end; they must embrace meaninglessness because of "the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation" (p. 60). The title of Camus's essay refers to the figure from Greek mythology, condemned in hell to the eternal task of rolling a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down to the bottom again and again. Sisyphus thus serves as the very symbol for the correct approach to an agonizingly meaningless existence. "I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone," Camus wrote (p. 40).

RELIGIOUS, PSYCHOANALYTIC, AND FEMINIST EXISTENTIALISM

Existentialism appeared in a riot of conflicting forms. In a development that might at first seem surprising, an important school of religious existentialism arose, with Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) as perhaps its most important representative. Its members were right to point out that existentialism had historically emerged out of the thought of a religious figure, Kierkegaard, and concluded that the obsolescence of tradition and the new emphasis on the individual did not mean God had died, as Nietzsche famously claimed. Rather, existentialism provided a new confirmation of the old religious theme of human neediness. Other existentialists, such as Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) and Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), tried to ally Heidegger's philosophy with Sigmund Freud's thought, arguing that existentialism in effect provided a new foundation for psychoanalysis by showing that symptoms were not biologically caused but freely chosen by an escapist self. Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Sartre's companion and lover, influentially applied the insights of existentialism to gender relations, suggesting in The Second Sex (1949) that the discovery of the obsolescence of tradition and the relativity of values spelled the end of the validity of sexual hierarchies as well.

EXISTENTIALISM AND ETHICS

Having spawned existentialism, which was already multiplying into many variants, Heidegger vehemently disavowed it at the moment of its triumph. He claimed that in Being and Time he had only introduced the focus on human existence as a means of addressing the far more important question of being in general; and in his "Letter on Humanism" (1947), addressed to his French enthusiasts, he indicted his legacy and his own earlier text as "anthropocentric." By then, however, existentialism had grown too fashionable for its repudiation by its founder to matter.

Since the fall of communism, the ethical ambiguity of existentialism—its challenge to all inherited systems of moral certitude—along with the political choices of its most famous exponents led scholars to lose interest in its intellectual content in order to focus on its putatively disastrous real-world consequences. Heidegger became a National Socialist and Sartre, shortly after World War II, broke with the apparent relativism and quietism of Being and Nothingness and, in an atmosphere of intellectual leftism, began a long campaign to combine his existentialism with Marxist theory and practice. How exactly to make existentialism compatible with Marxism, a deterministic science of history that would seem to be wholly at variance with existentialism's emphasis on human freedom, remained problematic and obscure in Sartre's work, even in his second major book of theoretical philosophy, The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). In any event, Sartre's turn to radicalism led, scandalously for many post–Cold War observers, to his apology for the communist Soviet Union, including the excesses of Joseph Stalin's violent reign. Sartre's one-time school friend and lifelong rival, the liberal thinker Raymond Aron (1905–1983), found it curious that a philosophy of freedom could lend its support to repression, and pilloried Marxism as a dangerous myth in The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) and other writings. But other existentialists, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty—probably the most philosophically enduring of the French band of thinkers, important notably for his attempt to ground the existentialist analysis of consciousness in the corporeal nature of human being—joined Sartre's campaign. In his Humanism and Terror (1947), Merleau-Ponty, who for a time coedited the main existentialist organ Les temps modernes with Sartre, defended violence as a morally plausible response to the deficiencies of liberal societies, since, he said, bourgeois rule also involved terror and, unlike the Soviet Union, did not promise a world beyond it. Merleau-Ponty later broke with both Sartre and Marxist politics. For his part, Camus, who could never bring himself to join Sartre's Marxist reinvention of existentialism, dissented from the Parisian intellectuals' sympathy for communism in The Rebel, whose publication in 1951 led to a bitter public quarrel between the two leading lights of the movement. For Camus, a dreamy utopian future did not justify immorality now; Sartre replied that not to resort to violence in effect ratified existing immorality, and he supported the insurrectionary struggle of Algerians against French rule. Camus, who came from a French family in the Algerian colony, revealingly admitted preferring "[his] mother to justice."

In fact, there was little connection between philosophical existentialism and political extremism, and its founders were wrong to posit a necessary one. After all, their discovery of the relativity of values precluded all attempts at the commitment they desired, and in retrospect the popularity of existentialism may well have served liberal capitalism better than it did its rivals. Undermining all traditions and emancipating the individual from inherited obligations, even religion and community, existentialism forced the human beings it influenced to embark on pained quests for meaning, aware in advance that little lasting satisfaction might follow but condemned to the search nevertheless. As modern life has continued to provide human beings with a way to cultivate ever-new and always-transitory tastes, to engage in experiments in living for every season, and to purchase products with planned obsolescence, it has allowed increasing numbers of people to embrace absurdity without regret, as Camus would have wanted. Narcissism and consumerism, rather than illiberal extremism, were perhaps in the end the main historical legacy of the existentialist movement.