EXISTENTIALISM

Existentialism came to prominence shortly after World War II as a philosophical and literary movement stressing individual human experience in a hostile or indifferent world and highlighting freedom of choice and personal responsibility. As a word, existentialism has roots in the Latin existere, meaning to stand forth. Indeed existentialists argue that human beings stand out from other things because of the way humans stand consciously and freely in relation with things and with one another. Existentialists developed criticisms of science and technology especially insofar as they deny or obscure this uniqueness.

Historical Development

In the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) first used the word existence to designate a deep individuality that escaped the grip of bourgeois society and religion, and rationalistic philosophy. Though Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) did not use the word, his radical analyses and demands for self-creation influenced later existentialist thinkers. Nineteenth-century Romanticism can be seen as proto-existentialist, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) (who both influenced Nietzsche) sought to redefine the self and called for new levels of choice and new social relations.

In part this was a response to industrial and social revolutions that shook traditional values. Writers were aghast at poverty and social dislocation amid the optimistic complacency of a society that seemed to offer no place to be fully human. The dislocations and wars of the twentieth century increased this tension, and the triumphs of technological rationality and the growth of the psychological and social sciences threatened those dimensions of human existence that cannot be reduced to relations among law-governed objects. The twentieth-century tone is more despairing in authors such as Franz Kafka (1883–1924) who chronicle human imprisonment and lack of possibilities.

Along with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) also influenced the French generation that created existentialism as an explicit philosophical school. Husserl tried to reveal the acts and necessities that lay beneath and make possible our ordinary perceptions and actions. Seeking to go behind science to reveal it as a construction within a more fluid lived experience, Husserl showed how science's power could nonetheless transform human life and be readily accepted. Max Scheler (1874–1928), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and others extended Husserl's analyses in more practical and dramatic directions. The most influential work before World War II was Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), which proclaimed a new mode of analysis of the self and a new conception of our relation to time and history. After the war, existentialism as such manifested itself in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). Soon the label "existentialist" was also given to the work of Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Albert Camus (1913–1960), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and others, though Marcel and Merleau-Ponty later rejected the term. Although these thinkers had been forming and writing their ideas before the war, the experience of the Nazi occupation and the problems of postwar reconstruction intensified the urgency of their thought.

Common Threads

The common thread of the existentialist critiques of science and technology is that human existence has dimensions that cannot be scientifically or technologically grasped. In a technoscientific world, humans are in danger of being imprisoned in an impoverished mode of living that denies their deepest possibilities. This situation calls for a deeper analysis of the structures of human experience, and for the assertion of human freedom through new ethical values and new projects, or avant-garde art, or political action, or religion; these all escape an everydayness that hides who human beings really are or can be.

Existentialists refuse technological determinism even while they admit that for the most part humans may be determined by received values and orientations that deny them the chance to revise basic choices. Rational calculation is an inadequate approach to policy issues because it avoids questioning the framework within which calculations will be performed.

The existentialists demand self-creation that goes beyond everyday and rationally analyzed frameworks. To bring their message of a more than rational criticism and creativity, existentialists produced novels, plays, autobiographies, journals, and literary criticism as well as philosophical tracts. Some were politically radical, some conservative, some religious, and some atheistic, but they shared a sense that self and society faced a crisis that was all the more serious for its general invisibility. Crucial dimensions of selfhood and social life were being ignored, and the need for self-creative decision was being denied even while such decisions were made but covered over in what Sartre called bad faith.

Contra Science and Technology

For issues relevant to science and technology the two most important existentialist writers are Sartre and Heidegger. Sartre demands that human individuals realize that their freedom is the sole source of meaning, and act resolutely in an inherently meaningless world. Though Sartre himself did not write extensively about science or technology until his later more Marxist period, his early existentialist ideas fit well with technological ambitions to control the world and decide its significance. Sartre refuses any appeal to social roles or to a given human nature. Things acquire meaning when humans project possible courses of action and language involving them. Human selves and personalities acquire meaning in the same way, within a projected net of values and activities, that projection is totally free and need not be consistent with the past; people are bound only by how they choose to bind themselves. Individuals fear this totally open freedom, and cling to rigid self-definitions as if they were natural things with a fixed nature. Sartre's ideas resemble those technological optimists and some posthumanists who find no limits to what people might make of themselves.

In his later writings Sartre saw the expansion of science and technology as part of a larger thinning of life and denial of freedom due to the capitalist mode of production, which attempts to reduce humans to docile subjects of serial processes. The image of technological progress seduces people away from collective free responsibility for the future. Social processes seem fixed and unavoidable; changing them requires cooperative revolutionary action, not just Sartre's earlier individualistic choice.

Denying that objects dictate their own meaning and human possibilities, the existentialists denied the adequacy of reductions of human activity to physiology, and the reduction social connections to economic and technological relations. They saw science as science reducing experience to static abstractions and collected data. They saw capitalist industrial systems as increasing the dominance of impersonal routine in human life, and condemned the technologization of war, as in the atom bombing of Hiroshima, associating it with the mechanization of death in the holocaust.

Heidegger feared the technological impulse to control and wrote in opposition to it. He wrote not about the choice of values but about finding creative and resolute new paths within the network of projects and significations that make up the lived world. No free Sartrean choice will allow individuals to escape their time's overall basic meanings, but they can invent creative responses that find unexpected possibilities within those basic meanings.

Heidegger argues that people are mistaken when viewing technology as a neutral tool or as an application of disinterested science. Scientific research and technology are expressions of a more basic way of interpreting-revealing things as raw material to be manipulated efficiently. He claimed that this differs from older ways of understanding the being and meaning of things. It also differs from any simple anthropocentric view, because in the completed technological world human persons too join the standing reserve ready for manipulation and service. No one profits from this and no one escapes it.

Heidegger protests the spoliation of the environment and the technologization of life. Yet for Heidegger there is no return to an earlier world. Any active human choice will replay the technological game. Individuals can only wait for some new way of valuing and interpreting to come about. In that waiting, though, they are redefining themselves as resolutely receptive and creatively open to the coming of a new basic meaning of reality, which brings a deeper sense of human existence than the image of themselves as manipulated manipulators that technology offers.

Between them Heidegger and Sartre raise the question of how projects for the future link to past frameworks and values. Both deny that the past merely continues due to inertia; they argue that open temporal existence means that the influence of the past is carried on in human freedom, so the future is open to more authentic choices. They deny that rational analysis of the past can legislate future values. For Sartre human choices are always separated from the past by a moment of indeterminate freedom. For Heidegger human choices are always within a net of meanings and projects that individuals did not originate and cannot eliminate, but which they can creatively reread and reform by discovering new depths and new possibilities.

Both these alternatives stand opposed to the idea that a completed social and psychological science could provide a whole explanation of human life and a guide to its values. The project for such a complete explanation threatens to create a society where other dimensions of self or society can neither be expressed nor thought of, a society that has lost the ability to question its own values and directions.

Other existentialists who rejected Sartre's pure freedom followed Kierkegaard in seeing authentic choices arising in free receptivity to a call from beyond the ordinary, from God, one's deepest self, or the unrevealed possibilities of a particular time and tradition. Camus struggled to develop a position that was more socially engaged than the early Sartre while still affirming individual freedom in a world devoid of both traditional religious and scientifically rational meanings. Gabriel Marcel stressed interpersonal encounter and dialogue, arguing that freedom and true personhood happen amid the active receptivity of mutual commitment, fidelity, and hope. This space of mutual encounter is fundamentally open to include God. Scientifically objectivist and technologically manipulative approaches to humanity deny the deepest human possibilities when they reduce persons to calculable units and human excellence to "having" rather than "being."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed existentialist issues through dialogue with scientific developments in biology and experimental psychology. He used ideas from Gestalt psychology and added his own analysis of the relation of animal to environment and perceiving body to objects. He claimed that scientific materialism paradoxically reinforces a split between subject and object when it mistakenly presumes that perception is the presentation of discrete data that is then subjectively interpreted. He argued that the perceived world and the perceiving bodily person are intertwined, revealing each other in perception and practical activity, without the need for a middle layer of data or representations. His ideas have become part of attacks that question the adequacy of computer models for the mind and fault cognitive theory for clinging to a theory of mental representations.

Merleau-Ponty's ideas about embodiment have been taken up by those trying to develop an environmental ethics that questions any purely manipulative approach to nature and seeks to foster more connectedness with non-human creatures.

Human Nature and Authenticity

Existentialists encourage choosing more authentic lives. The English authentic comes from the French autentique, meaning authored. An authentic life is not one attained through social conditioning or everyday expectations but is authored by the individual's own deep choice and self-creation. An authentic choice need not be restricted to the social roles commonly available. While Kierkegaard thought that individuals might choose to lead authentic lives that were to all outside appearances totally humdrum and ordinary, Sartre and especially Heidegger thought that authenticity could require dramatic new commitments and modes of action.

Existentialism denies traditional pictures of a fixed human nature, and also denies programs for a rational foundation of values derived from Kantian, Hegelian, or Marxist philosophy, or in a different way from economics and game theory. Existentialists agree with Max Weber (1864–1920) that ultimate values cannot have a rational foundation, but they make these choices subject to the criterion of authenticity, rather than arbitrarily. The crucial question becomes just what ethical import the criterion of authenticity can have. Can it provide limits on self-invention? Can one say that some authentic choices would be wrong? Could individuals make authentic choices to be fully conscious Nazis? Could people sacrifice others to their own projects? Must every situation be approached with the possibility that it may call for extreme measures that will seem unethical?

Nietzsche thought so, and he took seriously the idea that individuals would have to move beyond standard notions of good and evil. Facing this issue and wanting to find some limits through a sense of justice, Sartre and Camus both wrote dramas where characters confronted violence and the choice of becoming assassins and terrorists. These plays derived from the demand for self-sacrifice in the French Resistance against the Nazis, and from the terror on both sides of the 1950s Algerian liberation struggle. Twenty-first-century society faces this issue not only in its struggles with violent movements, but also in making decisions about the use of powerful weapons, and about the biotechnology revolution that will allow humankind to redefine itself, perhaps reshaping human potentials with no consideration for freedom and authenticity. Existentialists would argue that such issues demand active choice, lest humanity be carried along an unthinking path of automatic supposed "progress" that avoids the central choices of humans as self-making.

Existentialists ask about the limits of rationality in fundamental decisions. How do individuals determine the values that should guide their ethical choices about the limits of technology, or its application in situations of scarcity? They also urge reevaluating the success of social scientific explanations of self and society. Could a total scientific explanation really guide human choices, or would its application depend upon values that are not the outcome of scientific investigations? This leads to more general questions that get overlooked in the technological rush for efficiency and comfort: What is science for? Can one have choices about its meaning? Are there directions built into technology that ought to be questioned? Heidegger argues that individuals are caught within the technological dynamic and must learn to resist its onward rush while understanding themselves more deeply and waiting for a new basic meaning. Sartre argues that individuals should shake off the past, take the future in their hands, and choose anew. Merleau-Ponty urges a reexamination of the basic experience of bodily inhabiting the world and a consequent redefinition of individuals and their possibilities.

For all existentialists, the real question is: What will people choose to become? Do they have more freedom than they imagine in relation to the past, traditions, and social conditions? Modernist writers extol freedom, but think of it mainly in terms of linear progress in already obvious directions. Existentialists argue that issues of authentic choice open more possibilities than such standard options.

DAVID KOLB

SEE ALSO Alienation;Heidegger, Martin;Husserl, Edmund;Kierkegaard, Søren;Nietzsche, Friedrich W.;Neutrality in Science and Technology;Values and Valuing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abram, David. (1966). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Pantheon Books. Ecological discussion influenced by Merleau-Ponty's ideas.

Camus, Albert. (1972). "The Just Assassins" [Les justes]. In Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage Books. Camus's play examines the experience of self-righteous terrorists.

Heidegger, Martin. (1996). Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Originally published in German in 1929. Heidegger's most influential work, rethinking humans' relation to time and history, and the need for authenticity.

Heidegger, Martin. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. Includes: "The Question Concerning Technology," "The Turning," "The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead," "The Age of the World Picture," "Science and Reflection." Heidegger's major critical writings on science and technological civilization.

Husserl, Edmund. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Posthumously published in German in 1954. Husserl's examination of science and the origin of the modern experience of nature out of the more basic flow of bodily and temporal perception and meaning.

Kierkegaard, Søren. (1974). Fear and Trembling, and the Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Anxiety, despair, and their healing in an authentic selfhood in relation to God.

Marcel, Gabriel. (1965). Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Katharine Farrer. New York: Harper and Row. Originally published in French in 1935.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. New York: Humanities Press. Originally published in French in 1945. Merleau-Ponty's study of the bodily intertwining of subject and object.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (2001). The Gay Science, trans Adrian Del Caro. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche's most accessible presentation of his views; in the fifth part he discusses and critiques science.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1956). Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. Originally published in French in 1942. The most influential existentialist treatment of individual freedom.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1973). "Dirty Hands" (Les mains sales). In No Exit, and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Lionel Abel. New York: Vintage Books. In the play Sartre asks whether there can be an authentic act of violence.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1983). The Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. New York: Schocken Books. Originally published in French in 1960, with a second volume published posthumously in 1982. In this work Sartre reformulated existentialism, taking more account of social and economic relations in modern routinized society.

Zimmerman, Michael E. (1994). Contesting Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deep ecology that borrows from Heidegger's ideas.