The Meaning of Existentialism
I just finished this, so here it is, raw and unedited. Feel free to send me comments, as this will be published in the near future by the Gaetano Massa Forum. I haven’t finished the citations, so ask me if you’re interested in one. Hopefully this will clear up all of the misconceptions of existentialism for all you Tumblrs out there, but I doubt it:
Defining existentialism is no easy task. After all, it discusses concepts such as freedom, responsibility, existence, and the self, and in their fragmented states these abstractions are themselves difficult to tie down. There are also various ways of approaching the movement. As Thomas Flynn mentions in his address to his audience at SPEP 50, some consider existentialism to be a literary movement with philosophical implications, and others a philosophical movement with literary applications. Many, I would add, understand existentialism to originate in different time periods, with different thinkers, and different modes of thought. Some may view Socrates, for example, in his search for self-knowledge and representing the Delphic precept “know thyself” to be the first existentialist, or attribute its origins to the deeply religious Kierkegaard, who is often considered the father of the tradition. Others associate existentialism with Sartre, the atheist, and even Camus, who rejected the label whenever it was applied to him. In this paper, however, I set out to make clear the meaning of existentialism in three steps. The first is to provide for it a metaphysical foundation. Since Sartre’s contribution to the movement is built upon such a foundation, I will begin by briefly introducing key moves that he makes with his phenomenological ontology[1]. Second, I will introduce important historical figures often associated with existentialism, as well as the commonalities they each share with one another. Lastly, I will conclude by tying together the first two steps, and establishing a meaningful context for what existentialism is all about.
The question that we must attend to first, and especially after introducing various ways one may approach the origin of existentialism, is to state why we are beginning with Sartre. The answer is simply that, although Sartre did not coin the term,[2] he was the movement’s biggest advocate, and his theory of existentialism is founded on a highly developed ontology. Whereas other existential writers have their own theoretical systems, Sartre arrives at his conclusions by way of structures of being; rather than systematizing ideas such as the body, values, or freedom, he understands them to be necessary conditions of our existence. As we shall see later in this paper, this is the core to all existentialist thought – the continuity of these ontological structures and their metaphysical necessity.
Sartre was fundamentally a Husserlian phenomenologist, which is, broadly defined, the study of the necessary conditions for the possibility of an experience of a given object. Phenomenology was developed by Husserl in response to what he viewed as the psychologism of his age, and sought to examine consciousness from a first-person perspective with the hopes of returning to a logic founded on judicative thinking that would once again unify the social and natural sciences.[3] By adopting this method of Husserl’s, Sartre was aware of the many structures at play during a conscious experience, and especially of intentionality, the idea that all consciousness is consciousness-of something. What this means is that in any mental event, whether it be a perception, remembering, or imagining, there is always an object of consciousness. Rather than viewing consciousness as a Cartesian theater ready to be filled, Sartre, like Husserl, recognized the necessity of there always being an existent conditioning every experience at any particular moment (otherwise, we would have the experience of nothing, and remembering Parmenides, even the experience of nothing is the experience of something). After studying Husserl – and Heidegger – at length, Sartre set to task developing what he called Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.
At the beginning of Being and Nothingness, Sartre immediately does away with the modern dualist notion of appearance and essence, and claims that appearance and essence are the same since appearances manifest as a synthetic unity of the object itself. Therefore, since appearances only appear to a consciousness, the existence of consciousness is a necessary condition for essence as appearance, anticipating his famous dictum that existence precedes essence. It is not, as Sartre attempts to simplify in Existentialism is a Humanism, because he adopts the atheist notion that God does not exist; it is due to this “necessity of fact,”[4] that the existence of consciousness is necessary for any revelation of being.
An important idea to keep in mind is that although these appearances manifest as a synthetic unity of the object itself, we can only view one appearance of the object at any given moment. To the phenomenologists, an individual perceives a facet of an object from a given perspective, which is always seen as something (we see a cup as a cup, for example) in the world, and in the act of perception, we perceive it through a perspectival adumbration of sides (also considered profiles, or facets), which never allows for an exhaustive perception of the thing from all sides at one point in time. The question can then be raised, however, as to how we can reconcile the fact that we are unable to intuitively grasp an object in its fullness at any particular moment, and yet know the facets to belong to one and the same object. Sartre, and the phenomenologists,[5] would answer that there is a unifying temporal structure to consciousness. Sartre, specifically, argues that the “present” to consciousness is actually a unity of past and future.
How, though, are we to translate this into the individual existing in a world of exigencies? Well, when an individual reflects on his or her situation and posits the initial consciousness (of) being[6] as an object, we immediately make present the past, and it’s only the past that can be considered to be fixed. What this means is that since consciousness, to Sartre, is no-thing (he instead claims that it isa privation of being, since if it were a thing it would be an object, and objects cannot grasp the appearances of other objects – only subjects can do that) any attempt of consciousness to grasp itself simply results in bringing one’s relation to the being of the object to the level of explicit awareness. By doing so, again, the present is made past, which is unalterable and taken as fact, and only then can any concept of an essence of an individual be thought. Furthermore, since consciousness is always transcending itself by way of future possibilities, any sense of “self” that is disclosed by the revelation of essence qua past action is fleeting, bringing us to the next and possibly most important tenet of existentialism: freedom.
Freedom is, by far, the most convoluted notion in existentialism; partly because of how difficult the concept of freedom is to define, and partly because of how difficult it is to even discuss while recognizing determinant conditions. In any case, Sartre’s understanding of freedom is quite often misunderstood and sometimes worse – misrepresented. Some thinkers have attributed to Sartre a notion of freedom in the radical sense; the type of freedom where anyone can do anything they want, at any time, without keeping in mind the element of facticity found in his work – a term used to signify any determinant conditions that are outside of one’s control. To fully understand freedom as Sartre does, there are a few points we need to highlight.
For one, despite his Cartesian influences, Sartre maintained that consciousness is bodily, and instrumentalizes the world around embodied consciousness’s given perspective. Secondly, on occasion one will argue that Sartre is a subjectivist, with his claims of individuals creating the world in which they live. What he means, however, is that I cause the world to be in my contingency[7] since the mere fact that I exist necessarily presupposes a world. This is not to say that I create the world; rather, my existence presupposes it. Therefore, because of this situatedness in the world and the fact that all engagements and experiences occur from a given perspective (of which I am the center), I perceive the world as an instrumental complex that involves a relation to me in some way or another (the book is on the table to the left of the cup, for example). Additionally, this situatedness and way of engaging with and experiencing the world presents me with choices, since it structures my possibilities and affords certain projects that I may take on for myself (a simple example being to drink from the cup on the table, or read the book).
Which leads us to the third point: factual givens (facticity) of my situation cannot, by themselves, motivate me to act. On the contrary, it is the way that I interpret my situation in the context of my project that motivates me to act. Therefore, although limited by my facticity, freedom lies in the ability to meaningfully create the world (by way of interpretation and attitude) according to what the world affords. The only thing necessary about my situation is that I am in a situation – everything else is contingent. This is what Sartre means when he says that “man is condemned to be free, because once thrown into the world he’s responsible for everything he does.” Due to the contingency of my situation, there is nothing necessitating how I interpret my life other than the projects that I set out to accomplish. So when we “choose ourselves,” we are choosing based on the “as-structure” of intentionality. For example, when Sartre states that the disabled individual chooses their disability, what he means is that they are interpreting it as a disability. Just as when the individual finds a boulder in the road blocking his or her path, the meaning of the boulder may be an end to one’s journey or another obstacle to overcome.
Importantly, we must recognize that it is the factual limitations and the resistance of the world that make freedom manifest. After all, if we were able to actualize everything we ever wanted we would never have to make a choice. As Sartre (1943) states, “freedom can exist only as restricted since freedom is a choice. Every choice…supposes elimination and selection; every choice is a choice of finitude” (636) It is here where we find the heart of existentialism.
People often talk of existential crises. The word “crisis,” though, comes from the Greek, κρίσις (krisis), which means “choice,” or “to judge.” Thus, when we say we are having an existential crisis, we are making a statement about our existential situation, and borrowing from Heidegger, Sartre claims that in order to live authentically we must recognize that these choices are our own, bringing us to a discussion of authenticity and bad faith. Technically, bad faith is simply the denial that consciousness is both facticity (as past) and transcendence (as future). In this sense (consciousness being both facticity and transcendence) I am always transcending my current and past situations. Rather than something that just is, like a table or chair, I am continuously aiming toward fulfilling my projects, which are not-yet. Therefore, although there is an element of facticity to my being (again, the past), there is also a future, undetermined component, or transcendence. To deny either of those aspects would be a form of self-deception, or in this case, bad faith. Sartre sums this up in his claim that “I am what I am not, and am not what I am.” To apply this to concrete situations (a key element to Sartre’s philosophy, as we shall see later), though, we must examine one of his examples.
One of Sartre’s famous examples is of the woman on a date with a man who continues to make sexual advances toward her. The woman chooses to interpret the situation as harmless, ignoring the fact that at some point she is going to have to make a choice as to how to respond to these advances, and when he finally takes her hand in his, she leaves it there. She leaves it, however, because she does not notice she is leaving her hand there in response tothe gesture. She divorces her body from her intellect and makes her hand – body – a thing. Sartre’s analysis of this example concludes that the woman attempted to disarm the actions of the man by “reducing them to being only what they are; that is, to existing in the mode of the in-itself”[8] (Sartre 1943, 97). By doing so, she is denying the man’s transcendence, which, in this case, includes his desires accompanying those actions, and the goals those actions are moving toward. Additionally, in sensing the limitations of her own body, she realizes herself as not being it, effectively denying her facticity but also assuming all of her possibilities to be outside of it. So in this example, the woman rejects the synthesis of facticity and transcendence within the unity of a single consciousness for each of them, and is living in bad faith.
On the other side of the coin is the notion of authenticity, which Sartre borrows heavily from his reading of Heidegger while he was a prisoner of war. To Heidegger, and for the most part, Sartre, authenticity is the recognition that one’s possibilities are one’s own. Sartre’s discussion of Heidegger in Being and Nothingness sums it up nicely:
Authenticity and individuality have to be earned: I shall be my own authenticity only if under the influence of the call of conscience I launch out toward my own most peculiar possibility. At this moment I reveal myself to myself in authenticity, and I raise others along with myself toward the authentic. (Sartre 1943, 332)
This view is consistent with Sartre’s talk of when one chooses oneself he or she also chooses for others. For Heidegger, this is due to our first being part of the they – like a crew, moving in unison through the perpetual motions of everyday life. It is not until I break from the they, which, to Heidegger, is often motivated by the anxious realization that I am finite and will one day die. Often interpreted as morbid and depressing due to Sartre’s own ideas of authenticity being founded upon this theory, he is at times wrongly associated with this notion of the constant Being-unto-death of Heidegger. In actuality, Sartre stays away from writing about death, at least for the most part. In fact, when asked about the near-absence of death in Being and Nothingness by John Gerassi (the only individual authorized to write Sartre’s biography), his response was that he was writing about projects, which by definition exclude death:
I was writing against Heidegger then, because he claimed that life is a mere delay, a reprieve, in one’s own death. I was trying to explain that life is a series of projects, and projects do not encompass death, so why mention it? Think of death, and the project is destroyed. Philosophy is the imitation of life, as Spinoza said, not the other way around. (Gerassi 2009, 15-6)
Sartre’s main break with Heidegger, though, was his analysis of the Other, which is one of Sartre’s most misrepresented conceptions due to his novel No Exit being understood in isolation from his philosophical theory and other literary works. As is indicated by his notion of the they, Heidegger postulates that the ontological structure of the Other, or as he puts it, Being-with-others, is a priori, meaning that it is a necessary structure of one’s existence. Sartre, however, points out that this is unfounded and is still subject to the methodological doubt of Descartes. He states that if my relation to the Other is a priori, it renders impossible any concrete connection between my being and a particular Other given in my experience, since it effectively exhausts all possibility of relations with others (Sartre 1943, 335).[9] Instead, Sartre tells us that we encounter the other through the look, making me fully aware of myself through the eyes of the Other and destroying my possibilities in the form of rendering the world of my experience objective.
To recite the infamous “keyhole” example, if I am peeping through a keyhole[10] to spy on whoever is on the other side of the door and I hear a creak in the floor behind me, I immediately become aware of myself and feel ashamed. I am no longer the individual I may want to believe myself to be, but see myself as I expect to be seen by the Other. Even if I turn around and no one is there, just the idea of another’s gaze upon me is enough to motivate a reflective act, forcing me to face my relation to the world that is populated with others than myself. Therefore, instead of being able to passively live life while selectively attributing to myself desirable characteristics, I am forced to recognize myself as others see me, which may then lead me to question those desirable characteristics, and in an effort to affirm them, attempt to convince the Other that I am the individual who I think myself to be. Thus, after developing a narrative involving three individuals all trying to establish a sense of self through the affirmation of others, No Exit gives us the commonly quoted “Hell is—other people!” (Sartre 1989, 45).
To clarify, however, Sartre does not mean that all relations with people are “hellish.” To give an explicit account of this, he states:
“Hell is other people” is only one side of the coin. The other side, which no one seems to mention, is also “Heaven is each other”. Hell is separateness, uncommunicability, self-centeredness, lust for power, for riches, for fame. Heaven on the other hand is very simple, and very hard: caring about your fellow beings. And that’s possible on a sustained basis only in collectivity. (Gerassi 2009, 130) [edited]
This can be better seen in Sartre’s attempt to fuse existentialism and Marxism, which he admits was a failed project due to his inability to reconcile the individualism of existentialism and Marxism’s collective consciousness. That’s not to say, though, that this type of ideal collective made up of individuals is impossible; only that there were some inconsistencies in the two theories as a whole. Marcuse, who is often considered to share existentialist ideals, had the same fundamental issue with the Marxists. In The Aesthetic Dimension he claims that Marx ignores the subjective potential for revolution, and in doing so, succumbs to the same reification he attempts to oppose. Rather than recognizing the subjective component that he dissolves into the collective consciousness as enabling the individual to step outside the network of exchange relationships, according to Marcuse, Marx views the subject as determined by his or her social existence and neglects aspects that are not reducible to their class situation, such as personal experiences and subsequent joys, passions, and sorrows – their dimension of existence outside the social class structure. So as it seems, even thinkers from other camps – in this case, Marcuse, who is often associated with the Frankfurt School – are considered to share existentialist ideals. Although this is not necessarily incorrect, it perpetuates the difficulty of placing thinkers within the movement and understanding the tradition’s meaning. What is it, then, that these individuals frequently labeled as existentialists share that justifies them being thought of as such?
Labeled by many as the “father of existentialism,” Kierkegaard’s agenda can be summarized by his stating that, “Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for individual man” (Kierkegaard 1941, 33). Much like Marcuse’s concern that Marxism dissolves the subject into the collective consciousness, Kierkegaard launched an attack on the Hegelian idea of the collective that sheds itself of regard for the individual (which, of course, is what Marx founded his theory upon). To be an individual, according to Kierkegaard, one must break from this collective idea and passionately commit oneself to a project; only by living in this way can an individual be considered to be living authentically.[11] Of course, Kierkegaard argued from a more irrationalist position, but this is mainly due to the fact that even to Kierkegaard existence is contingent, making the subjective interpretation of the world framed and contextualized within the passionate commitment to a specific way of life.
Additionally, the choice of a way of life, to Kierkegaard, is ultimately unjustifiable – or irrational – in the sense that it is without appeal to Reason. That is not to say, of course, that one cannot reason in order to come to a decision, but again, Kierkegaard claims we need a passionate commitment to this project, giving the passions more weight than the attempt to find a reasonable criterion when all criterions are inevitably absurd. That is also not to say that these choices are arbitrary. It is precisely because we are the sole foundation for our choices due to the lack of a rational criterion, and our need to take a “leap of faith” toward our subjectively chosen projects that those choices must be meaningful ones; otherwise we will be crushed under the weight of meaninglessness and despair – two ingredients for freedom found in much of the existentialist literature. A common misconception, though, is that we are doomed to meaninglessness and despair, which is, as we’ve just seen, not the case. It is the existentialists that give us a way to transcend these emotions by prescribing a passionate commitment to creating oneself by choosing one’s way of life.
Another thinker commonly associated with the movement is Friederich Nietzsche. People tend to latch on to his idea that God is dead, his notion of nihilism, or his ideal of the Übermensch, but these ideas, like the ideas of the other philosophers we are examining, are at times misconceived. Nietzsche, for example, is sometimes thought to be advocating philosophical nihilism, or the belief that there is nothing of ultimate value and nothing can be ultimately justified, when in fact he is attacking this type of position. Whereas Kierkegaard accepts that values are unjustifiable but claims we ought to take a “leap of faith” and assimilate them anyway, Nietzsche’s project can and should be understood as an attempt at the revaluation of values. It is not that God has necessarily died, but the belief in God has been extinguished, and we therefore need turn our attention away from unfounded moral and religious values to aesthetic values founded on a naturalistic thesis. Thus, Nietzsche is not arguing that values are unjustifiable, but that we must justify the right type of values on the right type of foundation. The question, then, is how exactly are these types of values justified? The answer, according to Nietzsche, is actually quite pragmatic: problems that are not solved experimentally are not problems at all (Solomon 1972, 110).
It is also important to note that Nietzsche did not dismiss Reason as Kierkegaard did, but instead claims that Reason and the passions are intertwined. As is stated in his notes found in Will to Power:
The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason. (Nietzsche 1967, 387)
When understood in this way, we can then understand what Nietzsche meant in his discussion of the Übermensch. Translated as overman, the Übermensch overcomes oneself, and not necessarily others, as is often thought to be the case. By synthesizing what Nietzsche refers to as the Dionysian passions and Apollonian control of Reason, one may overcome moral and religious constraints and live one’s life aesthetically, like a work of art (Nietzsche 1967, 1026).
There are also Sartre’s contemporaries, such as Camus, who distanced himself from Sartre’s theory and rejected the existentialist label. Instead, he wrote about the absurd, which he defines as the bond between the individual and the world as the individual engages with the world in search of clarity, and claimed that the most important philosophical question is of suicide.[12] What always struck me as interesting, though, is that Camus’s solution to his question, “If the world is meaningless, why do we not just commit suicide?” is incredibly existentialist: the fact that we are able to commit ourselves to life and our projects despite the apparent “absurdity” of the world attests to the fact that we have the ability to affirm meaning in some way. I choose to live because I value living.
Finally, there are also the “literary” sources mentioned earlier. Dostoevsky, for one, is often classified as an existentialist writer (and rightly so); especially in his Notes from the Underground, which examines the themes that have thus far shown themselves to be common and metaphysically consistent. The first part of the novel sets the philosophical tone for the rest of the narrative, and involves the Underground Man proclaiming his disgust toward the scientistic and determinist view of his age. The Underground Man explains to the reader that his era seeks an arithmetic reduction of the individual’s desires, actions, reasoning, and will, and questions whether the achievement of such a goal will leave anything of a human left. It seems that the “gentlemen” that he is speaking to hold the ancient view that individuals only perform actions according to what they find to be most reasonable or beneficial to them, and are therefore determined and limited by this understanding. The Underground Man, however, draws limitations for Reason and places it as a fraction of an individual’s whole life, stating that:
[T]here is only one case, one only, when man may purposely, consciously wish for himself even the harmful, the stupid, even what is stupidest of all: namely, so as to have the right to wish for himself even what is stupidest of all and not be bound by an obligation to wish for himself only what is intelligent.” (Dostoevsky 1993, 28)
The underground man is asserting that the human individual ought not to be reduced to Reason alone, but must be considered in light of his passions and desire to will what he wants, and not be limited to what is considered “best.”
Earlier in the paper I broadly defined phenomenology as a method developed to uncover the necessary conditions for the possibility of an experience of a given object. Although this depicts the spirit of phenomenology, the particulars are lost without an understanding of the method as a whole, which is why we were briefly introduced to the theory of intentionality. If I were pressed to define existentialism in the same broad style, I would say that it is a philosophical movement that focuses on the ontological structures of the individual and emphasizes the recognition of contingency that motivates a passionate commitment to a project of our choosing, providing a meaningful context for each other aspect of our individual lives. What our investigation has shown is that although thinkers associated with the tradition have varying theories, they each focus on the individual and notions of freedom, choice, responsibility, authenticity, meaning, and the self, and how each of these notions present themselves as philosophical problems with the recognition of the contingency of our existence.
We are also in a better position to understand why there is an ambiguity as to the origin of existentialism, since both philosophical and literary works have been written extensively on these topics. When we are discussing a philosophical theory, however, without a logical and metaphysical foundation it is difficult to apply these theories to concrete situations, and we therefore need a philosophical base to provide continuity for the movement, no matter the specific theorist we’re examining. In this case, it is interesting to see that Sartre never considered himself a philosopher; instead, he thought himself to be a novelist, since he himself recognized that if a philosophy cannot be applied to concrete situations it is not worth anything at all. The fact of the matter, though, is he was both a novelist and a philosopher, remaining consistent with his philosophy when writing his many novels, and the same can be said for any other thinker whose reflections remain consistent with the metaphysical groundwork that Sartre has established.
Finally, we have clarified certain misconceptions that are commonly made regarding certain theorists and existentialism as a whole. Although some understand the tradition to be depressing or morbid, it is likely due to the decontextualized fragments of these associated thinkers in circulation, or reading in isolation a novel or essay written to act as an inverted mirror of sorts, to show us that a recognition of the contingency of our situations and our subsequent responsibility for our lives is only the first step. When taking all that we have into consideration, it seems that the next step, the following recognition of our ability to create a meaningful context in the world with which we engage, is actually the remedy for that sense of meaninglessness or despair we first encounter when reflecting on our contingency. It focuses back on to the individual and one’s desires, relationships, and ability to transcend one’s current situation in a scientistic age that typically argues from a structuralist and determinist position in attempt to reduce the individual to a quantifiable thing – a position we now identify as living in bad faith.
-Adam K.
[1] Ontology is the study of being.
[2] Gabriel Marcel coined the term, but disassociated himself from Sartre and his philosophy.
[3] The original draft of this paper had a more elaborate analysis of Husserl’s phenomenological method, but steered the paper outside of its limits set by the aims we are seeking to accomplish.
[4] BN, p. lv.
[5] Although each have their own theory of time, they typically agree that there is a unifying temporal structure to consciousness that is past-present-future.
[6] Sartre emphasized the unity and interdependence of consciousness and being, and therefore preferred the parenthetical consciousness (of) being, rather than the hyphenated consciousness-of object.
[7] Remembering that existence precedes essence.
[8] Sartre uses the term “in-itself” to describe objects in the world, and “for-itself” to describe consciousness.
[9] This is obviously a much more complicated argument than I am fleshing out here, due to the limitations of this paper. In essence, Sartre claims that Heidegger is passing from the ontological to the ontic by making my being-with-others an a priori fact of my existence, which actually exhausts all possible relations with other since it cannot belong to my experience as it’s relating two concrete “beings-in-the-world,” which effectively escapes from the domain of being-with. This may be more of an issue with Sartre’s translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time inappropriately translating Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as “human reality,” but in any case, this is an important break that Sartre makes from his predecessor. For further research, see Being and Nothingness, Chapter Three, Part One, Section Three: Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger (Sartre 1943, 315).
[10] Remember, Sartre was writing this during the late 1930’s and early 1940’s.
[11] Already we are seeing the influence of Kierkegaard on Heidegger and Sartre.
[12] See Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus.
