Existentialism
Introduction to Existentialism
Existentialism was a largely European philosophy, it was a philosophical movement that blossomed in the first half of the 20th century, in many ways is now passe, I’m inclined to look at the activist sixties as marking the end of existentialism, if the pessimistic existentialist was saying life is meaningless and it has no purpose, the sixties had too many meanings and purposes.
Existentialism is primarily not a theoretical position, a set of doctrines, it’s not primarily a school of thought. It’s more of a focus, an attention, a concern, a focus on human existence. not only essence of human nature, which would be essentialism, not existentialism. It’s focusing on the problem of human existence as we experience it. The idea that self consciousness being the lens through which everything else is viewed is very appropriate, because it’s self conscious existence, the consciousness of existing in this kind of a world. Existence that can be meaningless or inauthentic and the question is how can it be authentic, how we give it meaning. You can think of this existential focus as a philosophy of human existence, philosophizing about human existence in a broken world. What does it feel like to live self consciously, inwardly in this kind of a world. Self consciousness in the face of ones own dying, not just an awareness, but an emotion loaded awareness. What this is implying is that humans are not primarily rational animals ruled by reason, that Enlightenment vision is gone. We are not romantic creatures living in romanticized kind of realm, romanticism is gone. If you like, existentialism is romanticism turned sour. And this feeling augmented in a technological society. In an industrialized society there are themes like dehumanization, alienation(in Marx), ambiguity, meaninglessness. A self conscious existence in an industrialized society with everything pressing in upon us is a world of fact without value, of existence without essence. One German writer of this period, more a phenomenologist than an existentialist, Max Scheler, puts it this way: we are the first generation in which man has become fully and thoroughly problematic to himself in which he no longer knows what he essentially is but at the same time knows he doesn’t know yet desperately wants to.
The approach of the existentialist is not going to be offering a theory, you don’t offer a theory to resolve existential anxiety any more than you use a hammer to wash your face. The existentialist is not trying to refute an opponent by appeal to some universal norms of reason. He’s not trying to define the universal essence of human nature, and certainly not trying to achieve some objective detachment from the whole business. Rather he’s trying to describe the predicament in an illuminating way, to describe and illuminate the situation, the mess in which we found ourselves in, trying to recover what it is that we dread. The emphasis is upon the individual as a subject who consciously feels her existence, a subject with all the inwardness that accompanies I, the subject.
Kant & Hegel’s Influence on Existentialism
I think it’s fair to say existentialism is influenced by Kant and Hegel. Kant’s Copernican revolution, which was moving from the view that we are objective detached observers of the world and conform ourselves our thinking to what the world is to the view that the world is going to be conformed to us, to what we are bringing inwardly. It’s the Kantian emphasis on the transcendental self, the transcendental ego that is uncovered, that is presupposed in the forms of intuition and categories of understanding, this self, which brings its own structures and meanings to the world that is running throughout the existentialists. Hegel’s influence is the dialectic, the dialectic of an unfolding self consciousness. Admittedly Hegel had used this dialectic in moving from one essence to another essence, the theoretical dialectic, for Kierkegaard it’s the existential dialectic, the concreteness of our feelings move from thesis to antithesis and synthesis. And the final analysis with Sartre is that there is no final synthesis which is why Sartre is a pessimistic as he is. You and I are big nothings and we create ourselves as if we are refreshing in every act of thinking, seeing, participating. This is a dialectical process, you’ll find that Kant’s description of thesis antithesis and synthesis in terms of immediacy, mediation are characteristic in existential writers. In addition from Hegel the phenomenological description. Another theme from Hegel is the matter of freedom. Hegel says the process of history is the absolutization of freedom, the development of self consciousness is the absolutization of its freedom. While the existentialists forget about any teleology in history but finds absolutization of freedom.
The movement for existentialists is from existence to essence, or from being, via becoming, to another being. you’ll find in Heidegger this mere existence is referred to as Vorhandenheit, just being on hand like another object or Dasein as distinct from the meaningful thing. The emphasis is on process of unfolding self consciousness in creating authentic existence of self.
Different Variety of Existentialism
There are different variety of existentialism in which some characteristic are more prominent than another. For example, there are irreligious and religious. For Kierkegaard, authentic existence is gaining relationship to God, so there is no authenticity alone. It’s not surprising to see for someone like Sartre who tends to see relationships as masochistic or sadistic and as irreligious ends up by saying there is no meaning. In his big work “Being and Nothingness”, he has no discussion on love, he has discussion on sexuality, but it’s all about masochism and sadism. No positive nurturing relationship are involved. His phenomenology begins to explain the reason for it, which is two folds, one biographical, the other is that there is a dialectic that’s going on in Sartre which are “what is in itself” and “what is for itself”. The self conscious individual is concerned with the world is for me and is blocked all the time by the intransigence of the world as it is in itself, it’s the antithesis without a synthesis.
Kierkegaard
The central theme in Kierkegaard is the theme of becoming a person, which for Kierkegaard is becoming a Christian. This is the question of what is it to be a person in this kind of a world. Kierkegaard criticizes the inadequacy of both the Enlightenment account of a person and the Romanticist account of things. We are not rational animals, we are not primarily related to external things, we are not filled with creative spirit that’s just wonderful. Rather he talks about two paths to becoming a Christian. This is developed in his work called “A Concluding Unscientific Postscript”.
The path he talks about are the objective and subjective path. The objective path is the path of natural theology, or the path of historical evidences. His complain about that is the indecisiveness of the rational, you always have to respond to counter-argument etc.. So that objective path really leads nowhere, it’s never finished. Kierkegaard says it’s because it lacks any absolute starting point and because its logic is able to deal with universal concept but not with individual existence. Traditional logic is not the logic of a unique individual, the unique situation. But in addition the objective path cheats us out of the passion which alone provides impetus to faith and love, hope. A logical system is possible but an existential system is impossible. Because universal truth can’t catch that slippery eel of individual existence.
One the other hand, in the subjective path, the inwardness responds passionately to God in Christ, that is to say while the objective path is saying I cannot prove the existence of God or the incarnation, or there seems to be something paradoxical here about the eternal being in time, the subjective path just responds with passion of faith, a grateful love, and that’s what becoming a Christian is. There are places where he talks about truth as subjective, he does not mean it’s just in your mind and nowhere else, or it’s relative, he uses the term objective and subjective as a way of describing one’s relationship to God or to the truth. He uses objective to describe your rational relationship to the truth and subjective for talking about our relationship to God himself, focusing on the person relationship. The objective accent what is being said and the subjective accent how it is being said. So he has the definition of this truth, conceived in the subjective way as an objective uncertainly held fast as appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness, that’s the highest truth attainable in an existing individual. Most of the other stuff that Kierkegaard does is reflection on this, what is this passionate relationship and how we are going to describe it phenomenologically.
Kierkegaard finds himself saying we are confronted by the Unknown, he is echoing Paul’s speech at the Athens, in Acts 17, where midst all of the altars and temples Paul says he is going to declare the Unknown God. What is unknown by natural theology, what can’t be demonstrated by historical evidence though it can be attested by historical testimony, that’s what Christianity is about. The best we can do is to express the unknown in the form of a paradox. A paradox involves thesis an antithesis but no synthesis that we can conceptualize. The Lutheran theology tends to say the divine attributes and human attributes don’t interpenetrate, so you can’t define the unity of two persons in terms of the interpenetration of the attributes. Reformed theology talks about the interpenetration of the attributes so you begin to conceptualize the unity that way. What we know from the objective standpoint appears paradoxical, the response that’s elicited subjectively is response to paradox about the unknown, and it’s that he dwells on, one response might be absurd. What have in the objective path is what Kant called a limiting concept. That is to say that for Kant, the limiting concept relates to the phenomenal so that we try to conceptualize what would complete our understanding of the phenomena and the concept of God we come up with is a limiting concept.
It’s in such confrontation of the unknown, the subjective path comes into play. Those inner passions begin to emerge. We can look at Kierkegaard’s stages on life’s way. There are three stages, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. The aesthetic is the world of senses, it includes arts and social life, without moral conscience. He seems to be echoing the book of Ecclesiastes. That kind of melancholy began to develop. The aesthetic stage is not inward satisfying. What we have is a crisis of the spirit, self consciousness is beginning to dawn and finding the inadequacy of a purely sensate kind of existence.
So what happens is the stage of aesthetic gives way, because of the crisis of the beginnings of self discovery, to the ethical stage where a person decides to accept some responsibilities. But really it’s simply a structured life in which one has some objective duties acting out of a sense duty but without any deep moral anguish of decision.
But this ethical stage still is insufficient, it hasn’t plumbed the depth of the human spirit. So it elicits a further crisis. A person experiences a sickness unto death until there arises a teleological suspension of the ethical. In the Hegelian tradition, there is a sense of cosmic teleology. Kierkegaard’s not talking about that, he’s talking about the inner teleology of the human spirit. He’s not Hegel blowing up the human spirit into the whole life of the cosmos but he’s looking at the individual human spirit per se in this crisis of the spirit. And he’s discovering that the human spirit has an eros, a desire, a hunger and thirst that ethical life or conformity to social institutions and structures doesn’t satisfy. That’s sort of ethical stage transcended with a view to that which will satisfy and hence the transcendence with the religious stage. Faith comes out of that sickness under death, and you begin to see he’s playing with Paul’s imagery of death and resurrection to a new life. In the religious stage he distinguishes between two phases, religious A and religious B. Religious A is a little more of the continuation of the ethical in that the institutions and structures in which you now invest yourself are religious institutions and structures. Religion B is really a vital kind of spiritual life, that’s where the crisis of the spirit is fulfilled, satisfied and completed where one’s self consciousness before God is to the fore so that in this religious consciousness, one’s own status before God becomes most real, and were confronted with the incarnation with the eternal God and the response is that passion: faith and love. The term passion is reference to 18th century psychology, where Hume’s discussion of the psychological proclivities, the proclivities of the soul as distinct from reason. It’s the non-cognitive dimension of the inner life of the human spirit. The word passion is simply saying it is out of the very heart of one’s inner being that faith responds and that love embraces. What he’s talking about is genuine Christian faith in response to Jesus Christ.
The title piece in his book “The Present Age” is his indictment of the Enlightenment where the emphasis is on the objective path in which nobody would dream of a revolution. There’s no passion, nobody would have a passion that would be needed to start a revolution. What he’s saying is that the main springs of our life is the inner spirit. There is another article called “The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle” which is a critique of romanticism in religion, of people like Hegel and Schleiermacher in religion. The genius is the creative spirit, who sees ahead of others and stands out the crowd, the apostle is one sent by God who is remembered not for his genius but for the authority on which he speaks. There is a qualitative difference between a genius and an apostle. You can see his repudiation of his view of the 19th century liberal theology that revelation is simply the emergence of an increasing God consciousness out of the human spirit and in the course of life. The gradual evolution of the concept of God in the development of the human spirit. As distinct from revelation is God speaking from beyond history the eternal acting in the time. Therefore Kierkegaard is a religious existentialist,
Nietzsche
With Friedrich Nietzsche we have an antithesis that is a contradictory with regards to Kierkegaard, it would be synthesis these two. Nietzsche is as irreligious as one could imagine though it’s not always clear as to how much his rhetoric is to be taken literally as objective truth because he doesn’t think there is such thing. It’s also not clear whether his rhetoric is what he himself thinks because Nietzsche’s work was edited by his sister who was a Nazi. The point is Nietzsche is very much influenced by the romanticist movement. Very much the critic of the 19th century culture and of the Enlightenment.
Nietzsche represents the repudiation of evolutionary idealism with all its 19th century optimism, the world ain’t getting better and better all the time. There’s nothing benign driving the process but rather God is dead, which is the phase used first probably by Hegel. It appears in Matthew Arnold, Dostoevsky says if God is dead then anything is permissible. Nietzsche talks about death of God, and this is not just a philosophical fact for him, it’s a cultural phenomena, that is to say God language is a dead language, it doesn’t have meaning to people, believing God is irrelevant. For Nietzsche the thing which has made it irrelevant is that Christianity as he reads it has said no to nature and Jesus and Paul represent a weak-willed breed which can’t accept the physical nature of their lives. Paul is always blaming on the flesh. On the other hand, the ancient Greek paganism said yes to nature, strong-willed, willing to seize life as it is in all of its physical virility. Incidentally this is the background against which Karl Barth, the Protestant theologian, said that in Christ incarnate God says a giant yes to nature. In becoming incarnate in the human creation God says yes to that creation. But for Nietzsche God is dead. He’s critical of 19th century Victorianized religion that kept all of the seediness and physicality of our existence especially sexuality under wraps.
He’s also critical of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, because that sort of evolution thinks of life as a gradual adjustment to the environment and consequently would promise to make nothing but well-adjusted doodlers. Because they don’t have the creative vitality and the force of will not to adjust but overcome whatever the opposition is to their lives. Rather what he sees is that there is no hope in the uncreative well-adjusted conformist, fitting into its given station in life and its duties. F.H. Bradly has an essay on ethics that gets to the heart of his ethical theory which is called “My Station and Its Duties”. Nietzsche turns rather to the aesthetic point of view, which is the point of the view of creative individuality and he tries to adapt romanticism to his own point of view in a work of “The Birth of Tragedy”. Going back to Greeks he talks about two traditions in opposition to each other, the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian symbolize vitality of riotous creative outbursts of passion and the Apollonian form, rational order. In the tension between those two, the Greek creates tragedies in which life is creatively affirmed in the face of all that’s horrible as if there is an order, a logos structure of some sort even amidst all that vitality brings for better and especially for worse. The conception of tragedy then has to do with the overcoming of the horrible.
In this you can capture a few echos. In Schopenhaur’s major work “The World as Will and Idea”, will is vitality and idea is the rational mental representation. Schopenhaur is arguing that the idea is purely phenomenal, and it’s the will that is real, he was a voluntaristic idealist. Nietzsche likewise. Reason is matter of appearance, the underlying reality is creative will. And it’s that creative will he calls “The Will to Power”, which is the creative spirit of a master. In the selections there is one called master morality servant morality which reminds you of Hegel. What Nietzsche gives you is a dialectic between master morality and servant morality. Because there are two different moralities he’s an ethical relativist in the sense that the morality is the morality of the strong-willed or the weak-willed. So what is morally good is not good for the maximum number of people but what benefits the strong willed and furthers their creative power.
Nietzsche is first of all a voluntarist, the ultimate nature of things is more of a nature of will than of an intellect. You’ll find everything is an expression of that. He uses a French word to describe the subconscious in opposition to something, out of the subconscious negating an antithesis. If I reject an egoistic ethic and adopt a non-egoistic values concern for other people, this is a subconscious revenge against powerful dominating people turned inwards against myself. Or a guilty conscience is a subconscious aggression against myself and aestheticism subconsciously is an antagonism to myself. Because underlying all of this is the will to power, the will of a master morality that’s always striving to be on top and he speaks therefore of “ubermensch” which translated to “superman”. The strong will comprised of a “superrace” affirming life despite the death of God, despite Christianity’s no to life and this is why he calls it the spirit the Anti-Christ.
Secondly he is a philosophical naturalist, a vitalist. Vitalism is that life is a creative force, which is a very popular view during the romantic period. He’s a vitalist seeing the creative spirit of life breaking out in all sorts of ways. There is a biologically based creativity, a biological drive, this is the beginning of sociobiology, that there is a biological basis for social behaviors, for ethics etc. This biological vitalism is, along with the voluntarism, going to affect whatever he says about human knowledge and human thought. Nietzsche is saying God is dead, but you must become the meaning of the earth. What he’s doing is deconstructing every known theory about the universe. His point is none of the rational explanation work. You might just as well say let’s be our guard against thinking. The quest for truth is not an issue, that’s not the point, he has a purely instrumental value to the theories and beliefs we come up with, we create them in our own purposes in expression of the will to power. No such thing as truth, no objective moral qualities, no basis in reality for moral knowledge, no basis for any kind of knowledge. We create our own truth by virtue of utility that we force upon those who oppose it.
There are similarities between Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. Freud talks about the subconscious, which asserts itself in all sorts of ways in our thinking as well as our acting, the role of Oedipus complex in Freud, his book “Moses and Monotheism” in which believing in God is the projection of Oedipus complex. The substructure here is the emotional life for Freud. For Marx, the substructure is the material conditions of existence and the alienation that creates and because of the conditions of alienation, from ones labor, ones one self, you have a non-rational substructure, the fear is the social structures you build. If you read the “Communist Manifesto”, you find the assertion that all our moral standards are simply expressions of class conflict. So have this sort of things in these three and the name of Max Weber, the sociologist belongs along here too. While he talks a great deal about values, they seem to be relative to the projection of the ideologies. Another writer who picks up on this significantly is Allan Bloom, in his book “The Closing of the American Mind”. Bloom begins the book with the complaint from the contemporary university student who talks as if there is no such things as truth and falsity, right and wrong, has lost any sense of person identity and has no worldview on which to ground any of those things. Allan Bloom traces the situation to these continental thinkers whom he takes to be the source of the problem. My reaction to it is that it’s not the whole story, in the English speaking world the influence is as much from the pragmatist tradition that we only have instrumental view of truth, and the positivist tradition that all values are just expressions of emotion.
The influence of Nietzsche philosophically continues through the first half of the 20th century. Karl Jaspers echos what he is doing and most of the literature on existentialism talks about Jaspers. Jaspers was not satisfied what Nietzsche was doing, it seems to him that people Kierkegaard and Nietzsche put too much a gap between human subjectivity, these depth dimension of the inner life which Nietzsche speaks, and what he calls empirical existence, which we have as beings in this world. There is too much gap between the scientific and the existential. What Jaspers does in his book “Reason and Existenz” is to point out it shouldn’t be either or but rather both and. He distinguishes three dimensions of human being, there is empirical existence, what he calls “Dasein”(being there), there is consciousness as such, which is Kant’s transcendental ego, Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, the inner mental life, there is the spirit, the term “Geist” in the European sense in Hegel, that has to do with cultural creativity. The first is stressed by the idealists, the second by the Enlightenment, the third by empirical science. And you don’t really have authentic human existence, according to Karl Jaspers, until you have these three dimensions integrated appropriately by virtue of some ground of being which we become aware. What Jaspers talks about is transcending a purely impersonal inauthentic empirical kind of existence, transcending simply that Enlightenment notion of being a conscious rational being, transcending even the life of the culture, remember the Kierkegaard’s guardian note on this, transcending all of that in an act of faith. The nature of that transcendent being, the all-encompassing being is something we only speak of in symbols and ciphers, we can’t conceptualize it. It’s as if in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind” the triad of art, religion and philosophy, you can have your artistic symbols, religious symbols but there is no synthesis, that is to say you can’t have your philosophical conceptualization. So what is involved is an existential kind of attitude rather than a cognitive grasp in the act of faith. Jasper is a good critique of Nietzsche, what he caught is one limited aspect of human concern, the creativity of the human spirit.