Philosophies of Existence

An Introduction to the Basic Thought of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Sartre

Jean Wahl, F.M. Lory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367138288
• eBook ISBN: 9780429639685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book, first published in 1969, examines the 'philosophies of existence' or Existentialism and the field's leading philosophers. These philosophers, the book argues, wished to distinguish themselves from other philosophies in their structure and approach – and it is that structure that this book takes care to analyse.

Part One

I

Generalities

IN approaching the philosophies of existence¹ we are faced with a certain number of difficulties. The first arises from the extreme diversity of the various philosophical positions designated by that name.

The philosophy of existence springs from the essentially religious meditations of Kierkegaard. And today when this philosophy is mentioned people usually think of Sartre—a non-religious and even at times an anti-religious philosopher.

¹ We prefer the name, philosophy of existence,to the name,existentialism,for the reason that several of the most important philosophers that we shall discuss —Heidegger and Jaspers in particular—refuse to be called existentialists.

Heidegger in several lectures has spoken out against a doctrine he calls existentialism, and Jaspers has said that existentialism is the death of the philosophy of existence. They have done so because in existentialism they see a doctrine and they are wary of rounded doctrines.

On the other hand, there are philosophers—Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir—who accept the title of existentialist. Gabriel Marcel also happens to accept occasionally the name of Christian existentialist, and Messrs. Lavelle and Le Senne do not reject the word ‘existentialism’.

But if we wish to refer to this philosophy as a whole, the term ‘philosophy of existence’ is more appropriate. Yet even that term is not wholly satisfactory, for Heidegger would no more be called a philosopher of existence than he would an existentialist. For him the philosophy of existence is mainly the philosophy of Jaspers. As for himself, he believes that the basic problem in philosophy—the one and only problem—is that of Being. And if in Sein und Zeit he has taken up the question of existence, it is because he believes that the approach to Being is by way of an inquiry into our own existence. Being, then, is the essential object of all philosophical investigation for Heidegger, and he has sought to be not a philosopher of existence, but a philosopher of Being. Thus we ought to speak of Heidegger neither as an existentialist nor as a philosopher of existence.

For other reasons Kierkegaard, who is the father of all these philosophies, would decline the name of philosopher of existence: he would object not to the word ‘existence’ but to the word ‘philosopher’. He is not a philosopher, he would say; he is a religious man and has no philosophy to call ‘philosophy of existence’ or to oppose to other philosophies.

One of Sartre’s essays is called Existentialism is a Humanism. Heidegger, on the other hand, has written a letter, Letter to Beauffret, in which he attacks the idea of humanism. And Kierkegaard was certainly not a humanist.

Here then, we have two examples of conflict on matters of fundamental importance between the doctrines of some of the so-called philosophers of existence.

The same could be said of the ideas of inwardness and secrecy. If the philosophy of Hegel is not satisfactory to Kierkegaard it is largely because Hegel ignores the element of absolute inwardness, the fact that we cannot externalize ourselves completely. And we shall have the occasion to say that the whole philosophy of existence stems from the reflections of Kierkegaard on the events of his private life, on his engagement, for example, or on the impossibility of communicating with his fiancée. But when we come to read Sartre, we are told the contrary: a man is the sum total of his acts; there is no secret inner life. On this point it is the influence of Hegel, Kierkegaard’s chosen enemy, that is dominant in Sartre’s thought.

Being and Nothingness ends with a condemnation of what Sartre calls the spirit of seriousness. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, tells us that the category of seriousness is one of the most basic existential categories.

Thus, there are not only diversities but very grave conflicts between the so-called philosophers of existence. Can we, in the light of all these divergencies, still maintain that there really is a body of doctrines which could be called the philosophy of existence? Let us rather speak of an atmosphere, a climate that pervades all of them. The proof that there is such a thing as the philosophy of existence is that we can legitimately apply the term to certain philosophies and not to others. Therefore, there must be something that is common to these philosophies. That something we shall try to pursue without perhaps ever attaining it.

A second difficulty arises if we stop to consider the fact that we are trying to find the essence of the philosophy of existence which is a philosophy that rejects the idea of essence. But, as we shall see, the philosophers of existence, and in particular Heidegger, if, as we believe, he is to be classed among them, do not reject the idea of essence. We shall see how Heidegger holds that it is the essence of man that he seeks to define and how he concludes that the essence of man is his existence. And the word ‘essence’ comes up so to speak on every page of Heidegger’s last book. This last difficulty is therefore only an apparent one.

We are faced with a more serious difficulty in that the specific character of these philosophies is liable to fade away when we treat them objectively. Is not existence for a Kierkegaard or for a Jaspers the business of the solitary individual, the affair of subjectivity? Are we not likely to transform existence by the very act of talking about it—to transform it from authentic existence into unauthentic existence ? Are we not likely to level it out, to demote it to the impersonal domain of one, of Everyman, which is precisely what must be avoided ? Ought we not, then, to leave existence to our solitary meditations, to our dialogue with ourselves ?

But it is only by attempting to study the philosophy of existence that we shall be in a position to decide whether this danger can be avoided.

Is it possible to define the philosophies of existence ? We shall see that all definitions are more or less inadequate.

For example, in an article published in an American philosophical journal, Father Culbertson defines the philosophy of existence as a reaction against absolute idealism and positivism and as a constant effort to see man in his totality. It will easily be seen that this definition is not satisfactory: it can be applied just as well to pragmatism and the so-called life philosophies as to the philosophies of existence.

Existentialism has been defined in Rome by a high religious authority as a philosophy of disaster, a pessimistic irrationalism and a religious voluntarism. But this definition includes a condemnation and a dismissal and cannot therefore be taken as an approach to the philosophies of existence.

In his essay, Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre says that existentialism is a doctrine that ‘renders human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that all truth and all action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity’. Is it possible that Sartre himself considers this definition satisfactory ? One is struck by the ‘also’, which is a good indication that the definition is made up of disjunct elements. As to the contention that this philosophy ‘renders human life possible’, we could remark that all philosophies, except those of Schopenhauer and E. Von Hartman, would claim to ‘render human life possible’. And as to the statement that all truth and all action imply an environment and a human subjectivity, many an idealist philosopher would maintain it as staunchly as Sartre himself. Besides, many people would say that the philosophy of existence renders human life impossible.

That the philosophies of existence start out from subjectivity is true; this is the element of truth in Sartre’s definition. But the crucial thing is the meaning that is attached to subjectivity. For in a certain sense all great philosophies—Descartes’, for example, or Socrates’—may be said to start out from subjectivity.

In his excellent book on contemporary philosophies, Father Bochenski writes that, rather than propose a definition, we must try to enumerate a certain number of concepts that we consider to be the basic concepts of the philosophy of existence and set them against the background of experiences—such as anguish, nausea, etc.—which give them their initial impetus.

This is true. It can be said, to go back to one feature of Sartre’s definition, that the philosophy of existence begins with subjectivity as it is experienced in certain states such as anguish.¹ These philosophies are characterized by a common climate, by a preoccupation with certain particular experiences.

Father Bochenski also remarks—and the remark is again true— that the philosophies of existence repudiate the separation between subject and object. But although the attempt to overcome the subject-object alternative is one of the important facets of these philosophies, it is not their primary aim.

¹ Anguish, however, is not a central experience in the case of Gabriel Marcel.

II

The Traditions leading to the Philosophies of Existence

LET us, while keeping in mind Father Bochenski’s remarks, take as our point of departure an observation by Emile Bréhier: the philosophies of existence combine metaphysical empiricism with man’s feeling of anxiety. This is not a definition but a characterization, and characterization is all we can hope for.

The word empiricism here refers to the element of facticity, to use one of Heidegger’s terms, to that element of fact which is irreducible to any metaphysical construction or interpretation, and which is emphasized by the philosophers of existence. This empiricism is quite different from ordinary empiricism: it is coupled with an affirmation of a sort of metaphysical contingency and is itself in a sense metaphysical.

To retrace the tradition of this empiricism, one could go back to Schelling who sought to develop, as against what he calls negative philosophies which are according to him all rational philosophies, a positive philosophy. Now, it is known that Kierkegaard had attended Schelling’s lectures in Berlin and was enthused for a time by Schelling’s treatment of the notion of existence in his lectures.

From Schelling we can go back to Kant. In his critique of the ontological argument, Kant insisted on the fact that existence can never be deduced from essence.

And we can go still further back, as far back as Aristotle’s criticism of Platonic Ideas. When Aristotle says that the individual is the real, he could be looked upon as the progenitor of one of the traditions which culminate in the philosophy of existence, especially if it is remembered that the same philosopher who says that substance is the concrete individual also affirms that the individual cannot be subsumed under genera and species. It should also be noted that Schelling makes frequent references to Aristotle.

But this is only one of the traditions of the philosophy of existence. It was seen that, according to E. Bréhier, the philosophy of existence is a metaphysical empiricism allied to man’s feeling of anxiety. This means that there is another tradition we must retrace —a tradition of religious anxiety. It can be traced back to certain XIIth-century irrationalists who have had little influence on subsequent thought; it can be traced back to Saint Bernard. We could go further back to Saint Augustine, and even to certain sentiments expressed in the Old Testament. We could recall the importance Cheslov accorded to the Book of Job; he called him the private thinker who meditates on his own life, as against the professor of philosophy who deals with the impersonal. We could point to some of the aspects of this tradition of religious anxiety in a Pascal in the XVIIth century, in a Hamann at the end of the XVIIth century.

These two traditions, the one insisting on facticity, the other on affectivity, had already come together several times in the history of philosophy—in Pascal, in Hamann and Jacobi at the end of the XVIIIth century, a little later in Schelling. Already in these cases we can see how the junction of the category of facticity and that of affectivity or emotivity engenders the idea of existence.

A few other considerations must be added to what has already been said in order to understand the origin and the development of the philosophy of existence.

We have spoken of Kierkegaard as the father of the philosophy of existence, but we must not forget Nietzsche. It is certain that on Heidegger, on Jaspers, and even on Sartre, Nietzsche has had a very great influence.

Some of the philosophers of existence would have us also mention the influence of Hegel. But, in point of fact, we shall see Hegel primarily as the enemy against whom the philosophy of existence rose up in protest, particularly at the moment of its birth. It is nevertheless true that in the Phenomenology of Spirit there is an attempt to follow out the concrete development of the human mind which in some ways anticipates the philosophy of existence and may be said to be its precurser.¹

¹ What Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have in mind when they speak of Hegel’s influence is the fact that Hegel, especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit, attempts to go into the different doctrines not in the abstract, but as they were lived, as they were embodied in the various stages of history.

The dialectic of the master and the slave, the unhappy consciousness, and a good many other passages of thePhenomenology of Spiritare at the origin of Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s existentialism. Hegel’s youthful tendencies are also being rehabilitated. But we must take care not to accord too much importance, at least historical, to the young Hegel, unknown for such a long time.

On the other hand, even the pre-Kierkegaardian features which have been integrated into subsequent Hegelian philosophy have been integrated in such a way that they lose their character of subjective protestation.

Before the philosophies of existence there had developed in Germany life philosophies, on the one hand, and phenomenology on the other. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the philosophies of existence and the philosophies of life. Between these two forms of thought there are some affinities and some violent oppositions. Life philosophies, anxious above all to bridge the gaps that previous philosophical doctrines had created within reality and within the human individual, insisted upon the two ideas of unity and continuity. Life philosophies were too facile or at least appeared to be so. The philosophies of existence, on the other hand, have tended perhaps to separate too rigorously and to isolate the various elements between which life philosophies had posited an all too easy continuity.

We ought also to mention here the doctrine of personalism as developed by some followers of Scheler, and in particular by P. Landsberg and E. Mounier. Scheler, proceeding from the phenomenology of Husserl, insisted on the person as the centre of human acts. Under his influence Landsberg and Mounier make a radical distinction between the person, who is in communication with other persons, and the individual, who is not; the word ‘individual’ they think ought to be reserved to convey man’s isolation and atomic character in contrast to his open personality.

It was in the school of Husserl that Heidegger’s thought developed. It would take too long to go into the entire legacy that was handed down from Husserl to Heidegger. We should mention the idea of intentionality, which according to Heidegger, only becomes comprehensible in the lig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Part One
• Part Two: The Categories of the Philosophies of Existence
• Appendix A Note on Dread
• Bibliography
• Index