Existentialism: A Philosophical Inquiry

Joel Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367466374
• eBook ISBN: 9781000590074
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Existentialism asks some of the most fundamental questions about human existence: What gives our lives meaning and value? What is it to choose freely? How do I live an authentic life? How should I relate to myself and to others? In this book Joel Smith introduces and assesses the arguments and controversies surrounding these questions in an engaging way, providing a superb introduction to this important and perennial philosophical subject.

Connecting existentialist themes with contemporary questions in ethics, philosophy of action, and the emotions, he brings existentialism to life. He does so by focusing on a set of distinctively existentialist questions and themes, including race and gender, whilst at the same time engaging with the classic existentialist texts from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Fanon and others. The book is organised clearly around the following key topics:

• Life
• Subjectivity
• Meaning
• Freedom
• Angst
• Bad Faith
• Alienation
• Gender
• Race
• Authenticity

Including chapter summaries and annotated further reading, Existentialism: A Philosophical Inquiry is the ideal starting point for anyone interested in this fascinating and important subject, in Philosophy as well as related disciplines such as Literature and Religion.

1 Life

DOI: 10.4324/9781003030140-1

What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism

We each have just one life to lead. And how one leads one’s life is, typically at least, something of utmost importance to each of us. Yet lives and what it is to lead them are not usually treated as central philosophical topics. Philosophers are more often interested in the things that lead lives, that is, in persons. Philosophers frequently ask what sorts of things persons are, what sorts of things persons can know and what sorts of things persons should do. They less frequently ask what it is for a person to lead their life. This book is, amongst other things, concerned with that latter question, a focus partly driven by the thought that an answer to the question of what sort of thing a person is should be answerable to the question of what it is for a person to lead their life (cf. Wollheim, 1984, Ch. 1). This is an, often unstated, background assumption of much of existentialist philosophy, for existentialist philosophers typically use the words ‘exist’ and ‘existence’ in a special sense according to which only persons exist (though other ‘mere things’ certainly ‘have being’). The existing in existentialism is what we might more ordinarily call living. Whilst all living entities have lives, only people (or, at least, only things sufficiently like people) lead their lives. The mode of being, existence, enjoyed by people is radically unlike that possessed by other things. The existentialists, then, are concerned with what it is to lead the one and only life that each of us has. This chapter introduces some preliminary ideas about existentialism and the leading of lives, as well as some details of the lives led by some of existentialist philosophy’s more well-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century exponents.

1.1 Existential Unity

Existentialist philosophy is concerned with value, commitment, and action. Its focus is on the possibility of living, and constructing an identity, in an authentic fashion. It is a philosophical orientation that takes seriously those elements of everyday life that other approaches tend to gloss over, and it does this by connecting them to themes of perennial philosophical importance: belief, reason, meaning, autonomy, and sociality. It is also an outsider’s philosophy, with many of its central figures writing outside the context of the university system.

Towards the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that ‘all interest of my reason’ is combined in three questions: ‘1. What can I know? 2. What should I do? and 3. What may I hope?’ (Kant, 1781, A805/B833). Whilst existentialist philosophers are typically interested in all three of these, their focus is invariably the second, the practical, question. That is, existentialists are directed, in the first instance, to the question of how I should live my life. And it is no accident that the question is posed in the first person (‘I’) since the emphasis of the existentialist is on life as seen from the perspective of one who is engaged in it. The existentialist focus, then, whilst practical, is not just ethical – if by that we mean theoretical articulations of the right and the good – but is rather on what I should do in a more general sense; on how I should live my life. As the existential theologian, Paul Tillich puts it, ‘[t]he existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. “Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation’ (Tillich, 1952, pp. 123–124).

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) were, from the 1940s onwards, worldwide celebrities – public intellectuals par excellence. Partly because of their celebrity, the term ‘existentialism’ became very widely used to apply to pretty much anything (philosophy, literature, music, film, lifestyle choices) remotely bohemian or left field. Sartre and de Beauvoir are both eminently quotable, and existentialism is sometimes identified with a set of slogans that, without substantial philosophical background, are largely meaningless: ‘Existence precedes essence’, ‘We are condemned to be free’, ‘Man is a useless passion’, ‘Hell is other people’, and so on. Obviously a more substantial characterisation is needed.

Existentialism can be understood in, at least, two ways. On a narrow construal, it is the philosophical position defended by Sartre and de Beau-voir in their classic works of the 1940s and 1950s, in particular Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). On a broad construal, existentialism is a philosophical tradition that takes hold in the twentieth-century but has deep roots in the work of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Such a broad conception of existentialism will, of course, include not only Sartre and de Beauvoir, but also such thinkers as Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Jean Wahl (1888–1974), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), Benjamin Fon-dane (1898–1944), Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), Albert Camus (1913–1960), and Franz Fanon (1925–1961), amongst others.

The narrow conception (Webber, 2018, Ch. 1) has the merit of exactness. To the extent that Sartre and de Beauvoir offer a clear philosophical position, it is clear what existentialism is, defining it in terms of a set of substantive philosophical commitments. The alternative, it might be argued, is insufficiently precise; treating too wide a variety of philosophers as existentialists (or proto-existentialists) risks emptying the term of content.

This risk, however, is worth taking. For the broad conception allows us to situate the views defended by Sartre and de Beauvoir within a context of important issues in (the history of) ethics and the philosophy of action. And this, in turn, enables us to appreciate the extent to which the twentieth-century existentialists are engaged with philosophical questions that are live issues for us now. Perhaps ironically, seeing existentialism as a tradition of thought with roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries makes it easier for us to understand how it can speak to us in the twenty first. It allows us to appreciate the extent to which it is more than just a museum piece. As such, this book adopts a broad construal, whilst nevertheless remaining mindful of the danger of emptiness that this approach brings. The philosophers to whom we will pay most attention are Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Fanon.

Treating existentialism as a tradition in this sense precludes the possibility of giving it a neat definition in terms of substantive philosophical commitments. Rather, existentialism will be understood in terms of overlapping sets of substantive, methodological, and historical connections. What any two existentialists have in common may differ from case to case, but there is a family resemblance there. So, though declining to offer a definition, I hope that by the end of this book you’ll be able to recognise existentialist philosophy when you see it.

So what are these overlapping ways via which existentialism can be unified? First is the fact that, in one way or another, each of them is attempting to offer an account of the life of human beings as it has to be lived, from the individual point of view, rather than, as in Spinoza’s phrase, sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of eternity) (Spinoza, 1677, Part II, Proposition 44, Corollary 2). They attempt, that is, to give an account of human life, recognisable by those living it.

One way to think about this is in terms of the distinction between explanation (Erklären) and understanding (Verstehen) that is familiar from debates over the methodology of the social sciences. The natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) aim to explain phenomena, including those central to the subjective lives of human beings. Cognitive neuroscience, for example, investigates the biological processes the underlie human cognitive abilities such as perception, memory, or language. It attempts to explain these phenomena. But, plausibly, no cognitive neuroscientific explanation of memory will give us much insight into what it is like to live a life infused by memory. That is, whilst cognitive neuroscience may explain memory, there is a sense in which it does not allow us to understand it. Now, whether the human sciences all have as their goal understanding rather than explanation and whether this involves a distinctive methodology are controversial questions with a history stretching back to the nineteenth century (Feest, 2010). What is clear, however, is that existentialist philosophers are, one and all, concerned with understanding in the aforementioned sense. They are concerned with the nature of human existence, in particular its practical dimension, not as viewed from above, but as viewed from within – from the perspective of one whose existence, whose life, is an issue for them. And that, of course, is all of us.

In addition to this focus on understanding, in order to see what it is that unites the nineteenth- and twentieth-century existentialists, it is important to have some appreciation of the philosophical context in which they wrote. This means, above all else, having some understanding of various aspects of the views of both Kant and Hegel. At various points in the subsequent chapters we will introduce aspects of that philosophical background, in particular Kant’s views on both morality and religion, and Hegel’s master–slave dialectic. One thing that should be mentioned at this point, however, is the Enlightenment, a movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which emphasised the role of reason rather than tradition or religion in the pursuit of knowledge. The Enlightenment thinker is one who brings everything to the ‘tribunal of reason’ (Kant, 1781, Axi) and accepts nothing merely on authority. Kant is perhaps the paradigm Enlightenment thinker, opening his essay on the Enlightenment by claiming that

Enlightenment is the human being’s emancipation from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s intellect without the direction of another. The immaturity is self-incurred when its cause does not lie in a lack of intellect, but rather in a lack of resolve and courage to make use of one’s intellect without the direction of another. ‘Sapere Aude! Have the courage to make use of your own intellect!’ is hence the motto of enlightenment.

Idleness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large segment of humankind, even after nature has long since set it free from foreign direction, is nonetheless content to remain immature for life; and these are also the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so comfortable to be immature. If I have a book that reasons for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who determines my diet for me, etc., then I need not make any effort myself. It is not necessary that I think if I can just pay; others will take such irksome business upon themselves for me.

(Kant, 1784, p. 17)

These two paragraphs could easily serve as a rallying cry for existentialism. For the demand that one leave behind an immaturity – an inauthentic form of existence, in which one is content to be guided by others – to enter a state of englightenment – an authentic life in which one makes autonomous decisions – is something with which all the existentialists can agree. And, as we shall see, it forms the backbone of many of their analyses of the various elements of human existence.

1.2 Existential Diversity

The prevoiusly mentioned commonality notwithstanding, there are signifi-cant differences between the views and approaches of the various thinkers reasonably classed as existentialists. One useful way to divide the field is by way of each thinker’s relation to religion. There are both theistic and atheistic existentialists and, more often than not, their attitude towards religion is key to understanding their thought as a whole. From Kierkegaard’s claim that his ‘authorship, viewed as a totality, is religious from first to last’ (Kierkegaard, 1851, p. 6) to Sartre’s claim that, for him, ‘existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position’ (Sartre, 1946b, p. 56), the appropriate attitude to religion or, perhaps more accurately, God, looms large in an existentialist account of what it is to lead one’s life. But if, as Sartre claims, existentialism is essentially atheistic, what sense can be made of the phenomenon of religious existentialism, as exemplified by Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Marcel? Should we not, perhaps, reserve the label ‘existentialist’ for those – such as Nietzsche, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus – articulating an atheistic position?

The reason why we should answer this question negatively, and the reason for thinking that Sartre’s claim is an overstatement, is that he goes on to claim that

even if God existed that would make no difference from its [existentialism’s] point of view. Not that we believe God does exist but we think that the real problem is not that of his existence; what man needs is to find himself again, and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.

(Sartre, 1946b, p. 56)

Perhaps surprisingly, but as should become clear in the next chapter, this is something that the devoted Christian Kierkegaard could also accept. For, whilst devout, Kierkegaard was fiercely critical of the organised church in his native Denmark, at one point describing his goal as to ‘introduce Christianity again – into Christendom’ (Kierkegaard, 1851, p. 42). Religious existentialists are still existentialists (for an excellent account of religious existentialism, see Pattison, 1999).

Kierkegaard

Though never holding a university position, Kierkegaard wrote prodigiously on philosophy, theology, and literature. His major works include Either/Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), and The Sickness Unto Death (1849). As well as his critique of ‘Christendom’, Kierkegaard was severely critical of the prevailing philosophical dominance of ‘the system’ of Hegelian Absolute Idealism, arguing that it fails to make contact with the actual lives of existing subjects.

Though Kierkegaard enjoyed some celebrity during his lifetime, especially in his home city of Copenhagen, it was not until the twentieth-century that his importance was widely recognised. He was a major influence on twentieth-century existentialists, in particular Heidegger and Sartre. His voluminous notebooks and journals give an unusually clear insight into the life of a man whose writ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Endorsements
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Life
• 2 Subjectivity
• 3 Meaning
• 4 Freedom
• 5 Angst
• 6 Bad Faith
• 7 Alienation
• 8 Gender
• 9 Race
• 10 Authenticity
• 11 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index