Existentialism

A Beginner's Guide

Thomas E. Wartenberg

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781780740201
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

A lively introduction to this celebrated philosophical tradition. Existentialism pervades modern culture, yet if you ask most people what it means, they won't be able to tell you. In this lively and topical introduction, Wartenberg reveals a vibrant mode of philosophical inquiry that addresses concerns at the heart of the existence of every human being. Wartenberg uses classic films, novels, and plays to present the ideas of now-legendary Existentialist thinkers from Nietzsche and Camus to Sartre and Heidegger and to explore central concepts, including Freedom, Anxiety, and the Absurd. Special attention is paid to the views of Simone de Beauvoir and Franz Fanon, who use the theories of Existentialism to address gender and colonial oppression.

1

Existence

Even if man were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of sheer ingratitude, simply to have his own way … then, after all, perhaps only by his curse will he attain his object, that is, really convince himself that he is a man and not a piano key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated … then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and have his own way.

(Notes from Underground, 28)

These words, uttered by the Underground Man, the narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (see text box, p. 8) short novel, Notes from Underground, present one fundamental thesis of Existentialism: that human beings value their freedom more than anything else. The Underground Man says that freedom is so important to humans that we would prefer to go insane rather than accept the idea that our actions are completely determined by scientific laws. Although Dostoevsky’s prose conveys the point more dramatically than your average Existentialist philosophical text, it clearly presents the Existentialist espousal of freedom as a fundamental characteristic of human beings, indeed the feature that most clearly makes us the unique creatures we are.

But where does the need for such a striking defense of human freedom come from? Written in 1864, Notes from Underground was a response to the threat that the natural sciences posed to human beings’ self-understanding, for science claims to have the ability to explain everything that takes place in the world on the basis of its own natural laws. Dostoevsky structured his novel around the realization that science’s bold pretense to have the capacity to understand and predict all occurrences constituted a deep crisis for human beings and their sense of themselves. Are we human beings no more than piano keys, whose every motion is completely determined by natural laws? Many people in the mid-nineteenth century were not willing to cede their own being, their own freedom, to the dictates of scientists. Especially in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, freedom became the watchword of liberal intellectuals the world over, and it continues to be to this day. As the chains of monarchies and feudalism were broken through evolution and revolution, the bell of political freedom sounded throughout Europe and the Americas. Could all these upheavals have been merely the working out of natural laws instead of the result of human beings’ innate capacity to structure their lives according to their own lights?

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was one of the most important Russian novelists of the nineteenth century and arguably one of the greatest novelists of all time. As a young man, he was involved in radical politics and even served time in prison as a result of his seditious activities. Yet, after a firing squad pretended to carry out his death sentence in a mock execution, he became a conservative Christian.

Despite his Christian beliefs, Dostoevsky was cognizant of the struggles involved in maintaining faith in the face of a world that appears not to justify it. Although his fictional writings make a case for adopting a religious worldview, his portraits of those who were tempted to reject that perspective have been very influential within the Existential Tradition, for, in depicting those unbelievers, Dostoevsky presented some of the basic arguments of Existentialism. His novels include Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the greatest of them all.

But what exactly is that freedom about which I have been writing and the Existentialists have so much to say? There are many types of freedom that philosophers have distinguished. We will only consider two. First, there is social and political freedom. Because human beings must interact with one another, they have developed a set of social conventions and political institutions to regulate their relationships. When freedom is talked about in this context, it indicates that these conventions and institutions must not illegitimately constrain the human beings who are governed by them. The claim is that people have an inherent right to determine the course of their own lives, so there needs to be a specific justification for limiting their choices in any way. This is a far cry from the structure of traditional societies, for the people living in them are generally born into specific social roles that they will occupy for their entire lives. Western democracies are intended to give their members the freedom to choose how to live their lives.

Underlying this social notion of freedom, however, there is a different, metaphysical concept of freedom. This is the sense of freedom that the Underground Man has in mind. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was the first to discuss it in any detail. To grasp what it is, think about a tennis ball. The ball coming at you across the net is not free. Its trajectory is determined by the laws of physics together with what physicists call ‘initial conditions’: how hard your opponent struck it, what direction it began moving in, whether there is wind, and so on. And the racket that you are going to hit it with is not free either, for it can only move if you swing it. Depending on how you swing the racket, the ball will move either fast or slow, up or down, and so on. But what about you? There are philosophers who believe that you do not differ in any significant way from your racket or the tennis ball: there is someone or something ‘swinging’ you, making you act the way that you do. It could be God or your DNA, but in either case you are not the one doing anything. But this is exactly what Aristotle denies. He believes that you are free because you decide to initiate the sequence of events that results in your racket hitting the ball: you see where the ball is headed and decide that it will be in bounds, so you move toward it and swing your arm quickly and precisely, hitting the ball over the net, and, hopefully, winning the point. According to Aristotle’s view, we humans occupy a special place in what philosophers call the ‘causal series.’ Unlike balls and rackets whose movements are entirely determined by prior events and the laws of physics, human beings have the capacity to initiate a series of events. It is that ability that constitutes their freedom. This is precisely what philosophers mean by metaphysical freedom: humans can initiate actions based on their desires; they are not constrained to act in any particular way, as things like balls and rackets are, although there are certainly constraints on what it is possible for us to do. We humans, initiators of causal sequences, have a distinct way of being-in-the-world, to introduce one basic term of Existentialism.

Gradually, with the rise of modern scientific theory, it dawned on philosophers and other thinkers that human beings might not really be free, that our sense of ourselves as having the power to do one thing rather than another might be simply an illusion. Of course, philosophers had already confronted this issue from the beginning of the discipline. For example, Medieval philosophers recognized that God posed a threat to human freedom. If God is omniscient, that is, knows everything, then he also knows what you are going to do before you do it. Even though you think you are free, God, using his infinite knowledge, correctly anticipates your actions. But then it sure looks as if your decision is not freely made even though it may feel like it to you, because you could not have done things any differently without contradicting the fact that God has complete foreknowledge. (This idea is raised by the recent film The Matrix Reloaded (2003), although there it is not God but ‘the Oracle’ and ‘the Architect’ whose ‘foreknowledge’ threatens human freedom.) Modern science proved to be incredibly successful at explaining and predicting the behavior of all the objects to which it turned its attention. Indeed, as physical theory developed, the universe began to seem like a huge clock that moved, as clocks do, in completely predictable ways that could be understood on the basis of the laws of physics. Could the same be true of us? Could we really be just little gears in the great clock of the universe, mere mechanisms in the grand plan of nature?

It’s easy for us now to be blasé about the power of science and technology. After all, we’re used to the impact that scientific discoveries and technological innovations have had on our lives, even if we are continually being surprised by the latest technological breakthrough that makes our recently purchased iPods or PCs so quickly obsolete. But for people at the beginning of the nineteenth century – when the seeds of Existentialism were being sown – science promised to completely revolutionize human life on the planet. Think about it. Virtually every aspect of how we live our lives is affected by the technological products that modern science and technology provide. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the sounds we hear, even the sights we see all bear testimony to the ubiquity of the products of technology. And even when we go ‘back to nature,’ thinking that we are getting away from ‘civilization,’ technology remains very much in evidence, when, for example, the stream beside which we walk takes the course it does because of the flood control technology that keeps it within its banks.

One consequence of science’s great successes was its hubristic claim to be able to explain everything. ‘Hubris’ is Greek for ‘overarching pride.’ We can illustrate this notion through the well-known story from Greek mythology about Icarus. Icarus was the son of Daedalus, an amazing craftsman. Daedalus fashioned a set of wings for his son out of wax and feathers, and warned him not to fly too close to the sun lest the wax melt, nor too close to the sea lest the feathers get wet. But when Icarus took to the sky, he ignored his father’s advice. Intoxicated by flight and thinking himself capable of anything, he soared too close to the sun. Of course, the sun melted his wings, causing him to fall to his death in the sea. Now, modern science can be thought of as having the same sort of hubris as Icarus: intoxicated by its own success, science overreaches itself by maintaining that it can explain everything, even human behavior. But whether science’s boast actually is an example of hubris or whether the reach of science truly extends that far remains hotly debated by philosophers to this day.

Let’s think about how science might be able to explain the behavior of human beings. Basically, the claim is that science has the capacity to develop an intricate system of laws to explain all human actions. For example, as I sit here in front of my computer, typing this sentence, I think I am making decisions on my own about what to say and how to say it. According to hubristic natural science, however, my perception is false. There are psycho-physical laws about how the human brain works that could, in conjunction with facts about me together with my previous experiences, explain why I just typed the word ‘hubristic’ or used the story of Daedalus and Icarus as a way to explain the self-conceit of science about the scope of its power.

Science’s attempt to explain every feature of the human being was very threatening to many during the nineteenth century, especially as the traditional bases for religious faith became unconvincing to many. The Underground Man is a paradigmatic example of one response to science’s claim to see into the depths of our souls. If science could explain everything that a human being does, down to such minutiae as why I chose to type one word rather than another, then my view of myself as a possessor of metaphysical freedom would be merely an illusion. As the Underground Man puts it so well, the human being would be nothing more than a complicated piano key. When I strike the middle-C key on a piano, the key does not have a choice about what it will do: it moves a lever, triggering a hammer to strike a specific string that vibrates at precisely 261.1 cycles per second (hertz), thereby sounding the middle-C. Barring interference, the process is completely inevitable. In contrast, at least since Aristotle people had assured themselves that they were different, for they were the ones who initiated such processes. They were – you guessed it – free. But the natural scientists of the early nineteenth century laughed at this idea as merely one more pretense that humans had to learn to shed. After all, these scientists and their predecessors had proved Aristotle wrong about physics and astronomy. As in the account of creation in Genesis, Aristotle thought that the earth was the center of the universe. Yet a succession of great astronomers and physicists – Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Sir Isaac Newton – demonstrated that the earth was actually just one planet revolving around the sun. Now we know that the sun is not even the center of the universe. Such discoveries constituted huge threats to the self-image of human beings, a fact attested to by the persecution these first great scientists had to endure because of their theories and the challenge they posed to traditional religious belief. Eventually we got over the threat those theories presented to our sense of ourselves and accepted the cosmological views of the natural scientists. Now all we had to do, according to those working in the very same scientific tradition, was to come to terms with the next threat to our narcissism: our belief that we have a fundamentally different nature from all the other things that exist in the world.

This challenge posed by hubristic natural science and the philosophical schools that supported it was the spark that ignited the philosophical movement of Existentialism. The Underground Man’s words convey exactly how this challenge was countered: ‘Tell me that I’m no different from a piano key,’ we can imagine him to be thinking, ‘and I’ll do something stupid, unexpected, I might even utter a curse, just to show you that I am different. And if you try to prove to me that nothing I can do undermines your claim that my actions are as completely determined by scientific laws as those of a piano key, I’ll even go insane in order not to have to accept your arguments.’ In his colorful way, the Underground Man is saying what all the Existentialists believe: nothing, even our ability to think rationally, is more essential to us than our freedom.

Being human

The Underground Man’s assertion that he won’t accept any proof that he, a human being, is not unique among all the things existing alongside him in the world stakes out the territory that the Existentialists will occupy and develop. Indeed, so distinctive is the human being that, in his renowned book, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger (see text box opposite) developed a special word to refer to us: Dasein, composed of the two German words for ‘there’ (da) and ‘being’ (sein). Heidegger chose this word for a number of reasons. Characterizing human existence as ‘being-there’ was his way of asserting the importance of the awareness that we humans have of our own being, that our being has a there, exists in a specific place. But he also used this term to make it clear that humans are so distinctive a type of being or existent that they should not be characterized as simply one being among others, the human (type of) being. He thought the terminology of the ‘Western tradition of metaphysics,’ by referring to us as human beings, obscured our truly distinctive nature. After all, there are lots of beings in the world. Ants are a type of being and so are tables, chairs, and even rocks. If humans are regarded as just one type of being among others, then it is easy to underestimate their distinctiveness and treat them as more nearly continuous with other types of existents. So calling us Dasein was Heidegger’s way of emphasizing that we are not just one being among others, but that, on the contrary, there is something completely distinctive about the being of humans.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), played an important role in the formation of Existentialism, sounding many themes that would later become characteristic of the school. Among these are: the distinctive nature of the human being or Dasein; the alienation of the human being in its everyday world; others as central to the existence of humans but also as a source of social conformity; authenticity as a distinctive possibility of human existence; and death as the reality a person could focus upon in order to achieve authenticity.

After the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger’s thinking underwent a profound change and he began to emphasize the importance of human receptivity over activity. Instead of trying to control the conditions of our own existence, Heidegger now asserted, humans should concentrate on noticing the distinctive features of existence itself. As a result, he was critical of contemporary society for its reliance upon technology, which he claimed caused being to be obscured.

The most controversial aspect of Heidegger’s life was his embracing of Nazism and his service as the Rector (President) of the University of Freiburg under the Nazis. After World War II, he was banned from teaching and was the target of continuing criticism, especially for his failure to explain his support for the Nazis.

Although many are still suspicious of Heidegger’s philosophy for its purported fascist tendencies, his writings continue to be extremely influential, particularly for contemporary French thought.

But what exactly about humans makes them such a distinct type of being? To answer this question, we will have to do a bit of metaphysics ourselves. Metaphysics is that branch of phil...