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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Existentialism: An Introduction has established itself as the most comprehensive and accessible book on the subject available. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Kevin Aho draws on a wide range of existentialist thinkers from both the secular and religious traditions, adding a wealth of new material on existentialism's relationship with Marxist thought and its impact on feminist phenomenology and critical race theory. Chapters center on the key themes of freedom, authenticity, being-in-the-world, alienation, and nihilism. Aho also addresses important but often overlooked issues in the canon of existentialism, including the role of embodiment, existentialism's contribution to ethics, political theory and environmental and comparative philosophies, as well as its influence on the allied health professions. By tracking its many and significant influences on modern thought, Kevin Aho shows why existentialism cannot be easily dismissed as a moribund or outdated movement, but instead endures as one of the most important and vibrant areas of contemporary philosophy. Existentialism remains so influential because it forcefully deals with what it means to be human and engages with fundamental questions such as "Who am I?" and "How should I live?" Existentialism: An Introduction is the ideal text for upper-level philosophy students and for anyone interested in the movement's key figures and concepts.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Preface
What is Existentialism?
Why this Book?
1 Existentialism and Modernity
Roots of the Western Self
The Emergence of the Modern Worldview
Existentialism as a Cultural Mood
2 The Insider’s Perspective
The Problem of Detachment and Objectivity
Subjective Truth
Perspectivism
Phenomenology
3 Being-in-the-World
Being-in
Undoing Dualisms
The Work World
The Perceptual World
Aspects of Alterity
4 Self and Others
The Problem of Substance
Embodiment
The Self as a Tension
Conformism and Self-Deception
5 Freedom
The Core Idea of Existentialism
Freedom and Determinism
Radical Freedom
Situated Freedom
Creature and Creator
6 Authenticity
Moods and the Problem of the Real Self
Becoming an Individual
Living with Style
Anxiety and Resoluteness
Bad Faith and Nothingness
7 Ethics
Anything Goes
Subjectivism or Historicism
Intercorporeality
I and Thou
8 Marxist, Feminist, and Black Existentialism
The End of the Subject
Re-Envisioning Praxis
Existence in Black
Oppression and Recognition
9 Contributions to Psychiatry and Psychotherapy
The Problem of Medicalization
Anxiety, Embodiment, and Psychotherapy
Is Existentialism Anti-Psychiatry?
10 Existentialism Today
Self and Nature
Self and
dukkha
Health and Illness
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 The Rise of the First Reconstruction
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Existentialism
An Introduction
Second Edition
Kevin Aho
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Kevin Aho 2020
The right of Kevin Aho to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2014 by Polity Press
This edition published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3961-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3962-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aho, Kevin, 1969- author.
Title: Existentialism : an introduction / Kevin Aho.
Description: Second edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The anticipated second edition of the most lively and comprehensive introduction to Existentialism”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019050973 (print) | LCCN 2019050974 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509539611 | ISBN 9781509539628 (pb) | ISBN 9781509539635 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Existentialism.
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LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050974
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Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the teachers who first introduced me to existentialism. The initial exposure came from my parents, Jim and Margaret Aho, whose bookshelves were filled with the works of Camus, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Rilke, and Nietzsche (though, strangely, nothing from Heidegger). For them, the only thing that mattered in life was being true to oneself; and, without their encouragement and the dog-eared copy of The Brothers Karamazov as a Christmas gift, I may never have changed my major to philosophy and fallen so hard for existentialism. My parents have followed and supported my path from the ski slopes of Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming to the urban canyons of Manhattan to the subtropical swamps of south Florida. They have also read, commented on, and edited early drafts of this book, and their sharp and incisive feedback throughout the process has been invaluable. I am also thankful to many of my childhood friends, especially Donnie Cresswell, Matthew Harmon, and Martin Rose, who spent countless fuzzy nights with me talking about the nature of transcendence, suffering, and the meaning of life. And to my brothers, Ken and Kyle, who have long been my teachers by showing me, through their music, art, and bold adventures in the mountains, what a disciplined act of self-creation really is.
There were also quite a few influential professors in college and graduate school who exposed me to different aspects of existentialist thought, for example Carl Levenson and Paul Tate at Idaho State University; the incomparable Agnes Heller at the New School for Social Research; and my supportive mentors Stephen Turner, Ofelia Schutte, and Joanne Waugh at the University of South Florida. But, of all the teachers I’ve had over the years, the most important and enduring has been Charles Guignon. Indeed, the first edition of this book was originally conceived of as a co-authored project, and many of the ideas in it were developed over lengthy conversations with Charles over the span of two decades. His intellectual guidance and friendship have been a steady presence, and this book could not have been completed without him. Of course, once that is said, any scholarly and interpretive errors in the book are mine alone.
I also have to acknowledge the institutional support at Florida Gulf Coast University and of my wonderful colleagues, especially Carolyn Culbertson, Glenn Whitehouse, Miles Hentrup, Bob Gregerson, Chuck Lindsey, Jo Muller, Maria Roca, Rebecca Totaro, and Tom Demarchi. My colleagues in the philosophy department in particular helped create a pluralistic and open intellectual space where I could freely pursue my own research projects and integrate them into my teaching, in existentialist-themed courses such as “The Philosophy of Death and Dying,” “The Tragedy of Technology,” “Existential Psychotherapy,” “Philosophies of Liberation,” and “Phenomenology of the Body.” I have also been blessed with wonderful students, who have taken my existentialism courses over the years and helped me frame many of the ideas laid out in this book, including David Odem, Ashley Levi, Ellie Levy, Jon Morheim, Rachel Cicoria, Logan Schultz, Paul Smith, Jameson Yingling, and Natalie Worebel.
The editorial team at Polity Press has been nothing less than superb as I prepared the second edition of the book. Pascal Porcheron and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer have been consummate professionals in their support and gave me thoughtful responses to any questions I had. Pascal was especially helpful as the project neared completion. And Manuela Tecusan was an exceptionally skilled copyeditor, strengthening the manuscript and saving me from a number of embarrassing errors. I am also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for Polity, who offered extensive and insightful comments and suggestions for revisions that have sharpened this new edition.
Finally, I am indebted to my wife and partner Jane Kayser. She has been with me through the unavoidable emergencies and upheavals of life; and she embodies the foundation for what Rilke called “a good marriage” by being the guardian of my freedom and solitude. This book is dedicated to her.
Preface
What is Existentialism?
In his novel The Pale King, David Foster Wallace offers a powerful example of the existentialist attitude, illuminating the free-floating anxiety and confusion that we all experience in the modern age. He writes:
The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize that something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it. (Foster Wallace 2012, 38)
What Foster Wallace describes here is not an abstract or intellectual event, but a visceral sense that something’s not right with us; that we are not “real” or “at home” in this world; that our existence is inescapably finite and absurd; and that there are no moral absolutes that can tell us how to live. These are the elemental expressions of the human condition that existentialism grapples with. It is an attitude that confronts the unnerving givens lurking below the surface of our everyday lives, and it has the power to jolt us affectively out of our routines, compelling us to engage critically with the choices and actions that make us who and what we are. But what does “existentialism,” as a philosophical movement, refer to?
One of the initial difficulties in writing a book about existentialism is the word itself. It is an “ism” that gives the misleading impression of a coherent and unified philosophical doctrine – or, worse, school. The word was officially coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in 1943 and was quickly adopted by his compatriots Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. But many of the major twentieth-century philosophers, figures such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus, rejected the label, while its nineteenth-century pioneers, for example Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, had never heard of it. Existentialism’s representative thinkers are anything but unified in their views. There are secular existentialists such as Sartre, Nietzsche, and Camus, whose philosophies are informed by the idea of the death of God; but there are also prominent theistic existentialists, for example Marcel, Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber. There are existentialists who claim that we are radically free and morally responsible for our actions, but also others like Nietzsche, who contend that free will and moral responsibility are a fiction. Some, such as Kierkegaard, Beauvoir, and Sartre, maintain that existentialism is a form of subjectivism, while others, such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, reject this idea as an equivocation and posit the centrality of intersubjectivity or being-in-the-world. And there are both existentialists who argue that our relations with others are invariably tainted with alienation, self-deception, and conflict and existentialists who develop notions of mutual dependency, selfless love, and genuine communion with others.
Given these conflicting views, there are clear indications of a new philosophical orientation emerging in modern Europe and centering specifically on the question of what it means to be human. As early as the seventeenth century, the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal coined the phrase “logic of the heart” (logique du coeur) in an attempt to give an account of the mystery of the affective side of human existence – a mystery that traditional reason and logic could never access. In his Pensées, Pascal offers one of the first expressions of the existentialist attitude:
Let man, returning to himself, consider what he is in comparison with what exists; let him regard himself as lost, and from this little dungeon, in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him learn to take the earth, its realms, its cities, its houses and himself at their proper value. … Anyone who considers himself in this way will be terrified at himself. (Pascal 1995, 199)
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard would take Pascal’s experience of existential isolation and dread and develop an entire philosophy around it, stressing the importance of the singular and concrete passions of the “existing individual” over any abstract or objective truth. A generation later, Nietzsche would promote the ideals of “life philosophy” (Lebensphilosophie), which emphasized the incalculability of human experience and the impossibility to explain the inchoate forces of life by appeals to reason. In the 1920s, Heidegger was introducing his own “existential analytic” or “analytic of Dasein” (Daseinsanalytik), and his contemporary Karl Jaspers was developing a “philosophy of existence” (Existenzphilosophie). Both engaged with the inexpressible freedom of the individual and the human states of anxiety and being-toward-death, which defy rational apprehension. Thus, long before the word “existentialism” was officially introduced and the uniform of black sweaters, black pants, and cigarettes populated the cafés of Boulevard St. Germain in Paris, the core ideas of the movement had already been articulated. This helps explain David Cooper’s remark that “none of the great existentialist tomes contain the word ‘existentialism’” (1999, 1).
Although existentialism cannot be reduced to a unified doctrine or school of thought and its major representatives differ widely in their views, the common thread that ties these thinkers together is their concern for the human situation as it is lived. This is a situation that cannot be reasoned about or captured in an abstract system; it can only be felt and made meaningful by the concrete choices and actions of the existing individual. From this shared concern, a number of overlapping themes emerge in the writings that make it possible for us to group the latter together under the common descriptor “existentialism.”
Existence Precedes Essence Existentialists promoted the idea that humans exist differently from other things such as trees, cultural artifacts, and animals. We humans cannot be understood as mere things that are objectively present; this is because we exist, which is to say that we make choices and take action all throughout our lives. This means that there is no pre-given “essence” that determines who and what we are. We are self-making beings and we become what we are on the basis of the choices and actions we make as our lives unfold. On this view, there is no definitive or complete account of being human, because there is nothing that grounds or secures our existence; we are a “not yet,” always in the process of realizing who we are as we press forward into future projects and possibilities.
The Self as a Tension By interpreting existence as a process of self-making rather than as an object or thing, existentialists are saying that the structure of the self involves a tension or struggle between what they call “facticity” and “transcendence.” On the one hand, we humans are determined by the limitations of our factual nature: our physiology, our sexuality, our socio-historical situation. This is our facticity. On the other hand, insofar as we are self-conscious and aware of these limitations, we can transcend or surpass them by taking a stand on them, that is, by choosing to interpret them in certain ways, by giving them meaning, and thus we create our own identities. This is our transcendence.
The Anguish of Freedom As beings that can take a stand on our facticity, existentialists generally agree that we are free and responsible for who we are and what we do. But this realization is often accompanied by anguish because it reminds us that we alone are responsible for the choices and actions we make in our lives. Existentialists reject the idea that there are moral absolutes, utilitarian calculations, or natural laws that can explain or justify our actions. As Sartre (2001, 296, slightly modified) writes, when it comes to human actions, “there are no excuses behind us or justifications before us.”
The Insider’s Perspective Because human existence is not a thing that can be studied from a perspective of detached objectivity, existentialists hold the view that we can understand ourselves only by taking what might be called an insider’s perspective. That is, before engaging in any disinterested theorizing about who or what we are, we must come to grips with the experience of being human as it is lived within the context of our own situation. For this reason existentialists reject the idea that objectivity is possible when it comes to giving an account of human existence. Any account of what it means to be human is already mediated by the contextual interweaving of our social involvements, our bodily orientations, our emotions, and our perceptual capacities.
Moods as Disclosive According to existentialists, we do not gain knowledge of the human situation through detached thought or rational demonstration, but through the visceral experiences of the individual. We understand what matters in our lives through our moods, through the ways in which we feel about things. Some moods, such as anxiety (Heidegger), nausea (Sartre), guilt (Kierkegaard), and absurdity (Camus), are especially important for the existentialists, on the grounds that they have the capacity to shake us out of our everyday complacency and self-deception by disclosing the fundamental freedom and finitude of our situation. This, in turn, allows us the opportunity to be honest with ourselves and to commit to our lives with renewed passion, intensity, and focus.
The Possibility for Authenticity Because we have a tendency to conform to the leveled-down roles and identities of the public world, the question of authenticity, of being true to oneself, is central to the existentialists. The idea is formulated in many different ways, for example as being a “knight of faith” (Kierkegaard), an “overman” (Nietzsche), a “rebel” (Camus), or an “authentic individual” (Heidegger). In this way existentialists develop the possibility of living a meaningful, committed, and fulfilling life in the face of absurdity and death. The idea of authenticity serves as a powerful rejoinder to the criticism that existentialism is a kind of nihilistic, “anything goes” philosophy.
Ethics and Responsibility Existentialism does not require adherence to any normative moral principle. Yet the accusation that existentialism is an amoral philosophy is undeserved. Existentialism centers around two of the most fundamental of moral questions there are. What should I do? How should I live? Moreover, in acknowledging our fundamental freedom, its representatives recognize that we are not free from responsibility for our actions or from the obligation to cultivate the ideal of freedom for others. From this angle, existentialism offers a clear vision of what a valuable or praiseworthy way of life means. It is a life that faces up to the inescapable freedom and vulnerability of the human situation and takes responsibility for the fact that our actions have consequences that impact the lives of others.
Why this Book?
It is difficult to justify a new introduction to existentialism, given the number of high-quality monographs published on it over the past six decades. Beginning with William Barrett’s (1958) path-breaking Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, a number of early secondary works in English stand out, notably Calvin O. Schrag’s (1961) Existence and Freedom, Robert Olson’s (1962) An Introduction to Existentialism, John Macquarrie’s (1972) Existentialism, and Robert Solomon’s (1972) From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds. Despite their significant contribution, these texts are now quite outdated. More recently, Thomas Flynn has written a crisp and engaging little book called Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (Flynn 2006), but, because of its brevity, it is unable to engage a wide range of thinkers or develop key issues in sufficient detail. And Jonathan Webber’s (2018) Rethinking Existentialism offers a novel and compelling treatment of existentialism as an ethical theory, but the book’s narrow focus on Sartre and Beauvoir and their respective influence neglects other major figures and the broader philosophical and historical contours of the movement. In my view, it is David Cooper’s (1999) Existentialism: A Reconstruction (originally published in 1990) that has set the standard in terms of comprehensiveness and of bringing existentialism up to date and into conversation with core themes in mainstream anglophone philosophy. My aim in this book is to follow Cooper’s lead in emphasizing existentialism’s enduring relevance to contemporary philosophy, but I try to draw on a wider range of philosophical and literary figures and to address themes that are often neglected or underdeveloped in other introductory works.
There is a tendency in introductory texts on existentialism to focus narrowly on the “big four” – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. This approach is understandable, given their enormous philosophical and cultural impact, but it tends to overlook the significance of religious and literary existentialists such as Dostoevsky, Camus, Tolstoy, Marcel, Unamuno, Rilke, and Buber, as well as feminist existentialists such as Beauvoir. In some introductions the influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy is minimized, because he rejects one of the central tenets of existentialism, namely that human beings are radically free and therefore morally responsible for their actions. There are also crucial themes of embodiment and being-in-the-world that are often undeveloped, and there is sometimes a failure to situate existentialism within the historical context of modernity. Finally, there is the issue of the significant influence that existentialism has exercised in the applied fields of medicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy – an impact that is often glossed over in introductory texts.
Since the first edition of the present book was published in 2014, readers have brought to my attention a number of concerns. For instance, the coverage of Beauvoir seemed too limited, given the explosion of scholarship in feminist phenomenology in recent years; there was interest in an expanded discussion of the role of moods and the possibility of love and authentic being-with-others in existentialist thought; and some readers wanted to see a more robust treatment of existentialism’s influence on the emergence and development of critical race theory. But the most important critique of the first edition involved its failure to address the Marxist critique of existentialism, especially as these criticisms played a powerful role in shaping the transformation in Sartre’s later philosophy. This second edition attempts to address these concerns through revised and expanded discussions of these issues; it also offers an entirely new chapter entitled “Marxist, Feminist, and Black Existentialism” that engages critically with existentialism’s narrow emphasis on individual freedom and with its apparent neglect of the material conditions of life that oppress and constrain us.
This second edition continues to focus largely on the big four; but I cast a much larger net, drawing on a wide range of philosophical and literary figures as they become relevant to the issues discussed. The first chapter, “Existentialism and Modernity,” is devoted to the historical roots of the western self, as it emerges from the tension between Greek reason and Hebraic faith, and explains how this tension is recast in modernity. In conformity with this orientation, Nietzsche’s work is placed center-stage; it frames the situation of nihilism and the death of God, two themes that become crucial to twentieth-century existentialists. There is also a brief discussion of the broader cultural impact of existentialism outside philosophy.
Chapter 2, “The Insider’s Perspective,” engages existentialism’s critique of methodological detachment and objectivity by arguing that any account of human existence must begin from inside one’s own finite and situated perspective. Here different accounts of the insider’s perspective are introduced, for example Kierkegaard’s conception of subjective truth, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, and phenomenological accounts as they emerge in the work of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.
Chapter 3, “Being-in-the-World,” addresses the ways in which existentialism undermines traditional philosophical dualisms – namely by interpreting the human being not as an encapsulated thing or substance, but in terms of pre-reflective involvement in the world. Although the chapter draws largely on the seminal work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to articulate how we already embody an understanding of intra-worldly things, it also engages with the work of the likes of Frantz Fanon and Iris Marion Young, to show how this tacit understanding can break down as a result of racial and sexual difference.
The remainder of the book deals with the key issues of selfhood, freedom, authenticity, and ethics. Chapter 4, “Self and Others,” describes the existentialist configuration of the self as a struggle between facticity and transcendence. With wide-ranging references to Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Ortega y Gasset, as well as to contemporary English language philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt and Charles Taylor, the chapter illustrates how human beings are always making or creating themselves by interpreting and giving meaning to their factical situation. This chapter also addresses issues of embodiment and how the process of self-creation is often compromised by our tendency to conform to the calcified identities and roles of the public world.
Chapter 5 introduces freedom as the central idea of existentialism and identifies the ways in which existential freedom is distinct from more conventional views. Using Dostoevsky’s classic novella Notes from the Underground to frame the idea, the chapter discusses the radical or unconditioned forms of freedom promoted by Sartre, as well as the situated forms of freedom developed by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Nietzsche’s views on freedom. Although he breaks with other existentialists by criticizing the idea of free will and moral responsibility, Nietzsche can be viewed as offering his own version of situated freedom: a kind of freedom rooted in the polymorphous impulses of the body but that also reflects the goal of self-creation, which is crucial to the existentialist project.
Chapter 6, “Authenticity,” builds on the discussion of freedom by exploring what it means to be true to oneself. Here the significance of transformative moods such as anxiety, absurdity, and guilt is developed: they have the power to pull us out of self-deception and to bring us face to face with the existential givens of freedom and death. This discussion also explores how the existentialist account of moods breaks decisively with the romantic tradition. The second half of the chapter is framed around the core tension between being ethical (doing what is right) and being authentic (being true to oneself) and focuses on the influential accounts of authenticity offered by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre.
Chapter 7, “Ethics,” challenges the view that existentialism promotes a brand of “anything goes” philosophy. The chapter begins by showing how existentialists like Sartre and Beauvoir support a notion of moral responsibility and of cultivating freedom for others. The discussion then shifts to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who argue that there are moral demands that are already placed on us through our involvement in a shared historical situation (Heidegger) and through our intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty). The chapter concludes by showing how religious existentialists like Buber and Levinas challenge modern attitudes of selfishness and individualism and develop a moral orientation rooted in the affective recognition of human vulnerability and suffering.
Chapter 8, “Marxist, Feminist, and Black Existentialism,” addresses the objection that existentialism’s sustained focus on individual freedom fails to account for the myriad ways in which material conditions oppress and limit the possibilities for agency and self-realization. The chapter explores how Sartre’s thought evolved in the wake of Marxist criticisms. It describes his move away from the idea of unconditioned freedom of consciousness, which was central to his early work, to a more situated or mediated conception of freedom, one invariably shaped by socioeconomic forces. The chapter concludes by highlighting how the conceptual tools of existentialism as well as its sharpened sensitivity to oppressive social conditions are reflected in Beauvoir’s feminist phenomenology and in the contemporaneous emergence of critical race theory or black existentialism.
Chapter 9 engages existentialism’s enormous contribution to psychiatry and psychotherapy. Drawing on the work of existential therapists such as R. D. Laing, Irvin Yalom, and Rollo May, it explores the value of existentialism in psychiatry by showing how the patient’s experience of psychopathology always needs to be situated and contextualized. On this view, the therapist does not regard the patient as an object of scientific investigation and does not necessarily interpret psychic suffering as a medical disease but as an existential given that has the power to disclose who we are as human beings. When anxiety overwhelms us by bringing us face to face with our own freedom and death, the therapist does not simply want to manage or control this feeling with medication or psychiatric techniques. The aim is rather to accept and integrate the unsettling experience into our lives. This acceptance can, in turn, free us from everyday forms of self-deception and open deeper and more meaningful ways of living for us.
The final chapter, “Existentialism Today,” addresses important aspects of existentialism that continue to shape the current intellectual landscape. The chapter begins with a discussion of existentialism’s role in environmental philosophy. Drawing largely on the work of Heidegger, the discussion centers on the dangers of dualistic thinking when it comes to interpreting nature and shows how the existentialist understanding of the self as being-in-the-world has helped environmental philosophers reconfigure our relationship to technology and to the earth itself. This discussion leads to an account of existentialism’s impact on the emergence and legitimation of comparative philosophy in the West and throws some light on the affinities between Buddhist conceptions of “suffering” (dukkha) and their counterparts in the existentialist tradition. The discussion goes on to show how Buddhism can be used to address some potential shortcomings of existentialism, as it offers specific practices designed to end the suffering instead of romanticizing it. The chapter concludes with an assessment of existentialism’s legacy in contemporary medicine and its focus on the lived experience of illness rather than on the objective nature of disease. In questioning the viability of the scientific position of detachment and objectivity, existentialism calls for healthcare professionals not just to “fix” the diseased body but to help patients give meaning to and make sense of their own experiences.
This brief summary gives an indication of the purpose of my book. It is meant to offer not only an accessible scholarly introduction to the central themes of existentialism. With references to a broad range of thinkers and drawing on the work of leading anglophone commentators, it aims to show that existentialism is by no means a moribund or outdated mode of thinking. Its ideas remain fresh and vital because they speak to the most pressing concerns that we face in the secular age. Who am I? How should I live? These are the central questions of existentialism.
In the following chapters I will engage with the core ideas of existentialism, all the while keeping in view the difficulty in demarcating the boundaries of the movement. It is important to remind the reader that, among the myriad thinkers traditionally included under the label “existentialist,” only Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly identified themselves as such. The term, as I am using it, designates a diverse group of philosophers and literary figures who were concerned with what it means to be human. And, although the lineage of thinkers with such preoccupations can be traced back to Stoics and Epicureans in the Hellenistic and Roman world – and, after Seneca and Epictetus, to late antique and early modern authors such as Augustine, Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Pascal – my focus will be on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and on those who followed Kierkegaard.
In order to cast the net wide and to bring literary and religious aspects of existentialism into the discussion, I reject the notion that existentialism is a “relatively systematic philosophy” (Cooper 1999, 8); as some commentators have pointed out, such a view invariably excludes seminal literary figures like Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Rilke, and Kafka – and perhaps even Kierkegaard and Nietzsche themselves, whose indirect and aphoristic styles were anything but systematic (see Malpas 2012). In fact I want to suggest that these literary approaches are one of the major reasons why existentialism became the cultural phenomenon it is. With little or no training in academic philosophy, readers were provided with vivid and accessible points of entry into the ultimate questions of meaninglessness, freedom, and death. By broadening the term in this way, I can draw on a more comprehensive range of figures as they become relevant to particular topics, regardless of whether or not they were philosophers or literary figures and whether or not they were inclined to identify themselves as “existentialists.” For the purposes of this project, if a work captures the struggle of the human condition, the anguish of confronting our own finitude and the loss of moral absolutes, and the vertiginous freedom of self-creation, it can be called existentialism.
1Existentialism and Modernity
I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness … The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.
Blaise Pascal
Roots of the Western Self
In order to situate the movement of existentialism within the context of recent European thought, we first have to go back to the earliest philosophical and religious currents that shaped the western worldview. Understanding that it is impossible to compress the complexities of the last three millennia into a few pages, one can make the broad claim that the conflicting traditions of Hebraic faith on the one hand and Greek reason on the other have informed our sense of who we are. Both traditions offer the idea of the human being as unique to the extent that we are self-conscious and have “higher” potentialities, which allow us to surpass or transcend our finite earthly existence (e.g. Dreyfus 2009; 2012). In the tradition of Greek philosophy, transcendence was achieved from a position of rational detachment, which allowed the philosopher to rise above the temporal particularities of existence in order to gain knowledge of the universal, that is, of timeless and abstract forms or essences. In the Hebraic tradition, the experience of transcendence is understood not in terms of detached reason but in terms of an intense faith and trust in an incomprehensible God. This kind of faith can lead to confusion and despair, because the Hebrew God is beyond rational understanding and is often cruel and violent. This is why, as William Barrett points out, there is a certain “uneasiness” in the biblical interpretation of the human condition that is not found in Greek philosophy (1958, 71). The human creature depicted there is one that is frail and finite, standing naked and exposed before an unknowable God. In this sense, Job is the paradigmatic biblical figure. He confronts the calamitous trials that God has put before him, and he does so not with detached reason but with the involved fullness of his whole being and all the confusion, rage, and despair that comes with it. But, through it all, his commitment to God remains passionate and unwavering, and it is by means of his faith that he is transformed. His anguish turns to awe in the face of God’s infinite and incomprehensible majesty. In this way we are introduced to the idea that the infinite and eternal can be revealed in passionate commitments that are finite and temporal. Thus there is little discussion of heaven, the immortality of the soul, or the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible. Transcendence is found not in an otherworldly realm but in the concrete commitments of the whole person, body and soul, who inhabits this world. This idea of transcendence conflicts radically with the views of Plato and the traditions of Greek philosophy.
For Plato (429–347 bc), transcendence is not attained by the passionate faith of the whole person. It is achieved when reason, the “higher” or divine part of the soul, rises above the “lower,” animal part, above the fleeting perceptions and passions of the body. This rational detachment makes theoretical knowledge possible, where “contemplation” (theōria) is understood as a kind of disembodied seeing or reflection. For Plato, the essential truths that philosophy discovers have the same form as the immutable truths of geometry and arithmetic. In this way the philosopher becomes a disinterested spectator who transcends the contingent sensations of the body and comes to have a God’s-eye view of reality. This view allows him access to abstract Forms (eidē), which represent the timeless and eternal essence of things. Under Plato’s influence, the cognizing mind becomes the absolute authority by discovering an unchanging “reality” that lies behind the transitory “appearances” of the temporal body.
We see, then, that – to simplify the picture – the tradition of Greek reason conflicts with the Judaic worldview in two important ways. First, philosophy à la Plato provides a kind of intellectual protection or salvation from the experience of anguish and dread that is so vital to the Hebrew interpretation of faith. By focusing on knowledge of abstract forms, the philosopher rises above the horrifying predicament that biblical figures such as Job had to face. Second, Greek reason privileges a conception of transcendence that is attained from a disembodied theoretical position. Indeed, for Plato, what distinguishes us as human beings is not our impassioned faith in an unknowable and fearsome God but the soul’s ability to rationally detach from these emotional upheavals. It is only when such detachment is attained that we arrive at a domain of truth that is immutable and timeless. The consequence of these conflicting versions of transcendence is a tension between two conceptions of selfhood in the West, one where the God of Abraham tells us to live one way and the God of Greek reason tells us to live another (Dreyfus 2012, 97). The self, in the words of the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), emerges as a “conflict” or “contradiction,” pulled apart by an inner struggle between “the heart and the head,” between faith and reason (1954, 260). For figures such as Unamuno, the tragedy of being human lies in part in the fact that this contradiction cannot be eradicated or overcome by separating the abstract truths of reason from the concrete commitments of faith. Such a separation is a denial of the wholeness of the human being and of the anguished uncertainty and doubt at the core of our situation.
From its origins in the ancient Greek world, western philosophy has long perpetuated this separation by regarding the cognizing mind as the essential substance that gives us knowledge of eternal truths and, as a result, the mind itself is conceived of as a substance that is eternal, providing an escape from the temporal vicissitudes of the body. As Plato says in the Phaedo, “[i]f we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must escape from the body, and contemplate things by themselves with the soul itself” (66e). On this view, reason came to be regarded as the supreme and defining characteristic of the human being, and this philosophical assumption remained relatively unscathed until the nineteenth century, when existential philosophers and literary figures began to exhume embodiment, emotion, and historical contingency as being central to the human situation. Indeed, even with the historical rise and spread of Christianity through the Middle Ages, the vision of the human as animal rationale (“rational animal”) endured.
Although early church fathers such as Paul (5 bc–ad 67) and Tertullian (ad 160–220) were still deeply committed to the principle of Hebraic faith, the cultural and political impact of Hellenistic philosophy compelled Christians to come up with an “apologetics,” that is, a discipline of producing rational defenses of their own religious positions and beliefs. Whereas for the Jews and the Greeks faith and reason occupied two incompatible domains, Christians were confronted with both sources of transcendence. And, beginning with St. Augustine (ad 354–430) and continuing over more than a thousand years, Christian theologians engaged with this tension via the Augustinian expression “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum), by showing how the timeless, universal truths of reason work in relation to and in harmony with personal faith (Barrett 1958, 97).
Unfortunately, as Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), father of existentialism avant la lettre, would make clear, the aim of bringing together the conflicting domains of faith and reason was absurd. How, for instance, can one make rational sense of God’s command to Abraham to kill his own son, or of the senseless suffering of Job, or of the intrinsic sinfulness of human beings, or of the incarnation of the God-man? “The problem,” as Kierkegaard writes, “is not to understand Christianity, but to understand that it cannot be understood” (1959, 146). Indeed, Kierkegaard can be viewed as a philosopher who attempts to resuscitate the Hebraic experience of vulnerability and dread, and of transcendence as passionate commitment, by articulating the qualitative difference between the impersonal and objective truths of reason on the one hand and what he calls “the highest truth attainable for an existing individual” (1941, 182) on the other. Truths of the latter kind are subjective, fundamentally uncertain, and inaccessible to logic or reason. Subjective truths cannot be thought; they can only be felt with inward intensity in the course of living one’s life.
We will explore together how Kierkegaard engages with the tension between “subjective” and “objective” truth in chapter 2, but at this point I want to make clear that at least one thing remained consistent in the historical transition from Hellenism to Christianity. This was the belief that human beings belong to and are dependent upon a divine, value-filled cosmos that provided an enduring moral order, a “great chain of being” that determined the proper function and place of things and how humans ought to act. On this view, the people of Graeco-Christian Europe inhabited an enchanted world filled with magic, deities, and supernatural meaning. This conception of a divine cosmos provided ready-made answers to the ultimate questions. Who am I? How should I live? What is the meaning of my life? The ability to answer these questions became increasingly difficult in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the premodern orientation began to break down in the wake of a new worldview – namely that of the Enlightenment – once early modern philosophers such as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), René Descartes (1596–1650), and Isaac Newton (1643–1727) began to lay the scientific groundwork that challenged ideas about the inherent divinity and meaningfulness of the world.
The Emergence of the Modern Worldview
Although this reduction is admittedly simplistic, it is generally agreed that there were three key events that contributed to the historical formation of the modern worldview (e.g. Taylor 1989; 2003; Guignon 2004). The first and, arguably, the most significant one was the advent of modern science. From the perspective of the new science, the cosmos was no longer understood from a teleological angle, as a moral order of absolute ends, but as a valueless aggregate of quantifiable objects colliding with one another. The cosmos became, in the words of German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), “disenchanted,” a vast, all-encompassing machine that operates on the basis of fixed, law-like formulas. The vision of the scientist, on this account, is that of a disinterested observer who impartially collects data and formulates theories. Crucial to this method is the ability to abstract the subjective qualities that we give to things – such as beauty, meaning, purpose, and value – and to focus only on the objective qualities of things, that is, on those qualities that can be measured or quantified – such as mass, velocity, and location in a spatial–temporal coordinate system. On this view, anything in the natural world can now be objectified, examined from a perspective of cool detachment, as an object to be manipulated. This is an explicitly humanistic view, insofar as it revolves around the human being as the knowing “subject” who masters and controls “objects.” Weber summed up the aims of the new science by claiming that “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather … one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world becomes disenchanted” (1948, 139, my emphasis). Of course, on this view, human beings too can be regarded as quantifiable objects to be manipulated for specific purposes. And human behavior is no longer explained in terms of incalculable meanings or divine ends but in instrumental terms of causality, where every action and event is necessarily determined by a set of antecedent conditions.
Many philosophers of the time regarded the scientific revolution positively. Not only did it liberate human beings from the superstitions and oppressive dogmas of the church; it also provided techniques for increasing our mastery over the natural world. But some philosophers expressed reservation. One of the earliest and most powerful expressions was provided by the proto-existentialist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), who, although a brilliant physicist and mathematician in his own right, experienced this new mechanistic and deanimated world not with optimism, but with dread. In his Pensées of 1670, he offers a powerful description of a world stripped of any trace of divinity or overarching meaning:
This is what I see and what troubles me. I look around in every direction and all I see is darkness. Nature has nothing to offer me that does not give rise to doubt and anxiety. If I saw no sign there of a Divinity I should decide on a negative solution: if I saw signs of a Creator everywhere I should peacefully settle down in the faith. But, seeing too much to deny and not enough to affirm, I am in a pitiful state. … The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread. (Pascal 1995, 201, 429)
With Pascal, we see the Janus face of modern science. On one hand, it frees human beings from the prejudices and superstitions of religion. On the other hand, this freedom leaves us abandoned and forlorn in a cold and meaningless universe.
A second important development in the formation of the modern worldview was the emergence of a new form of Christianity, Protestantism, which reconfigured the self by privileging the inner states of the soul. Although the emphasis on subjective inwardness is present in the western tradition as early as Augustine’s Confessions (written between ad 397 and 398), the cultural shift to religious individualism was officially inaugurated with Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) famous protest against the Catholic Church that took place in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517. Luther rejected the Catholic notion of salvation through sacraments or rituals, by buying indulgences, or by doing “good works” and focused exclusively on the moral content of one’s intentions – one’s inner feelings, desires, and thoughts. The Protestant turn inward revealed a sharp distinction between the “inner” self, which was genuine and true, and the transient and corruptible “outer” self, which is engaged in superficial worldly affairs. Luther’s shift to individualism also made it possible to disown one’s actions in the world and to see them as separate and distinct from one’s real self, on the grounds that it is one’s intentions, not one’s actions, that are essential to who one is. In this way Protestantism fortified the Christian attitude of contemptus mundi (“contempt for the world”) – an attitude that contributed to a growing sense that we do not belong to this world (Guignon 2004, 30). And, like the new science, this contempt played a key role in the demystification of nature, regarding it as a domain of hostile objects to be mastered through self-discipline and an industrious work ethic.
The third major development in the formation of the modern worldview was a new picture of society, where human beings no longer understood themselves in terms of the social roles, relationships, and functions that had been preordained for them by some divine decree. Society rather came to be viewed as something artificial, an aggregate of disconnected individuals that was held together by instrumental social contracts and monetary exchanges. On this view, public life began to emerge as something unnatural, where one was compelled to adopt a number of fake personae – social masks or characters that were foreign to one’s real self (Guignon 2004, 33–36). As a result, an older way of being, rooted in close-knit feudal societies where one’s identity was shaped by a deep sense of belonging to one’s place and to one’s role within a community, gave way to an increasingly rationalistic, impersonal, and alienating social order; and this was the birth of the centralized state. This new version of society reduced human beings to calculable resources or commodities that, in turn, required the creation of a class of technical bureaucrats and administrators to manage and control these resources in factories, schools, hospitals, and office buildings. The nightmarish experience of having one’s public life monitored and regulated by a cadre of anonymous bureaucrats heightened the modern experience of alienation and confusion and became a central theme in existentialist literature, notably in the writings of Franz Kafka (1883–1924). In his novel The Castle (published posthumously, in 1926; Kafka 2009), the main character, known only as “K,” arrives at a village in the winter and spends his time trying desperately to understand and communicate with the inaccessible bureaucrats of the castle, who have control over all aspects of life in the village. The castle is a symbol of bureaucratic authority that, through endless paperwork, permits, and administrative procedures, stifles any expression of individual freedom and undermines the possibility for genuine human interaction, leaving “K” feeling forlorn and isolated. The castle destroys what Kafka sees as the most basic of human needs. This, in the words of Max Brod, was “the need to be rooted in a home and calling, and to become a member of a community” (quoted in May 1950, 7).
The impersonal and dehumanizing characteristics of the bureaucratic state were magnified by the Industrial Revolution with its wrenching pace, numbing repetitiveness, and alienating working conditions, which became commonplace in the massive factories of western Europe and the United States. A number of existentialists engaged the problem of alienation rising from the standardization and collectivization of the human being in the machine age. In his 1864 Notes from the Underground, for instance, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) mockingly described this form of mechanized social engineering as a Crystal Palace, a reference to the huge glass and cast-iron building that housed the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and displayed the latest scientific and technological breakthroughs of the industrial age. For Dostoevsky, the Crystal Palace was not a sign of rational progress but a nightmare that symbolized lifeless conformism, loneliness, excessive pride, and the mutilation of human existence. After personally visiting the building in London in 1862, he wrote:
The Crystal Palace … you sense that here something has been achieved, that here there is victory and triumph. You even begin to fear something. However independent you may be, for some reason you become terrified. “For isn’t this the achievement of perfection?” you think. “Isn’t this the ultimate?” … People come with a single thought, quietly, relentlessly, mutely thronging into this colossal palace, and you feel that something has come to an end. It is like a Biblical picture, something out of Babylon, a prophecy from the Apocalypse coming to pass before your eyes. … In the presence of such hugeness, of the colossal pride of the sovereign spirit, of the triumphant finality of the creations of that spirit, even the hungry soul takes flight; it bows down, it submits, it seeks salvation in gin and debauchery and believes that everything is as it ought to be. The fact lies heavy; the masses become insensible and zombie-like. (Dostoevsky 1955, 92)
Given these wrenching social upheavals that characterized the modern age, it is no surprise that, by the turn of the century, literary and philosophical references to inchoate feelings of anxiety, boredom, and suicide were becoming increasingly common. Indeed, in 1881 the American physician George M. Beard introduced the term “neurasthenia” into the medical lexicon, referring to feelings of profound nervous exhaustion and anxiety that were becoming an epidemic in the industrialized cities of Germany, England, and the United States. According to Beard (1881, vi), “[t]he chief and primary cause of this development and the very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization [itself].” With these conditions in place, the seeds of existentialism were sown.
Of all the existentialists, none was more tuned into the upheavals of modernity than Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). His writings vividly convey the frightening sense of abandonment and forlornness experienced in the modern age, where moral absolutes no longer serve as a source of security and meaning for our lives. This experience is famously captured in The Gay Science (originally published in 1882), which contains Nietzsche’s account of the madman who descends into the marketplace to announce to the world that God is dead:
“Where has God gone?” [the madman] cried, “I’ll tell you where! We’ve killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers! … Aren’t we wandering as if through an endless nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing upon us? Hasn’t it gotten colder? Isn’t night and more night continuously coming upon us? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Don’t we yet hear the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Don’t we yet smell the divine rot? – For gods rot too! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” (1995: A 125)
For Nietzsche, the traditional idols of Greek reason and Judeo-Christian faith have been destroyed by the Enlightenment’s science, which exposes them as fleeting human constructs, “metaphysical comforts” employed for millennia to conceal our underlying frailty. But Nietzsche makes it clear that the new science is just another idol that we construct and cling to for security. Regardless of the success of this science at rationally ordering and subduing the natural world, the answer to the question of what it means to be human cannot be provided by any scientific proof. “We have arranged a world for ourselves in which we can live,” says Nietzsche, “by postulating bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith, nobody could stand to live now! But this still does not mean that they have been proved. Life is no argument” (1995: A 121, my emphasis).
Existentialism as a Cultural Mood
Nietzsche’s announcement of God’s death set the stage for much darker events in the first half of the twentieth century that confirmed his prophecy: the horrors of the Great War and of World War II, the Nazi death camps, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These events were followed by the threat of global annihilation during the Cold War, regional explosions of racial and colonial violence, and increasing environmental devastation. All of this contributed to a cultural mood in Europe and America: a feeling that life is fundamentally absurd, that we are estranged from one another and not at home in the world, and that, because there are no moral absolutes, we are left alone, rudderless and adrift in a “terrifying infinity” (Nietzsche 1995: A 124), with nothing and no one to tell us how to live our lives. Although Nietzsche offered the clearest and most powerful articulation of this predicament and laid the intellectual groundwork for understanding the modern experience of nihilism, there were other important fin de siècle literary figures that played a crucial role in giving a voice to the anguished confrontation with modernity. Although offering an exhaustive account of these figures is beyond the scope of my introduction, a number of key works are worth mentioning if we want to get a sense of the chronology and cultural and global scope of the movement.
As we will see in proceeding chapters, a number of Russian writers were uniquely equipped to address the upheavals of modernization because the process happened so quickly in Russia. In the span of a few decades in the middle of the nineteenth century, Russia rapidly transitioned from a feudal economy that was historically rooted in the close-knit indigenous practices of the Eastern Church to one that embraced the ideals of the Enlightenment and the secular values of rational egoism and scientific materialism that constituted this new worldview. Literary works that engaged critically with these wrenching social transformations include Ivan Turgenev’s (1818–1883) Fathers and Sons (originally published in 1862), Dostoevsky’s 1864 Notes from the Underground, his 1866 Crime and Punishment, and his 1880 The Brothers Karamazov, and Leo Tolstoy’s (1828–1910) Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych (originally published in 1878 and 1886 respectively). The Russian essayist Lev Shertov (1866–1938) also played an important role by introducing and synthesizing the works of Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky in two important books, The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy, published respectively in 1900 and 1903. There were also important works by Norwegian contemporaries, for example Henrik Ibsen’s (1828–1906) A Doll’s House (published in 1879) and Knud Hamsun’s (1859–1952) novella Hunger
