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3 MODERN SCHOOLS
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The various philosophies (dating from
about 1930) that have been referred to by the term Existentialism have in common
an interpretation of human existence in the
world that stresses its concreteness and its problematic character. |
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According to Existentialism: (1)
Existence is always particular and individual--always my
existence, your existence, his
existence. (2) Existence is primarily the problem of existence (i.e.,
of its mode of being); it is, therefore,
also the investigation of the meaning of Being. (3) This investigation is
continually faced with diverse possibilities,
from among which the existent (i.e., man)
must make a selection, to which he must then commit himself. (4) Because these
possibilities are constituted by man's relationships with things and with other
men, existence is always a being-in-the-world--i.e., in a concrete and historically determinate situation that
limits or conditions choice. Man is therefore
called Dasein
("there being") because he is defined by the fact that he exists,
or is in the world and inhabits it. (see also metaphysics) |
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With respect to the first point, that
existence is particular, Existentialism is opposed to any doctrine that views
man as the manifestation of an absolute or of an infinite substance. It is thus
opposed to most forms of Idealism, such as those
that stress Consciousness, Spirit, Reason, Idea, or Oversoul. Secondly, it is
opposed to any doctrine that sees in man some given and complete reality that
must be resolved into its elements in order to be known or contemplated. It is
thus opposed to any form of objectivism or scientism
since these stress the crass reality of external fact. Thirdly, Existentialism
is opposed to any form of necessitarianism; for existence is constituted by
possibilities from among which man may choose and through which he can project
himself. And, finally, with respect to the fourth point, Existentialism is
opposed to any solipsism (holding that I alone
exist) or any epistemological Idealism (holding that the objects of knowledge
are mental), because existence, which is the relationship with other beings,
always extends beyond itself, toward the being of these entities; it is, so to
speak, transcendence. (see also Absolute
Idealism, free will, transcendentalism) |
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Starting from these bases,
Existentialism can take diverse and contrasting directions. It can insist on the
transcendence of Being with respect to existence, and, by holding this
transcendence to be the origin or foundation of existence, it can thus assume a
theistic form. On the other hand, it can hold that human existence, posing
itself as a problem, projects itself with absolute freedom, creating itself by
itself, thus assuming to itself the function of God. As such, Existentialism
presents itself as a radical atheism. Or it may
insist on the finitude of human existence--i.e.,
on the limits inherent in its possibilities of projection and choice. As
such, Existentialism presents itself as a humanism.
(see also religion,
philosophy of, theology) |
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From 1940 on, with the diffusion of
Existentialism through continental Europe, its directions have developed in
terms of the diversity of the interests to which they are subject: the religious
interest, the metaphysical (or nature of Being) interest, the moral and
political interest. This diversity of interests is rooted, at least in part, in
the diversity of sources on which Existentialism has drawn. One such source has
been the subjectivism of the 4th-5th-century theologian St.
Augustine, who exhorted man not to go outside himself in the quest for
truth, for it is within him that truth abides. "If you find that you are by
nature mutable," he wrote, "transcend yourself." Another source
has been the Dionysian Romanticism of Nietzsche,
who exalted life in its most irrational and cruel features and made this
exaltation the proper task of the "higher man," who exists beyond good
and evil. Still another source has been the nihilism
of Dostoyevsky, who, in his novels, presented
man as continually defeated as a result of his choices and as continually placed
by them before the insoluble enigma of himself. As a consequence of the
diversity of these sources, Existentialist doctrines have focussed on several
aspects of existence. |
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They have focussed, first, on the
problematic character of the human situation, through which man is continually
confronted with diverse possibilities or alternatives, among which he may choose
and on the basis of which he can project his life. |
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Second, the doctrines have focussed on
the phenomena of this situation and especially on those that are negative or
baffling, such as the concern or preoccupation that dominates man because of the
dependence of all his possibilities upon his relationships with things and with
other men; the dread of death or of the failure
of his projects; the "shipwreck" upon insurmountable "limit
situations" (death, the struggle and suffering inherent in every form of
life, the situation in which everyone daily finds himself); the guilt inherent
in the limitation of choices and in the responsibilities that derive from making
them; the boredom from the repetition of situations; the absurdity of man's
dangling between the infinity of his aspirations and the finitude of his
possibilities. |
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Third, the doctrines have focussed on
the intersubjectivity that is inherent in existence and is understood either as
a personal relationship between two individuals, I and thou,
such that the thou may be another man or God, or as an impersonal relationship
between the anonymous mass and the individual self deprived of any authentic
communication with others. |
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Fourth, Existentialism focusses on
ontology, on some doctrine of the general meaning of Being, which can be
approached in any of a number of ways: through the analysis of the temporal
structure of existence; through the etymologies of the most common words--on the
supposition that in ordinary language Being itself is disclosed, at least partly
(and thus is also hidden); through the rational clarification of existence by
which it is possible to catch a glimpse, through ciphers or symbols, of the
Being of the world, of the soul, and of God; through existential psychoanalysis
that makes conscious the fundamental "project" in which existence
consists; or, finally, through the analysis of the fundamental modality to which
all the aspects of existence conform--i.e.,
through the analysis of possibility. |
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There is, in the fifth place, the
therapeutic value of existential analysis that permits, on the one hand, the
liberating of human existence from the beguilements or debasements to which it
is subject in daily life and, on the other, the directing of human existence
toward its authenticity; i.e., toward
a relationship that is well-grounded on itself, and with other men, with the
world, and with God. |
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The various forms of Existentialism may
also be distinguished on the basis of language, which is an indication of the
cultural traditions to which they belong and which often explains the
differences in terminology among the various authors. The principal
representatives of German Existentialism are Martin
Heidegger and Karl Jaspers; those of
French personalistic Existentialism are Gabriel Marcel
and Jean-Paul Sartre; that of French
Phenomenology is Maurice Merleau-Ponty; that of
Spanish Existentialism is José Ortega y Gasset; that of Russian
Idealistic Existentialism is Nikolay Berdyayev
(who, however, lived half of his adult life in France); and that of Italian
Existentialism is Nicola Abbagnano. The
linguistic differences, however, are not decisive for a determination of
philosophical affinities. For example, Marcel and Sartre are farther apart than
Heidegger and Sartre; and there is greater affinity between Abbagnano and
Merleau-Ponty than between Merleau-Ponty and Marcel. |
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Many of the theses that Existentialists
defend or illustrate in their analyses are drawn from the wider philosophical
tradition. |
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The problem of what man is in himself
can be discerned in the Socratic imperative
"know thyself," as well as in the work of Montaigne and Pascal, a
religious philosopher and mathematician. Montaigne
had said: "If my mind could gain a foothold, I would not write essays, I
would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial." And
Pascal had insisted on the precarious position
of man situated between Being and Nothingness: "We burn with the desire to
find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower
reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens
to abysses." |
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The stance of the internal tribunal--of
man's withdrawal into his own spiritual interior--which reappears in some
Existentialists (in Marcel and Sartre, for example) already belonged, as earlier
noted, to St. Augustine. In early 19th-century French philosophy, it was
defended by a reformed Idéologue, Marie
Maine de Biran, who wrote: "Even from infancy I remember that I
marvelled at the sense of my existence. I was already led by instinct to look
within myself in order to know how it was possible that I could be alive and be
myself." From then on, this posture inspired a considerable part of French
philosophy. |
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The theme of the irreducibility of
existence to reason, common to many
Existentialists, was also defended by a leading German Idealist, F.W.J.
von Schelling, as he argued against Hegel in the last phase of his
philosophy, and Schelling's polemic, in turn, inspired the thinker usually cited
as the father of Existentialism, the religious Dane Søren
Kierkegaard. |
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The requirement to know man in his
particularity and, therefore, in terms of a procedure different from those used
by science to obtain knowledge of natural objects was confronted by Wilhelm
Dilthey, an expounder of historical reason, who viewed "understanding"
as the procedure and thus as the proper method of the human sciences.
Understanding, according to Dilthey, consists in the reliving and reproducing of
the experience of others. Hence it is also a feeling together with others and a
sympathetic participation in their emotions. Understanding, therefore,
accomplishes a unity between the knowing object and the object known. |
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The theses of Existentialism found a
particular relevance during World War II, when
Europe found itself threatened alternately by material and spiritual
destruction. Under those circumstances of uncertainty, the optimism of Romantic
inspiration, by which the destiny of man is infallibly guaranteed by an infinite
force (such as Reason, the Absolute, or Mind) and propelled by it toward an
ineluctable progress, appeared to be untenable. Existentialism was moved to
insist on the instability and the risk of all human reality, to acknowledge that
man is "thrown into the world"--i.e., abandoned to a determinism that could render his initiatives
impossible--and to hold that his very freedom is conditioned and hampered by
limitations that could at any moment render it empty. The negative aspects of
existence, such as pain, frustration, sickness, and death--which 19th-century
optimism refused to take seriously because they do not touch the infinite
principle that these optimists believed to be manifest in man--become for
Existentialism the essential features of human reality. (see also Romanticism) |
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The thinkers who, by virtue of the
negative character of their philosophy, constituted the exception to
19th-century Romanticism thus became the acknowledged masters of the
Existentialists. Against Hegelian necessitarianism, Kierkegaard interpreted
existence in terms of possibility: dread--which dominates existence through and
through--is "the sentiment of the possible." It is the feeling of what
can happen to a man even when he has made all of his calculations and taken
every precaution. Despair, on the other hand, discovers in possibility its only
remedy, for "If man remains without possibilities, it is as if he lacked
air." Karl Marx, in holding that man is
constituted essentially by the "relationships of work and production"
that tie him to things and other men, had insisted on the alienating
character that these relationships assume in capitalistic society, where private
property transforms man from an end to a means, from a person to the instrument
of an impersonal process that subjugates him without regard for his needs and
his desires. Nietzsche had viewed the amor
fati ("love of fate") as the "formula for man's
greatness." Freedom consists in desiring what is and what has been and in
choosing it and loving it as if nothing better could be desired. |
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Contemporary Existentialism reproduces
these ideas and combines them in more or less coherent ways. Human existence is,
for all the forms of Existentialism, the projection of the future on the basis
of the possibilities that constitute it. For some Existentialists (the Germans
Heidegger and Jaspers, for example), the existential possibilities, inasmuch as
they are rooted in the past, merely lead every project for the future back to
the past, so that only what has already been chosen can be chosen (Nietzsche's amor
fati). For others (such as Sartre), the possibilities that are offered to
existential choice are infinite and equivalent, such that the choice between
them is indifferent; and for still others (Abbagnano and Merleau-Ponty), the
existential possibilities are limited by the situation, but they neither
determine the choice nor render it indifferent. The issue is one of
individuating, in every concrete situation and by means of a specific inquiry,
the real possibilities offered to man. For all the Existentialists, however, the
choice among possibilities--i.e., the
projection of existence--implies risks, renunciation, and limitation. Among the
risks, the most serious is man's descent into inauthenticity or into alienation,
his degradation from a person into a thing. Against this risk, for the
theological forms of Existentialism (as in Gabriel Marcel, a Socratic dramatist;
Karl Barth, a Swiss Neo-orthodoxist; Rudolf
Bultmann, a biblical interpreter), there is the guarantee of the transcendent
help from God, which in its turn is guaranteed by faith.
(see also theological Existentialism) |
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Existentialism, consequently, by
insisting on the individuality and nonrepeatability of existence (following
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), is sometimes led to regard one's coexistence with
other people (held to be, however, an ineluctable fact of the human situation)
as a condemnation or alienation of man. Marcel has said that all that exists in
society beyond the individual is "expressible by a minus sign," and
Sartre has affirmed in his major work L'Être
et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956) that "the Other is the hidden
death of my possibilities." For the other forms of Existentialism, however,
a coexistence that is not anonymous (as that of a mob) but is grounded on
personal communication conditions man's authentic
existence. |
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Existentialism has had ramifications in
various areas of contemporary culture. In literature,
Franz Kafka, author of haunting novels, walking
in Kierkegaard's footsteps, described human existence as the quest for a stable,
secure, and radiant reality that continually eludes it (Das
Schloss [1926; The Castle, 1930]);
or he described it as threatened by a guilty verdict about which it knows
neither the reason nor the circumstances but against which it can do nothing--a
verdict that ends with death (Der
Prozess [1925; The Trial, 1937]). |
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The theses of contemporary
Existentialism were then diffused and popularized by the novels and plays of
Sartre, by the writings of the French novelists and dramatists Simone
de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. In L'Homme
révolté (1951; The
Rebel, 1953), Camus described the "metaphysical rebellion"
as "the movement by which a man protests against his condition and against
the whole of creation." In art, the analogues of Existentialism may be
considered to be Surrealism, Expressionism,
and in general those schools that view the work of art not as the reflection of
a reality external to man but as the free immediate expression of human reality.
(see also art,
philosophy of) |
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Existentialism made its entrance into
psychopathology through Karl Jaspers' Allgemeine
Psychopathologie (1913; General
Psychopathology, 1965), which was inspired by the need to understand
the world in which the mental patient lives, by means of a sympathetic
participation in his experience. Later, Ludwig
Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist of the Daseinsanalyse
school, in one of his celebrated works, Über
Ideenflucht (1933; "On the Flight of Ideas"), inspired by
Heidegger's thought, viewed the origin of mental illness as a failure in the
existential possibilities that constitute human existence (Dasein). From Jaspers and Binswanger, the Existentialist current
became diffused and variously stated in contemporary psychiatry. |
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In theology, Barth's Römerbrief (1919; The
Epistle to the Romans, 1933) started the "Kierkegaard
revival," the emblem of which was expressed by Barth himself; it is
"the relation of this God with this man; the relation of this man with this
God--this is the only theme of the Bible and of philosophy." Within the
bounds of this current, on the one hand, there was an insistence upon the
absolute transcendence of God with respect to
man, who could place himself in relationship with God only by denying himself
and by abandoning himself to a gratuitously granted faith. On the other hand,
there was the requirement to demythologize the religious content of faith,
particularly of the Christian faith, in order to allow the message of the
eschatological event (of salvation) to emerge from among the existential
possibilities of man. |
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The methods that the Existentialists
employ in their interpretations have a presupposition in common: the immediacy
of the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted, between the
interrogator and the interrogated, between the problem of being and Being
itself. The two terms coincide in existence; for the man who poses the question
"What is Being?" cannot but pose it to himself and cannot respond
without starting from his own being. |
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This common ground notwithstanding, each
Existentialist thinker has defended and worked out his own method for the
interpretation of existence. Heidegger, an Existentialist with ontological
(nature of Being) concerns, availed himself of the philosophy of Edmund
Husserl, founder of Phenomenology, which,
as logos of the phainomenon,
employs speech that manifests or discloses what it is that one is speaking
about and that is true--in the etymological use of the Greek word aletheia (i.e., the sense
of uncovering or manifesting what was hidden). The phenomenon
is, from Heidegger's point of view, not mere appearance, but the manifestation
or disclosure of Being in itself. Phenomenology is thus capable of disclosing
the structure of Being and hence is an ontology of which the point of departure
is the being of the one who poses the question about Being, namely man. |
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Jaspers, an authority in psychopathology
as well as in the philosophy of human existence, on the other hand, employed the
method of the rational clarification of existence; he maintained that existence,
as the quest for Being, is man's effort of rational self-understanding, or
universalizing, of communicating--a method that presupposes that existence and
reason are the two poles of man's being. Reason is possible existence; i.e.,
existence that, as Jaspers writes in his Vernunft
und Existenz (1935; Reason and
Existence, 1955), becomes "manifest to itself and as such real, if, with,
through and by another existence, it arrives at itself." This activity,
however, is never consummated; thus, when the impossibility of its achievement
is recognized, it is changed into faith, into the recognition of transcendence
as providing the only possibility of its final achievement. |
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According to the views of Sartre, the
foremost philosopher of mid-20th-century France, the method of philosophy is
existential psychoanalysis; i.e.,
the analysis of the "fundamental project" in which man's existence
consists. In contrast to the precepts of Freudian
psychoanalysis, which stop short at the irreducibility of the libido, or
primitive psychic drive, existential psychoanalysis tries to determine the
"original choice" through which man constructs his world and decides
in a preliminary way upon particular choices (which, however, may place in
crisis the primordial choice itself). |
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According to Marcel, a Christian
Existentialist philosopher and dramatist, the method of philosophy depends upon
a recognition of the mystery of Being (Le
Mystère de l'être [1951;
The Mystery of Being, 1950-51]); i.e.,
on the impossibility of discovering Being through objective or rational
analyses or demonstrations. Philosophy should lead man up, however, to the point
of making possible for him "the productive illumination of
Revelation." |
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Finally, according to humanistic
Existentialism, as represented by Abbagnano, the leading Italian Existentialist,
and by Merleau-Ponty, a French Phenomenologist, the method of philosophy
consists of the analysis and the determination--by employing all available
techniques including those of science--of the structures that constitute
existence; i.e., of the relations that
connect man with other beings and that figure, therefore, not only in the
constitution of man but in the constitution of the other beings as well. |
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Both the ontology and manner of human
existence are of concern to Existentialism. |
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The fundamental characteristic of
Existentialist ontology is the primacy that that study of the nature of
existence gives to the concept of possibility. This priority dominated the
philosophy of Kierkegaard and also was amply utilized by Husserl, who had
explicitly affirmed the ontological priority of possibility over reality.
Possibility, however, is not understood by the Existentialists in the purely
logical sense as absence of contradiction nor in the sense of traditional
metaphysics as potentiality destined to become actuality but, rather, in the
sense of ontic or objective possibility, which is the very structure of human
existence; it is thus the specific modality of man's being. |
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Another way of expressing this thesis is
the affirmation of Heidegger and Sartre that "existence precedes essence,"
which signifies that man does not have a nature that determines his modes of
being and acting but that, rather, these modes are simply possibilities from
which he may choose and on the basis of which he can project himself. In this
sense, Heidegger has said that "Dasein
is always its own possibility," and Sartre has written: "It is
true that the possible is--so to speak--an option on being, and if it is true
that the possible can come into the world only through a being which is its own
possibility, this implies for human reality the necessity of being its being in
the form of an option on its being." |
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As possibility, human existence is the
anticipation, the expectation, the projection of the future. The future is its
fundamental temporal dimension, to which the present and the past are
subordinate and secondary; existence is always stretched out toward the future.
As possibility, existence is also transcendence, being beyond, because all of
its constitutive possibilities organize it beyond itself toward the other beings
of the world and toward the world in its totality. To transcend thus means to
move toward something that is not one's own existence; i.e.,
toward things and toward other men, with which man is related in every
situation in which he finds himself. |
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Yet for some Existentialists, the being
of these other entities has a modality that differs from the being of man's
existence: their existence is not possible being but real or factual being. To
existence, Heidegger contrasts the presence of the things in the world--a
presence that assumes, as man takes notice of these things for his needs, the
aspect of utilizability. But utilizability is not a simple quality of things; it
is their very being. Analogously, Sartre distinguishes the for-itself--the mode
of being of man's existence that he identifies, following Descartes and Husserl,
with consciousness--from the in-itself, the
being or reality of things that he identifies with their utilizability.
According to Jaspers, over against the existence of the possible (man, Dasein)
stands the world as the infinite horizon that encompasses within itself each
possible existence and, therefore, cannot itself be encompassed by any one of
them. This is a world that is a reality of fact, at the origin of which there is
a Being that is pure transcendence and that, therefore, never reveals itself. |
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Similarly, the religious forms of
Existentialism insist on transcendence, considering it to be the property of the
Being that is beyond the existential possibilities and that can enter among them
solely under the form of mystery (Marcel) and of the extratemporal revelation of
faith (Barth, Jaspers). Marcel, in this regard, has contrasted Being, which is a
mystery, with having, which is the condition of man in the world; that is to
say, man has objects before him that are foreign to his subjectivity. He tries
to organize them and discover the bond that ties them together so as to control
and use them. |
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In all of these doctrines, there is the
dominating theme of the contrast between the modality proper to existence, which
is possibility, and the modality proper to Being, which is reality or facticity.
As a result of this contrast, existence (as possibility) appears as the nothingness
of Being, as the negation of every reality of fact. In a brief but famous essay,
Was ist Metaphysik? (1929),
Heidegger affirmed that "Human existence cannot have a relationship with
being unless it remains in the midst of nothingness." Rudolf
Carnap, a semanticist and leading Logical Positivist, in an equally
famous essay, "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch die logische Analyse
der Sprache" (1931; "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical
Analysis of Language"), criticized this hypostatization (or making real) of
Nothingness as one of the grosser fallacies of metaphysics. In truth,
Nothingness is, for the Existentialists, possible existence, as the negation of
the reality of fact. Sartre has written: "The possible is the something
which the For-itself lacks in order to
be itself"; it is what the subject lacks in order to be an object; thus it
does not exist except as a lacking. |
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This is also true of value, which is
such insofar as it does not exist. For even when value occurs or is perceived in
certain acts, it lies beyond them and constitutes the limit or the goal toward
which they aim. Analogously, knowledge, in which the object (the in-itself)
presents itself to consciousness (the for-itself), is a relationship of
nullification, because the object cannot be offered to consciousness except as
that which is not consciousness. Furthermore, another existence is such insofar
as it is not mine; thus this negation is "the constitutive structure of the
being-of-others." (see also axiology,
epistemology) |
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But this reduction of existence to
Nothingness can lead in two directions: it can lead to insisting on the lack of
meaning--i.e., on the absurdity
of existence and of every possible project--as it does in Sartre, in Camus, and
in atheistic Existentialism; or it can lead toward the quest for a more direct
relationship of existence with Being, beyond the constitutive possibilities of
existence, so that Being reveals itself, at least partly, in existence--through
language or through faith or through some mystical form of religiousness, as
happens in the later phase of Heidegger's thought, in Jaspers, and in all of the
forms of theological Existentialism. |
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Existentialism is never a solipsism in
the proper sense of the term (that I alone exist), because every existential
possibility relates man to things and to other men. Sometimes it is presented as
humanism in the sense that it places human
destiny in the hands of men themselves. But this version is rejected by all of
the currents of the movement that, starting with Heidegger, insist on the
priority and the initiative of Being with regard to human existence. The
opposition between these two points of view depends on how the different
Existentialists solve the problem of freedom. |
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Man always finds himself in a situation
in which his constitutive possibilities are rooted. For Heidegger and Jaspers,
this situation determines the choice that he makes among these possibilities;
for Sartre, conversely, the situation is determined by the choice.
Existentialism fluctuates in this way between the concept of a destiny in which,
like Nietzsche's amor fati, man
accepts what has already been chosen and the concept of a radical freedom
whereby the choices are offered to man in an absolute indifference. From the
first point of view, every project of life falls back on or is reduced to the
situation from which it starts; thus the possibility of being, of acting, of
willing, of choosing is really, as Jaspers points out in his Philosophie
(1932), the impossibility of being, acting, willing, and choosing in a
manner different from the way things are; i.e.,
from the factual conditions of the situation. From the second point of view,
the fundamental project, which is the primordial choice, has no conditions; as
Sartre says: "Since I am free, I project my total possible, but I thereby
posit that I am free and that I can always nihilate this first project and make
it past." From the first, or deterministic, point of view, the past
determines the future and assimilates it to itself; from the second, or
libertarian, point of view, the meaning of the past depends upon the present
project. In the latter instance, freedom is a kind of damnation: as Sartre
affirms: "We said that freedom is not free not to be free and that it is
not free not to exist." (see also free
will) |
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A choice, however, is offered to man
even from the destinarian point of view: that between understanding and not
understanding one's own nothingness. According to Heidegger, a man achieves what
he calls "authentic existence" when he understands the impossibility
of all of the possibilities of existence--the impossibility of which the sign or
term is death. Jaspers affirms, in his turn, that the only choice offered to man
is that between accepting or rejecting the situation with which he is
identified. The rejection of it, however, is a betrayal that plunges him back
into the situation itself. |
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Existentialist ontology thus fluctuates
between Being and Nothingness and concludes by regarding Nothingness as the only
possible revelation of Being. In the atheistic version, it is man, as Sartre
affirms, who "strives to be God" and consumes himself vainly in the
effort. In the cosmological or theological version, it is Being that intervenes,
in a way that is more or less mysterious or hidden, to redeem man from
Nothingness. |
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The key problems for Existentialism are
those of man himself, of his situation in the world, and of his more ultimate
significance. |
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Existentialist anthropology is strictly
connected with its ontology. The traditional distinction between soul and body
is completely eliminated; thus the body is a lived-through experience that is an
integral part of man's existence in its relationship with the world. According
to Sartre, "In each project of the For-itself, in each perception the body
is there; it is the immediate Past in so far as it still touches on the Present
which flees it." As such, however, the body is not reduced to a datum of
consciousness, to subjective representation. Consciousness,
according to Sartre, is constant openness toward the world, a transcendent
relationship with other beings and thereby with the in-itself. Consciousness is
existence itself, or, as Jaspers says, it is "the manifestation of
being." In order to avoid any subjectivistic equivocation, Heidegger went
so far as to renounce the use of the term consciousness, preferring the term Dasein,
which is more appropriate for designating human reality in its totality. For
the same reasons, the traditional opposition between subject and object, or
between the self and the nonself, loses all sense. Dasein is always particular and
individual. It is always a self; but it is also always a project of the world
that includes the self, determining or conditioning its modes of being. (see
also mind-body
dualism) |
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All of these modes of being thus arise,
as Heidegger shows in his masterpiece Sein
und Zeit (1927; Being and Time, 1962), from the relationship between the self and
the world. Heidegger has regarded concern (in the Latin sense of the term) to be
the fundamental aspect of this relationship, insofar as it is man's concern to
obtain the things that are necessary for him and even to transform them with his
work as well as to exchange them so as to make them more suitable to his needs.
Concern demonstrates that man is "thrown into the world," into the
midst of other beings, so that in order to project himself he must exist among
them and utilize them. Being thrown means, for man, being abandoned to the
whirling flow of things in the world and to their determinism. |
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This happens inevitably, according to
Heidegger, in inauthentic existence--day-to-day and anonymous existence in which
all behaviour is reduced to the same level, made "official,"
conventional, and insignificant. Chatter, idle curiosity, and equivocation are
the characteristics of this existence, in which "One says this" and
"One does that" reign undisputed. Anonymous existence amounts to a
simple "being together" with others, not a true coexistence, which is
obtained only through the acceptance of a common destiny (see below). |
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All of the Existentialists are in
agreement on the difficulty of communication; i.e.,
of well-grounded intersubjective relationships. Jaspers has perhaps been the
one to insist most on the relationship between truth and communication. Truths
are and can be different from existence. But if fanaticism and dogmatism (which
absolutize a historical truth) are avoided on the one hand while relativism and
skepticism (which affirm the equivalence of all truths) are avoided on the
other, then the only other way is a constant confrontation between the different
truths through an always more extended and deepened intersubjective
communication. |
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Sartre, however, denies that there is
authentic communication. According to him, consciousness is not only the
nullification of things but also the nullification of the other person as other.
To look at another person is to make of him a thing. This is the profound
meaning of the myth of Medusa. Sexuality itself, which Sartre holds to be an
essential aspect of existence, fluctuates between sadism and masochism, in which
either the other person or oneself is merely a thing. On this basis, the
intersubjective relationship is obviously impossible. |
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Heidegger has pointed to the foundation
of the intersubjective relationship in dread. When a man decides to escape from
the banality of anonymous existence--which hides the nothingness of existence,
or the nonreality of its possibilities, behind the mask of daily concerns--his
understanding of this nothingness leads him to choose the only unconditioned and
insurmountable possibility that belongs to him: death.
The possibility of death, unlike the possibilities that relate him to other
things and to other men, isolates him. It is a certain possibility, not through
its apodictic evidence but because it continuously weighs upon existence. To
understand this possibility means to decide for it, to acknowledge "the
possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all" and to live for
death. The emotive tonality that accompanies this understanding is dread,
through which man feels himself to be "face
to face with the 'nothing' of the possible impossibility of [his]
existence." |
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But neither the understanding of death
nor its emotive accompaniment opens up a specific task for man, a way to
transform his own situation in the world. They enable him only to perceive the
common destiny to which all men are subject; and they offer to him, therefore,
the possibility of remaining faithful to this destiny and of freely accepting
the necessity that all men share in common. In this fidelity consists the
historicity of existence, which is the repetition of tradition, the return to
the possibilities from which existence had earlier been constituted, the wanting
for the future what has been in the past. And in this historicity participate
not only man but all of the things of the world, in their utilizability and
instrumentality, and even the totality of Nature as the locus of history. |
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Dread,
therefore, is not fear in the face of a specific danger. It is rather the
emotive understanding of the nullity of the possible, or, as Jaspers says, of
the possibility of Nothingness. It has, therefore, a therapeutic function in
that it leads human existence to its authenticity. From the fall into factuality
into which every project plunges him, man can save himself only by projecting
not to project; i.e., either by
abandoning himself decisively to the situation in which he finds himself or by
being indifferent to any possible project--with regard to which Sartre says,
"Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a
leader of nations." |
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The pivotal point of that
conclusion--the conclusion most widely held among the Existentialists and the
one in fact often identified with Existentialism--is the antithesis between
possibility and reality. On the one hand, existence is interpreted in terms of
possibilities that are not purely logical possibilities or manifestations of a
man's ignorance of what exists but are, rather, effective, or ontic,
possibilities that constitute man as such; on the other hand, contrasted to
possibilities in this sense is a reality, a for-itself, a world, a transcendence
that is a factual presence, insurmountable and oppressive, with respect to which
possibility is a pure Nothingness. The contradiction to which this antithesis
leads becomes clear when the same reality is interpreted in terms of
possibility: when the being of things, for example, is reduced to their
possibility of being utilized; when the being of other men is reduced to the
possibility of anonymous or personal relationships that the individual can have
with them; and when the being of transcendence,
or of God, is reduced to the possibility of the relationship, although ineffable
and mysterious, between transcendence, or God, and man. |
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It has been said that a coherent
Existentialism should avoid the constant mortal leap between Being and
Nothingness; should not confuse the problematic character of existence with the
fall into factuality; should not confuse the finitude of possibilities with
resignation to the situation, choice with determinism; freedom conditioned by
the limits of the situation with the acknowledgment of the omnipresent necessity
of the Whole. In this inquiry, it is held, Existentialism could well benefit
from a more attentive consideration of science, which it has viewed until now
only as a preparatory, imperfect, and objectifying knowledge in comparison with
the authentic understanding of Being, which it considers to be a more
fundamental mode of the being of man in the world. Science, it is submitted,
offers today the example of an extensive and coherent use of the concept of the
possible in the key notions that it employs, especially in those branches that
are interdisciplinary--among them such notions as indeterminacy, chance,
probability, field, model, project, structure, and conditionality. (see also science,
philosophy of, possibility) |
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Some steps in this direction have been
taken by Abbagnano and by Merleau-Ponty.
According to the latter, considerations of probability are rooted in the being
of man, inasmuch as he is situated in the world and invested with the ambiguity
of his events. Merleau-Ponty has written in his Phénoménologie de la perception
(1945): |
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Our freedom does not destroy our
situation, but is engaged with it. The situation in which we live is open. This
implies both that it appeals to modes of privileged resolution and that it is of
itself powerless to obtain one of them. |
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From this point of view, there is always
a certain freedom in situations, although its degree varies from situation to
situation. |
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Among the thinkers most frequently
mentioned here, the concept of the necessity of Being prevails as the basis of
their metaphysical or theological orientations. Heidegger has come more and more
to insist on the massive presence of Being in the face of human existence, by
attributing to Being all initiative and to man only the possibility of
abandoning himself to Being and to the things that are the modes of the language
of Being. For Heidegger, Being is interpreted better through the etymology of
those words that designate the most common things of daily life than through the
analysis of existential possibilities. Jaspers has seen the revelation of
transcendence in ciphers--i.e., in
persons, doctrines, or poems--all of which can be interpreted as symbols of
existential situations and above all of limit situations, the insurmountability
of which, in provoking the total "shipwreck" of human possibilities,
makes man feel the presence of absolute transcendence. In a less philosophically
elaborate form, Being has been understood as mystery by Marcel;
as the perfect actuality that guarantees the existential possibilities by Louis
Lavelle, a leader of the French philosophie
de l'esprit; and as the absolute value that man encounters in his own
spiritual intimacy by René Le Senne, also of the philosophie de l'esprit. |
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Existentialism has a theological
dimension. Though Heidegger rejects the label of atheist, he also denies to the
Being of which he speaks the essential qualifications of divinity, inasmuch as
it is not the ultimate cause and the Good. But Jaspers, in his last writings,
emphasized more and more the religious character of faith in transcendence.
Faith is the way to withdraw from the world and to resume contact with the Being
that is beyond the world. Faith is life itself, in that it returns to the
encompassing Whole and allows itself to be guided and fulfilled by it. Jaspers
has even developed a theology of history. He speaks of an axial age, which he
places between the 8th and 2nd centuries before Christ, the age in which the
great religions and the great philosophers of the Orient arose--Confucius and
Lao-tzu, the Upanisads, Buddha,
Zoroaster, the great prophets of Israel--and in Greece the age of Homer and of
classical philosophy as well as Thucydides and Archimedes. In this age, for the
first time, man became aware of Being in general, of himself, and of his limits.
The age in which man now lives, that of science and technology, is perhaps the
beginning of a new axial age that is the authentic destiny of man but a destiny
that is far off and unimaginable. |
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For Bultmann,
the theologian of the demythologization of Christianity, inauthentic existence
is tied to the past, to fact, to the world, while authentic existence is open to
the future, to the nonfact, to the nonworld; i.e., to the end of the world and to God. Thus, authentic existence
is not the self-projection of man in the world but, rather, the self-projection
of man in the love of and obedience to God. But this self-projection is no
longer the work of human freedom; it is the saving event that enters
miraculously through faith into the future possibilities of man. |
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In these theological speculations and in
others that are comparable, the common presupposition of the Existentialists is
recognized--i.e., the gap between
human existence and Being. There is either an acknowledgment of that gap, with
existence assuming the role of the demonic (the alternative that Sartre and
others have all illustrated above all in their literary works), or an
acknowledgment of the hidden participation of human existence in Being through a
gratuitous initiative on the part of Being. |
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Kierkegaard
had earlier distinguished three stages of existence between which there is
neither development nor continuity but gaps and jumps: the aesthetic stage is
the one in which one lives for the pleasure of the moment; the ethical stage is
the one based on the stability and continuity of life in work and in matrimony;
and the religious stage is the one characterized by faith,
which is always a "dreadful certainty"--i.e.,
a dread that becomes certain of a hidden relationship with God. |
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The ethical and religious stages
correspond roughly to what Heidegger and Jaspers
call, respectively, the inauthenticity and the authenticity of existence. Art is
not as a rule recognized by contemporary Existentialists as an autonomous stage;
it is almost always for them an essential manifestation of existence itself. For
Jaspers, it is a mode of reading in nature, in
history, and in men the cipher of transcendence;
i.e., the negative symbol in which
transcendence is revealed. According to Camus,
it is an aspect of man's revolt against the world. The artist tries to remake
the sketch of the world that is before him and to give it the style--that is to
say, the coherence and unity--that it lacks. For this purpose, he selects the
elements of the world and freely combines them in order to create a value that
escapes man continuously but that the artist perceives and tries to salvage from
the flux of history. (see also theology,
religion, philosophy of, authentic
existence) |
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From this point of view, art would be a
way of reshaping the world beyond its factual forms, in order that it might show
their negative and troublesome characteristics. The directions of contemporary
art that have deliberately forsaken the imitation of reality find their
justification in this point of view. |
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The metaphysical or theological
dimension of Existentialism does not leave man with nothing to do. Once the
nullity of the existential possibilities is recognized, man cannot but resign
himself to Being, which, in one of its new manifestations in the world or beyond
it, conducts him to a new epoch. Even someone like José
Ortega y Gasset, the leading Spanish Existentialist and writer, who, in
examining the social aspects of existence, has characterized the present epoch
by the advent of the masses and the socialization of man, has halted at the
recognition of the crisis and the total uncertainty that dominates the future of
man (La rebelión de las masas [1929;
The Revolt of the
Masses, 1932]). (see also political philosophy) |
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On the other hand, humanistic
Existentialism has recognized the positive and the to-some-degree determining
function that man may have in history. It has insisted, as in Merleau-Ponty, on
man's duty to assume the responsibility of an effective action for the
transformation of society and, in general, of the world that he inhabits. |
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Along this line of assuming
responsibility, Existentialism has moved toward Marxism,
with which it shares the diagnoses of existence as the primordial and
ineradicable relationship of man with nature and with society. In the Critique de la raison dialectique (1960;
"Critique of Dialectical Reason"). Sartre
attempted a synthesis between Existentialism and Marxism by modifying the notion
of "project" that he defended in L'Être et le néant and by utilizing the notion of dialectic
as understood by Marx. The project of which existence consists is not the result
of an arbitrary choice (as Sartre had previously maintained); it is, instead,
that of a conditioning by the objective possibilities that Sartre identifies (as
does Marx) with "the material conditions of existence." The project
remains, however, that of the particular individual of a unique consciousness--but
of a consciousness that tries to become totalized; i.e., to enter into relationship with others so as to constitute,
with others, human groups that are more and more comprehensive. In this manner
it tends toward a complete and definitive totalization without appeals.
Dialectical reason would be precisely such a process of growing totalization;
and it becomes, moreover, the true protagonist of history and becomes that with
which the interior freedom of any individuals who participate in history is
identified. |
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From the defense of the freedom of the
individual, Sartre has thus moved to the defense of the absolute dialectical
necessity of history despite its being interiorized and lived by individuals. A
historical project of human life that tries to remove the characteristics of
inauthenticity or of alienation from existence--a project that may bring
Existentialism and Marxism close together--thus ends by losing, in this form,
its risky and problematic character and the awareness of the conditions and the
modalities of its realization. These features are also lost in the
"transcendental project" of a new society elaborated by one of the
leaders of the New Left, the German-born American Herbert
Marcuse. While insisting on the requirement that the "transcendental
project" be "in accord with the real possibilities open at the
attained level of the material and intellectual culture," Marcuse entrusts
its realization to an impersonal and contemplative Reason, which cannot but
invite the "great refusal" of contemporary society. |
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Having developed in different and
contrasting directions, Existentialism has furnished philosophy and the whole of
contemporary culture with conceptual tools, of which the nature and techniques
of employment have still not been clarified--as, for example, terms like
"problematicity," "chance," "condition,"
"choice," "freedom," and "project." Although these
tools can be employed usefully for the interpretation of existence--i.e.,
to orient philosophical inquiry in the fields of epistemology, ethics,
aesthetics, education, and politics--it is nonetheless indispensable that the
pivot on which they turn, "possibility," be granted its own
ontological status that does not reduce it either to Nothingness or to Being. It
is indispensable, moreover, that a positive datum be perceived in possibility, a
datum that is verifiable with appropriate techniques and that, while not
offering infallible guarantees, allows man to
project and to act in the world with calculated risks and with a prudent trust.
(N.Ab.) |
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