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Thomas Flynn
EXISTENTIALISM
A Very Short Introduction
1
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3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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First published as a Very Short Introduction 2006
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Printed in Great Britain by
Ashford Colour Press Ltd., Gosport, Hants
ISBN 0–19–280428–6 978–0–19–280428–0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Contents
Preface
ix
Acknowledgements xiii
List of illustrations xv
1
Philosophy as a way of life
1
2
Becoming an individual 24
3
Humanism: for and against 45
4
Authenticity 63
5
A chastened individualism? Existentialism and
social thought 81
6
Existentialism in the 21st century
104
References
126
Further reading 129
Glossary
133
Index 136
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Preface
Existentialism is commonly associated with Left-Bank Parisian
cafes and the ‘family’ of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone
de Beauvoir who gathered there in the years immediately following
the liberation of Paris at the end of World War II. One imagines off-
beat, avant-garde intellectuals, attached to their cigarettes, listening
to jazz as they hotly debate the implications of their new-found
political and artistic liberty. The mood is one of enthusiasm,
creativity, anguished self-analysis, and freedom – always freedom.
Though this reflects the image projected by the media of the day
and doubtless captures the spirit of the time, it glosses over the
philosophical significance of existentialist thought, packaging it as a
cultural phenomenon of a certain historical period. That is perhaps
the price paid by a manner of thinking so bent on doing philosophy
concretely rather than in some abstract and timeless manner. The
existentialists’ urge for contemporary relevance fired their social
and political commitment. But it also linked them with the
problems of their day and invited subsequent generations to view
them as having the currency of yesterday’s news.
Such is the misreading of existentialist thought that I hope to
correct in this short volume. If it bears the marks of its post-war
appearance, existentialism as a manner of doing philosophy and a
way of addressing the issues that matter in people’s lives is at least
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as old as philosophy itself. It is as current as the human condition
which it examines. To ensure at the outset that this point is not lost,
I begin my initial chapter with a discussion of philosophy, not as a
doctrine or a system of thought but as a way of life. The title of
Chapter 1 comes from Classical scholar Pierre Hadot’s study of the
return to the Stoics as an example of how ‘Ancient’ philosophy can
offer meaning to people’s lives even in our day. Though his
preference is for the Greeks and Romans, Hadot finds a similar
concern in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich
Nietzsche, the so-called 19th-century ‘fathers’ of the existentialist
movement, and among their 20th-century progeny.
It is commonly acknowledged that existentialism is a philosophy
about the concrete individual. This is both its glory and its shame.
In an age of mass communication and mass destruction, it is to its
credit that existentialism defends the intrinsic value of what its
main proponent Sartre calls the ‘free organic individual’, that is, the
flesh-and-blood agent. Because of the almost irresistible pull
toward conformity in modern society, what we shall call ‘existential
individuality’ is an achievement, and not a permanent one at that.
We are born biological beings but we must become existential
individuals by accepting responsibility for our actions. This is an
application of Nietzsche’s advice to ‘become what you are’. Many
people never do acknowledge such responsibility but rather flee
their existential individuality into the comfort of the faceless crowd.
As an object lesson in becoming an individual, in the following
chapter, I trace what Kierkegaard calls ‘spheres’ of existence or
‘stages on life’s way’ and conclude with some observations about
how Nietzsche would view this project of becoming an existential
individual.
Shortly after the end of the war, Sartre delivered a public lecture
entitled ‘Is Existentialism a Humanism?’ that rocked the
intellectual life of Paris and served as a quasi-manifesto for the
movement. From then on, existentialism was associated with a
certain kind of humanistic philosophy that gives human beings and
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human values pride of place, and with critiques of alternative
versions of humanism accepted at that time. In Chapter 3, I discuss
the implications of that problematic lecture, the only one Sartre
ever regretted publishing, as well as his contemporary Martin
Heidegger’s ‘response’ in his famous Letter on Humanism.
While the supreme value of existentialist thought is commonly
acknowledged to be freedom, its primary virtue is authenticity.
Chapter 4 is devoted to this topic as well as to the nature and forms
of self-deception, or bad faith, that function as its contrary. I relate
authenticity to existential individuality and consider the possibility
of an ethics of authenticity based on existential responsibility.
In order to counter the criticism, widespread immediately after the
war, that existentialism is simply another form of bourgeois
individualism, bereft of collective consciousness and indifferent to
the need to address the social issues of the day, I devote Chapter 5 to
the issue of a ‘chastened individualism’, as the existentialists try to
conceive of social solidarity in a manner that will enhance rather
than compromise individual freedom and responsibility, which
remain non-negotiable.
In the last chapter, I draw on the foregoing as well as on other
aspects of existentialist thought to consider the continued relevance
of existentialist philosophy in our day. It is necessary to separate the
philosophical significance of the movement, its powerful insights,
and its attention to the concrete, from the arresting but now dated
trappings of its Left-Bank adolescence. From many likely
candidates, I choose four topics of current interest to which the
existentialists have something of philosophical import to say.
Two features of this brief volume may perhaps strike the reader as
limitations even in a short introduction: the number of commonly
recognized ‘existentialist’ names that are absent and, at the other
extreme, the possibly excessive presence of Jean-Paul Sartre
throughout the work. Regarding the first, though I could have
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mentioned, for example, Dostoevsky or Kafka, Giacometti or
Picasso, Ionesco or Beckett, all powerful exemplars of existentialist
themes in the arts, my concern is to treat existentialism as a
philosophical movement with artistic implications rather than as
(just) a literary movement with philosophical pretensions – which
is a common though misguided conception. The reason for not
discussing Buber or Berdaiev, Ortega y Gasset or Unamuno, and
many other philosophers deserving of mention here, is that this is a
‘very’ short introduction, after all. Those interested in pursuing the
topics discussed here will find suggestions of useful sources at the
end of the book.
As for the prominence of Sartre, he and de Beauvoir are the only
philosophers in this group who admitted to being existentialists. To
the extent that it is a 20th-century movement, existentialism
certainly centred on his work. And no one better exemplifies the
union of and tension between philosophy and literature, the
conceptual and the imaginary, the critical and the committed,
philosophy as reflection and philosophy as way of life, that defines
the existentialist mode of philosophizing than does Jean-Paul
Sartre.
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Acknowledgements
This short volume was written under the ideal conditions provided
by the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. I am
most grateful for the Senior Research Fellowship as well as for the
support of Tina Brownley, Steve Everett, Keith Anthony, Amy Erbil,
and Collette Barlow of the Center in making this possible and
bringing it to completion.
I appreciate the comments of David Carr, Tony Jensen, Vanessa
Rumble, and Cindy Willett on specific portions of the manuscript.
The inevitable omissions, oversights, and errors in a short and
simple study of an increasingly long and complex subject are clearly
my own. My thanks to John Mercer for compiling the index.
Finally, I wish to dedicate this work to my sister, her husband, and
their family, whose love remains as authentic as it is human. Quam
bonum et quam iucundum habitare in unum.
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List of illustrations
1 The Death of Socrates
(1787), by Jacques-Louis
David
11
© The Metropolitan Museum,
New York/2006 TopFoto.co.uk
2 Jean-Paul Sartre
addressing students
in the Sorbonne,
20 May 1968
15
© Keystone/Camera Press,
London
3 Edmund Husserl,
c. 1930
18
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
4 Søren Kierkegaard, by
H. P. Hansen
28
© Roger-Viollet/2006
TopFoto.co.uk
5 Abraham’s Sacrifice of
Isaac (1650), by Laurent
de la Hire
36
© Photos12.com/ARJ
6 Friedrich Nietzsche,
aged 29
39
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
7 Sisyphus
48
© Alan E. Cober/Images.com/
Corbis
8 Martin Heidegger in his
garden, c. 1964
52
© ullstein
9 Gabriel Marcel, 1951
55
© Roger-Viollet/2006
TopFoto.co.uk
10 Karl Jaspers, 1956
57
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
11
Albert Camus, reading a
newspaper, 1953
93
© Roger-Viollet/2006
TopFoto.co.uk
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12 Serge Reggiani in Sartre’s
The Condemned of Altona,
1965
95
© Roger-Viollet/2006
TopFoto.co.uk
13 Maurice
Merleau-Ponty
97
© AFP/Getty Images
14 Simone de Beauvoir,
1947
99
© Hulton Archive/Getty Images
15
Structuralists cartoon,
by Maurice Henry
114
La Quinzaine Litteraire.
© ADAGP, Paris and
DACS, London 2006
The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions
in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at
the earliest opportunity.
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Chapter 1
Philosophy as a way of life
If I do not reveal my views on justice in words, I do so by my
conduct.
Socrates to Xenophon
Despite its claim to be novel and unprecedented, existentialism
represents a long tradition in the history of philosophy in the West,
extending back at least to Socrates (469–399 bc). This is the
practice of philosophy as ‘care of the self’ (epimeleia heautou). Its
focus is on the proper way of acting rather than on an abstract set of
theoretical truths. Thus the Athenian general Laches, in a Platonic
dialogue by that name, admits that what impresses him about
Socrates is not his teaching but the harmony between his teaching
and his life. And Socrates himself warns the Athenian court at the
trial for his life that they will not easily find another like him who
will instruct them to care for their selves above all else.
This concept of philosophy flourished among the Stoic and
Epicurean philosophers of the Hellenistic period. Their attention
was focused primarily on ethical questions and discerning the
proper way to live one’s life. As one Classical scholar put it,
‘Philosophy among the Greeks was more formative than
informative in nature’. The philosopher was a kind of doctor of the
soul, prescribing the proper attitudes and practices to foster health
and happiness.
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Of course, philosophy as the pursuit of basic truths about human
nature and the universe was also widespread among the Ancient
Greeks and was an ingredient in the care of the self. It was this more
theoretical approach that led to the rise of science and came to
dominate the teaching of philosophy in the medieval and modern
periods. Indeed, ‘theory’ today is commonly taken as synonymous
with ‘philosophy’ in general, as in the expressions ‘political theory’
and ‘literary theory’, to such an extent that ‘theoretical philosophy’
is almost redundant.
At issue in this distinction between two forms of philosophy
(among other things) are two different uses of ‘truth’: the scientific
and the moral. The former is more cognitive and theoretical, the
latter more self-formative and practical, as in ‘to thine own self be
true’. Whereas the former made no demands on the kind of
person one should become in order to know the truth (for the
17th-century philosopher René Descartes, a sinner could grasp a
mathematical formula as fully as a saint), the latter kind of truth
required a certain self-discipline, a set of practices on the self such
as attention to diet, control of one’s speech, and regular
meditation, in order to be able to access it. It was a matter of
becoming a certain kind of person, the way Socrates exhibited a
particular way of life, rather than of achieving a certain clarity of
argument or insight in the way Aristotle did. In the history of
philosophy, care of the self was gradually marginalized and
consigned to the domains of spiritual direction, political formation,
and psychological counselling. There were important exceptions to
this exiling of ‘moral’ truth from the academy. St Augustine’s
Confessions (ad 397), Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1669), and the
writings of the German Romantics in the early 19th century are
examples of works that encouraged this understanding of
philosophy as care of the self.
It is in this larger tradition that existentialism as a philosophical
movement can be located. The existentialists can be viewed as
reviving this more personal notion of ‘truth’, a truth that is lived as
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distinct from and often in opposition to the more detached and
scientific use of the term.
It is not surprising that both Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) and
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the 19th-century ‘fathers of
existentialism’, had ambivalent attitudes towards the philosophy of
Socrates. On the one hand, he was seen as the defender of a kind of
rationality that moved beyond merely conventional and subjective
values towards universal moral norms, for which Kierkegaard
praised him and Nietzsche censured him. But they both respected
his individuating ‘leap’ across the gap in rationality between the
proofs of personal immortality and his choice to accept the sentence
of death imposed by the Athenian court. (Socrates was tried and
found guilty on charges of impiety and for corrupting the youth by
his teaching.) In other words, each philosopher realized that life
does not follow the continuous flow of logical argument and that one
often has to risk moving beyond the limits of the rational in order to
live life to the fullest. As Kierkegaard remarked, many people have
offered proofs for the immortality of the soul, but Socrates, after
hypothesizing that the soul might be immortal, risked his life with
that possibility in mind. He drank the poison as commanded by the
Athenian court, all the while discoursing with his followers on the
possibility that another life may await him. Kierkegaard called this
an example of ‘truth as subjectivity’. By this he meant a personal
conviction on which one is willing to risk one’s life. In his Journals,
Kierkegaard muses: ‘the thing is to find a truth which is true for me,
to find the idea for which I can live and die’ (1 August 1835).
Clarity is not enough
Galileo wrote that the book of nature was written in mathematical
characters. Subsequent advances in modern science seemed to
confirm this claim. It appeared that whatever could be weighed and
measured (quantified) could give us reliable knowledge, whereas
the non-measurable was left to the realm of mere opinion. This
view became canonized by positivist philosophy in the 19th and
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Philosophy as a way of life
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early 20th centuries. This positivist habit of mind insisted that the
‘objective’ was synonymous with the measurable and the ‘value-
free’. Its aim was to extract the subject from the experiment in order
to obtain a purely impersonal ‘view from nowhere’. This led to a
number of significant discoveries, but it quickly became apparent
that such an approach was inconsistent. The limiting of the
knowable to the quantifiable was itself a value that was not
quantifiable. That is, the choice of this procedure was itself a ‘leap’
of sorts, an act of faith in a certain set of values that were not
themselves measurable.
Moreover, the exclusion of the non-measurable from what counted
as knowledge left some of our most important questions not only
unanswered but unanswerable. Are our ethical rules and values
merely the expression of our subjective preferences? To paraphrase
the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, scarcely an
existentialist: can anyone really believe that the revulsion they feel
when they witness the gratuitous infliction of pain is simply an
expression of the fact that they don’t happen to like it? Such was the
doctrine of the ‘emotivists’ in ethical theory, sometimes called the
‘boo/hurrah’ theory of moral judgements. They were forced in that
direction by acceptance of the positivist limitation of knowledge to
the measurable. But are we even capable of the kind of antiseptic
knowledge that the positivists require of science? Perhaps the
knowing subject can be reintroduced into these discussions without
compromising their objectivity. Much will depend on us revising
our definition of ‘objectivity’ as well as on discovering other uses of
the word ‘true’ besides the positivists’ ‘agreement with sense
experience’. The existentialists among others responded to this
challenge.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) exemplifies this response when he
remarks that the only theory of knowledge that can be valid today is
one which is founded on that truth of microphysics: the
experimenter is part of the experimental system. What he has in
mind is the so-called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle from atomic
4
Existentialism
physics which, in its popular interpretation at least, states that the
instruments which enable us to observe the momentum and the
position of an orbital electron interfere with the process such that
we can determine the one or the other but never both at once.
Analogously, one can object that the very act of intervening in the
life of a ‘primitive’ tribe prevents the ethnologist from studying that
people in their pristine condition. Such considerations served to
undermine the positivists’ concept of knowledge as measurability.
But they also clouded the rationalists’ view of reality as exhaustively
available to a logic of either/or with no middle ground. To cite
another example, light manifests qualities that indicate it is a wave
and others that show it to be a particle. Yet these two characteristics
seem to exclude each other, leaving the question ‘Is light a wave or a
particle?’ unanswerable with the standard logic of either/or. Light
seems to be both and yet neither exclusively. Another kind of logic
seems called for to make sense of this phenomenon. Numerous
other examples from physics and mathematics appeared early in the
last century that offered counterexamples to the positivists’ and the
rationalists’ claims about knowledge and the world.
Lived experience
It is into this world of limited and relative observation and
assessment that the existentialist enters with his/her drive to
‘personalize’ the most impersonal phenomena in our lives. What,
for example, could be more impersonal and objective than space
and time? Even the chastened view of space-time that the Relativity
Theory offers us relies on an absolute or constant referent, namely
the speed of light. We measure time by minutes and seconds and
chart space by yards or metres. This too seems quantitative and
hence objective in the positivists’ sense. And yet the notion of what
existentialists call ‘ekstatic’ temporality adds a qualitative and
personal dimension to the phenomenon of time-consciousness.
For the existentialist, the value and meaning of each temporal
dimension of lived time is a function of our attitudes and choices.
Some people, for example, are always pressed to meet obligations
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Philosophy as a way of life
whereas others are at a loss to occupy their time. Time rushes by
when you’re having fun and hangs heavy on your hands when you
are in pain. Even the quantitative advice to budget our time, from
an existentialist point of view, is really a recommendation to
examine and assess the life decisions that establish our temporal
priorities in the first place. If ‘time is of the essence’, and the
existentialist will insist that it is, then part of who we are is our
manner of living the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of our existence,
made concrete by how we handle our immersion in the everyday.
The existentialist often dramatizes such ‘lived time’. Thus, Albert
Camus (1913–60) in his allegory of the Nazi occupation of Paris, The
Plague, describes the people in a plague-ridden, quarantined city:
‘Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the
future, we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred,
forces to live behind prison bars.’ The notion of imprisonment as
‘doing time’ is clearly existential. And Sartre, in an insightful
analysis of emotive consciousness, speaks of someone literally
‘jumping for joy’ as a way of using their bodily changes to conjure
up, as if by magic, the possibility of possessing a desirable situation
‘all at once’ without having to await its necessary, temporal
unfolding. Though Sartre stated this thesis in the 1930s, one
immediately thinks of the photo of Hitler’s little ‘jig’ under the Arc
de Triomphe during the German occupation of Paris. Time has its
own viscosity, as Michel Foucault remarked. Ekstatic temporality
embodies its flow.
But existential space is personalized as well. Sartre cites the social
psychologist Kurt Lewin’s notion of ‘hodological’ space (lived space)
as the qualitative equivalent to the lived time of our quotidian
existence. The story is told of two people, one who prefers to get as
closely face-to-face in conversation as possible and the other a
distant, stand-off kind of person, propelling and repelling each
other around the room at a cocktail party in an attempt to carry on a
conversation. Lived space is personal; it is the usual route I take to
work, the seating arrangement that quickly establishes itself in a
6
Existentialism
classroom, or the ordering of the objects on my desk. It is what
psychologists call my ‘comfort zone’. This too is a function of my life
project. How I deal with my meaningful ‘spaces’ depends on how I
choose to order my life.
These are, of course, psychological considerations. But it is a
defining feature of existentialist thought and method that they
carry an ontological significance as well. They articulate our ways
of existing and provide access to the meaning and direction (two
translations of the French word ‘sens’) of our lives. As we shall see,
whereas many philosophers have tended to discount or even to
criticize the philosophical significance of our feelings and emotions,
the existentialists will place great significance on such emotions as
‘anguish’ (which Kierkegaard called our awareness of our freedom)
and feelings like ‘nausea’ (which Sartre characterized as our
experience of the contingency of existence and a ‘phenomenon of
being’). This sets them immediately in likely dialogue with creative
artists, who trade on our emotional and imaginative lives. In fact,
the relation between existentialism and the fine arts has been so
close that its critics have often dismissed it as solely a literary
movement. To be sure, the dramatic nature of existentialist thought,
as well as its respect for the disclosing power of emotional
consciousness and its use of ‘indirect communication’, to be
discussed shortly, does invite the association. But the issues they
address, the careful distinctions they draw, their rigorous
descriptions, and, above all, their explicit conversation with others
in the philosophical tradition clearly identify the existentialists as
primarily philosophical even as they underscore the ambiguity of
the distinction between the conceptual and the imaginative, the
philosophical and the literary.
‘A truth to die for’
If impersonal space and time can be personalized and brought
into the domain of our choice and responsibility, so too can the
notion of ‘objective’ truth. As mentioned at the outset, Kierkegaard
7
Philosophy as a way of life
Five themes of existentialism
There are five basic themes that the existentialist appropri-
ates each in his or her own way. Rather than constituting
a strict definition of ‘existentialist’, they depict more of a
family resemblance (a criss-crossing and overlapping of the
themes) among these philosophers.
1. Existence precedes essence. What you are (your essence)
is the result of your choices (your existence) rather than
the reverse. Essence is not destiny. You are what you make
yourself to be.
2. Time is of the essence. We are fundamentally time-bound
beings. Unlike measurable, ‘clock’ time, lived time is qualita-
tive: the ‘not yet’, the ‘already’, and the ‘present’ differ among
themselves in meaning and value.
3. Humanism. Existentialism is a person-centred phil-
osophy. Though not anti-science, its focus is on the human
individual’s pursuit of identity and meaning amidst the
social and economic pressures of mass society for superficial-
ity and conformism.
4. Freedom/responsibility. Existentialism is a philosophy of
freedom. Its basis is the fact that we can stand back from
our lives and reflect on what we have been doing. In this
sense, we are always ‘more’ than ourselves. But we are as
responsible as we are free.
5. Ethical considerations are paramount. Though each
existentialist understands the ethical, as with ‘freedom’, in
his or her own way, the underlying concern is to invite us to
examine the authenticity of our personal lives and of our
society.
Existentialism
distinguished between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reflection and
truth. He allowed for the common scientific uses of objective
reflection, which he described as follows:
The way of objective reflection makes the subject accidental, and
thereby transforms existence into something indifferent, something
vanishing. Away from the subject the objective way of reflection
leads to the objective truth, and while the subject and his
subjectivity become indifferent, the truth also becomes indifferent,
and this indifference is precisely its objective validity; for all interest,
like all decisiveness, is rooted in subjectivity. The way of objective
reflection leads to abstract thought, to mathematics, to historical
knowledge of different kinds; and always it leads away from the
subject, whose existence or non-existence, and rightly so, becomes
infinitely indifferent.
The existentialists are not irrationalists in the sense that they
deny the validity of logical argument and scientific reasoning.
They simply question the ability of such reasoning to access the
deep personal convictions that guide our lives. As Kierkegaard said
of the dialectical rationalism of Hegel: ‘Trying to live your life by
this abstract philosophy is like trying to find your way around
Denmark with a map on which that country appears the size of a
pinhead.’
In contrast to the objective reflection that ignores individual
existence, Kierkegaard speaks of subjective reflection and its
corresponding truth as subjectivity:
When subjectivity is truth, subjectivity’s definition must include an
expression for an opposition to objectivity, a reminder of the fork in
the road, and this expression must also convey the tension of
inwardness [the self’s relation to itself]. Here is such a definition of
truth: the objective uncertainty, held fast in an appropriation
process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest
truth available for an existing person.
9
Philosophy as a way of life
Here too it is a matter of a change in the direction one is taking in
one’s life, the ‘fork in the road’. That is what makes the option for
subjective reflection an ‘existential’ choice. Were it simply a
question of an impersonal claim about a fact or a law of nature, we
would be dealing with ‘objective certainty’ and the wager of one’s
personal existence would be irrelevant. One would simply be
following the complete directions. Such would be the case of
Socrates if his belief in personal immorality were merely the
conclusion of an argument. But here the ‘truth’ is more of a ‘moral’
nature. As Kierkegaard says, it’s a question of ‘appropriation’ (of
‘making it one’s own’) rather than of ‘approximation’ to some
objective state of affairs, the way one weighs the probabilities of a
possible outcome or reads the distance markers along the way to a
destination. As he notes elsewhere, for truth as subjectivity, the
emphasis is on the ‘how’ and not on the ‘what’ of our belief. This
has led some to misunderstand him as claiming that it doesn’t
matter what you believe so long as you believe it. Though scarcely
espousing religious relativism, as a deeply committed Christian,
Kierkegaard was more concerned with combating lukewarm or
purely nominal religious belief than with apologetics.
If one translates a secularized existential truth into the language
of the meaning of life, it would imply that there is no ‘objectively’
correct path to choose. Rather, for the existentialist, after getting
clear on the options and the likely outcomes, one makes it the right
choice by one’s follow-through. For the existentialist, such truth is
more a matter of decision than of discovery. But, of course, one is
not making these choices blindly and without criteria (contrary
to popular misconception). But the nature of the choice is
criterion-constituting rather than criterionless, as some have
objected. What Kierkegaard is talking about expresses what one
might call a ‘conversion’ experience, where the decisive move is
not purely intellectual but a matter of will and feeling (what
Kierkegaard calls ‘passion’) as well. Such is the nature of the
so-called ‘blind leap’ of faith that catapults one into the religious
sphere of existence, as we shall see in the next chapter. But it applies
10
Existentialism
1. Socrates discourses over personal immortality as he is about to take the poison as commanded by the State
equally to other fundamental ‘turnings’ in a person’s life, from a
basic change in one’s political convictions to falling in love.
This is but one of many places where existentialist, pragmatist, and
‘analytic’ philosophy overlap. The great American psychologist and
pragmatist philosopher William James, for instance, makes an
analogous claim in his The Will To Believe when he observes that
our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an
option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that
cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds. But some
such options are what British ethicist R. M. Hare calls ‘decisions of
principle’. Such decisions are not themselves principled because
they are what establish the principles according to which we shall
make subsequent options in our life. Such principles are like the
‘rules of the game’ that one opts for when deciding to participate but
which do not apply beforehand. You do not follow those rules before
deciding to play the game; your decision to play means abiding by
those very rules. These are what I have been calling ‘criteria-
constituting’ choices. As we shall see, this is analogous to what
Sartre calls initial or ‘fundamental Choice’ that gives unity and
direction to a person’s life. We discover it by reflecting on the
direction of our lives up to the present. It is a ‘Choice’, Sartre claims,
that we find we’ve already made implicitly all along.
Committed philosophy and literature
Kierkegaard’s ‘truth’ as subjectivity is the forerunner to what Sartre
will call ‘commitment’ (l’engagement) in the next century. As if to
play down the concept of objective truth, or at least to subscribe to a
new meaning for ‘objectivity’ in light of late modern science, Sartre
remarks: ‘There is only committed knowledge.’ On the other hand,
he also subscribes to the more classical, ‘objectivist’ view of
knowledge and truth proposed by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)
and his descriptive method of phenomenology (see below). One way
to reconcile these two views is to claim with Kierkegaard that each
refers to a different use of the term ‘truth’. In Sartre’s case, it may be
12
Existentialism
a question of absorbing the phenomenological descriptions into a
more pragmatist, dialectical notion of truth; that is, one that
reconciles alternative claims in a higher viewpoint. This would fit
better with a hermeneutical or interpretive phenomenology such as
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) introduced in the 1920s (see
Chapter 6). Nietzsche had insisted that all knowledge was
interpretation and that there was no ‘original’ non-interpreted text.
In other words, what counted as knowledge was interpretation ‘all
the way down’. So whether completely with Nietzsche or merely in
part with Kierkegaard, truth too has been ‘personalized’ by the
existentialists. ‘My truth’ ceases to be a self-contradictory
expression.
In a famous set of essays, What is Literature? published in 1948,
Sartre develops the concept of ‘committed literature’. His basic
premise is that writing is a form of action for which responsibility
must be taken, but that this responsibility carries over into the
content and not just the form of what is communicated. The
experience of the Second World War had given Sartre a sense of
social responsibility that, arguably, was lacking or at least ill-
developed in his masterpiece, Being and Nothingness (1943). In
fact, the existentialists had generally been criticized for their
excessive individualism and apparent lack of social conscience.
Sartre, who had already distinguished himself with several
well-received plays and the impressive novel Nausea, now
addressed the moral responsibility of the prose artist. ‘Though
literature is one thing and morality another,’ he admits, ‘at the heart
of the aesthetic imperative we discern the moral imperative’,
namely an act of confidence in the freedom of both parties. The
concept of the relation between artist and audience as one of
‘gift-appeal’ emerges as central to Sartre’s aesthetics and soon
serves as the model for disalienated social relations generally; that
is, the example for relations that do not treat humans as mere
things or instruments but as values in themselves. What might
appear to be the merely formal condition of one freedom respecting
another assumes a substantive character when Sartre concludes:
13
Philosophy as a way of life
The unique point of view from which the author can present the
world to those freedoms whose concurrence he wishes to bring
about is that of a world to be impregnated always with more
freedom. It would be inconceivable that this unleashing of
generosity provoked by the writer could be used to authorize an
injustice, and that the reader could enjoy his freedom while reading
a work which approves or accepts or simply abstains from
condemning the subjection of man by man.
In other words, as we shall see, existentialism is developing a social
conscience and, with it, a conviction that the fine arts, literature at
least, should be socially and politically committed.
In this seminal essay, written in the early post-war years, in a
remark he will come to regret, Sartre draws a famous distinction
between poetry and prose. Poetry, on this account, signifies any
non-instrumentalist form of language or of any art form such as
music and visual and plastic art. Such forms essentially pursue art
for its own sake and so are incapable of commitment to social
change under pain of violating their artistic nature. Prose, on the
other hand, because it is instrumental in character, can and, in our
day, should be committed to the fostering of individual and
collective freedom both by the subject matter it addresses and by its
manner of treatment. Though he will subsequently revise that
distinction in an essay on the revolutionary character of Black
African Francophone poetry, Sartre’s general thesis remains that
literature, at least in our current situation of what he sees as social
oppression and economic exploitation, should be committed to its
alleviation. As he wrote, merely failing to condemn such practices is
not enough. Active opposition is called for. We shall pursue the
matter of social responsibility among the various existentialist
authors in Chapter 5. But for the moment it may suffice to mention
the socially and politically ‘committed’ character of the artistic
works that several of these writers produced.
14
Existentialism
2. Sartre addresses a student uprising in 1968
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80)
A native Parisian, he was probably the most renowned
philosopher of the 20th century. He travelled extensively
throughout the world, usually with his lifelong partner,
Simone de Beauvoir. His name became synonymous with the
existentialist movement. He wrote numerous plays, novels,
and philosophical works, the most famous of which was
Being and Nothingness (1943). Offered the Nobel Prize for
Literature, he declined the honour. He was deeply commit-
ted to the political Left for the greater part of his public life.
At his death, thousands of people spontaneously filled the
streets to join his cortège. As one publication headlined:
‘France has lost its conscience.’
15
Philosophy as a way of life
Existentialism and the fine arts:
indirect communication
Because of its dramatic conception of existence, its widespread use
of powerful images in its arguments, and its appeal to personal
response in its communications, existentialism has always been
closely associated with the fine arts. In fact, both Camus and Sartre
were offered the Nobel Prize for Literature (which Sartre declined).
Kierkegaard was a kind of poet who used pseudonyms, parables,
and other forms of ‘indirect communication’ to enlist our personal
involvement in the matter at hand. Nietzsche was one of the great
prose artists of the German language and his allegory of a religious
prophet, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, like Sartre’s Nausea, is a model of
philosophical dramatization. The novels of Simone de Beauvoir
(1908–86), too, are expressions of her philosophical insights.
Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) wrote philosophy in a meditative
manner that he once said was perhaps better exhibited in his
30 published plays. Among the philosophers we are discussing,
perhaps only Heidegger, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) fit least appropriately in this category.
Yet, with the exception of Jaspers, even they wrote significant
studies in aesthetics and all three employed the phenomenological
method that valorizes argument by example. Each insisted that the
artist, especially the poet in Heidegger’s case, and the visual artist
for Merleau-Ponty, anticipates and often more adequately expresses
what the philosopher is trying to conceptualize. So strong is the
influence of existentialist ideas in the fine arts that, as we have
seen, some would prefer to describe existentialism as a literary
movement. Certainly, authors like Dostoevsky and Kafka,
playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco, and artists like Giacometti
and Picasso exemplify many of the defining characteristics of
existentialist thought.
The concept of commitment to social and moral reform that
characterizes all of these writers finds its most apt expression in what
came to be called their use of ‘indirect communication’ to transmit
16
Existentialism
their ideas. The term denotes a rhetorical move that conceals the
philosopher’s authorial identity in order to invite the reader’s
identification with the characters of the work by suspension of their
disbelief. Thus Kierkegaard could write in the voices of different
pseudonymous authors, each conveying a certain viewpoint
associated with that persona and not precisely with the philosopher
himself. Nietzsche was able to parody scriptural prophecy even as
he undermined religious belief in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Even
his aphorisms, though enunciated in his own name, carry the
rhetorical force of a blow to the head, despite one’s occasional
misgivings about where it came from, that is, what kind of
‘argument’ stands behind it. Similarly, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus,
and Marcel could write novels and plays that conveyed their ideas in
concrete fashion to an audience that, for the moment at least, had
suspended its critical distance. Once asked why he presented his
plays in the bourgeois quarters of the city rather than in its
working-class sections, Sartre replied that no bourgeois could
witness a performance of one of his plays without having
entertained thoughts ‘traitorous to his class’. Such is the power of
art to convey a philosophical invitation to a way of life.
Husserl and the phenomenological method
Though the phenomenological method developed by Edmund
Husserl in the first third of the 20th century was adopted in one
form or another by the existentialists of that same period, many,
perhaps most, phenomenologists are not existentialists. But all
accept the best-known and most significant claim of this approach,
namely that all consciousness is consciousness of an other-than-
consciousness. In other words, it is the very nature of consciousness
to aim towards (to ‘intend’) an other. Even when it is directed
towards itself in reflection, consciousness is directed as towards an
‘other’. This is called the principle of intentionality. In this context,
‘intentional’ has nothing to do with ‘on purpose’. It is a technical
term for what is unique about our mental acts: they extend beyond
themselves towards an other.
17
Philosophy as a way of life
3. Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement
The significance of this principle is twofold. It overcomes the
problem of the ‘bridge’ between ideas ‘in’ the mind and the external
world which they are supposed to resemble. We have no ‘third eye’
to compare what’s in the mind with what’s outside so as to confirm
our claim to know the external world. This problem was the legacy
of the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes (1596–1650),
and his followers. In his quest for certitude against sceptical doubt,
Descartes concluded that he could be certain of one thing, namely
that he was a thinker since doubting was a form of thinking. This
seemed to justify his intuitive claim: ‘I think therefore I am’ (Cogito
ergo sum). But this hard-won certitude was a Pyrrhic victory, for it
left him trapped ‘inside’ his mind, facing the problem of ‘bridging’
the gap between inner and outer reality. How could he extend this
certainty to the ‘external’ world?
According to the principle of intentionality, this was a false
problem, for there is no inside/outside for consciousness. Every
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)
Born in Prossnitz, in the Czech Republic, he earned a doc-
torate in mathematics before turning to philosophy. He
taught in Göttingen in Germany from 1901 to 1916, and in
Freiburg im Breisgau from 1916 until his retirement in 1928.
The founder of phenomenology, Husserl played a seminal
role in European philosophy in the 20th century. Martin
Heidegger was his most famous pupil and succeeded him at
Freiburg. Of Jewish origin, his last years were marred by
the rise of National Socialism. At his death in Freiburg,
a Belgian priest friend transported his widow and his
manuscripts to the University of Louvain before they could
be destroyed by the Nazis.
19
Philosophy as a way of life
conscious act ‘intends’ (is intentionally related to) an object that is
already ‘in’ the world. Our manner of ‘intending’ these objects will
differ as we perceive, conceive, imagine, or recollect them, for
example, or are related to them in an emotive manner. But in every
case, being conscious is a way of being in the world.
Consider our images, for example. As Sartre pointed out in an early
study, images are not miniatures ‘in the mind’ to be projected onto
the external world, raising the problem of the correspondence
between the inner and the outer once more. Rather, imaging
consciousness is a way of ‘derealizing’ the world of our perceptions
that manifests its distinctive features to careful phenomenological
description. If we imagine an apple that we previously perceived, for
instance, a careful description of the experience will reveal how the
imagining differs from the perceiving of the same apple. For one
thing, unlike the perceived apple, the imagined one has only those
features that we choose to give it. Images as such teach us nothing.
And so it is with our other conscious acts. Each reveals its
distinctive features to phenomenological description.
But because consciousness ‘intends’ its objects in such different
ways, we can employ the method of phenomenological description
called ‘eidetic reduction’ or the ‘free imaginative variation of
examples’ to arrive at the intelligible contour or essence of any of
these diverse conscious experiences. And this imaginative task of
rigorous description of what is ‘given’ to consciousness in its various
modes of ‘givenness’ is what the existentialists favour in mounting
their concrete arguments. As Husserl once said, the point of
phenomenological method is not to explain (by finding causes) but
to get us to see (by presenting essences or intelligible contours).
Consider a couple of examples. A forensic artist might sketch an
image of a criminal for an eyewitness to identify. As she adds or
subtracts aspects of the image, the witness will agree or disagree
with the likeness until, optimally, the person says ‘yes, that’s the
fellow; that’s what he looked like’. This is a homely analogy of an
20
Existentialism
eidetic description that uses the free imaginative variation of
examples to achieve an insight, an immediate grasp of the object
intended.
Let us take for our second example a famous phenomenological
‘argument’ from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which I take to be
a less technical form of eidetic reduction. A voyeur is looking
through a keyhole at a couple when suddenly he hears what he takes
to be footsteps behind him. In one and the same act, he experiences
his body ‘objectified’ by another consciousness. His mounting
embarrassment, his reddening face, is the equivalent of a twofold
argument for the existence of other minds (an old philosophical
conundrum) and for his body as vulnerable to objectification in a
manner over which he has no control. Even if the voyeur were
mistaken (the sound was made by the wind in the curtains before
the open window), still the experience has justified our belief in
other minds far more immediately and with a greater degree of
certainty than any argument from analogy, which is the standard
empiricist’s proof. This is the force of a successful ‘eidetic reduction’.
It captures the essence or intelligible contour of the experience of
another subject as subject and not simply as an object.
The strength and potential weakness of such arguments from
phenomenological description or the free imaginative variation of
examples is that they home in on what I have been calling an
‘intelligible contour’. This is a kind of immediate grasp of the
presence of the ‘thing itself’, as Husserl said. It resembles the ‘aha!’
experience at the end of a mathematical or logical demonstration
(Husserl’s doctorate was in mathematics). The assumption is that if
the description is mounted rigorously, the inquirer will simply see
for himself. The potential weakness, of course, is that, in response to
the claim ‘I don’t see it’, the phenomenologist can merely reply,
‘well, look more closely’. But, in fact, we often do get the point; we
succeed in seeing the invariant ‘essence’ through the numerous
variations. And such arguments by example not only provide the
existentialist with the concrete way of reasoning that he is seeking,
21
Philosophy as a way of life
they almost beg for embodiment in imaginative literature, films,
and plays.
I mentioned that many phenomenologists are not existentialists.
The converse is also true: while 20th-century existentialists accepted
Husserl’s concept of intentionality because it opened a wide field for
their descriptive method, they resisted another feature of his later
thought as being incompatible with what existentialism is all about,
namely his project of ‘bracketing’ existence. Husserl spoke of the
natural attitude, which might be described as pre-philosophical and
naive in its uncritical acceptance of the real world of everyday
experience. In his drive to make phenomenology a strict science
synonymous with philosophy itself, Husserl insisted that one should
suspend the naive realism of the natural attitude and disregard, or
bracket, the question of the existence or being of the objects of
phenomenological description. Husserl called this a
‘phenomenological reduction’, or epochē, and he thought it could
short-circuit sceptical objections to which the natural attitude was
liable. He admitted that one could perform an ‘eidetic reduction’ in
the natural attitude and achieve a kind of ‘eidetic’ psychology. But
he later argued that this left unresolved the sceptical question, ‘Does
what you’re describing hold true in the real world?’ Husserl’s point
was that if you produce this additional reduction and bracket the
‘being question’ of the objects of your inquiry (setting aside the
question whether they exist ‘in reality’ or merely ‘in the mind’), you
disarm the sceptic who doubts you can ever attain ‘reality’ with your
descriptions. The point of the phenomenological reduction is to
leave everything as grist for the phenomenologist’s mill except the
being of the ‘reduced’ objects, now called ‘phenomena’. When you
suspend the being question, you retain all of the experiences and
their respective objects that you had before (perceptions, images,
memories, and the rest), but now as consciousness-relative, that is,
as phenomena. In a sense, you have the same tune as in the natural
attitude but now in a different key. Inoculated against sceptical
doubt – which has been a negative force driving philosophy since
the Greeks – you can now undertake rigorous descriptive analyses
22
Existentialism
of any phenomenon whatsoever. The descriptions themselves will
sort out the difference between an apple that is perceived, for
example, and one that is merely imagined. This seems to be an
ingenious way of marginalizing the philosophical sceptic and
assuring our certain knowledge of the world. That was Husserl’s
dream.
The existentialists offer two reasons for rejecting Husserl’s
phenomenological reduction. First, it makes our basic relationship
to the world theoretical rather than practical, as if we were born
theoreticians and later learned about practice. Husserl’s student,
Martin Heidegger, on the contrary, insisted that we were originally
‘in the world’ instrumentally by means of our practical concerns and
that philosophy should analyse this ‘pre-theoretical’ awareness in
order to gain access to being. Similarly, Sartre, as we saw, insisted
that all knowledge was ‘committed’. And Merleau-Ponty spoke of a
certain ‘operative intentionality’ of our lived bodies that interacted
with the world prior to our reflective conceptualization. Even
Husserl, later in life, seemed to acknowledge these claims by
introducing the concept of the ‘lifeworld’ as the pre-theoretical basis
of our theoretical reflection.
But the major existentialist objection is that being itself is not an
‘essence’ subject to reduction and, as Merleau-Ponty famously
phrased it, ‘a complete [phenomenological] reduction is impossible’
because you cannot ‘reduce’ the existing ‘reducer’. The existing
individual is more than his or her ‘definition’ such as one might
hope to capture in a theoretical concept. As Sartre argues, there are
‘phenomena of being’, such as our experience of nausea, that reveal
that we are and that we need not be (our ‘contingency’). But such an
experience is not cognitive. Rather, it is a matter of feeling or
emotional consciousness – the stuff of arresting descriptions and
novels.
23
Philosophy as a way of life
Chapter 2
Becoming an individual
No two beings, and no two situations, are really commensurable
with each other.
To become aware of this fact is to undergo a sort of crisis.
Gabriel Marcel
Existentialism is known as an ‘individualistic’ philosophy. We shall
qualify this view when we consider its social dimension in Chapter
5. But from the outset we should note that, for the existentialist,
being an individual in our mass society is an achievement rather
than a starting point. Again, each existentialist will treat this
subject in his or her own way. But their underlying theme is that the
pull in modern society is away from individualism and towards
conformity. It is in this respect that Kierkegaard refers to the ‘plebs’,
Nietzsche unflatteringly speaks of the ‘herd’, Heidegger of ‘Das
Man’, and Sartre the ‘one’. In every case, the reference is to thinking,
acting, dressing, speaking, and so forth as ‘they’ do. In Leo Tolstoy’s
short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the speaker, a conformist and
social climber, frequently refers to behaving ‘comme il faut ’
(‘properly’), even to the point of using the French phrase preferred
by the better levels of society to which he aspires. In that sense,
becoming an individual is a task to be undertaken and sustained
but perhaps never permanently achieved. As we suggested in
the previous chapter, the time-bound nature of the human
24
condition requires that existing as an individual is always
dynamic and under way, never static and complete. And
depending on the circumstances, it may also involve
considerable risk.
Nietzsche has spoken eloquently of the loneliness of the individual
who has risen above the herd. As is often the case with
existentialists, his personal life gave tragic witness to the price often
demanded for such nonconformity as he sought in the manner of
Socrates to harmonize his life with his teaching. For years,
Nietzsche moved around Europe, never remaining in the same
place more than a few months, living in rented rooms or as the
guest of others, suffering from severe migraines and stomach
problems, often having to pay for the publication of his own books,
which never reached a large audience during his lifetime. He
likened himself to Spinoza, a 17th-century Dutch philosopher of
Jewish descent who was excommunicated from the Synagogue for
his unorthodox views. One of his aphorisms reads: ‘To live alone one
must be either a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third
case: one must be both – a philosopher.’ Insisting that the
philosopher must act against the received wisdom of the age,
Nietzsche remarks:
Today . . . when only the herd animal is honored . . . the concept of
‘greatness’ entails being noble, wanting to be oneself, being capable
of being different, standing alone and having to live independently;
and the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when he
posits: ‘He shall be the greatest who can be the loneliest, the most
hidden, the most deviating, the human being beyond good and evil.’
By these criteria, Søren Kierkegaard was the epitome of the
Nietzschean philosopher, though the latter seems to have had
only a passing acquaintance with his work. Kierkegaard wrote
essays and tracts attacking the three most potent forces of
conformity in the Copenhagen of his day, namely the popular
press, the State Church, and the reigning philosophy, that of
25
Becoming an individual
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), each in the name of the individual.
The popular press, in his view, did people’s thinking for them, the
Church their believing for them, and the Hegelianism their
choosing for them, in the sense that it ‘mediated’ otherwise
individualizing choices in some higher, encompassing viewpoint
in a process called ‘dialectic’. In other words, Hegel’s philosophy
transformed a challenging ‘either/or’ into a comfortable ‘both-
and’. These unfavourable judgements, though made in the name
of becoming an individual, isolated Kierkegaard from his society
and occasioned considerable backlash from the establishment.
Indeed, he was reported to have preferred for the epitaph on his
tombstone the simple phrase, ‘That Single Individual’. Add to this
the famous and seemingly heartless breaking of his engagement
to Regine Olsen, ostensibly because he did not wish to inflict his
singular vocation on her, as well as his subsequent celibate life,
and we have the kind of solitary thinker whom Nietzsche lauds as
the true philosopher. And in a sense, as we are about to see,
Kierkegaard’s ideal knight of faith was also ‘beyond good and
evil’, though not precisely in Nietzsche’s use of that famous
expression.
Kierkegaard’s theory of stages
The most extended analysis of the project of becoming an
individual appears in two places, Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and his
Stages on Life’s Way. Both are examples of his method of oblique
communication. Each tells a tale, actually several tales, by
pseudonymous authors in order to enable us to see and test the
respective morals of these stories on our own lives. Together, their
narrative arguments provide a rather complete description of the
three spheres of existence that Kierkegaard formulates in order to
trace the process of becoming an individual. Though we shall have
to modify and nuance this process once it has been laid out, the
spheres or stages are three (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the
religious). Each stage has its own model as befits a morality tale:
Don Juan, among others, for the aesthetic, Socrates, again among
26
Existentialism
others, for the ethical, and Abraham for the religious sphere. These
figures convey a concrete, emotional force to the ‘argument’ as it
unfolds. Like the docent in an art gallery, Kierkegaard keeps
referring to the model as he enables us to see how it instantiates the
quality under discussion. So let us follow this path and encounter its
literary and historical characters as we progress on the road
towards individuality. As one should expect from an existentialist
analysis, each stage or sphere will reveal its own relation to
temporality that distinguishes it from the others. Again, time is
of the essence.
Perhaps the best way to begin is towards the end, when one of its
characters, ‘Frater Taciturnus’, in a letter to the readers of Stages on
Life’s Way summarizes the stages or spheres as follows:
There are three existence-spheres, the aesthetic, the ethical, the
religious. . . . The ethical sphere is only a transition sphere and
therefore its highest expression is repentance as a negative action.
The aesthetic sphere is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical the
sphere of requirement (and this requirement is so infinite that
the individual always goes bankrupt), the religious the sphere of
fulfillment, but please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills
an alms box or a sack with gold, for repentance has specifically
created a boundless space and as a consequence the religious
contradiction: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water
and yet be joyful.
Obviously written from a ‘religious’ viewpoint, Brother Taciturn’s
analysis downplays the stability and permanence of the ethical
sphere, as if its limitations, which we are about to witness, render it
inadequate in dealing with life’s most pressing problems, for
example the scandal of bad things happening to good people. From
a contrary perspective, Sartre will proclaim and Camus will
dramatize in his novel The Plague, that ‘evil cannot be redeemed’.
Such, at least, is the view of the atheistic existentialist. In any case, it
is clear that what will later go by the name of ‘existentialism’ deals
27
Becoming an individual
4. Søren Kierkegaard, at the age of 41, a year before his death
with specific individuals in concrete problematic situations. So let
us follow these stages more closely.
The aesthetic stage
This is the sphere of the immediate temporally speaking. It has
been observed that the range of differences it embraces could
extend from plain philistinism to the greatest intellectual
refinement. The person who lives at this stage, and one could do
so for an entire lifetime, is focused on the present and remains
indifferent to the past as repentance or the future as obligation
except in a calculating manner geared to enhance the present, as we
are about to see in the case of Johannes the Seducer. Kierkegaard
was taken with the opera Don Giovanni – the tale of the
unrepentant womanizer ‘Don Juan’ whose story as a tireless seducer
of women was put to music by Mozart in one of the greatest operas
ever written. The Don, whom Kierkegaard takes as a major model
of the aesthetic sphere, lives only for the sensual satisfaction of the
present moment. His presence haunts the descriptions in both
Stages and Either/Or.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55)
Known as the father of theistic existentialism, he was born in
Copenhagen, where he lived all of his life. Schooled in the-
ology and in Hegelian philosophy at the local university, he
engaged in sharp polemics with the State Church, the popu-
lar press, and champions of Hegelian philosophy. Perhaps
because he considered his personal calling a painful and
lonely one, he broke his engagement with Regine Olsen,
a member of a prominent local family, and remained celibate
for the rest of his life. He published numerous philosophical
and theological works, many under pseudonyms, dis-
tinguished by their sharp wit and psychological insights.
29
Becoming an individual
The first tale in Stages is the story of an ideal ‘aesthetic’ gathering
entitled ‘In Vino Veritas’ (an ancient adage which might be
translated as ‘wine as truth serum’). It serves as the password for the
occasion. The story is a parody of Plato’s famous banquet of love,
the Symposium. In both works, the emphasis is on drink and
speeches in praise of love by the inebriated banqueters. But whereas
Plato’s party finally focuses on true, lasting eros that attends to the
soul in contrast with the fleeting attraction of sensuous beauty, ‘In
Vino’ is a celebration of sensuous beauty in its very fleetingness.
In fact, the sheer immediacy and contingency of the event is
underscored both by the delivery of the invitations at the last
minute and the presence of the work crew ready to dismantle the
gathering place immediately upon its conclusion. As one of the
participants remarks: ‘To be good, a thing must be all at once, for
‘‘at once’’ is the most divine of all categories . . . ’. Recall Sartre’s
analysis of someone literally ‘jumping for joy’ in their vain attempt
to condense a pleasant experience into a moment.
Tellingly, the revellers enter the banquet room to the strains of
Mozart’s opera. Their various speeches deal with erotic love or the
quotidian relations between men and women. The concluding
speech is given by one of Kierkegaard’s characters, Johannes the
Seducer, introduced in an earlier work, Either/Or. Since he
personifies life in the aesthetic sphere, let us detail this domain
by turning to his introduction in that prior volume.
‘The Diary of a Seducer’, one of Kierkegaard’s most remarkable tales
of life in the first sphere, recounts the machinations of ‘Johannes
the Seducer’, whose tactics are a parody of the rakish progress of
Don Juan. In fact, lines from the opera serve as an epigram at the
start of the story. Johannes is attracted by a young woman of
16 years, Cordelia, whom he notices on the street in the company
of her aunt who is also her guardian. He later encounters a young
man, obviously smitten by the same girl, and proceeds to befriend
him on the pretext of helping his suit. Having gained entrance to
the girl’s home as the young man’s friend, Johannes proceeds to win
30
Existentialism
the favour of the aunt even as he charms the maiden. The young
man is soon dismissed from Johannes’s company as now more of a
liability than an asset. The story of the seduction and subsequent
abandonment of the young Cordelia is recounted in a series of
letters exchanged between them. Johannes seems quite indifferent
to the pain he is causing, so intent is he on the ‘ultimate enjoyment’,
after which he contrives to manoeuvre Cordelia into breaking their
engagement so that she will assume responsibility for the
separation. As Johannes remarks: ‘The curse of an engagement is
always on its ethical side. The ethical is just as tiresome in
philosophy as in life. . . . I shall certainly manage it so that she will
be the one who breaks the engagement.’ No doubt, Johannes is less
spontaneous than the Don. But his aim is the same: momentary
conquest followed by abandonment without regret. Johannes
captures the rich ambiguity of the term ‘aesthetic’ and of this
existential sphere when he expostulates: ‘To poetize oneself into a
young girl is an art; to poetize oneself out of her is a masterpiece.’
The aesthete is a kind of poet.
The ethical stage
Kierkegaard realizes that Johannes is not immoral; he simply fails
to play the ethical game at all. The rules of right and wrong do not
apply in his sphere of existence. Every consideration is aimed at the
present, even if this ‘present’ lies in the future, as with the Seducer’s
calculations regarding Cordelia. There is no place here for the past
as repentance or the future as obligation, defining features of the
ethical sphere. The existentialist concept of ‘commitment’ is absent
from this discourse. Repentance, obligation, and commitment are
properly ethical categories and they come into play after a ‘leap’ or
‘conversion’ experience that is an exercise of free choice and thus an
individuating act. In a move we shall elaborate shortly, this ‘leap’ is
not the natural, much less, the necessary, evolution of the earlier
stage, as a Hegelian reading of the situation would suggest.
Kierkegaard seems to believe that most people live their entire lives
in the aesthetic sphere. In any case, the aesthete, he argues, is
incapable of the choice that enables him or her to be a self. As
31
Becoming an individual
Judge William, another of Kierkegaard’s inventions, warns the
young aesthete who, in Either/Or, has insisted that life is a
masquerade:
Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone
has to throw off his mask? . . . I have seen men in real life who so
long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal
itself. . . . Or can you think of anything more frightful than that it
might end with your nature being resolved into a multiplicity, that
you really might become many, become, like those unhappy
demoniacs, a legion and you thus would have lost the inmost and
holiest thing of all in a man, the unifying power of personality? . . .
[Such a one] may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life
which extend far beyond himself, that he almost cannot reveal
himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who
cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.
The Judge is articulating the general existentialist thesis that
choice is self-constituting and liberating. Recall that, whereas
Hegelian philosophy, in Kierkegaard’s view, emphasizes
‘mediation’ between alternatives, which it raises to a higher, more
comprehensive stage or standpoint, existential thinking stresses
choice, the ‘either/or’ that involves risk, commitment, and
individuation. With a particularly apt analogy, the Judge
proposes:
Think of the captain on his ship at the instant when it has to come
about. He will perhaps be able to say ‘I can either do this or that’; but
in case he is not a pretty good navigator, he will be aware at the same
time that the ship is all the while making its usual headway, and that
therefore it is only an instant when it is indifferent whether he does
this or that. So it is with a man. If he forgets to take account of the
headway, there comes at last an instant when there no longer is any
question of an either/or, not because he has chosen but because he
has neglected to choose, which is equivalent to saying, because
others have chosen for him, because he has lost his self.
32
Existentialism
This teaches the existentialist lesson that our entire life is an
ongoing choice and that the failure to choose is itself a choice for
which we are equally responsible. Sartre formulates this bluntly
when he asserts that for human reality [the human being], to exist
is to choose and to cease to choose is to cease to be. Sartre also
echoes Kierkegaard’s relation of choice to self-constitution when he
adds that, for human reality, to be is to choose oneself.
The basic ‘choice’ that the Judge offers the young aesthete is what
we have called a criterion-constituting choice. As he explains: ‘My
either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between
good and evil, it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and
evil/or excludes them.’ In other words, it constitutes the decision to
‘play the game’ in which the categories of moral good and evil
operate. In Kierkegaard’s case, the defining feature of the moral is
the universal and exceptionless nature of its rules. The ethic that
Kierkegaard is proposing, derived from the work of the 18th-
century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, takes the essence of
the immoral to consist in holding yourself an exception to a rule
that you want everyone else to observe. As Kant points out, the only
reason we can lie or cheat or steal is that others will not do so. Its
point is not simply that the social consequences of such a choice
would be harmful, as the utilitarians (who hold that actions are
right if they are of benefit to the majority) have argued, but that to
universalize the practice, that is, to will that everyone do likewise, is
a practical impossibility. For if everyone lied, nobody would be
believed, thus rendering lying impossible. This also implies that
such behaviour would reduce the others who obey moral rules to the
status of mere instruments for the ends of the rule-breaker. This is a
clear violation of the intrinsic value of each individual – a standard
existentialist claim. We are dealing with a set of rules like the Ten
Commandments or the Golden Rule, but formulated in
non-religious terms. A person can be just or upright, as were
Socrates and the Roman consul Brutus (who did not except his son
from the death penalty for treason, though it lay in his power to do
so), without being aware of Biblical directives. In fact, Socrates, by
33
Becoming an individual
obeying the laws of Athens even when they condemned him
unfairly, emerges as the model of the ethical sphere: he did not
place himself above the general rule, though doing so caused him
apparent harm. Kierkegaard designates these individuals ‘tragic
heroes’ but adds that, unlike Abraham, ‘the tragic hero still remains
within the ethical’.
The religious stage
In Kierkegaard’s view, the ‘leap’ of faith constitutes entrance into
the religious sphere and the highest form of individuation. Here,
the operative categories are neither pleasure and pain, as in the
aesthetic sphere, nor good and evil, as in the ethical, but sin and
grace. The model is Abraham, who in the story from Genesis was
ready to sacrifice his only son in obedience to God’s command,
notwithstanding the Divine promise that the old man would be the
father ‘of many nations’. The temporal dimension of this
extraordinary event is the ‘instant’ wherein this ‘infinite’ movement
is made. The categories of the ethical are suspended in response to a
divine command addressed to Abraham alone and by name. In this
sense, the motives for the actions at the religious stage cannot be
generalized as the ethical requires. In other words, the religious
individual is ‘beyond good and evil’, in Nietzschean terms,
and accordingly can be considered to be acting immorally. In ethical
terms, Abraham has no words by which to explain his singular
action to his wife. He can rely neither on the surety of general
principles nor the support of universal reason. He is alone before
God – the consummate individual. Abraham stands out from such
anonymous refuge (he ‘exists’) in the most extreme manner. As he
makes this move beyond the ethical, he experiences the anguish
(Angst) of his freedom, even as he knows the risk that this
command, so contrary to general moral principles, might not be
Divine in origin. The religious individual is above the universal and,
from that religious viewpoint, the ‘temptation’ now is to reverse this
relationship, namely to make the ethical/universal absolute, to do
the ‘moral’ thing and disobey the Divine command. This is truly a
‘leap’ of faith.
34
Existentialism
It has been argued that Kierkegaard’s interpretation of this Biblical
story unwittingly gave rise to what is known as ‘situation ethics’
associated with Nietzschean and Sartrean existentialism. This is an
approach to moral decision-making that considers each ethical case
to be unique and incomparable, except in a general rule-of-thumb
manner. Thus Sartre speaks of a young man faced with the choice of
staying in Nazi-occupied France with his mother, whose husband
was suspected of collaboration and whose first son had been killed
in the German offensive of 1940, or of leaving the country to fight
with the Free French forces. Were he to seek advice from a party
considered favourable to one or the other decision, he would in
effect already have made his choice. Instead, Sartre dares: ‘You are
free, therefore choose – that is to say, invent.’ As he explains: ‘No
rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do; no
signs are vouchsafed in this world. The Catholics will reply, ‘‘Oh, but
there are!’’ Very well; still, it is I myself, in every case, who have to
interpret the signs.’ The perils and the fruits of ‘moral creativity’ are
an underlying theme in existentialist writing, especially as exhibited
by Nietzsche, Sartre, and de Beauvoir.
Certainly, Kierkegaard did not propose that one reject the ethical.
Indeed, he referred to Abraham’s act as the ‘teleological suspension
of the ethical’, not to its abandonment. The ethical sphere was being
placed on hold for a higher goal, or telos, namely fidelity to the
Divine command. As Abraham descends the mountain where the
sacrifice of Isaac was to have taken place (an angel had stayed his
hand, indicating that Abraham had passed the test of unconditional
faith in God), he is returning to the ethical sphere but with a
difference. He now knows that it is not exceptionless and that his
observance of its precepts and rules are based on a higher loyalty. In
the final analysis, as Kierkegaard summarizes, the individual is
above the universal. Standard moral rules are no longer absolute in
the sense of demanding to be followed by all and always.
This raises the issue of the relation among these spheres and the
unity of a life. Speaking of the ‘dissipation’ of life in the aesthetic
35
Becoming an individual
sphere, namely its fragmentation and squandering, the Judge warns
the young aesthete: ‘[In your present state] you are incapable of
love because love means self-giving and you have no self to give.’
And he refers to the interrelation of the spheres as if the meaning of
life depended on the integration of all three: ‘If you cannot reach the
point of seeing the aesthetical, the ethical, and the religious as three
great allies, if you do not know how to conserve the unity of the
diverse appearances which everything assumes in these diverse
spheres, then life is devoid of meaning, then one must grant that
you are justified in maintaining your pet theory that one can say
of everything, ‘‘Do it or don’t do it – you will regret both’’.’ The
alternative to such a synthesis, in the case of this aesthete, at least,
seems to be scepticism and/or nihilism.
Kierkegaard is not entirely consistent in his account of these stages
or spheres. On the one hand, he stresses the ‘either/or’ that
catapults one from one state to the other. Individuating choice is
5. Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac
36
Existentialism
clearly at the core of each move. And there seems to be no simple
return to the prior sphere after the leap has occurred. Once having
chosen to play the ethical game, as it were, one cannot reconsider
and return to the purely aesthetic without qualification. You have
lost your innocence, literally, and now can resume your hedonistic
behaviour only as an immoral person. By parity of reasoning, it
would seem, the lonely individual who had made the leap of
religious faith cannot backslide to the merely aesthetic or even to
the purely ethical (as if the experience of its limits had not occurred)
without incurring the penalty of ‘sin’ – a properly religious category,
though Kierkegaard sometimes conflates it with ethical vice. And
yet, as we have just observed, the point of seeing these spheres as
‘three great allies’ implies either a Hegelian ‘synthesis’ (return of the
repressed) or an ‘overlap’ that resonates more fully with the image
of sphere than with that of stage. In either case, the guiding theme
of individuating ‘choice’ is seriously compromised. Admittedly, one
of the advantages of such indirect communication as Kierkegaard’s
use of pseudonyms (or Nietzsche’s of allegories, or even Plato’s of
dialogues) is that one does not have to seek consistency among the
voices. As we shall see, the existentialists prize ambiguity. But, to
repeat, they are not irrationalists. They aim to make sense insofar as
sense can be made in and out of our contingent world.
Freedom but not for all: Nietzsche
Existentialism is a philosophy of freedom, even if these thinkers do
not agree on the precise meaning of that basic term. Nietzsche, for
one, famously denied the notion of free will and the moral choice
that it exercises. His project of bringing the human being back to
earth and away from its illusions about the transcendent and
eternal turned him toward the biological dimension of human
existence, its irrational instincts and drives: what he called
‘will-to-power’, which, despite its popular association with choice
and dominance, is really the answer to the metaphysical question
‘What is there, ultimately?’ – and this, notwithstanding his animus
against metaphysics. Taken in its cosmic sense, will-to-power is the
37
Becoming an individual
force that moves the universe; understood biologically, it is the
irresistible life impetus that drives the biosphere; psychologically, it
is the drive to dominate and control. Its ‘highest’ expression is the
self-control exercised by the free spirits for whom Nietzsche
reserves a ‘higher’ morality than the chiefly religious ethics of the
herd. As French philosopher Michel Haar observes, ‘Nature as a
whole is will-to-power’, and it manifests itself in every dimension of
existence. This is why philosopher Paul Ricoeur could list Nietzsche
among the ‘masters of suspicion’, along with Marx and Freud. Each
thinker casts doubt on our ostensive accounts of why we do what we
do. The real reason for our behaviour, they claim, lay elsewhere. In
Nietzsche’s case, that ultimate source is will-to-power. As Foucault
will later say in a Nietzschean mode, the most high-minded efforts
at penal reform in the early 19th century, for example, were
ultimately expressions of the desire for more effective control of
populations.
What place is there, then, in such a universe for creative freedom in
the existentialist sense? What is the ground for the responsibility
that we feel in ourselves and ascribe to others? This is the perennial
problem of freedom versus determinism, but given a more dramatic
twist as befits an existentialist version. In a universe where every
event has a cause and every cause is necessitating (both claims open
to dispute), no place seems left for the ‘absolute beginnings’ that
popular understanding of existentialist freedom proclaims. Every
event has an antecedent (whether natural or cultural according to
the kind of determinism one is proposing) and every cause is
necessitating. In effect, under this description, nobody could have
acted otherwise than they did.
The ‘error’ of free will, Nietzsche insists, is the belief that choice
rather than physiological and cultural forces is the basis of our
judgements of moral approval and disapproval. Displaying his
predilection for psychological rather than ontological explanations,
he remarks: ‘The evil acts at which we are most indignant rest on
the error that he who perpetrates them against us possesses free
38
Existentialism
6. Nietzsche’s intense gaze
will, that is to say, that he could have chosen not to cause us this
harm.’ If Nietzsche is correct, it would seem to follow that our
tolerance could know no bounds because, to quote the pre-
Romantic French novelist Madame de Staël, ‘to understand all is
to forgive all’. Though this may be the wisdom of Spinoza and his
German admirer, it is scarcely the common sense of the herd.
But Nietzsche, in his allegory of a religious prophet, Zarathustra,
sets forth the possibility of a ‘higher’ ethic based on the freedom/
ability to create values. In a sense, with the ‘death of God’, that is,
with the increasing irrelevance of the idea of the Judaeo-Christian
God, the ‘free’ spirits (Nietzsche’s true individuals) are challenged to
assume divine prerogatives, among which the most important is
that of creating life-affirming moral and life-enhancing aesthetic
values. ‘Man is an evaluating animal’, Nietzsche claims, and moral
values of nobility and aesthetic values of the beautiful coalesce in
the project of making of one’s life a work of art. This union of the
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
Born in Röcken, Germany. Such was his recognized brilliance
that he was named professor of philology at the University of
Basel before he had received his doctorate. Burdened with
poor health most of his life, he resigned his professorship
after ten years and spent the next decade moving around
Europe, writing essays known for their caustic wit and
affirmation of life. The father of ‘atheistic’ existentialism, his
most famous pronouncement is ‘God is dead’, meaning that
modern science has rendered belief in the Divine irrelevant.
His self-appointed task was to combat the nihilism that
this event entailed. He succumbed to insanity during the last
decade of his life.
40
Existentialism
noble and the beautiful can save us from ourselves as it did the
Ancient Greeks; that is, from the despair arising out of our
realization that the Universe does not care. Art is to supplant
religion for Nietzsche, just as it would later promise a kind of
salvation to Anton Roquentin, the protagonist in Sartre’s
philosophical novel Nausea. So it seems that an ethics of freedom is
available to those ‘free spirits’ who have the ears to hear and the
courage to affirm what they hear. Could they have done otherwise,
those free spirits? Nietzsche seems to dismiss this as a false problem
raised by the erroneous belief in free will. In fact, they will not do
‘otherwise’, if they are truly free spirits, since it follows from their
nobility of birth or character to act in just this manner.
Nietzsche sees our current Judaeo-Christian ethics as the result of
an exercise of will-to-power on the part of ‘slaves’ who reversed, or
‘transvalued’, an original ‘master’ morality. In Nietzsche’s fabulous
account, the original ‘pagan’ leaders subscribed to a life-affirming
morality of the noble and the ignoble. These values were the very
opposite of what we know as Judaeo-Christian morality. Motivated
by ressentiment against the masters’ life-affirming and unvarnished
exercise of will-to-power, Nietzsche hypothesizes, the priestly class
of the slaves inverted the master’s values into their own categories of
what today we call moral ‘good and evil’ by a covert exercise of will-
to-power. Thus the masters’ good and bad (noble and ignoble) was
transvalued into the slaves’ evil and good respectively. What the
masters had considered good, the slaves condemned as evil and
what they disdained as ignoble became the slaves’ ‘virtues’ of
humility, pity, and the like. Nietzsche preaches a higher morality to
the ‘free spirits’ which consists of a reversal of the slaves’
transvaluation such that selfishness is converted from a slavish vice
to a masterly virtue and so forth. This new (or older) morality is
thus ‘beyond good and evil’ of Judaeo-Christian ethics but
subscribes to the ‘good and bad’ of the master morality. Where
the master’s exercise of will-to-power was relatively open and
unbridled, that of the slaves was marked by a covert, life-denying
ressentiment. The reversal that Nietzsche teaches the free
41
Becoming an individual
spirits is essentially life-affirming once more. But it is only for
the few.
Nietzsche proposes to those who can bear it a doctrine of fatalism
that is even more challenging to the existentialist spirit than the
determinism just discussed. According to this theory, we are fated
to do just what we do. Nietzsche calls this the thesis of ‘eternal
recurrence’. He thinks it follows from the fact that our options are
finite but time is infinite. Thus, as he interprets it, whatever can
happen will occur again an infinite number of times. If
determinism is retrospective, fatalism is prospective; it concerns
what is written in the book of life, the pages of which have yet to be
turned. Given this situation, Nietzsche’s recommendation is not
passive resignation but active ‘love of fate’ (amor fati) as the
ancient Stoics preached. We shall review Camus’s version of this
doctrine later on. But whether one takes this theory literally or,
more plausibly, reads it as a moral imperative to act with courage
and circumspection, ‘redeeming the past by a resolute act of will’, as
Zarathustra urges, it raises the issue again of how ‘free’ we are to
follow or to reject Nietzsche’s counsel. And this is a paradox worthy
of Kierkegaard.
Curiously, Kierkegaard’s Judge William faces his hapless young
aesthete with a somewhat analogous challenge by referring to a
kind of psycho-social conditioning:
For me the instant of choice is very serious . . . because . . . [of the]
danger that the next instant it may not be equally in my power to
choose, that something already has lived which must be lived over
again. To think that for an instant one can keep one’s personality a
blank, or that strictly speaking one can break off and bring to a halt
the course of the personal life is a delusion. The personality is
already interested in the choice before one chooses, and when the
choice is postponed the personality chooses unconsciously, or
the choice is made by obscure powers within it. So when at last the
choice is made, one discovers (unless, as I remarked before, the
42
Existentialism
personality has been completely volatilized) that there is something
which must be done over again, something which must be revoked,
and this is often very difficult.
In the case of Kierkegaard, the choice is reciprocal with the ‘self ’
that it both constitutes and expresses. ‘Personality’ here resembles
more Nietzsche’s underlying ‘instinct’ that urges the decision and
serves as its default mode. Or, perhaps better, it functions like a
habit that is the sedimentation of previous choices, in which case
the autonomy of existential choice can be preserved.
Sartre wrote an essay entitled ‘Cartesian Freedom’ where he
developed the Nietzschean view that, in the absence of belief in
God, we should assume the absolute freedom that Descartes had
ascribed to the Divinity. In phenomenological terms, this meant
that the entire ‘world’ (the horizon of our meanings) is our creation
for which we hold total responsibility. ‘We are without excuse’, he
insisted. Like Nietzsche, Sartre focused chiefly on the creation of
moral values, as we have seen. But unlike his predecessor, he
claimed that these values were the result of our creative ‘choices’.
Nietzsche, on the contrary, seems to believe that ‘those who can
hear’, that is, the free spirits, are genetically capable of being moved
by the force of his arguments, which elude or threaten the herd. If
so, he is subscribing to a kind of psycho-biological determinism (we
must follow what we perceive to be the strongest argument and only
the free spirits are capable of appreciating those motives that are
properly life-affirming). This certainly separates him from Sartre
and de Beauvoir but not unambiguously from Kierkegaard, as we
have just seen.
‘To philosophize in view of the exception’
The first one to propound a philosophy of Existenz was the German
psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers. Though he devoted many
pages to Nietzsche and very few to Kierkegaard, it was probably the
latter who influenced him more. Jaspers was the first major thinker
43
Becoming an individual
to discuss them as a pair. Despite their contradictory views on the
existence of God, Jaspers considered Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to
be the major thinkers of the 19th century after Hegel and the ones
whose works most effectively set the stage for 20th-century
European thought. As the Nazi regime was strengthening its grip
on German society and culture in 1935, Jaspers, a courageously
anti-Nazi figure, spoke the following in a public lecture: ‘Regarding
the situation of philosophizing as well as of real life, Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche articulate the impending calamity which at that time
no one had become aware of (except as momentary, quickly
forgotten presentiments) but which became clear to them.’ That
calamity was the devaluing of what Jaspers called Existenz (the
properly human way of existing) for the sake of a naive form of
scientific knowledge. Without slipping into irrationalism and with
due respect for the power as well as the limits of reason to guide our
lives, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche criticized ‘systematic’
accounts such as Hegel offered of our elusive and ambiguous
existence. Each spoke to the individual, the one who had the spirit
to be able to understand and accept what they were teaching. It was
in this regard that Kierkegaard cited the 18th-century German
scientist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s epigram: ‘Such
works are mirrors; if a monkey peeks in, no apostle can peek out.’
In Jaspers’s eyes, both men pursued the values of honesty,
commitment, and ‘authentic truth’ beyond the limit of their
physical and psychological endurance. They were truly exceptions,
to be admired but not imitated. No one is obliged to martyrdom, he
seemed to be saying. Like Socrates, they lived and suffered the
authenticity of their teaching. Their lives were what Jaspers called
‘shipwreck’. As such, they stand as warnings of the excess that we
should not follow but likewise as models of the virtues we should
emulate. This inspires Jaspers’s lesson from their lives: ‘To
philosophize in view of the exception without being an exception’.
44
Existentialism
Chapter 3
Humanism: for and against
Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine.
What interests me is being a man.
Albert Camus, The Plague
If there is a humanism today, it rids itself of the illusion Valéry
designated so well in speaking of ‘that little man within man whom
we always presuppose.’
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
On 29 October 1945, Sartre delivered a public lecture entitled ‘Is
Existentialism a Humanism?’ that was soon to become the manifesto
of the existentialist movement. From all accounts, it was truly an
intellectual event. It certainly fuelled the flames of the movement
that was spreading from the Left-Bank cafes and music halls of Paris
to similar haunts across Europe and around the world. Delivered to
an overflow crowd, it summarized briefly what came to be known as
the defining characteristic of Sartrean existentialism: the claim that
‘existence precedes essence’. Given the postulated atheism of Sartre’s
view, it seemed to follow that individuals were left to create their own
values because there was no moral order in the universe by which
they could guide their actions, indeed, that this freedom was itself the
ultimate value to which one could appeal (as he put it, ‘in choosing
anything at all, I first of all choose freedom’). Now this much could
have been gleaned by anyone who had read his masterwork,
45
Being and Nothingness, published two years earlier. But that long
and difficult book was not exactly a bestseller and, one could add,
like Darwin’s The Origin of Species, it was more often cited
than read.
What made this lecture necessary was not only that it rendered
more accessible many of the basic claims of the larger work, but that
it attempted to answer the objections of Sartre’s leading critics from
both the Communists and the Catholics that this new philosophy
was the incarnation of bourgeois individualism and that it
was totally insensitive to the demands of social justice felt by
war-ravaged European society. In other words, the leading voice of
existentialist thought was challenged to answer the claims that his
was just another narcissistic opiate to divert the youth from the task
of rebuilding a just society out of the ruins of the Fascist tragedy.
Existentialism would lose its credibility to the larger public if it
could not present a viable and relevant social philosophy.
Such a task could scarcely be met in an evening’s lecture. Indeed,
the strength and weakness of this brief talk lay in its attempt to do
so. Sartre appealed to Kant’s ethic of universal principles (the ones
that Kierkegaard’s Abraham had suspended for a higher goal) when
he said that no one could be free in a concrete sense (and not merely
in the abstract sense employed in Being and Nothingness that
defines the individual as free) unless everyone were free. ‘In
choosing, I choose for all people’, he insisted. And in words that
carry a distinctively Kantian ring, Sartre challenges that each agent
ought to say to himself: ‘Am I he who has the right to act such that
humanity regulates itself by my acts?’ This seemed to convey a sense
of responsibility for the other person and even for society as a whole
that was different from his previous contentions. Sartre introduced
yet another ethical principle when he asserted that in every moral
choice we form an image of the kind of person we want to be and,
indeed, of what any moral person should be: ‘For in effect, there is
not one of our acts that, in creating the man we wish to be, does not
at the same time create an image of man such as we judge he ought
46
Existentialism