Barrett, W. (1958). Irrational man: A study in existential philosophy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Cotkin, G. (2003). Existential America. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dreyfus, H. (2009). The roots of existentialism. In H. Dreyfus and M. Wrathall (eds.), A companion to phenomenology and existentialism (pp. 137–161). Oxford: Blackwell.
McBride, W. (2012). Existentialism as a cultural movement. In S. Crowell (ed.), The Cambridge companion to existentialism (pp. 50–69). New York: Cambridge University Press.
2: The Insider's Perspective
The problem of detachment and objectivity
One of the enduring contributions of existentialism has been its critique of what Merleau-Ponty called “high-altitude thinking” (penseés de survol) (1968, 73). Beginning with Plato, this way of thinking has been associated with genuine truth and knowledge because it allows the philosopher to rise above the prejudices of history and the distorted flux of sense perceptions in order to gain access to the way things really are. The aim of philosophy, then, is to adopt a ‘God's-eye view’ or ‘view from nowhere,’ a dispassionate standpoint that gives us an objective and eternal perspective on reality, one that transcends our own temporal and historically situated view of things. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) sums up this detached attitude in the following way:
Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union [with reality] which the intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge — knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible to attain. (1969, 161–162)
For Plato, it is only by means of detached contemplation that we are able to comprehend the essential, unchanging form of things. In his famous ‘Allegory of the Cave,’ the philosopher is described as one whose intellect is freed from the worldly prison of fleeting images and shadows, who climbs up and out of the cave and is dazzled by the knowledge of abstract ideas that are immutable and timeless.
The model for this kind of philosophical knowledge has always been mathematics. Unlike the mutability of visible objects, the abstract objects of arithmetic and geometry are eternal and unchanging. This is why proper training in mathematics has been so important in the Western philosophical tradition. “It leads the soul forcibly upward,” as Plato says in the Republic, “and compels us to discuss the numbers themselves, never permitting anyone to propose for discussion numbers attached to visible or tangible bodies” (525d). On this account, when the sun appears to me through the situated perspective of my senses, as something warm, small, and yellow, I am not being provided with genuine knowledge. But when I detach myself from the contingencies of my physical body and my historical situation and employ the faculty of reason alone, I am able to encounter the essence of this particular object in terms of numbers that are timeless and universal. Instead of seeing a small circular thing, I see the unchanging essence of a circle expressed in the geometrical formula of, for example, πr2. It is the faculty of reason or the intellect, then, that gives us a ‘perspective of eternity’ (sub specie aeternitatis), allowing us to transcend the world of particular things and enter a world of timeless ideas or essences. And, as we saw in the preceding chapter, because this faculty gives us knowledge of objects that are eternal, it follows that the faculty itself must also be eternal. Thus, reason not only gives us the classical configuration of the human being as the ‘rational animal,’ it also makes us immortal, providing an escape from death and the frailties of time (see Barrett 1958, 79–91; Olson 1962, 41–50).
The Greek focus on rational detachment, objectivity, and the enduring certainties of mathematics was formalized into a method in the modern era beginning with early Enlightenment philosophers like Descartes. Understanding that arithmetic and geometry provided ‘the certainty and self-evidence of its reasoning,’ Descartes sought to use the deductive methods of mathematics to gain genuine knowledge of all things, including those in the physical world. In his Discourse on Method (1637), he describes his aim this way:
This long chaos of utterly simple and easy reasoning that geometers commonly use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations had given me occasion to imagine that all the things that can fall within human knowledge follow from one another in the same way, and that, provided only that one abstain from accepting any of them as true that is not true, and that one always adheres to the order one must follow in deducing the ones from the others, there cannot be any that are so remote that they are not eventually reached nor so hidden that they are not discovered. (1998, 11)
Descartes's method would provide knowledge that was ‘clear and distinct’ by creating an accurate picture of the external world that was represented in the intellect or mind. This could only be done by detaching ourselves from our normal way of experiencing things and abstracting out the contingent qualities of our senses and our historicity. It is through this logical, step-by-step method of abstraction that we begin to encounter nature in its mathematical form, where physical bodies are reduced to de-animated matter that is ‘extended, flexible, and mutable,’ whose qualities can be measured, and whose movement can be explained and predicted mathematically according to law-governed causal processes. And, to the extent that we too are physical bodies and part of the natural order, our decisions and actions can also be mathematized in terms of the same mechanistic laws. The French rationalist Paul Henri Holbach (1723–1789) describes how this method can be applied to human behavior when he writes, “Let [man] study nature, that he learn its laws, that he contemplate its energy and the immutable way it acts; let him apply his discoveries to his own felicity, and submit in silence to laws from whose binding force nothing can remove him” (cited in C. Taylor 1989, 326). With the rise of ‘methodologism,’ the classical conception of the human being as the ‘rational animal’ is recast. Reason is not simply the supreme faculty that gives us access to timeless truths and distinguishes us from other animals; there is now an underlying belief that in principle, every human decision and action is grounded in rational explanation (Williams 1985, 18).
It is this enduring philosophical assumption, that by adopting a standpoint of theoretical detachment and objectivity we can arrive at a rational explanation of human behavior, that informs much of the existentialist protest. For the existentialists, when it comes to the concrete concerns of the human situation, reason is inadequate. As beings who are self-conscious, our existence is always penetrated by feelings of uncertainty and doubt; we experience anguish in the face of our own death, in the radical contingency of our choices, and the sheer arbitrariness that anything, including ourselves, exists at all. The existentialists challenge the assumption that our actions are grounded in rational explanation, arguing that this creates the comforting illusion that there is a mechanism of stability, order, and control to the universe and to human existence. But, as Nietzsche says, this is nothing more than an invention, an intellectual “fable” we tell ourselves to deny how “transient, aimless and arbitrary” human existence actually is (1954b, 42).