First, existentialists are in agreement that philosophy does not begin from a standpoint of detachment and objectivity because it can never address the concrete concerns of the existing individual. This means that any account of what it means to be human has to start from my own first-person experiences and the situated understanding that I have of myself. Indeed, as the phenomenologists have shown, I have no choice but to start out from the insider's perspective, from my sense of things as they initially appear to me from my own perspective and modes of apprehension.
Second, existentialists reject the configuration of the human being as a self-contained subject that is separate and distinct from objects. In my everyday life I am bound up with the meanings, values, and practices of the world. As an embedded way of being, I am limited and constrained by the world that I find myself in, and this influences how I interpret myself and make sense of who I am. This means that any attempt to address the question of human existence must also address how I am situated in a shared world.
Finally, the standpoint of detachment and objectivity cuts us off from the affective meaning and worth of things. When I adopt the standpoint of objectivity, I am often left in a dispassionate state, where I am alienated from what matters to me as an individual, and the world shows up as a “gray collage of facts” (Bergmann 1983, 41). Detached in this way, my choices and actions are stripped of their emotional significance. I may be able to know what is objectively true, but without feelings I cannot know what is true for me, because it is the passion, focus, and intensity, not the correctness, of my choices that determine their truth. As Kierkegaard says, “In making a choice, it is not so much a question of choosing the right way as of the energy, the earnestness, [and] the pathos with which one chooses” (1946a, 106).
But if intellectual detachment results in an emotionally desiccated and bleached-out view of the world, the insider's perspective presents its own problems. Specifically, if we are embedded in a world of meanings that invariably distorts and colors our view of things in ways that we are not explicitly aware, then how can we ever be true to ourselves and commit to an identity that is genuinely our own? In order to address this question, we have to first get a clearer sense of the ways in which existentialists contend that we are bound up in the world. In the next chapter we will explore a number of influential accounts of being-in-the-world and show how they not only undermine the view of the philosopher as a detached spectator but also challenge a number of entrenched dualisms that have been central to Western thought.
Cooper, D. (2012). Existentialism as a philosophical movement. In S. Crowell (ed.), The Cambridge companion to existentialism (pp. 27–49). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Joseph, F. and J. Reynolds (2011). Existentialism, phenomenology and philosophical method. In F. Joseph, J. Reynolds, and A. Woodward (eds.), The Continuum companion to existentialism (pp. 15–35). London: Continuum.
Moran, D. (2000). Introduction to phenomenology. New York: Routledge.
Richardson, J. (1986). Existential epistemology: A Heideggerian critique of the Cartesian project. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
3: Being-in-the-World
Being-in
Again, existentialists reject the standpoint of detachment and objectivity because it invariably overlooks the situated needs and commitments that matter to me as an individual. As Kierkegaard writes, “What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth, of working through all the systems of philosophy … to construct a world in which I do not live but only hold it up for the view of others?” (1959, 78). The aim of rational detachment is to achieve the ‘perspective of eternity,’ but this results in the abandonment of the concrete meanings that shape our lives. To address this problem, existentialists often begin their projects with accounts of life as it is lived in ordinary contexts. What is revealed in these accounts is that we are already ‘being-in,’ that is, embedded and involved in a shared world. Understood this way, being-in is not a reference of spatial inclusion, of an object or thing that is inside a container (e.g., ‘The chicken is in the pot’). It is a reference to how we are concretely involved in the world in a particular way (e.g., ‘The professor is in class’). The latter example refers to how one is engaged in the practices of the academic world that constitute what it means to be a professor — lecturing to students, grading papers, holding office hours, replying to emails, etc. (see Dreyfus 1991, 40–43). ‘Being-in,’ then, is not an accidental property that we may or may not have; it is essential to and constitutive of what it means to be human. And ‘world’ is not to be understood in the usual sense as a spatial container or the sum total of objects. The world, rather, is that “wherein [we] live” (Heidegger 1962, 83). It is the meaningful public setting of our lives.
Insofar as it is constitutive of human existence, ‘being-in’ suggests that we are not disinterested minds looking down on the world. We are already caught up in a concrete situation as we handle various tools, try to accomplish certain tasks, and engage in the lives of others. This not only means that we encounter things from a limited physical perspective and orientation; it also implies that we are always woven into the meanings and values of our sociohistorical context, and this shapes the way we make sense of things, including ourselves. Interpreting existence from this standpoint allows existentialists to dismantle a number of dualisms that have dominated the Western philosophical tradition. To illustrate this, we can turn to the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who offer the most robust and influential accounts of being-in-the-world.
Undoing dualisms
By giving primacy to being-in-the-world, existentialists challenge the subject-object model that characterizes much of modern philosophy. This model, expressed most famously in the work of Descartes, regards humans as self-contained subjects of experience trapped in their own minds and who are trying to discover whether or not their ‘inner’ perceptions and ideas accurately represent ‘outer’ objects in the world. This representational view creates skepticism or doubt about whether or not anything in the world — that is, outside the ‘I’ or consciousness — can be known with any certainty. The result is an explicit separation between mental and physical phenomena and creates two competing accounts in the modern epistemological tradition, ‘realism’ and ‘idealism.’ On the realist view, the world and material things are said to exist externally or independently of our minds; on the idealist view, the only things we know that exist are the ideas in our own minds. Underlying these two accounts is the problem of proving the existence of a mind-independent world if the only thing we can claim to know with any certainly is the contents of our own mind. After all, how could I possibly doubt that I perceive, desire, or feel something? The problem is whether or not what I perceive, desire, or feel actually represents or corresponds to things that exist in the world. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) will famously refer to the fact that modern philosophers have still not proven whether or not an external world exists as a ‘scandal.’ Existentialists will go further than Kant by arguing that the whole ‘inner/outer’ question is nothing more than a tired pseudo-problem that has bogged down philosophers for three hundred years. As Heidegger says, what is truly “scandalous” is not that philosophers have failed to adequately demonstrate the existence of an external or mind-independent world, “but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again” (1962, 249).