This brief summary provides an indication of the purpose of this book. It is not only meant to offer an accessible and scholarly introduction to the central themes of existentialism. With references to a broad range of thinkers and drawing on the work of leading Anglophone commentators, it is meant to show that existentialism is by no means a moribund or outdated mode of thinking. The ideas remain fresh and vital because they speak to the most pressing concerns that we face in the secular age: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘How should I live?’ In the following chapters, we will engage the core ideas of existentialism, all the while keeping in view the difficulty in demarcating the boundaries of the movement. It is important to remind the reader that, among the myriad thinkers traditionally included under the label ‘existentialist,’ only Sartre and Beauvoir explicitly identified themselves as such. The term, in the way I am using it, refers to a diverse group of philosophers and literary figures who were concerned about the question of what it means to be human. And although the range of thinkers can be traced back to the classical works of Epicurus and the Stoic philosophies of Seneca and Epictetus, and core ideas can be found germinating in the writings of Augustine, Shakespeare, Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Pascal, my focus will be on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and those figures that followed Kierkegaard.
In order to cast the net as widely as possible and to bring literary and religious figures into the discussion, I reject David Cooper's notion that existentialism refers to a “relatively systematic philosophy” (1999, 8) and agree with commentators like Jeff Malpas (2012) who suggest that such a view invariably excludes seminal literary figures like Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka, and perhaps even Kierkegaard and Nietzsche themselves, whose indirect and aphoristic styles were anything but systematic. Indeed, I want to argue that these literary approaches are one of the major reasons why existentialism became the cultural phenomenon that it did. With little or no training in academic philosophy, readers were provided with vivid and accessible points of entry into the ultimate questions of ‘absurdity,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘death.’ By broadening the term in this way, I can draw on a more comprehensive range of figures as they become relevant to particular topics, regardless of whether or not they were philosophers or literary figures and whether or not they were inclined to self-identify as ‘existentialists.’ For the purposes of this project, if the work engages the struggle of the human condition, the anguish at the loss of moral absolutes, and the vertiginous freedom of self-creation, it can be called existentialism.
1: Existentialism and Modernity
Roots of the Western self
In order to situate the movement of existentialism within the context of recent European thought, we first have to go back to the earliest philosophical and religious currents that shaped the Western worldview. Understanding that it is impossible to compress the complexities of the last three millennia into a few pages, we can make the broad claim that the conflicting traditions of Hebraic faith on the one hand and Greek reason on the other have informed our sense of who we are. Both traditions offer the idea of the human being as unique to the extent that we are self-conscious and have ‘higher’ potentialities that allow us to surpass or transcend our finite earthly existence (e.g., Dreyfus 2009, 2012). In the tradition of Greek philosophy, transcendence was achieved through the standpoint of rational detachment, allowing the philosopher to rise above the temporal particularities of existence in order to gain knowledge of the universal, that is, to timeless and abstract forms or essences. In the Hebraic tradition, the experience of transcendence is understood not in terms of detached reason but in terms of an intense faith and trust in an incomprehensible God. This kind of faith can lead to confusion and despair because the Hebrew God is beyond rational understanding and is often cruel and violent. This is why, as William Barrett points out, there is a certain “uneasiness” in the biblical interpretation of the human condition that is not found in Greek philosophy (1958, 71). The picture of the human condition is one that is frail, finite, and filled with sin, and that stands naked and exposed before an unknowable God. In this sense, Job is the paradigmatic biblical figure. He confronts the calamitous trials that God has put before him, not with detached reason, but with the involved fullness of his whole being and all of the confusion, rage, and despair that comes with it. But through it all, his commitment to God remains passionate and unwavering, and it is by means of his faith that he is transformed. His anguish turns to awe in the face of God's infinite and incomprehensible majesty. In this way, we are introduced to the idea that the infinite and eternal can be revealed in passionate commitments that are finite and temporal. Thus, there is little discussion of heaven, the immortality of the soul, or the afterlife in the Hebrew Bible. Transcendence is found not in an otherworldly realm but in the concrete commitments of the whole person, body and soul, who inhabits this world. This idea of transcendence conflicts radically with the views of Plato and the tradition of Greek philosophy.
For Plato (427–347 bce), transcendence was not attained by the passionate faith of the whole person. It was achieved when reason, the ‘higher’ or divine part of the soul, rises above the ‘lower’ animal part, from the fleeting perceptions and passions of the body. This rational detachment makes theoretical knowledge possible, where ‘theory’ (theoria) is understood as a kind of disembodied seeing or contemplation. For Plato, the essential truths that philosophy discovers have the same form as the immutable truths of geometry and arithmetic. In this way, the philosopher becomes a disinterested spectator who transcends the contingent sensations of the body and comes to occupy a ‘God's-eye view’ of reality. This view allows him access to abstract ‘ideas’ (eidos), to the timeless and eternal essence of things. With Plato's influence, the cognizing mind becomes the absolute authority by discovering an unchanging ‘reality’ that lies behind the transitory ‘appearances’ of the temporal body.
We see, then, that the tradition of Greek reason conflicts with the Judaic worldview in two important ways. First, Greek philosophy provides a kind of intellectual protection or salvation from the experience of anguish and dread so vital to the Hebrew interpretation of faith. By focusing on knowledge of abstract ideas, the philosopher rises above the horrifying predicament that biblical figures like Job had to face. Second, Greek reason privileges a conception of transcendence that is attained through a disembodied theoretical standpoint. Indeed, for Plato, what distinguishes us as human beings is not our impassioned faith in an unknowable and fearsome God but the soul's ability to rationally detach from these emotional upheavals. It is only then that we arrive at a domain of truth that is immutable and timeless. The consequence of these conflicting versions of transcendence is a tension between two conceptions of selfhood in the West, one where the God of Abraham tells us to live one way, and the God of Greek reason tells us to live another (Dreyfus 2012, 97). The self, in the words of the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), emerges as a “conflict” or “contradiction,” pulled apart by an inner struggle between “the heart and the head,” between faith and reason (1954, 260). For figures like Unamuno, the tragedy of being human rests in part in the fact that this contradiction cannot be eradicated or overcome by separating the abstract truths of reason from the concrete commitments of faith. Such a separation is a denial of the wholeness of the human being and the anguished uncertainty and doubt at the core of our situation.