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THE RISE OF EXISTENTIALISM
by
Nobin Narzary
Under the Guidance of
Fr. John Sequeira
An Article Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of
the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Philosophy
November 2011
DIVYADAAN
Salesian Institute of Philosophy
Nashik – 422005
INDIA
INTRODUCTION
Existentialism was a philosophy which developed between nineteenth and twentieth century. It is a philosophical trend which was not well accepted in the beginning, but later became a massive and powerful movement. This philosophical movement is believed to have originated in the writings of 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Actually, existentialist trends were visible very early in the history of philosophy. For instance it is said that Socrates expressed some of his opinions in a very existential language. Even St. Augustine is believed to have used an existential language in his writings. Thus we see that existentialism as an ideology or as style of expression is quite an old terminology. But it gained acceptance in the normal philosophical circles only in the twentieth century.
Existentialism is basically a philosophy which developed as a reaction to the existing social situation. During the time of the development of existentialism we see that idealism was held as the only valid and true philosophy. Being the time of two World Wars, this era witnessed lack of respect for human life and dignity; it was this social situation that existentialism responded to. If we analyze existentialism we realize it is nothing but a trend in the history of philosophy which gives a lot of importance to human existential situation. It is in existentialism that dignity and right of a human person is paid attention to. One of the most important issues existentialism deals with is the human authenticity; existentialism views authenticity as highest of all virtues. Here the feelings, emotions and longings of human being are respected. Thus care and love for human beings as equals is promoted. In simple words, we may call it a very down to earth and realistic philosophy, because it looks at everyday problems which affect our daily life and suggests ways to handle them.
In this article I intend to describe the rise and growth of existentialism. It is basically a description of the development of existentialism. Here I intend to expound the meaning of the term Existentialism, its Origins and the History of its Development. My article will also deals with the dangers that existentialism could lead to, if taken to the extremes. Hence, this small venture is my attempt at trying to understand the development of existentialism more clearly.
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1. The Meaning of Existentialism
The term existentialism is used to refer to a philosophical trend that focused on the importance of taking the human existential situation very seriously. It is a philosophy that deals with things here and now. Actually, “Existentialism is a term applied to the work of several 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject, not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.”[1] In existentialism, “the individual’s starting point is characterized by what has been called the existential attitude or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.”[2] Most existentialists regard traditional, systematic or academic philosophy, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience and consequently, impractical or useless. The major theme of existentialism is as the term suggests, existence; it is understood in German word, Existenz which basically means “standing out from mere biological vitality by which all sub-human forms of existence are characterized and circumscribed.”[3]
The early 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of existentialism. He maintained that “the individual is solely responsible for giving her or his own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many existential obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, alienation, and boredom.”[4] The existentialist philosophers who came after Kierkegaard retain the emphasis on the individual, but differ, in varying degrees. We can thus think of atheist existentialists and theist existentialist. Existentialism became fashionable in the post-World War years as a way to reassert the importance of human individuality and freedom. It was during this time that existentialism spread all over the world and especially Europe. It is actually very difficult to define existentialism however if one attempted to define it, it could be defined as; “an attempt at philosophizing from the stand point of the actor instead of, as has been customary, from that of the spectator.”[5]
The term existentialism was used to refer to “a set of ideas about human existence, beyond the terms used in ancient philosophy and objective science.”[6] The term existentialism is used both for philosophical concepts and for literary works, as well as being a label applied to various works by others. The exact meaning depends on the particular writer, and some writers objected to the notion of being called existentialists as an attempt to restrict their ideas into a pre-defined category.[7] The early 19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, posthumously regarded as the Father of Existentialism, maintained that “the individual has the sole responsibility for giving one's own life meaning and with living life passionately and sincerely, in spite of many obstacles and distractions including despair, angst, absurdity, choice, boredom, and death.”[8] The subsequent existential philosophers retain the emphasis on the subjective individual, but differ, in varying degrees, on how one achieves a fulfilling life, what obstacles must be overcome, and what external and internal factors are involved, including the potential consequences of the existence or non-existence of God. Some existentialists considered the meaning of life to be based in faith, while others noted self-determined goals.[9] Existentialism became fashionable after World War II, as a way to reassert the importance of human individuality and freedom. As such, many existential philosophers did not consider themselves existentialists as they did not want to be associated to or typecast with other philosopher’s conception of existentialism. In general, “existentialism has been described as a set of ideas to categorize human existence, beyond the traditional ancient philosophies and scientific method.”[10]
2. The Origin of Existentialism
The origin of existentialism is quite difficult to point out for the simple reason that this trend in philosophy had so to say a very humble beginning; it gained acceptance in philosophical circles only in twentieth century and in the post-war era. The term “existentialism seems to have been coined by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid-1940s and adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre who, on October 29, 1945, discussed his own existentialist position in a lecture to the Club Maintenant in Paris. The lecture was published as L'existentialisme est un humanisme, a short book which did much to popularize existentialist thought.”[11] This term is now being used to refer to those authors who have human existence as their main subject of research and writings. We have the example of Martin Heidegger who made human existence (Dasein) the focus of his work since the 1920s, and Karl Jaspers who called his philosophy Existenzphilosophie in the 1930s.[12] We cannot deny the fact that both Heidegger and Jaspers had been influenced by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, the crisis of human existence had been a major theme. He came to be regarded as the first existentialist, and has been called the Father of Existentialism. In fact, “he was the first to explicitly make existential questions a primary focus in his philosophy.”[13] In the latter years we see many other writers who implicitly discussed existentialist themes throughout the history of philosophy and literature. It was due to the exposure of existentialist themes over the decades, when society was officially introduced to existentialism, the term became quite popular.
Existentialism if not looked into deeply may seem that it is a new phenomenon and no one in the history of philosophy spoke about existential issues. But this notion may not be as true as it may seem to be, because if we go down the lane of the history of philosophy we realize how relevant the topic of existence had been from the time past. We read in the Confessions of St. Augustine, “the encounter of the individual with his mortal destiny, dread, anguish, and despair”[14] with which the existentialists of today familiarize us. If we go back to Socrates we see how the closing section of the Apology thrill us as we read it centuries later by its existentialist attitude to death, he writes, “I do not know, what lies in the beyond, but I go forward with courage and hope, and I shall find out in good time.”[15] Thus we already see some shades of existentialism in the early beginnings of philosophy itself.
3. A Short History of the Development of Existentialism
Some of the thinkers diagnosed a disease towards which modern world was moving. Those great thinkers took great courage to take counter positions against the existing philosophical trends. For instance German poet, Goethe, grew doubtful and melancholy when he weighed the progressive trends of the early 19th century against the chances of human happiness. In one of his works he mentions, “Men will become more shrewd and clever but they will not be better or happier. I see a time approaching when God will no longer be pleased with man, when he will have to smash his creation to pieces in order to re-juvinate it.”[16] Nietzsche, who came half a century after Goethe would express similar feelings, he wrote, “Oh thou proud European of the 19th century art thou not mad? Thy knowledge does not complete nature, it only kills thine own nature…thou climbest towards chaos. Thy manner of going is fatal to thee; the ground slips from under thy feet into the dark unknown; thy life has no stay but spiders’ webs torn asunder by every new stroke of thy knowledge.”[17] It was between the time of Goethe and Nietzsche that Hegel proposed or rather came up with his Metaphysical Idealism. Probably his intention was to unify science, philosophy and religion. He used a dialectical method to do so.[18] But as we see his theory was attacked by many thinkers from all sides. In fact his own followers, influenced by Auguste Comte’s positivism developed a Dialectical Historic Materialism. This new dialectical materialism “saw in history no longer any issues involving problems of true and false, right and wrong, good and evil but merely questions of fact and material force.”[19] Hegel through his idealism propagated a deductive system of reasoning but no sooner was it replaced by the inductive method of natural science.[20] Many other trends that came after Hegel attacked his Idealism most popular among them being, materialism influenced by Comte, Darwin and others.[21]
Existentialism is foreshadowed most notably by 19th century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. In the 20th century, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (starting from Husserl's phenomenology) influenced other existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and (absurdist) Albert Camus.[22] Some of the other writers who had existentialist tint were Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Franz Kafka; their literary works portrayed lot of existentialist themes. It is quite visible that, “although there are some common tendencies among existentialist thinkers, there are major differences and disagreements among them (for example, the divide between atheist existentialists like Sartre and theistic existentialists like Martin Buber and Paul Tillich); not all of them accept the validity of the term as applied to their own work.”[23]
One of the most distinctive marks of existentialism is the variety of mode of expressions they used. For instance, “the novels of Sartre are read by many who do not grasp the moral purpose behind the deliberately nauseating account he gives of human lives in our great cities. His plays delight a few, intrigue more and one may suspect, puzzle most of those who go to see them.”[24] An existential novelist like Camus could distress one by his portrait of the outsider and then go on to write the plague as a credo of atheist humanism.[25] Some writers describe Heidegger’s Zeit Iste Halfte as one of the most obscure books ever written. We also realize that In L’ Etre et le Neant the existentialism of Sartre takes on immense proportions.[26] Following the example of Sartre, Gabriel Marcel has used media of expression, the formal philosophical discussion and the novel or play.[27]
Some of the most prominent existentialists, who contributed to the growth of this philosophical trend, are as follows:
3.1 Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard was born in 1813; he was the last of seven children by a second marriage. Kierkegaard lived all his life in Copenhagen; in fact it is the place of his birth and death. Kierkegaard was very strongly influenced by his father, his father was “profoundly melancholy and exerted a powerful and somber influence upon Kierkegaard, communication to the child his preoccupation with his own guilt and the most violent concepts of the Christian faith. Kierkegaard later described this treatment as spiritual rape.”[28] Kierkegaard’s “ideas about human freedom in an uncertain world make him one of the founders of existentialism, even though he did not use that label for himself.”[29] However there is, indeed very little in existentialist philosophy today, which cannot also be found in the writings of Kierkegaard.
3.2 Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was born in 1889; he belonged to the Black Forest region and came from a Catholic peasant family. He was “actively interested from early youth in western theology and philosophy.”[30] He “employed Husserl's ideas about phenomenology in an effort to better understand the nature of 'Being' - i.e., questions about ontology. Indeed, according to Heidegger there is only one basic question in philosophy: the Seinsfrage, or the question of Being.”[31]
3.3 Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844, near Leipzing. His father was of a Protestant pastor, who died before Nietzsche was five. “At school he was influenced by Greek studies and by the Poet Holderlin, himself a passionate Grecian. Meant for the church, he abandoned theology for philology and followed Ritschl from the University of Bonn to that of Leipzing, where Goethe had been inscribed a student one hundred years earlier. He took Goethe as his master; fell under the spell of Schopenhauer, read the Greeks, above all the pre-Socratics, and such moderns as Novalis, Brentano and Heine.”[32] He may be described as a difficult, complex, and controversial philosopher in fact he has been claimed as part of a number of difficult philosophical movements. Because his work was consciously designed to break from the philosophy of the past, it is perhaps expected that much of what would come after him would expand upon the themes he discussed.
3.4 Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers was a German philosopher, born in 1883 at Oldenburg. He was the son of a bank manager. As a youth, “he studied law at Heidelberg and Munich, before devoting himself during the next five years to the study of medicine, at Berlin, Gottingen, and Heidelberg.”[33] His “place in the history of philosophy is based primarily on his work in existentialism - indeed, he may be considered the first to construct a self-consciously existentialist philosophy in the modern era.”[34] Jaspers originally studied law and medicine, even receiving an M.D. from University of Heidelberg but today he is well known as an existentialist philosopher.
3.5 Jean Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French novelist and philosopher. He was born in 1905; he studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and went to Havre to teach at the Lycee. “Between1939-1941 he was in the army, and spent nine months as a prisoner of war in Germany. After his release, he was active in the resistance movement from 1941-44.”[35] Perhaps today “he is most famous for his development and defense of atheistic existential philosophy - as a matter of fact, his name is linked with existentialism more closely than any other, at least in most people's minds.”[36]
3.6 Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist and novelist whose literary work is regarded as a primary source of modern existentialist thought. “A principle theme in Camus' novels is the idea that human life is, objectively speaking, meaningless. This results in 'absurdity' which can only be overcome by a commitment to moral integrity and social solidarity.”[37]
3.7 Gabriel Marcel
Gabriel Marcel was born in 1889, his father being French Minister in Stockholm and afterwards director of the great national collections. His mother died when he was four, and he was brought up by an aunt. From his childhood he had much opportunity of travel, and places played an important formative part in his intellectual and cultural enhancement. During the First World War, he was not fit for active service and was engaged for the Red Cross in tracing the missing. It was this experience which transformed his life completely; it was here that he realized what it means to lose someone who is close at heart. From his youth “he engaged dramatic writing and in philosophical studies, beginning with the idealism of German, English, and American thinkers.”[38] He was very much into music and composition. In fact he is believed to have said, “It was my true vocation, in that alone I am creative.”[39] He lived more like an agnostic but after much reflection and experiences during the war he was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in 1929 at the age of 39.
4. The Dangers that Extreme Forms of Existentialism Could Lead To
Every philosophy begins with good intention but taking a single philosophy too seriously could lead one to some very negative consequences; though we cannot deny the fact that every philosophy has something valuable to teach us. Humans have always been questioning about their existence and comparing one’s life with that of other creatures. “Existentialism in its modern and particularly its contemporary form concentrates this critical reflection on the individual human self.”[40] It is a system of philosophy that “confronts the individual existence with those collective claims and forces which threaten to submerge or pulverize individuality and personality in abstract, ideal essences or in such pseudo absolutes as the nation, the fatherland, the race.”[41] Existentialism grew in Europe as a reaction to “the collectivistic and idealistic trends which were found useless in practical life. So we may say existentialism was the product of the modern European crisis but on a whole we may say it was the result of modern crisis of human existence.”[42] Existentialism taken to the extreme could lead to negative results like “narcissic self-centrism,”[43]extreme forms of materialism, pragmatism, subjectivism and individualism.
When we read between the lines of existentialism we realize that it is not the best of philosophical systems; because it has its own defects. We cannot deny the fact that it brings forth lot of positive consequences; however it is also criticized by various thinkers in many different ways. In fact, some of whom we consider as existentialist philosophers have been found criticizing each other with regard to certain issues. “Herbert Marcuse criticized Existentialism, especially Being and Nothingness (1943), by Jean-Paul Sartre, for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of existence itself: Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory.”[44] In 1946, Sartre already had replied to Marxist criticism of Existentialism in the lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. In Jargon of Authenticity, Theodor Adorno criticized Heidegger's philosophy, especially his use of language, as a mystifying ideology of advanced, industrial society, and its power structure.[45]
In one of the rare cases, in letter on Humanism, Heidegger criticized Sartre's existentialism: Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement “he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.”[46] Some of the Logical positivists, such as Carnap and Ayer, say “Existentialists frequently are confused about the verb to be in their analyses of Being. They argue that the verb is transitive and pre-fixed to a predicate (e.g., an apple is red): without a predicate, the word is meaningless.”[47] Thus we realize that though existentialism is one of the most popular philosophical trends of today it is not free from errors.
CONCLUSION
Existentialism as we see it today has reserved for itself as being one of the most popular philosophical systems till date. In fact many philosophical trends have developed from this school of thought. As we see it, it is very down to earth philosophy and appealing to most people. If we look at the world of today we realize that people are very pragmatic and they view things very realistically and always in terms of practicality and impracticality. There is no place for idealism and useless intellectual gymnastics today. People by and large look for something that is practical and relevant here and now and this is one of the reasons why existentialism has become very popular today. Of course we cannot deny the fact that there are other philosophies too that are popular and well received in society. However existentialism still has a place in the hearts of many.
When we read existentialism we come across philosophers who were atheists as well as theists. Existentialism has a place for all. Basically it is a philosophy that challenges us to be more human, more loving and more understanding in our dealings with others. A philosophy which challenges us to be more authentic and true to ourselves. Truth is one of the most important virtues that existentialists keep on speaking about. There are some who criticize existentialism for being too literal and worried about simple events of life. But after all it is all that matter to human beings.
One of the great lesions we can learn from existentialism is to be more concerned and considerate towards our fellow human beings, after all we are social beings and we find meaning only in being sociable. If we apply existentialist philosophy to our society surely it will bring about lot of positive changes. Because then there will be more love and concern among the people and less of selfishness that is eating up today’s society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen E.L., Existentialism from Within, (London: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1974)
Blackham H. J., Six Existentialist Thinkers, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961)
“ Existentialist Philosophers: Biographical History of Existentialism,”
http://atheism.about.com/od/existentialistphilosophers/Existentialist_Philosophers_Biographical_History of_Existentialism.htm, accessed on 13/11/2011.
Reinhardt F. Kurt, The Existentialist Revolt, (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1972)
Essence precedes existence. I wonder how before postmodern era pessimism was always in vogue. It is only the expectations that hurt! Keeping no expectations leaves no space for the hurt since when there are no expectation then what is to be shaken. A simple example, a student expecting A grade gets B+ and a student expecting C also gets B+, then student expecting C would be way more happier than the other student. Satisfaction is perspective and happiness too. Being too much happy and satisfied makes it hard for you to be happy since it is unity of opposites. Pessimism has its share of wisdom.
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