40. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 868-890

Existence: Value in Existence (Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger). Faith: Christianity and Christendom (William Blake, Søren Kierkegaard)

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Jean-Paul Sartre: The Common Condition of Man 
In Existentialism and Humanism (1946) Sartre takes "the Cartesian cogito" -- "I think, therefore I am" -- as a "point of departure": "the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself." Anything outside of the individual consciousness is "no more than probable." 


But in fact, "I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another." Sartre calls this "inter-subjectivity." Through our experience with others, we arrive at "a human universality of condition. It is not by chance that the thinkers of today are so much more ready to speak of the condition than of the nature of man." This condition consists of "all the limitations which a priori define man's fundamental situation in the universe." These include the unvarying "necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and die there." Nevertheless, we "attempt either to surpass these limitations, or to widen them, or else to deny or to accommodate oneself to them."

What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realizes himself in realizing a type of humanity -- a commitment always understandable, to no matter whom in no matter what epoch -- and its bearing upon the relativity of the cultural pattern which may result from such absolute commitment.

It is the particular nature of the commitment that makes us part of a given culture: i.e., French, American, Chinese, modern, ancient, medieval, etc. "There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity," which is why we recognize other commitments, other cultures, as still human. This "existential humanism" is the recognition that "man is not shut up in himself but forever present in a human universe." Thus "it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, that man can realize himself as truly human." 

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Martin Buber: The Primary Words 

Martin Buber, date unknown

Like Sartre, in I and Thou (1923) Buber also recognizes relatedness as a key function in the human condition. The "Thou" of Buber's thought is the German du, the second-person pronoun that has no equivalent in modern English other than "you"; it presumes a familiarity between the speaker and the person addressed -- e.g., an adult and a child, members of the same family, lovers, close friends, etc. 


Buber contends that in all relatedness between subject and object there are what he calls "primary words": "the combination I-Thou" and "the combination I-It; wherein ... one of the words He and She can replace It." 

Primary words are spoken from the being. If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it. If It is said, the I of the combination I-It is said along with it. The primary word I-Thou can only be said with the whole being. The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being. 

Buber is not making a linguistic statement here, but rather a statement about the role of subject and object in human existence. To "experience" the world is to hold it in an I-It relationship. "The world has no part in the experience. It permits itself to be experienced, but has no concern in the matter." 


The I-Thou arises when a relationship, a mutuality, has been established. We can have an I-Thou relationship with nature, though it is a vague and tenuous one. In our relationship with other humans, however, "the relation is open and in the form of speech. We can give and accept the Thou." And then there's what Buber calls "our life with intelligible forms," which is the role of the imagination: "we feel we are addressed and we answer -- forming, thinking, acting." 

In every sphere in its own way, through each process of becoming that is present to us as we look out toward the fringe of the eternal Thou; in each we are aware of a breath from the eternal Thou; in each Thou we address the eternal Thou. 

In each case we perceive relatedness, but when we reduce this relationship to experience, when we attempt to objectify, the Thou becomes an It. 

This is the eternal source of art: a man is faced by a form which desires to be made through him into a work. this form is no offspring of his soul, but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power. The man is concerned with an act of his being. If he carries it through, if he speaks the primary word out of his being to the form which appears, then the effective power streams out, and the work arises. 

Love is a manifestation of I-Thou. Hate is a rejection of it. "Hate is by nature blind. Only a part of a being can be hated. He who sees a whole being and is compelled to reject it is no longer in the kingdom of hate, but is in that of human restriction of the power to say Thou.... Yet the man who straightforwardly hates is nearer to relation than the man without hate and love."


Eventually, "every Thou in our world must become an It." The relation terminates, if not because of separation or disaffection, eventually because of death. Even "love cannot persist in direct relation." But Thou is essential for the liberation of humanity from the sense of inevitability, of fate: "He who goes out to it with concentrated being and risen power to enter into relation becomes aware of freedom. And to be freed from belief that there is no freedom is indeed to be free." 

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Karl Jaspers: The Encompassing 


In Reason and Existenz (1935) and "On My Philosophy" (1941), Jaspers examines the context of existence, the Encompassing. "We always live and think within a horizon. But the very fact that it is a horizon indicates something further which again surrounds the given horizon." It is "the medium or condition under which all Being appears as Being for us." We sense it as "the most extreme, self-supporting ground of Being." It urges us, "Do not lose yourself in what is merely known! Do not let yourself become separated from Transcendence!" In this sense, Jaspers is echoing Buber's encouragement not to remain in the I-It but to strive for the I-Thou. 


"In the world man alone is the reality which is accessible to me. Here is presence, nearness, fullness, life.... To fail to be human would mean to be to slip into nothingness." But is there more beyond the human? 

In every form of his being man is related to something other than himself: as a being to his world, as consciousness to objects, as spirit to the idea of whatever constitutes totality, as Existenz to Transcendence.

Jaspers rejects the positivism of the nineteenth century that resulted from scientific discovery. Humankind must continue to strive "more decisively than ever for a certainty that he lacks, for the certainty that there is that which is eternal, that there is a Being through which alone he himself is. If the Deity is, then all hope is possible." But this "Deity, if it exists, is only as it appears to us in the world, as it speaks to us in the language of man and the world." 

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Martin Heidegger: Recollection of Being


In "The Way Back Into the Ground of Metaphysics" (1949), Heidegger also seeks the transcendent, the Encompassing, to overcome "the barrier which keeps man from the original involvement of Being in human nature." We have confused "beings" with Being, Heidegger says, and need "a different kind of thinking which is brought to pass by Being itself and, therefore, responsive to Being.


Which is a segue into the final section of the book: Faith. 

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William Blake: The Lord's Prayer Modernized


The introduction to this section observes, "The declining authority of the Christian churches, with the decline of individual Christian faith, is a cultural fact that weighs heavily upon the modern consciousness.... There have been attempts to turn the discrediting of public Christian institutions into a renascence of personal Christian belief; there have been reinterpretations of Christian doctrine and of the meaning of religion in general; and there have been embattled declarations of orthodoxy." 


Blake is one of those severe critics of institutionalized Christianity and of "the conventional believer [who] clings to his church in proportion to his own lack of real faith and his secret commitment to an irreligious secular world." His "modernization" of the Lord's Prayer (1827) is addressed to "Our Father Augustus Caesar" and is the prayer of a Tory for worldly success. 

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Søren Kierkegaard: A Hypocritical Generation


Kierkegaard's "Attack Upon 'Christendom'" (1854-55) is a sardonic look at ecclesiastical materialism, which is "playing Christianity" by substituting the outward observances of faith for the actual practice of it. Preachers in their churches as "Artists in dramatic costumes [who] make their appearance in artistic buildings." They are "tradesmen-priests," and the "official Christianity" of Sundays "is much worse than ... weekday worldliness, it is hypocrisy, it is blood-guilt."

The Christianity of the New Testament was truth. But man shrewdly and knavishly invented a new   kind of Christianity which builds the sepulchers of the prophets and garnishes the tombs of the righteous, and says, "If we had been in the days of our fathers." And this is what Christ calls blood-guilt.

For Kierkegaard, Christianity is predicated on suffering, which is precisely what today's Christians prefer to avoid. If Christ were to return, he would turn his anger on the hypocrisy of the ministers for leading the faithful astray "and likely as of yore He would make a whip of small cords and drive them out of the temple." In "the Sunday twaddle" of the church services, "Christ ... becomes a languishing figure, the impersonation of insipid human kindness," instead of the figure who turned his wrath upon the hypocrites.  

39. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 844-867

Existence: Value in Existence (Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers)

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Albert Camus: Absurd Freedom 


Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) took the story of the king condemned by the gods to roll a stone to the top of a hill and then watch it roll back down again, and to repeat the action for eternity, and made it a central existentialist fable about humankind's confrontation with the absurd. 


What sets humanity apart from the rest of living beings is reason, which compels us to desire order, unity, meaning, solutions, "clarity and cohesion." But since we can "understand only in human terms," much of the universe remains alien to us. "This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of the pen. What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve." Religions and systems tempt us to leap toward their solutions, but "the absurd man" must "reply ... that he doesn't fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands." 

Hence, what he demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.

This rejection of a "higher authority," of unquestionable revelation, carries with it the temptation of suicide. But if one rejects the notion that life must have meaning if it is to be worth living, then it "becomes clear ... that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning." Life "is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity." Suicide, like the accepting some religious or systematized authoritarian creed, "is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history.... In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death. But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously acceptance and rejection of death." We know we are going to die, but we reject the offer to get on with as soon as possible. "It is essential to die unreconciled and not of one's own free will. Suicide is a repudiation."


Recognition of the absurd also eliminates the paradoxes of free will. "Knowing whether or not man is free doesn't interest me. I can experience only my own freedom." A belief in God traps one in paradox: "either we are not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all-powerful. All the scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything from the acuteness of this paradox." 

I cannot understand what kind of freedom would be given me by a higher being. I have lost the sense of hierarchy. The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action. Now if the absurd cancels all my changes of eternal freedom, it restores and magnifies, on the other hand, my freedom of action. That privation of hope and future means an increase in man's availability.

A belief in the eternity of the soul limits one's freedom: "To the extent to which [a man] imagined a purpose to his life, he adapted himself to the demands of a purpose to be achieved and became the slave of his liberty." If the temporal existence is only a prelude to an eternal one to be achieved by following certain precepts, then one is not free. "The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future. Henceforth this is the reason for my inner freedom."

The absurd man ... catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consolation. But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given.

One lives in the "perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles." And accepting that this finite life is what one is given means that "what counts is not the best living but the most living" -- quantity of life rather than quality. "A man's rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate." The Greeks were mistaken to assert "that those who died young were beloved of the gods." Those who do so lose "the purest of joys, which is feeling, and feeling on this earth." 

Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death -- and I refuse suicide.

In their condemnation of Sisyphus, the gods "thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor." But Sisyphus triumphs over his punishment with his "scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life" even though his "whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing." When the rock rolls back downhill, the period in which he returns to start his labor again is "the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lair of the gods, he is superior to his fate."

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.... The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

Sisyphus's task, then, is much like that of Marx's alienated laborer. But rather than making this alienation a particular function of the class struggle, Camus turns it into a universal statement about the nature of consciousness. The alienation is not resolved by seizing the means of production but by acknowledging it and scorning it. 


And in the end, this is the only path to happiness. "Happiness and the absurd ... are inseparable." Sisyphus's "fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up." By scorning the gods, Sisyphus negates them. "The struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." 


Jean-Paul Sartre: Commitment 


Camus speaks of the refusal to hope, and so does Sartre in this excerpt from Existentialism and Humanism (1946). "Beyond the point at which the possibilities under consideration cease to affect my action, I ought to disinterest myself. For there is no God and no prevenient design, which can adapt the world an all its possibilities to my will. When Descartes said, 'Conquer yourself rather than the world,' what he meant was, at bottom, the same -- that we should act without hope." 


We should confine ourselves to that which we can experience, not basing our actions on a trust in "human goodness or upon man's interest in the good of society" or any concept of "human nature." What matters is one's own commitment. If one wishes to achieve a social change, one should do whatever one can to bring it about, but count on nothing outside of one's own endeavor: "there is no reality except in action." Similarly, "there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art." In short, "a man is no other than a series of undertakings." 


We are not by nature either cowards or heroes: "the coward makes himself cowardly, the heron makes himself heroic; and ... there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero. What counts is the total commitment, and it is not by a particular case or particular action that you are committed altogether."


     
Søren Kierkegaard: Faith by Virtue of the Absurd


In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1844) Kierkegaard outlines ideas that he embodies in Fear and Trembling through his equivalent of the myth of Sisyphus, the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac. And like Sartre, he begins with the recognition that one's own reality, not that of others, is the starting point: "the only question of reality that is ethically pertinent, is the question of one's own reality." 


But unlike Camus or Sartre, Kierkegaard makes room for faith: "To ask with infinite interest about a reality which is not one's own, is faith" and "the believer [is] infinitely interested in the reality of another (in the fact, for example, that God has existed in time)" -- i.e., through the incarnation  of Christ. Because of this, Christianity is not a subject of intellectual analysis: "If Christianity were a doctrine, the relationship to it would not be one of faith, for only an intellectual type of relationship can correspond to a doctrine. Christianity is therefore not a doctrine, but the fact that God has existed." 


Thus Kierkegaard finds faith to be the way of confronting the absurd. Faced with a choice of actions, reason tells you, "you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say, you cannot act -- and yet here is where I have to act." The situation is absurd. In this case, the leap of faith comes into the process: "I must act, but reflection has closed the road, so I take one of the possibilities and turn to God saying: This is what I do, bless my actions, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection." 


Through faith, one calls on the eternal to help in the temporal. "Despair makes everything easier because it is an undisturbed agreement with oneself that the suffering is unbearable. The further effort which the idea of God demands of us it to have to understand that suffering must not only be borne but that it is a good, a gift of the God of love." One endures the suffering because of the belief that it is part of an inscrutable plan. "God wishes to be believed, unconditionally; but one who is infinite cannot but put the price of faith infinitely high. Oh, but it is blessed to believe, and the higher the price the greater the happiness; the dearer you buy, the happier you will be." Like Camus, Kierkegaard sees happiness and suffering as inextricable. 


Abraham took on faith God's promise "that in his seed all races of the world would be blessed." But the promise was a long time in fulfillment: Sarah remained barren. "Time passed, the possibility was there. Abraham believed; time passed, it became unreasonable, Abraham believed." God continued to try Abraham's faith. 

Yet Abraham believed, and believed for this life. Yea, if his faith had been only for a future life, he surely would have cast everything away in order to hasten out of this world to which he did not belong. But Abraham's faith was not of this sort, if there be such a faith; for really this is not faith but the furthest possibility of faith which has a presentiment of its object at the extremest limit of the horizon, yet is separated from it by a yawning abyss within which despair carries on its game.

And in time the faith was rewarded with a son, Isaac. And then God tested Abraham further by commanding him to sacrifice that son. Abraham persisted in his faith and was rewarded for it. He knew "that highest passion, the holy, pure and humble expression of the divine madness which the pagans admired." 


Karl Jaspers: The Will to Communicate 

Karl Jaspers, date unknown

These excerpts from Reason and Existenz (1935), The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (1948) and "On My Philosophy"  (1941) center on Jaspers's brand of existentialism -- he dissociated himself from Sartrean existentialism -- that he called "Existenz-philosophy," retaining the German word even in translation. Where Sartre and Camus stress the aloneness of the individual, and the necessity of acting as if one's actions were definitive for all humankind, Jaspers stresses community and communication. He cites Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as his forerunners. 


Doubt is for Jaspers an "imperative," but only in so far as doubt is necessary as a means "to gain pure truth." 

The understanding, as unanchored thought, is nihilistic; reason, as grounded in existence, is salvation from nihilism, because it preserves the confidence that through its movement in conjunction with the understanding, it will, amid the conflicts, divisions, and abysses of the concrete world, regain in the end its certitude of transcendence.

But this certitude is only potential, and not guaranteed. It requires a leap of faith, and the only way to approach it is through communication. "Reason demands boundless communication, it is itself the total will to communicate." For "existence can come into its own only with other existence," and "communication is the form in which truth is revealed in time." 


Thus Jaspers posits a "philosophical faith, which may also be called faith in communication. For it upholds these two propositions: Truth is what joins us together; and, truth has its origin in communication." Science is limited because it "does not unite us completely as real human beings, but only as intellectual beings. It unites us in the object that is understood, in the particular, but not in the totality." It omits "feeling, subjectivity, instinct" and "causes man to oscillate between the dogmatism of the intellect that transcends its limits and, as it were, as it were, the rapture of the vital, the chance of the moment, life." Communication provides the vital link between the intellect and the other aspects of life. "Thus the intellect finds clarity only in discussion." 

38. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 828-843

Existence: Moments of Existence (Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger) 

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Søren Kierkegaard: Choice


Freedom and choice go hand in hand, and as Kierkegaard argues in Either/Or (1843), choice is a moral imperative. "the choice itself is decisive for the content of the personality, through the choice the personality immerses itself in the thing chosen, and when it does not choose it withers away in consumption." 

That which has to be chosen stands in the deepest relationship to the chooser, and when it is a question of a choice involving a life problem the individual must naturally be living in the meantime, and hence, it comes about that the longer he postpones the choice the easier it is for him to alter its character, notwithstanding that he is constantly deliberating and deliberating and believes that thereby he is holding the alternative distinctly apart. 

The longer one hesitates to choose, the more one is driven toward one of the alternatives by external forces, until "there comes at last an instant when there no longer is any question of an either/or ... because he has neglected to choose, which is equivalent to saying, because others have chosen for him, because he has lost his self." The choice is then made unconsciously, and since consciousness is freedom, one has lost one's freedom. 


All choice is ethical choice, and "it is not so much a question of choosing the right as of the energy, the earnestness, the pathos with which one chooses." It validates the subjective chooser, and Kierkegaard warns "the great-hearted, heroic objectivity with which many thinkers think on behalf of others and not on their own behalf."


The self that is affirmed by the choice "is the most abstract of all things, and yet at the same time it is the most concrete -- it is freedom."

Yea, even a suicide does not really desire to do away with his self, he too wishes, he wishes another form for his self, and therefore one may find a suicide who was in the highest degree convinced of the immortality of the soul but whose whole being was so entangled that by this step he expected to find the absolute form for his spirit. 

Every choice is a definition of one's self, for one remains free by constantly realizing this freedom. But "only 'fear and trembling,' only constraint, can help a man to freedom. Because 'fear and trembling' and compulsion can master him in such a way that there is no longer any question of choice -- and then one chooses the right thing. At the hour of death most people choose the right thing." 


Science, because it reduces "everything to calm and objective observation," is no help with choice. It reduces freedom to "an inexplicable something." If one "is to recover his freedom it can only be through an intensified 'fear and trembling' brought forth by the thought of having lost it." 


Jean-Paul Sartre: Choice in a World Without God 


Kierkegaard's choice is made in a Christian context, but in Existentialism and Humanism (1946) Sartre explains how a rejection of the concept of God can guide choice. Existentialism recognizes that "man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders." It's a burden that many shun -- hence the continued adherence to religious dogma. 


Existentialist choice echoes Kant's "categorical imperative": 

For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better; and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all.

If one chooses to become a Christian, for example, one not only chooses the idea "that man's kingdom is not upon this earth," one chooses this for everyone: "I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself, I fashion man." Existence precedes essence, and the choice defines what one believes the essence of humanity to be. But if one makes the choice without anxiety, Sartre says, "we affirm that they are merely disguising their anguish or are in flight from it." You can't get off the hook by rejecting the notion that your choice doesn't define all humanity. That is "a kind of self-deception." From the existential point of view, "Everything happens to every man as though the whole human race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing and regulated its conduct accordingly." 


The assumption that societal norms will replace religion as a guide to conduct is a delusion, Sartre says. 

The existentialist ... finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it.... Dostoevsky once write "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.

Man is, in sort, "condemned to be free. Condemned,  because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does." 




Martin Heidegger: Dread Reveals Nothing 

Martin Heidegger, date unknown

It's evident that the translators of "What Is Metaphysics" (1929) had a lot of trouble Englishing the nuances of Heidegger's German, which seems to have many more subtle distinctions of kinds of fear. Heidegger's "dread," which is akin to Kierkegaard's "fear and trembling" and the anxiety that Sartre associates with the choices that define humanity, is a confrontation with Nothing. "The indefiniteness of what we dread is not just lack of definition: it represents the essential impossibility of defining the 'what.'" When we are unable to pinpoint the source of our uneasiness, "Dread strikes us dumb. Because what-is-in-totality slips away and thus forces Nothing to the fore." 


Søren Kierkegaard: Dread as Education Toward Faith 


Kierkegaard's own wrestling with this existential Angst is explored in The Concept of Dread (1844). He posits that it comes from humanity's position as a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal: "If a man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in dread. Since he is a synthesis he can be in dread, and the greater the dread, the greater the man." Again, it is a product of consciousness: "Dread is the possibility of freedom." 


For Kierkegaard, only the small-minded and complacent are not subject to this kind of dread. They have "never known what possibility is, and ... since reality showed them that they were not fit for anything and never would be," they treat possibility as worthless. But "in possibility everything is possible, ... the dreadful as well as the smiling." Anyone who has acknowledged this knows "that he can demand of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and ... that every dread which alarms ... may the next instant become a fact." 


Confronting possibility is a path to faith: "By faith I mean what Hegel in his fashion calls very rightly 'the inward certainty which anticipates infinity.'" But it can also lead to suicide. 


Jean-Paul Sartre: Authenticity 


The possibilities presented by choice include self-deception, Sartre observes in Existentialism and Humanism (1946): "any man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, or by inventing some deterministic doctrine, is a self-deceiver," for he denies his freedom. 

I declare that freedom, in respect of concrete circumstances, can have no other end and aim but itself; and when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values.... We will freedom for freedom's sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that te freedom of others depends upon our own.... I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim. Consequently, when I recognize, as entirely authentic, that man is a being whose existence precedes his essence, and that he is a free being who cannot, in any circumstances, but will his freedom, at the same time I realize that I cannot not will the freedom of others. 

To reject this freedom is cowardice, Sartre asserts. "Others, who try to show that their existence is necessary, when it is merely an accident of the appearance of the human race on earth -- I shall call scum." For "principles that are too abstract break down when we come to defining action." To choose, to act, is to invent the rule for action. "The one thing that counts, is to know whether the invention is made in the name of freedom." 

37. The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson Jr., pp. 803-828

Existence: Introduction; The Definition of Existence (Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche); Moments of Existence (Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre) 

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Søren Kierkegaard: The Individual and the Crowd


It's not much of a step from Dostoevsky's underground man to the existentialists. As the introduction notes, "many of the themes of the preceding section [Self] will recur: an opposition of individual and society; an inner division of particularity and universality; temporal emergence; the struggle for authenticity; and a troubled assertion of freedom." But existentialism "has a psychological subtlety and a sense of urgency that are its own. The distinctive existentially vocabulary -- turning on such categories as being, absurdity, choice, dread, despair, commitment -- is like a situational survey or map courageously drawn at a moment of supreme crisis." 


In The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859), Kierkegaard stresses the subjectivity that becomes central to existentialism, though from the point of view of a Christian. Taking as his text St. Paul's assertion, "only one attains the goal," he proclaims that truth is a matter of individual perception, not that of the group to which one belongs: "a 'crowd' is the untruth ... by reason of the fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent and irresponsible, or at least weakens his sense of responsibility by reducing it to a fraction." Even if the "crowd" is unanimous in its choice, the will to act is an individual one: "For 'crowd' is an abstraction and has no hands:  but each individual has ordinarily two hands." It is that individual's choice to use those hands that is significant, for the individual may choose to follow the crowd or not to follow it. 


Søren Kierkegaard: Concrete Existence and Abstract System 


In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1844), Kierkegaard emphasizes process rather than dogma, citing Lessing's assertion that if God offered him a choice between the truth and the pursuit of truth, he would choose the pursuit. In fact, Kierkegaard says, we are not presented with the choice at all. There are many who proclaim that they have a "System" that is the truth, but they're lying: they assert "that the System is almost finished, or at least under construction, and will be finished by next Sunday." He admits, "I shall be as willing as the next man to fall down in worship before the System, if only I can manage to set eyes upon it." But despite promises of its imminent completion, no one has produced it yet. 


"System and finality are pretty much one and the same, so much so that if the system is not finished, there is no system." And "a fragment of a system is nonsense.... A persistent striving to realize a system is on the other hand still a striving; and a striving, aye, a persistent striving, is precisely what Lessing talks about." Instead of systems, we get false advertising, like that of the man who advertised that he had lost a cotton umbrella because if he had told the truth, that it was silk, the person who found it would be more likely to keep it rather than return it. 

So also thinks, in all probability, the systematist: "If on the title-page and in the announcements I call my production a persistent striving for the truth, alas! who will buy it or admire me? But if i call it the System, the Absolute System, everyone will surely want to buy the System."

The "existing individual [is] a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal situated in existence." But because abstract thought deals with eternal verities, it fails to take into account the plight of the human being who stands at the intersection of time and eternity: "the difficulty inherent in existence constitutes the interest of the existing individual, who is infinitely interested in existing." So "an abstract thinker is a duplex being: a fantastic creature who moves in the pure being of abstract thought, and on the other hand, a sometimes pitiful professorial figure which the former deposits, about as when one sets down a walking stick." 


The problem arises when one tries to think of "the eternal as in process of becoming." It's compounded by the fact that "the thinker himself is in process of becoming. It is easier to indulge in abstract thought than it is to exist." The Greeks regarded "a thinker [as] an existing individual stimulated by his reflection to a passionate enthusiasm." And the early Christians regarded the thinker as "a believer who strove enthusiastically to understand himself in the existence of faith. If anything of this sort held true of the thinkers of our own age, the enterprise of pure thought would have led to one suicide after another. For suicide is the only tolerable existential consequence of pure thought." Thus Kierkegaard anticipates by about a century Camus's famous assertion that the only real philosophical question is that of suicide. "Nowadays a thinker is a curious creature who during certain hours of the day exhibits a very remarkable ingenuity, but has otherwise nothing in common with a human being."




Friedrich Nietzsche: The Free Thinker and the Consensus


In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche also asserts that truth is a matter of individual and subjective judgment: "One must get rid of the bad taste of wishing to agree with many others" and especially not be a slave "of democratic taste and its 'modern ideas,'" especially the "inclination to see the cause for all human misery and failure in the structure of society as it has been up to now" and the desire for "the universal green pasture-happiness of the herd: security, lack of danger, comfort and alleviation of life for everyone." He sneers at "equal rights" and "compassion for all that suffers," and rejects the idea that suffering is "something that must be abolished." Suffering is what toughens us up, and leads to "the advancement of the species." 




Friedrich Nietzsche: Subjective Will and Objective Truth


In another excerpt from Beyond Good and Evil and one from The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche rejects objectivity: "The objective man is indeed a mirror; above all he is something that wishes to be recognized and understood; he is accustomed to subordination, devoid of any pleasure other than that afforded by cognition, by 'mirroring.'" As a consequence, he knows nothing about himself: "Whatever 'person' is left in him seems accidental to him, often arbitrary, even more often disturbing." In the end, "he places himself at too remote a point to side with either good or evil." Nietzsche scathingly runs through the insipid and ineffectual character of the "objective man," and concludes, wickedly, "he is usually a man without substance or content, a 'self-less' man. Hence, not a man for women either (parenthetically remarked)." 


Moving less satirically and more pointedly into the realm of metaphysics, Nietzsche takes aim at the seekers of truth, whose claim to objectivity is an attempt to conceal their biases, conscious or unconscious: "the largest part of conscious thinking must be consider an instinctual activity, even in the case of philosophical thinking." The philosopher's own instincts guide and color his conclusions: "Even behind logic and its apparent sovereignty of development stand value judgments, or, to speak more plainly, physiological demands for preserving a certain type of life." 


Beneath the supposedly rational judgment of every philosopher lies "a pre-conceived dogma, a notion, an 'institution,' or mostly a heart's desire, made abstract and refined, ... defended by them with arguments sought after the fact." He mocks "The spectacle of old Kant's Tartuffery, as stiff as it is respectable, luring us onto the dialectical crooked paths which lead (or better, mislead) to his 'categorical imperative.'" Nietzsche asserts that "every great philosophy up to now has been ... the personal confession of its originator, a type of involuntary and unaware memoirs.... Each individual desire wants badly to represent itself as the final aim of existence and as rightful master of all the others." 


Over against the "man of theory, ... working in the service of science," the traditional ideal  embodied by Socrates, Nietzsche sets the man of action. He reminds us that the "Alexandrian culture" that makes the philosopher and the scientist the paragon "requires a slave class for its continued existence, but in its optimism it denies the necessity for such a class." And Kant (now back in Nietzsche's good graces) and Schopenhauer have demonstrated that the Enlightenment "optimism [that] treated the universe as knowable, in the presumption of eternal truths, and space, time, and causality as absolute and universally valid laws ... serve only to raise appearance ... to the status of true reality, thereby rendering impossible a genuine understanding of that reality." The challenges to the optimists and the objective thinkers have been shaken to the core. "The man of theory, having begun to dread the consequences of his views, no longer dares commit himself freely to the icy flood of existence but runs nervously up and down the bank."




Albert Camus: The Fact of Absurdity 

Albert Camus in 1957

Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) familiarized us with the "absurd," that moment of recognition that meaning does not necessarily inhere in our daily activities. When we respond to "the impulse of consciousness," and question why we do what we do, "At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery." Camus concludes that this is for the good: "For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.... Mere 'anxiety,' as Heidegger says, is at the source of everything." 


We grow up thinking of the future as a time when things will begin to take shape for us, and we will understand what we have been preparing for. "Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty  Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in time." Consciousness reveals to him that "after all, it's a matter of dying." And he recognize that while "he was longing for tomorrow, ... everything in him ought to reject it." He has experienced the absurd. 


Or we realize that the world is alien to us. "At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very moment lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them.... that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd." The absurd is also found in those moments when we confront ourselves in a mirror or a photograph and find ourselves alien. And when we contemplate our own mortality, and the fact that "everyone lives as if no one 'knew'" that they were going to die. "This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced by what has been lived and made conscious." 


The "giddy whirling" that the mind experiences in contemplating logical paradoxes leads us to the truism: "All thought is anthropomorphic." When we recognize that the world cannot be reduced to human terms, we experience the absurd. "If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled." But of course it doesn't. And if we try to assert that we are one with the universe, "we fall into the ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve."

It is essential to consider as a constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life.

For the only thing we can know is our existence and our sensory contact with the world. "There ends my knowledge, and the rest is construction.... Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled." Theory can present us possible models of the world and the laws that govern it, but not certitude: 

But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.... So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.... I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.

"Hence the intelligence, too, tells me in its way that this world is absurd," though in fact what is absurd is not the world but our attempts to apprehend it: "the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart." The absurd is the only link between man and the world. "It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together." 




Jean-Paul Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence 

Jean-Paul Sartre, c. 1950

In Existentialism and Humanism (1946) Sartre sets out to explain that central tenet of existentialism, "existence precedes essence." He starts with a paper-knife (something that people used to use before books came with their pages trimmed). A craftsman has the specs for the paper-knife and he knows what it's to be used for. Its essence precedes its existence. And then there's God, who creates man the same way that the artisan creates the paper knife: following a pattern and knowing what man is to be used for. "Thus each individual man is the realization of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding." 


The Enlightenment eliminated God from the process, while still retaining the idea of natural law, of man as filling a certain function in the universe. "Man possesses a human nature; that 'human nature,' which is the conception of human being, is found in every man, which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception." Again, man's essence precedes his existence. 


But existentialism, at least the kind espoused by Sartre, rejects the existence of God. And in this view of man, he exists without any prior conception of what his function in nature, he "surges up in the world -- and defines himself afterwards.

Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself already existing -- as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.