The Uncomplicated Core of Existentialism
Why existential philosophy doesn’t have to be a surfeit of pretentious obscurities
Existentialism is perhaps the most important topic that’s been the most obfuscated and has therefore suffered the fate of a fad and been left in history’s dustbin, at least as far as the academy and wider public are concerned.
The problem is that the leading later existentialists, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, encased their philosophy in Edmund Husserl’s language of phenomenology, on the pretense that doing so would make their philosophy sound scientific or at least professional.
They thought they could make a science out of verbose descriptions of our subjective states. What exactly does it feel like to be alive as a person, to fear death, to defer to mass opinion, to make an important decision? Of course, literature deals with those practical questions, and some existentialists wrote fiction, too, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sartre, and Albert Camus.
But existentialism as a movement in the mid-twentieth century became associated with Heidegger’s and Sartre’s more pretentious tomes. What rose to fame on that basis could just as easily fall into obscurity, which is what happened when the pessimism fostered by the two world wars gave way to optimism, the science of phenomenology didn’t pan out, and behaviourism and cognitive psychology stole the phenomenologists’ thunder.
Nevertheless, the overall lesson of existentialism seems to me both important and not so difficult to separate from the existentialists’ subtleties and obfuscations. Here, then, is the core of what I take from existentialism.
The upshot of existentialism
There’s an “existential,” fundamental, and universal condition to which we’re subject as members of our species. This condition has to do with our very mode of being as persons, which differs from the condition of less knowing, less free animals.
We’re subject to two potentials:
First, we can come to understand the nature of our basic condition.
Second, we can decide what to do about it.
These are mere potentials because we’re free to ignore both the condition and our obligation to decide what to do once we understand our situation. Indeed, ignoring them is the norm, and existentialists call that ignorance “inauthenticity” or “living in bad faith.” It’s partly a matter of being so busy with our personal problems that we neglect the more general ones. Thus, philosophy itself, the contemplation of the most general patterns, is typically a countercultural endeavour.
But the popular neglect is also due to the nature of our existential condition. What we fundamentally are is scary to contemplate because we’re anomalies that are inherently alienated from natural norms. Our basic condition is therefore a predicament, the predicament of living with absurdity.
Our existential condition
What’s our condition, in a nutshell? Although it can be expressed in religious terms, the more striking—not to mention more plausible—interpretation is the secular one, namely the philosophical upshot of history and the scientific picture of how we evolved, think, and behave. You just paint that picture with a broad brush, and you have our existential condition.
Thus, you have the godless universe that’s palpably inhuman in its vastness. You have the accident of life’s emergence, and the appalling state of most animal species that struggle solely to transmit their genes and perpetuate their kind. Despite animals’ heroic feats, the natural environment displays no favouritism towards high-minded virtues, so species evolve, which is to say they go extinct and are replaced with more suitable body types. Eventually, mammals replaced the dinosaurs, and some mammals developed into primates and people.
People differ from animals because of our godlike power to shape our environment, which circumvents nature’s blind selection of species. Nature doesn’t rig the playing field or play favourites, but we do, and our cerebral cortex and opposable thumbs put us on a long genetic leash, freeing us to build artificial worlds that are programmed by culture, driven by knowledge of far-flung matters, and no small audacity.
Given the historical and scientific narratives, we’re an immensely hubristic species.
We don’t aim merely to survive long enough to reproduce members of our kind, like the other animals. We don’t seek homeostasis with our natural habitat. Instead, we aim to progress, to transcend natural limitations. (That makes us all Nietzschean Übermenschen, at least compared to the other species). We’re not content to balance our health with environmental constraints since we build artificial domains on the ruins of the wilderness. We extend our bodies and minds with tools and civilizations, imposing ourselves on the planet. Ideally, we’d terraform the entire universe.
But this progress is tragic and absurd. Nature will likely thwart our vain ambitions, or we’ll destroy ourselves in our rebellion. At any rate, there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed, nor is there a cosmic purpose we achieve in sticking it to nature. Unconsciously, at least, we’re dismayed by the universe’s monstrousness. After all, nature is spectacularly ordered but godlessly so, making physical complexities and evolutions zombie-like in the root inexplicability of their patterns. Contrary to the biblical myth, we prefer life outside of Eden.
Thus, we draped ourselves, at first, with a mostly cultural mantle, lacking the later technological innovations that could only have accumulated over centuries. Prehistorically, as animists, we followed our intoxicated shamans and personified the wilderness, befriending and worshipping nature. Eventually, we developed agriculture and took to domesticating/enslaving plants, animals, and classes of people. We moved from the wild and into civilization. That is, we became preoccupied with extensions of ourselves, with social games and conventions that are naturally meaningless, with ideologies that again count for nothing as far as the universe is concerned.
Our progressive pastimes are absurd, from the cosmic vantage point, the latter being available to us, to some extent, in our more reflective, humiliating moments. We need merely abstract from our presumptions and ambitions to contemplate the cosmic status of what we’re doing, to see that personhood is an abomination. We’re tragically heroic experiments gone awry, racing upwards on a downward escalator. Objectifying ourselves the way scientists objectify everything else, we realize that as honourable and impressive as our advances may be, they’re alien to what the universe has in mind, as it were, so even our progress is likely futile.
Our existential decision
Obviously, that doesn’t stop most of us from living as civilized people, if we can help it. And here we’re poised to take the second step: once our existential condition is clear, after we’ve studied philosophy, science, and history to confirm these matters for ourselves, what can we do about it? There’s no easy answer, but what existentialists emphasize is the need for a preliminary judgment on our condition.
Before we can dream up and orchestrate the best way to live, we need to decide whether we should bother. We must say “No” or “Yes” to our existential condition. Given the truth of what we are, as best as we can tell it, should we care what happens, or should we go on living at all? It’s no accident that Camus said suicide is the “one really serious philosophical problem,” or that Plato said philosophers “are in training for dying.”
Still, there are many ways to say “No,” existentially speaking, without killing yourself. There’s asceticism, the renunciation of pleasures and the mortification of the body. There’s the unconscious tendency to sabotage your opportunities for success because you secretly believe you don’t deserve them, since no one does, and the world is unfair and tainted by its monstrous impartiality. Indeed, these strategic negativities can be long-term, active rebellions against life, which might make them more formidable than suicide.
By contrast, authentic life for people means affirming life despite its absurdity and tragedy. Yet the opposite of that affirmation isn’t so much the choice to kill ourselves in despair, as it is to ignore philosophy’s meta-perspective altogether and automate our lives. Personal inauthenticity is the human retreat to animality. Arguably, most members of our species aren’t full persons in that they’re not existentially awake.
The dawn of personhood is the choice to go on living or dedicate yourself to a worthy pursuit, after you’ve recognized the awful truth. The individual who goes on living or ends her life, after she’s reckoned with our existential condition, is at least a person because she’d have rationally modelled not just the evolutionary necessities but herself and her relation to the environment, and she’d have done so without confusions and self-deceptions.
We all do this to some extent, but most don’t do so with the depth needed to appreciate what’s at stake in our basic problems. We think of ourselves in terms of our masks—our personalities and social performances—and we plan instrumentally how to get by from one setting or obstacle to the next. But that’s not enough to choose whether to condemn or affirm our existential condition, explicitly and directly, with no illusions. Likely, only a minority of humans have ever been persons to that grim extent.
Most existential thinkers say we should say “Yes” to life, meaning that they argue there’s a silver lining to our predicament, that not all is hopelessly rotten and futile, and I agree with that assessment. Still, existentially authentic life for full-blown people begins in darkness, in some wretched, hair-raising observations, and with the pitiless bursting of some thought bubbles.
Moreover, we can say “Yes” by taking our worthwhile project to be the act of warring with nature. We might affirm not everything in the universe as being equally laudatory, but only our species’ potential for progressing at everything else’s expense. This is roughly the stance of “modern,” progressive civilization, although we seem mostly to have sleepwalked into that stance.
The illusions we must dispel to arrive at a point at which our choice to go on living is honourable include most mainstream opinions and standards. Thus, existentialism is at the forefront of philosophy and the intellectual counterculture.
Certainly, the fad of existentialism ended over half a century ago, but that doesn’t mean the themes of this philosophy have been superseded. Only the boasts of some pretentious existentialists have proven to be hollow, and the dichotomy between those who grapple with the basic facts in life and those who don’t is inescapable.
Yep, nail meet hammer! Well done!