What is Not Existential?
There is no one answer to what is existential, so I am going to present what is not in an attempt to clarify things through the fog. (That is satire, if you read Camus.) By first understanding what existentialism excludes, discussions of what might be included become possible.
Existentialism does not support any of the following:
- The good life is one of wealth, pleasure, or honor.
- Social approval and social structure trump the individual.
- Accept what is and that is enough in life.
- Science can and will make everything better.
- People are good by nature, ruined by society or external forces.
There are, according to existentialism and its predecessor, phenomenology, some problems with Western philosophical traditions. The basic problem is that humans are not good, sharing, generous creatures. Children are what we remain our entire lives… greedy, manipulative, brats. Some people disguise it better than others. The people in charge of America would be the people in charge of most countries: the best “political” people. Or, as one 60s radical said, “There were eventually leaders in every commune.”
Watch a preschool class. I owned a children’s bookstore, and before that I was a teacher. Children are not nurtured to behave poorly. In fact, the challenge is to socialize a child. We struggle to be social creatures. Society is unnatural. Rules are difficult.
“Mine” is naturally a child’s way of thinking. It is soon followed by “I didn’t do it!”
Existentialism requires the active acceptance of our nature. Professor Robert Olson noted that we spend our lives wanting more and more. Once we realize the futility of wordly desire, we try to accept what we have. We turn to philosophy or religion to accept less. We want to detach from our worldly needs — but we cannot do so. It is the human condition to desire. To want. To seek more, even when that “more” is “more of less.” It is a desire to prove something to ourselves, as well as others.
The existentialists … mock the notion of a complete and fully satisfying life. The life of every man, whether he explicitly recognizes it or not, is marked by irreparable losses. Man cannot help aspiring toward the goods of this world, nor can he help aspiring toward the serene detachment from the things of this world which the traditional philosopher sought; but it is not within his power to achieve either of these ambitions, or having achieved them to find therein the satisfaction he had anticipated.
- Existentialism; Olson, p. 14
One
female visitor complained about “mankind,” but attempts at “non-sexist”
writing ignore etymology: man was Old English for
“any person.” Man as gender-specific is unique to Modern
English. Other words I considered were once limited to men, and
in some places still are. There’s no easy solution, even if we
want one. See Style
Guide, Mankind. |
Existentialism assumes we are best when we struggle against our nature. Mankind is best challenging itself to improve, yet knowing perfection is not possible. Religions present rules, yet the believers know they cannot live by all of those rules. The “sin-free” life is beyond human nature. Is that any less reason to try to be good, generous, caring, and compassionate? Perfectionism is considered unhealthy by psychiatrists for a reason.
The Struggle
The word “existential” is used to describe so many people, fictional characters, choices, and situations that it has been reduced to meaning any dilemma revealing the true nature of a person. The notion of dilemma reduces “existential” to an adjective describing too many common choices. Existentialism properly defines a broader philosophy, in which life itself is a choice.
Why is Buddhism Not Existential?
Siddharta Gautama was appalled by suffering and chaos in the world. So much so, he left his wife and son to meditate on the meaning of everything. Unfortunately, he didn’t find answers among the gurus. There were no easy answers. In some ways, yes, Siddharta experienced an “existential” discovery: life is suffering.
But, Siddharta did not follow the existential notion of rebelling or fighting to establish a meaning. He did not openly challenge people and political leaders. Instead, he took a different approach:
When he met his first disciples at Benares after his enlightenment, the Buddha outlines his system, which was based on one essential fact: all existence was dukkha. It consisted entirely of suffering; life was wholly awry. Things come and go in meaningless flux. Nothing has permanent significance. Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong. […] The Buddha taught that is was possible to gain release from dukkha by living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and accurately, and refraining from anything like drugs or intoxicants that cloud the mind.
- A History of God; Armstrong, p. 32
Unlike the existentialists, Siddharta is a stoic in nature: accept things as they are, don’t try to change them or control them. Curiously, this is rebellious in that it rejects social norms. Siddharta was rejecting the Hindu teachings of his time, much as Kierkegaard challenged the ritualized nature of Christianity. But, Siddharta was not an active rebel. He was, in many ways, teaching a passive resistance that the existentialists would reject.
Questions to Ponder
Philosophy and religion exist to answer “why?” when we want an excuse for human nature. Maybe science will explain away sociopaths and even mere anger someday. We can treat depression, anxiety, mania, and numerous other “disorders” with pills. Alienation, despair, and anguish may vanish. If they do, what of existentialism? Do humans need their pain? Is suffering what makes us stronger, as Nietzsche suspected?
Some questions posed by the thinkers profiled on this site:
- If something worth living for is worth dying for, what about something not worth dying for? (Camus)
- Did man create God to have a reason to live? (Dostoevsky)
- Does society make women and men different or do we choose our roles? (Beauvoir)
- Would living forever add meaning to life? (Heidegger)
- How do you really act in private? (Sartre)
- Without love, without people, what is a person? (Kafka)
Language, Essence, and Existence
For myself, questions of philosophy eventually confront matters of language and expression. What we know is complicated when we try to share knowledge or wisdom. Each time we communicate, some loss of meaning is risked.
Most visitors to this site have heard Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous statement from Being and Nothingness, “Existence precedes and rules essence.” In general, it is accepted that people create an essence while all other things have an essence and are then created or understood by people. If you have a new idea for a tool, the idea exists before the object you intend to create. However, you can understand your idea only via words or symbols already known. This means all comprehension of “essense” is limited by existing language.
Likewise, how we relate to people and each other is limited by language, even if we accept the idea that first a person exists, then he or she is free to define a “self” in the world. The concepts of language and symbols complicate the existence-essence relationship because how we describe something affects how others perceive that thing or person.
Science has yet to appreciate fully how the deaf think, which admittedly complicates this entire model. |
We communicate via images, sounds, and touch. For most of us, what we think is converted to a form of “unspoken speech” in our minds. This means we can only understand and explain things in some form of spoken word. Philosophers dealing with ideas of deconstruction and postmodern linguistics have come to appreciate the limits of language and the social implications of words.
French, as with most languages, is gender-specific even when naming objects. Simone de Beauvoir wondered how language affects gender identity. Language shapes us, while we also have some power to shape language. Because language is not static, we can argue for new words, new meanings, and even new grammars. Unfortunately, no language is a perfect representation of ideas, and our ideas are shaped by existing language.
If we each define an essence by living and making choices, we are still
limited by words and other forms of text when we want to express that
essence to others.
A Quick Lesson
Good morning/afternoon/evening class. {Mr. Wyatt pauses to accept joyful greetings.} Allow me to write a word on the board.
I need my morning tea, or I will not be able to discuss matters in a civil tone. So, you have until I finish tea to ponder and write your thoughts on what I have written.
{Mr. Wyatt enjoys a simple tea, gathered from his favorite tin, which is kept in a drawer at his desk. The hotplate, violating some campus policy or other, sits on a table behind him.}
Ah, refreshed. What did some of you write?
Blue is the English word for a wavelength in the visible light spectrum. We use it to symbolize many things…
For that, you must read Husserl’s complete works and report on how he viewed the relationship between science and philosophy. Anyone else?
I don’t know. It is the word “blue” written in white chalk on a blackboard.
Bravo! That is exactly the problem we face when studying anything. There are 20 definitions for “blue” in the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Until I write a sentence, “blue” is only a word. Alone, most things lack meaning — even people. We isolate things, even ourselves, to appreciate them and undertand them better. Isolated, the meaning is somehow lost. It is a paradox Kafka explored in short stories and Sartre examined ad nauseam.
I have a list of study questions on existentialism for those interested.
Existentialism is Living
Mankind is the only known animal, according to earth-bound existentialists, that defines itself through the act of living. In other words, first a man or woman exists, then the individual spends a lifetime changing his or her essence. Without life there can be no meaning; the search for meaning in existentialism is the search for self… which is why there is existential psychotherapy. (Imagine a therapist telling people life has no meaning!) In other words, we define ourselves by living; suicide would indicate you have chosen to have no meaning.
Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
- Anita Brookner (b. 1938), British novelist, art historian. Interview in Writers at Work, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton (1988).
Existentialism is not dark. It is not depressing. Existentialism is about life. Existentialists believe in living — and in fighting for life. Camus, Sartre, and even Nietzsche were involved in various wars because they believed passionately in fighting for the survival of their nations and peoples. The politics of existentialists varies, but each seeks the most individual freedom for people within a society.
All too often people link a lack of faith or secular beliefs with existential ideals. Existentialism has little to do with faith or the lack thereof. To quote Walter Kaufmann, one of the leading existential scholars:
Certainly, existentialism is not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets. The three writers who appear invariably on every list of existentialists — Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre — are not in agreement on essentials. By the time we consider adding Rilke, Kafka, and Camus, it becomes plain that one essential feature shared by all these men is their perfervid individualism.
- Existentialism; Kaufmann, p. 11
In order to understand the current meaning of existentialism, one must first understand that the American view of existentialism was derived from the writings of three political activists, not intellectual purists. Americans learned the term existential after World War II. The term was coined by Jean-Paul Sartre to describe his own philosophies. It was not until the late 1950s that the term was applied broadly to several divergent schools of thought.
Despite encompassing a staggering range of philosophical, religious, and political ideologies, the underlying concepts of existentialism are considered:
- Mankind has free will.
- Life is a series of choices, creating stress.
- Few decisions are without any negative consequences.
- Some things are irrational or absurd, without explanation.
- If one makes a decision, he or she must follow through.
Existentialism, broadly defined, is a set of philosophical systems concerned with free will, choice, and personal responsibility. Because we make choices based on our experiences, beliefs, and biases, those choices are unique to us — and made without an objective form of truth. There are no “universal” guidelines for most decisions, existentialists believe. Instead, even trusting science is often a “leap of faith.”
The existentialists conclude that human choice is subjective, because individuals finally must make their own choices without help from such external standards as laws, ethical rules, or traditions. Because individuals make their own choices, they are free; but because they freely choose, they are completely responsible for their choices. The existentialists emphasize that freedom is necessarily accompanied by responsibility. Furthermore, since individuals are forced to choose for themselves, they have their freedom — and therefore their responsibility — thrust upon them. They are “condemned to be free.”
For existentialism, responsibility is the dark side of freedom. When individuals realize that they are completely responsible for their decisions, actions, and beliefs, they are overcome by anxiety. They try to escape from this anxiety by ignoring or denying their freedom and their responsibility. But because this amounts to ignoring or denying their actual situation, they succeed only in deceiving themselves. The existentialists criticize this flight from freedom and responsibility into self-deception. They insist that individuals must accept full responsibility for their behavior, no matter how difficult. If an individual is to live meaningfully and authentically, he or she must become fully aware of the true character of the human situation and bravely accept it.
- World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia © 2001 by World Book, Inc.
Ivan Soll, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Beyond this short list of concepts, the label existentialist is applied broadly. Even these concepts are not universal within existentialist works, or at least the writings of people groups as the existentialists. There is no one or two sentence statement summarizing what more than a dozen famous and infamous people pondered. The only common factor seems to be despair. The accompanying grid illustrates the range of ideals expressed by the major existentialists. Not every existentialist follows a perfect row in the grid. In particular, their political theories are more varied than the three categories listed.
| Religious | Predetermination | Elitist | Moralistic | Intentions |
| Agnostic | Chance | Communist | Relativistic | Actions |
| Atheistic | Free Will | Anarchist | Amoralistic | Results |
The first row might represent the writings of Blaise Pascal or Fyodor Dostoevsky, both of whom defended fundamentalist religious beliefs, including their inherent contradictions. The last row is representative of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings, if not his own beliefs. As previously stated, uniting the men and women behind this matrix of concepts is futile. Their thoughts are linked by a belief that this life is a near-futile struggle against forces aligned in opposition to the individual.
The Existentialists
The individuals listed represent major contributors to existentialism and related philosophies. This chart is in philosophical order, not in the order of publication or life. Following the chart is further information on other existentialists or contributors to the philosophy. I would like to thank site visitor Eduardo Tenenbaum for his suggestions for this chart. I have made some minor changes, reflecting the input of visitors.
| Name Philosophy / Faith |
Contribution | Bartleby.com Entry | Kaufmann’s Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fyodor Dostoevsky Eastern Orthodox |
Studied individual will, freedom, and anguish. | Probably as a consequence of his long association with criminals, he had an intense interest in abnormal and perverted types, the psychology of which he analysed with an uncanny subtlety. | I can see no reason for calling Dostoevsky an existentialist, but I do think that Part One of Notes from Underground is the best overture for existentialism ever written. |
| Søren Kierkegaard Existentialist, Protestant Theist |
Considered the first existentialist, his works were
popularized by Heidegger. E.T.: Formulated the aesthetic, ethical and religious as modes of existence. Perfected the Socratic technique of indirect communication |
Danish religious philosopher. A precursor of modern existentialism, he insisted on the need for individual decision and leaps of faith in the search for religious truth, thereby contradicting Protestant rationalist theology. | Here lies Kierkegaard’s importance for a vast segment of modern thought: he attacks received conceptions of Christianity, suggests a radical revision of the popular idea of the self, and focuses attention on decision. |
| Friedrich Nietzsche Individualist, Anti-Christian |
Ideas influenced Heidegger and Sartre. E.T.: Developed concepts of Will-to-Power, Eternal Recurrence and Overman. |
German philosopher who reasoned that Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife makes its believers less able to cope with earthly life. | The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, the opposition to philosophic systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life — all this is eminently characteristic of Nietzsche. |
| Georg W. F. Hegel German Idealism, Protestant |
Influenced Marx, Husserl, Sartre, and many others. Hegel’s followers broke into “left” and “right” wings. First to promote the concept of phenomenology. | German idealist philosopher who interpreted nature and human history and culture as expressions of a dialectical process in which Spirit, or Mind, realizes its full potentiality. | |
| Edmund Husserl Phenomenologist |
Developed concept of essences and being. E.T.: Developed the concept of the Lifeworld |
Austrian-born German philosopher and mathematician. A leader in the development of phenomenology, he had a major influence on the existentialists. | |
| Martin Heidegger Phenomenologist, Existentialist, Theist |
Assistant to Husserl, wrote about Kierkegaard’s works. E.T. Student of Husserl’s phenomenology, proclaimed the end of metaphysics. |
German existentialist philosopher. His masterpiece, Being and Time (1927), argued that confronting the question of the meaning of being, encompassing one’s own death, was central for an authentic human existence. | An early disciple… would sum up Heidegger’s importance by asserting that he introduced Nietzsche into philosophy. {Note: Kaufmann disagrees with the preceding observation} He made it possible for professors to discuss with a good conscience matters previously considered literary, if that. |
| Franz Kafka Absurdist, Jewish |
Similar to Camus, Sartre, in depictions of cruel fate. | Kafka presents a world that is at once real and dreamlike and in which individuals burdened with guilt, isolation, and anxiety make a futile search for personal salvation. | Kafka stands between Nietzsche and the existentialists: he pictures the world into which Heidegger’s man, in Sein und Zeit, is “thrown,” the godless world of Sartre, the “absurd” world of Camus. |
| Jean-Paul Sartre Existentialist, Atheist |
Student of Heidegger, colleague and lover of de Beauvoir. | French philosopher, playwright, and novelist. Influenced by German philosophy, particularly that of Heidegger, Sartre was a leading exponent of 20th-century existentialism. His writings examine man as a responsible but lonely being, burdened with a terrifying freedom to choose, and set adrift in a meaningless universe. | It is mainly through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre that existentialism has come to the attention of a wide international audience. Sartre is a philosopher in the French tradition… at the borderline of philosophy and literature. |
| Simone de Beauvoir Existentialist, Feminist |
Best known as a “feminist” writer, she was the editor of many of Sartre’s works. Lover of Sartre, friend to Camus and Merleau-Ponty. | French writer, existentialist, and feminist. Women’s social subjugation is credited to patriarchal rather than biological or psychological structures. Her book became one of the seminal treatises of the modern feminist movement. | |
| Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenologist, Existentialist |
One-time friend of Sartre, Camus. Supporter of Husserlian Phenomenology. | Unlike many phenomenologists, he affirmed the reality of a world that transcends our consciousness of it. In his studies of perception he laid emphasis on the physical and the biological (or vital) as levels of conceptualization that preconditioned all mental concepts. | |
| Albert Camus Existentialist / Absurdist, Atheist |
French Resistance member during WWII with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir. Brought “humanism” to his existentialism. | His belief that man’s condition is absurd identified him with the existentialists (see existentialism), but he denied allegiance to that group; his works express rather a courageous humanism. The characters in his novels and plays, although keenly aware of the meaninglessness of the human condition, assert their humanity by rebelling against their circumstances. | {Paraphrase of Kaufmann} Camus marks the finale of existentialism… an attempt to move beyond what Sartre had defined. Camus cannot be called an existentialist, but his ideas evolved alongside those of Sartre and others. |
| Karl Jaspers Existentialist, Agnostic, Theist |
Contemporary of Sartre, Camus, et al. Jaspers sought to make philosophy more open for the general public… more relevant. | German psychiatrist, philosopher, and theologian. A founder of modern existentialism, he was concerned with human reactions to extreme situations. | It is in the work of Jaspers that the seeds sown by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche first grew into existentialism or, as he prefers to say, Existenzphilosophie. |
Other Thinkers of Note
Other existentialists worthy of mention include:
- Jean Wahl (1888–1974), founder of the French Existentialists movement, which grew under Sartre.
- Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), French Roman-Catholic philosopher.
Influential philosophers and writers, with existential concepts reflected in their works include:
- Nicolas Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874–1948), Russian Neo-Romanticist
- Leo Isakovich Shestov Schwarzman (1866–1938), Russian Irrationalist
- José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Spanish writer
- Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Spanish philosopher
