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The Great Thinkers of Western Philosophy |
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Background Essay General Observations about Existentialism Danish and German Existentialists The Dane Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) (picture) gave an account of his own life in his writings. His is a drama of a soul tormented to the point of desperation by its consciousness of sin. Because of this sense of desperation, the soul abandons itself to God and in God finds its salvation. The predominant motives of Kierkegaard's thought may be summed up as follows:
The consciousness of this contradiction causes anguish, and anguish ends in despair -- the individual accepts existence as a mystery which he cannot hope to fathom. But because of the coincidence of opposites, from despair rises faith, and faith gives the individual the hope of redemption by means of grace. I abandon myself to the grace of God; I pray, and the prayer gives me the "pre-sentiment" that time will be changed into eternity and death into life. In The Radical Academy
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Karl Barth: Theory of the Theological Crisis Karl Barth (1886-1968) (picture) in his Commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans centers his attention on the question of the opposition between the finite and the infinite, which was the basic point of Kierkegaard's writings. The problem Barth tries to solve is this: God is in heaven, and man is on earth. What is the relation between such a God and such a man, between such a man and such a God? Barth observes that the infinite and the finite -- i.e., God and man -- are in perfect antithesis. There is a "line of death" dividing God from man, and any attempt to overcome this line is vain, as well as sacrilegious. Man lives in a world which is the opposite of that of God. The world of man, "flesh," is the world of nature, which is the framework for man's history, his culture, and his civilization -- all things that are completely under the domination of death. Man -- as an existent being, subject to death -- is conscious of his own nothingness and of the nothingness of his culture and civilization. Even religion cannot help man to overcome this sentiment of nothingness, for any attempt to cross the line of death and to come close to God is destined to fail. But precisely because of this wreckage of culture and religion -- this general theological crisis -- faith arises in man. (Barth, like Kierkegaard, is a Christian Protestant.) Faith is due completely to God. It is the despotic domination of God over man. Now, because of faith, the line dividing time from eternity and man from God, disappears. Under the absolute domination of God, the existence of man is transformed into an achievement of the eternal plan of God. (Predestination.) Time and man's sinful and imperfect activity in the world are absorbed in eternity. In short, the "no" of man corresponds to the "yes" of God. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
Barth, as we have seen, was influenced by the "transcendence" of Kierkegaard; Heidegger and Jaspers were affected by the naturalistic immanentism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) (picture). Nietzsche replaced the God of Christianity, the Creator of man, with the "will to power" which, according to him, is the soul of the world and is scattered among individual men. Each man is a center of the "will to power," and his existence can be represented as the will to dominate the whole universe. The human will knows no obstacle, no limits. The will reasons thus:
It is easy to understand that no moral, religious or scientific principle can oppose such a will to power. For Nietzsche such principles were set up by the weak in order to defend themselves and to prevent the impetus of the will to power. But even the will to power, if it wishes to be the creator of its world, must have sort of ethics. Its ethics consists in loving what is dangerous and heroic, and in being prepared to suffer all things. To live in this way means to transcend self, and by transcending self the individual becomes a superman who lives in contempt of those who remain behind and below him. In The Radical Academy
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Edmund Husserl: Founder of the Phenomenological School Note: Strictly speaking, Husserl should not be considered to be an existentialist; he would probably have rejected that classification. The influence of his philosophy of phenomenology on the development of existentialism (especially in the case of Heidegger and Sartre) is the reason for his being included here. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) (picture) was the teacher of Heidegger and the founder of the Phenomenological School. According to Husserl, philosophy must be able to present a doctrine of truths of absolute validity. In his search for this absolute truth, Husserl starts from the phenomenology of the spirit, with the purpose of discovering whether a truth of absolute validity can be drawn from an analysis of the phenomena which are present to man's consciousness. By "phenomena" Husserl understands any act of sensitive perception or of intellective knowledge which makes its "appearance" in consciousness. Consciousness, understood as the background upon which the phenomena are offered to the will, receives and connects these phenomena. Now, Husserl observes that in any phenomenon there is an "ideal essence" which is perceived by the mind and which makes up the "content of consciousness." These essences are understood by Husserl to be like Plato's Ideas, but with this difference -- that they come from within the phenomena and are not separated from them. The ideal essences, making up the content of consciousness, do not depend for their reality upon the existence of the external world. In other words, even assuming the Cartesian principle that I may be deceived as to the real existence of all surrounding objects, I cannot be deceived by whatever is actually experienced in my consciousness. The objects of my experience may be real or imagined, but my experiences are genuine contents of my consciousness; and as such, they have an absolute element (ideal essence) which has to be distinguished from what is contingent (the existence). Now, it is the ideal essence which gives a significance to the facts of experience. In other words, any knowledge and judgment of the facts of experience must be preceded by knowledge of the ideal essences, because they open the way to an understanding of what reality is. These essences can be combined to form part of another, larger pattern -- for instance, the idea of species, of morality, of aesthetics. But no matter how greatly the pattern may be enlarged, it never will contain Being in its totality. For the absolute Being is transcendent, while the greatest possible pattern is still in itself an activity of consciousness and therefore a phenomenon. In The Radical Academy
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Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) (picture) in his work Being and Time starts his investigation from the point his master had reached. Husserl had traced the elements of the world in their historical and psychological reality to the final state of "ideal essences" which, in turn, should give us the explanation of that historical and psychological reality. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the existent reality should give us an understanding of the essence of reality. Thus every metaphysical investigation must start from reality as it is in our experience, i.e., from existent reality, and seek to determine what it is in its finiteness, i.e., in its existence and in its temporal possibilities for developing the different forms of its own existence. Therefore, the initial problem of philosophy must be the following: Why am I here, rather than not existing at all? If I am able to determine the essence of the existent being, then I know what being is. In his attempt to inquire into the nature of existence, Heidegger distinguishes two ways of living: the one, inferior, called the unauthentic; the other, superior, called the authentic. Unauthentic existence is an uncritical participation in the world as it is; authentic existence consists in an analysis of self. Although distinct, the unauthentic and the authentic life have some common characteristics:
On the other hand, the unauthentic life is distinct from the authentic life in many ways:
Authentic existence is something decidedly different from everyday life. To live authentically means "to exist"; this in turn means to stand out -- from the Latin "ex-stare," i.e., to be outside the anonymous mass, to emerge from the world in which we find ourselves, and to accept our own situation with all its limitations. To exist means both to stand apart (to withdraw) and to stand out (to be offered as a target for the fullness of being). Authentic existence, a conscious returning to oneself, is a means of discovering and disclosing that the surrounding banality of the world is vanity and disappears into "nothingness." This universal sense of nothingness produces anguish. Anguish must not be confused with fear. Fear has as its object some determined thing, a determined danger; anguish, on the contrary, is a dread of that indefinite something which, because it is indefinite, is a dread of nothing in particular. The struggle with anguish and the outcome of this struggle opens new horizons as regards the interpretation of being. Even though men and things are fashioned by "nothingness," I exist, I am not nothing; but I come from nothing. I accept my existence, with all the responsibilities involved in my present situation. I am aware that I am a finite being, and I can reach the fullness of my being only to the degree that my circumstances permit. The scope of my potentialities depends on time (the second section of Heidegger's work). Time is what I am not yet; it is my present situation in so far as it is moving toward my possibilities. Time is the horizon open to me. But time tells me that every being has its own end. Being is for death. Thus I am an "existent being destined for death." And since I accept existence with all its ramifications, I accept my death without fear. Heidegger's Existentialism is a valuable contribution to the understanding of individual life; but being guided by no spiritual principle, Heidegger ends with destruction and death. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
For Heidegger, existence in its attempt to transcend its limits ends in nothingness. For Jaspers (1883-1969) transcendence -- as a unique and absolute Being -- is always beyond and just outside the existent being. The more the "being in the world" clarifies his existence, the further the Absolute Being will remain from him. The transcendence of Being is intangible to human experience. The philosophical search of Jaspers may be divided into three stages:
The first stage considers "the being in the world" understood as a mere fact: I exist and things exist around me. In this first stage, man believes that he can reach being in its totality. This attempt is illusory and hence it is destined to fail. Indeed, all knowledge of the "being in the world" is a "limitation of horizon." Jaspers distinguishes three main types of limitation of horizon:
There are three types of truth corresponding to this threefold horizon:
But not one of these types of knowledge is able to comprehend being in its entirety. Every degree of human knowledge is a limitation of horizon beyond which there is something more. Knowledge is a subjective point of view belonging to the being in the world. It is also limited because of the existence of many subjective points of view. Thus the intellect tells us of a multiplicity of possible presentations of reality, each of them based on the actual existence of a being. Jaspers calls this discovery of multiple existence a transcendent act, in so far as the intellect transcends the particularity of the various points of view and reaches what is absolute in these presentations: the fact that they are found in an existing being. Thus we pass to the second stage of philosophizing, whose object is the clarification of existence. Thought, in so far as it is a faculty illuminating existence, is called "reason" by Jaspers. Because of the illumination of reason, the difficulty which was found in the first stage of philosophizing is now transferred to existence. Indeed, existence, on the one hand, illuminated by reason, becomes conscious of its own limitations; on the other hand, reason shows us other modes of existence, and beyond all, the transcendent, to which our existence should be related in order to be constituted on its true level. The study of "transcendence" belongs to metaphysics, and hence we are in the third stage of philosophizing. But the difficulty already found in the first and second stages appears again. Our existence is a search for transcendence; but transcendence cannot be reached, because if transcendence were attainable, it would not be transcendence. Thus the transcendence of being is always something else, something more; and any attempt to attain it is destined to fail. There is in my existence an impassable barrier, a limit beyond which there is Transcendence (God), inaccessible to my being in the world. However, the transcendent Being can be perceived in the form of "ciphers" or symbolic characters expressed by the things of the world. Philosophy, in its search for being, reads these ciphers as possible traces of God ("vestigia Dei"), as signs and signals pointing toward the ultimate depth and plenitude of Being. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
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