Existentialism

 

Outside Nietzsche and Heidegger, existentialism is not much read today, but its concerns with spiritual loss and alienation are still relevant to contemporary literature. Here lie the roots of much literary theory — most notably the hostility to science, to rationalism and to the notion of a literal language.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) belongs to the continental philosophical tradition — was indeed the forerunner of many schools antagonistic to the analytical tradition. Husserl was not interested in language, however, but in the contents of consciousness, and attempted to make his phenomenology a rigorous science, one that cleared away misconceptions and started with things as they really present themselves. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and not an abstract state of mind. We try to isolate and then to group what is common in our perceptions.

 

How do we include the experiences of other people if we bracket off experience in this way? Husserl never fully answered this question, which found expression in existentialism and hermeneutics. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Husserl's assistant and then successor at Freiburg, wrote the difficult and unfinished Being and Time which shifted emphasis from Husserl's interest in perception to something overlooked since the pre-Socratics: the fundamental nature of existence itself. Besides everyday unreflecting beings that we refer to (the ontic mode), there is Being-in-the- world (Dasein), the primordial individual nature of our existence, the wonder of being here: Heidegger's ontology. Because existence is willy-nilly given to us, and is an active process (we project ourselves into possibilities, merging the horizons of the actual and potential) Heidegger called our existence "a thrown project." Being and Time is a self-involved and anguished work, but the concern for others emerges from Heidegger's ontology: we are automatically born into a world of relationships to people and things.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche was an atheist and stressed the irrational basis of our beliefs. Law, religion, philosophy, culture — all were fictions which a free man rejects. Truth varies with viewpoint, ultimately reduces to convention and personal interpretation, so that the dispassionate search for knowledge is better seen as a will to power. Indeed, power is very much the ultimate reality, and one which the aristocratic individual will boldly grasp. Human beings do not seek knowledge: they want life in all its strength, abundance and variety.

 

Sartre studied philosophy at the Ècole Normale Supérieure in Paris, became a teacher in Le Havre, returned to Paris and published Nausea in 1938. He was mobilized the following year, served as a meteorologist, was captured and, while in prison, read Heidegger and wrote his first play. Upon release he devoted his time to writing the important but very difficult Being and Nothingness (1943). International fame came soon after when his plays and lectures captured the public imagination. He refused an academic appointment and threw himself into international issues, briefly joining the Communist party but leaving and denouncing communism after the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian uprising. He espoused Algerian nationalism, opposed the American involvement in Vietnam, and was still a potent voice in the events of 1968.

 

Existentialism is not a philosophy so much as a protest against certain features of contemporary life. God has disappeared. Nature is governed by abstract laws. Man himself has dwindled to a statistic in the state bureaucracy; even his inmost thoughts and feelings are matters of psychology, physiology, ultimately of chemistry. Man's dethronement has been going on for three hundred years ago, ever since the advent of science in the seventeenth century, but it has taken this century's wars, depressions, concentration camps and wholesale state engineering to bring matters to a head. Existentialism champions what has been overlooked in man's one-sided desire to intellectually comprehend and to control the uniqueness of human life: its variety, its need for personal validation. Hence the irrationalism of the movement, its partisan nature, its willingness to dispense with reason or close argumentation, even to denigrate custom and logic as fiction.

 

A greatly expanded version of this article can be found on TextEtc.

 

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Existentialism

 

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