Why existentialism

But I can do the same thing authentically if, in keeping my promise for the sake of duty, acting this way is something I choose as my own , something to which, apart from its social sanction, I commit myself.

But such character might also be a reflection of my choice of myself, a commitment I make to be a person of this sort. In both cases I have succeeded in being good; only in the latter case, however, have I succeeded in being myself. Some writers have taken this notion a step further, arguing that the measure of an authentic life lies in the integrity of a narrative , that to be a self is to constitute a story in which a kind of wholeness prevails, to be the author of oneself as a unique individual Nehamas ; Ricoeur In contrast, the inauthentic life would be one without such integrity, one in which I allow my life-story to be dictated by the world.

Even interpreted narratively, then, the norm of authenticity remains a formal one. Authenticity defines a condition on self-making: do I succeed in making myself , or will who I am merely be a function of the roles I find myself in? Thus to be authentic can also be thought as a way of being autonomous. Being a father in an authentic way does not necessarily make me a better father, but what it means to be a father has become explicitly my concern. It is here that existentialism locates the singularity of existence and identifies what is irreducible in the first-person stance.

At the same time, authenticity does not hold out some specific way of life as a norm; that is, it does not distinguish between the projects that I might choose. The possibility of authenticity is a mark of my freedom , and it is through freedom that existentialism approaches questions of value, leading to many of its most recognizable doctrines.

Existentialism did not develop much in the way of a normative ethics; however, a certain approach to the theory of value and to moral psychology, deriving from the idea of existence as self-making in situation, is a distinctive mark of the existentialist tradition. Existential moral psychology emphasizes human freedom and focuses on the sources of mendacity, self-deception, and hypocrisy in moral consciousness.

The familiar existential themes of anxiety, nothingness, and the absurd must be understood in this context. As a predicate of existence, the concept of freedom is not initially established on the basis of arguments against determinism; nor is it taken, in Kantian fashion, simply as a given of practical self-consciousness.

Rather, it is located in the breakdown of direct practical activity. Both Heidegger and Sartre believe that phenomenological analysis of the kind of intentionality that belongs to moods does not merely register a passing modification of the psyche but reveals fundamental aspects of the self.

Fear, for instance, reveals some region of the world as threatening, some element in it as a threat, and myself as vulnerable. In anxiety, as in fear, I grasp myself as threatened or as vulnerable; but unlike fear, anxiety has no direct object, there is nothing in the world that is threatening.

And with this collapse of my practical immersion in roles and projects, I also lose the basic sense of who I am that is provided by these roles. In thus robbing me of the possibility of practical self-identification, anxiety teaches me that I do not coincide with anything that I factically am.

Further, since the identity bound up with such roles and practices is always typical and public, the collapse of this identity reveals an ultimately first-personal aspect of myself that is irreducible to das Man. The experience of anxiety also yields the existential theme of the absurd , a version of what was previously introduced as alienation from the world see the section on Alienation above. So long as I am gearing into the world practically, in a seamless and absorbed way, things present themselves as meaningfully co-ordinated with the projects in which I am engaged; they show me the face that is relevant to what I am doing.

But the connection between these meanings and my projects is not itself something that I experience. So long as I am practically engaged, in short, all things appear to have reasons for being, and I, correlatively, experience myself as fully at home in the world. In the mood of anxiety, however, it is just this character that fades from the world. As when one repeats a word until it loses meaning, anxiety undermines the taken-for-granted sense of things. They become absurd.

As Roquentin sits in a park, the root of a tree loses its character of familiarity until he is overcome by nausea at its utterly alien character, its being en soi. While such an experience is no more genuine than my practical, engaged experience of a world of meaning, it is no less genuine either. An existential account of meaning and value must recognize both possibilities and their intermediaries.

To do so is to acknowledge a certain absurdity to existence: though reason and value have a foothold in the world they are not, after all, my arbitrary invention , they nevertheless lack any ultimate foundation.

Values are not intrinsic to being, and at some point reasons give out. In commiting myself in the face of death—that is, aware of the nothingness of my identity if not supported by me right up to the end—the roles that I have hitherto thoughtlessly engaged in as one does now become something that I myself own up to, become responsible for. Sartre [, 70] argues that anxiety provides a lucid experience of that freedom which, though often concealed, characterizes human existence as such.

For instance, because it is not thing-like, consciousness is free with regard to its own prior states. Motives, instincts, psychic forces, and the like cannot be understood as inhabitants of consciousness that might infect freedom from within, inducing one to act in ways for which one is not responsible; rather, they can exist only for consciousness as matters of choice. I must either reject their claims or avow them.

For Sartre, the ontological freedom of existence entails that determinism is an excuse before it is a theory: though through its structure of nihilation consciousness escapes that which would define it—including its own past choices and behavior—there are times when I may wish to deny my freedom. This is to adopt the third-person stance in which what is originally structured in terms of freedom appears as a causal property of myself.

I can try to look upon myself as the Other does, but as an excuse this flight from freedom is shown to fail, according to Sartre, in the experience of anguish. For instance, Sartre writes of a gambler who, after losing all and fearing for himself and his family, retreats to the reflective behavior of resolving never to gamble again.

This motive thus enters into his facticity as a choice he has made; and, as long as he retains his fear, his living sense of himself as being threatened, it may appear to him that this resolve actually has causal force in keeping him from gambling. In order for it to influence his behavior he must avow it afresh, but this is just what he cannot do; indeed, just this is what he hoped the original resolve would spare him from having to do.

As Sartre points out in great detail, anguish, as the consciousness of freedom, is not something that human beings welcome; rather, we seek stability, identity, and adopt the language of freedom only when it suits us: those acts are considered by me to be my free acts which exactly match the self I want others to take me to be.

Characteristic of the existentialist outlook is the idea that we spend much of lives devising strategies for denying or evading the anguish of freedom. The idea that freedom is the origin of value—where freedom is defined not in terms of acting rationally Kant but rather in existential terms, as choice and transcendence—is the idea perhaps most closely associated with existentialism.

While it does not explain evaluative language solely as a function of affective attitudes, existential thought, like positivism, denies that values can be grounded in being—that is, that they can become the theme of a scientific investigation capable of distinguishing true or valid from false values.

How is it that values are supposed to be grounded in freedom? Why ought I help the homeless, answer honestly, sit reverently, or get up? For instance, I do not grasp the exigency of the alarm clock its character as a demand in a kind of disinterested perception but only in the very act of responding to it, of getting up. If I fail to get up the alarm has, to that very extent, lost its exigency. Why must I get up? At this point I may attempt to justify its demand by appeal to other elements of the situation with which the alarm is bound up: I must get up because I must go to work.

But the question of the foundation of value has simply been displaced: now it is my job that, in my active engagement, takes on the unquestioned exigency of a demand or value.

But it too derives its being as a value from its exigency—that is, from my unreflective engagement in the overall practice of going to work. Ought I go to work? If these questions have answers that are themselves exigent it can only be because, at a still deeper level, I am engaged as having chosen myself as a person of a certain sort: respectable, responsible.

From within that choice there is an answer about what I ought to do, but outside that choice there is none—why should I be respectable, law-abiding? Only if I am at some level engaged do values and so justification in terms of them appear at all. And, as with all anguish, I do not escape this situation by discovering the true order of values but by plunging back into action.

If the idea that values are without foundation in being can be understood as a form of nihilism, the existential response to this condition of the modern world is to point out that meaning, value, is not first of all a matter of contemplative theory but a consequence of engagement and commitment.

Thus value judgments can be justified, but only relative to some concrete and specific project. For this reason I can be in error about what I ought to do.

It may be that something that appears exigent during the course of my unreflective engagement in the world is something that I ought not to give in to. If, thanks to my commitment to the Resistance, a given official appears to me as to be shot, I might nevertheless be wrong to shoot him—if, for instance, the official was not who I thought he was, or if killing him would in fact prove counter-productive given my longer-term goals.

Yet though I alone can commit myself to some way of life, some project, I am never alone when I do so; nor do I do so in a social, historical, or political vacuum. If transcendence represents my radical freedom to define myself, facticity—that other aspect of my being—represents the situated character of this self-making. Because freedom as transcendence undermines the idea of a stable, timeless system of moral norms, it is little wonder that existential philosophers with the exception of Simone de Beauvoir devoted scant energy to questions of normative moral theory.

However, because this freedom is always socially and thereby historically situated, it is equally unsurprising that their writings are greatly concerned with how our choices and commitments are concretely contextualized in terms of political struggles and historical reality.

For the existentialists, engagement is the source of meaning and value; in choosing myself I in a certain sense make my world. On the other hand, I always choose myself in a context where there are others doing the same thing, and in a world that has always already been there. In short, my acting is situated, both socially and historically.

Such choices make up the domain of social reality; they fit into a pre-determined context of roles and practices that go largely unquestioned and may be thought of as a kind of collective identity. In social action my identity takes shape against a background the collective identity of the social formation that remains fixed. On the other hand, it can happen that my choice puts this social formation or collective identity itself into question, and so who I am to be is thus inseparable from the question of who we are to be.

Here the first-person plural is itself the issue, and the action that results from such choices constitutes the field of the political. But we cannot stop to examine all such differences here. Instead, we shall look at the positions of Heidegger and Sartre, who provide opposing examples of how an authentic relation to history and politics can be understood. For Heidegger, to exist is to be historical. This does not mean that one simply finds oneself at a particular moment in history, conceived as a linear series of events.

That this choice has a political dimension stems from the fact that existence is always being-with-others. Though authenticity arises on the basis of my being alienated, in anxiety, from the claims made by norms belonging to the everyday life of das Man , any concrete commitment that I make in the movement to recover myself will enlist those norms in two ways. The point is that I must understand myself in terms of something , and these possibilities for understanding come from the historical heritage and the norms that belong to it.

The idea here seems roughly to be this: To opt for a way of going on is to affirm the norms that belong to it; and because of the nature of normativity, it is not possible to affirm norms that would hold only for me. There is a kind of publicity and scope in the normative such that, when I choose, I exemplify a standard for others as well. Heidegger suggests that it was this concept of historicality that underwrote his own political engagement during the period of National Socialism in Germany.

Heidegger later became very suspicious of this sort of existential politics. A very different reading, and a very different recommendation, can be found in the work of Sartre. In making me an object for his projects, the other alienates me from myself, displaces me from the subject position the position from which the world is defined in its meaning and value and constitutes me as something.

This sets up a dimension of my being that I can neither control nor disavow, and my only recourse is to wrench myself away from the other in an attempt to restore myself to the subject-position.

For social relations take place not only between human beings but also within institutions that have developed historically and that enshrine relations of power and domination.

Thus the struggle over who will take the subject position is not carried out on equal terms. Employing similar insights in reflection on the situations of racial and economic oppression, Sartre sought a way to derive political imperatives in the face of the groundlessness of moral values entailed by his view of the ideality of values.

At first, Sartre argued that there was one value—namely freedom itself—that did have a kind of universal authority. To commit oneself to anything is also always to commit oneself to the value of freedom. In the latter case, he contradicts himself, since the very idea of writing presupposes the freedom of the reader, and that means, in principle, the whole of the reading public. Whatever the merits of this argument, it does suggest the political value to which Sartre remained committed throughout his life: the value of freedom as self-making.

Because existing is self-making action , philosophy—including existential philosophy—cannot be understood as a disinterested theorizing about timeless essences but is always a form of engagement, a diagnosis of the past and a projection of norms appropriate to a different future in light of which the present takes on significance.

It therefore always arises from the historical-political situation and is a way of intervening in it. Marxism, like existentialism, makes this necessarily practical orientation of philosophy explicit. From the beginning existentialism saw itself in this activist way, providing the basis for the most serious disagreements among French existentialists such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Camus, many of which were fought out in the pages of the journal founded by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Les Temps Modernes.

Marxism is unsurpassable, therefore, because it is the most lucid theory of our alienated situation of concrete unfreedom, oriented toward the practical-political overcoming of that unfreedom. He thus undertook his Critique of Dialectical Reason to restore the promise of Marxism by reconceiving its concept of praxis in terms of the existential notion of project.

Dialectical materialism is the unsurpassable philosophy of those who choose, who commit themselves to, the value of freedom. The political claim that Marxism has on us, then, would rest upon the ideological enclave within it: authentic existence as choice. Authentic existence thus has an historical, political dimension; all choice will be attentive to history in the sense of contextualizing itself in some temporally narrative understanding of its place.

But even here it must be admitted that what makes existence authentic is not the correctness of the narrative understanding it adopts.

Authenticity does not depend on some particular substantive view of history, some particular theory or empirical story. From this point of view, the substantive histories adopted by existential thinkers as different as Heidegger and Sartre should perhaps be read less as scientific accounts, defensible in third-person terms, than as articulations of the historical situation from the perspective of what that situation is taken to demand, given the engaged commitment of their authors.

As a cultural movement, existentialism belongs to the past. As a philosophical inquiry that introduced a new norm, authenticity, for understanding what it means to be human—a norm tied to a distinctive, post-Cartesian concept of the self as practical, embodied, being-in-the-world—existentialism has continued to play an important role in contemporary thought in both the continental and analytic traditions. In the area of gender studies, Judith Butler draws importantly on existential sources, as does Lewis Gordon in the area of race theory see also Bernasconi Matthew Ratcliffe and Kevin Aho develop existential approaches to psychopathology.

Interest in a narrative conception of self-identity—for instance, in the work of Charles Taylor , Paul Ricoeur, David Carr , or Charles Guignon—has its roots in the existential revision of Hegelian notions of temporality and its critique of rationalism. Hubert Dreyfus developed an influential criticism of the Artificial Intelligence program drawing essentially upon the existentialist idea, found especially in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, that the human world, the world of meaning, must be understood first of all as a function of our embodied practices and cannot be represented as a logically structured system of representations.

In a series of books, Michael Gelven e. Even if such writers often proceed with more confidence in the touchstone of rationality than did the classical existentialists, their work cultivates the terrain first glimpsed by the latter. This means you have to develop your own moral code to live by. Sartre cautioned looking to authority for guidance and answers because no one has them and there is no one truth. Any purpose or meaning in your life is created by you. You have the answer, you just have to own it.

By signing up you agree to our privacy policy. Article Being Human. I agree with a lot of the existentialist theory. However, what do they believe with regard to illnesses eg cancer or natural disasters?

They emphasise that once we are born, we are responsible for everything, however, if we live a healthy lifestyle no smoking etc how can we be responsible for getting cancer?? Hi Elena. Good question! De Beauvoir thought that whilst we were radically free, out choices were constrained by the circumstances of our life — particularly because of our bodies.

There are some things that limit our ability to freely choose different options. However, existentialists also encourage us not to overstate how much our bodily situation limits our freedom. We can let that determine how we live our lives from that point onward, or we can continue to live a life that is ours, despite the diagnosis, or in light of it.

I largely agree with the personal responsibility, as it relates to ethics. Though I do believe it takes a village and sometimes we must depend on the bounds of socioeconomic factors. Or just having a lot of lucky breaks. It depends on the risks we are willing to take, as well. I suppose wisdom and intellect must be filtered in to an extent, too. Or to be the very best at something in the whole world. Although it has much in common with Nihilism , Existentialism is more a reaction against traditional philosophies, such as Rationalism , Empiricism and Positivism , that seek to discover an ultimate order and universal meaning in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world.

It asserts that people actually make decisions based on what has meaning to them , rather than what is rational. In the s and s, French existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre , Albert Camus - , and Simone de Beauvoir - wrote scholarly and fictional works that popularized existential themes , such as dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment and nothingness.

Existence, then, is prior to essence essence is the meaning that may be ascribed to life , contrary to traditional philosophical views dating back to the ancient Greeks. As Sartre put it: "At first [Man] is nothing.

Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Kierkegaard saw rationality as a mechanism humans use to counter their existential anxiety , their fear of being in the world.

Sartre saw rationality as a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a fundamentally irrational and random world of phenomena "the other". This bad faith hinders us from finding meaning in freedom, and confines us within everyday experience. Kierkegaard also stressed that individuals must choose their own way without the aid of universal, objective standards. Friedrich Nietzsche further contended that the individual must decide which situations are to count as moral situations.

Thus, most Existentialists believe that personal experience and acting on one's own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth , and that the understanding of a situation by someone involved in that situation is superior to that of a detached, objective observer similar to the concept of Subjectivism. According to Camus, when an individual's longing for order collides with the real world's lack of order , the result is absurdity.

Human beings are therefore subjects in an indifferent, ambiguous and absurd universe , in which meaning is not provided by the natural order , but rather can be created however provisionally and unstable by human actions and interpretations. Existentialism can be atheistic , theological or theistic or agnostic. Some Existentialists, like Nietzsche , proclaimed that "God is dead" and that the concept of God is obsolete.

Others, like Kierkegaard , were intensely religious, even if they did not feel able to justify it. The important factor for Existentialists is the freedom of choice to believe or not to believe. Existentialist-type themes appear in early Buddhist and Christian writings including those of St. Augustine and St.