[Starting Points]
What Is Existentialism?
Part Four: "Broad Church" Existentialism
Last May, I thought I’d write a post giving readers a general introduction to existentialism. That proved to be too much for a single post so I restricted myself to existentialism proper, the French existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialism “proper” because Sartre and Beauvoir were the only thinkers to style themselves self-consciously as existentialists (and only for a time).
But this term “existentialism” has taken on a life of its own and has found application in a much wider range of contexts. I’ve since written blog posts about the major themes of existentialist thought and some of its historical antecedents. Now it’s time to turn to some of the thinkers most closely associated with existentialism who aren’t named Sartre or Beauvoir.
In a wry nod to existentialism’s complicated relationship with religion, I’ll call this broader movement “broad church existentialism.” None of these thinkers explicitly identified as existentialist—either because they disavowed the label (both Heidegger and Camus did) or because they lived before the term was coined. For each of these thinkers, I’ll give a brief overview and some pointers to where you might look to dig deeper into their thought.
And I’m not done yet! In the new year, I hope to write one last (?) post, this one exploring some of the ways in which existentialism has resonated in twentieth-century culture.
By the way, if the theme of existential anxiety appeals to you, I wrote a guide on “how to be anxious” for Psyche. It looks at the theme of anxiety in the work of Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger, and offers some tips for exploring the idea yourself.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55)
When you hear “angsty Dane,” you probably think of Hamlet. But spare a thought for Kierkegaard, who can lay claim to being the second most famous angsty Dane. He has two advantages on Hamlet. The first is that he actually existed. The second is that it’s Kierkegaard we can thank for making angst famous.
Existential anxiety (Angst in German, from which the word made its way into English) entered the philosophical canon with Kierkegaard’s 1844 work, The Concept of Anxiety. Kierkegaard traces the origin of anxiety to the moment at which Adam eats the fruit in the Garden of Eden. God’s prohibition on eating the fruit reveals two things. First, that Adam’s choices have consequences. And second, that his choices are his. God’s prohibition only makes sense because Adam is free to choose for himself what to do.
Adam’s predicament is our own—this is the meaning of original sin. At each moment we face choices that are ineluctably our own and these choices determine the shape and meaning of our lives. It’s a terrifying predicament. We puny, fleshy creatures, shuffling from home to the office and back again, are also living out a great cosmic drama in which we’re infinitely responsible for the choices we make. Coming face to face with this predicament gives rise to anxiety.
The easiest, and most common, response to anxiety is simply to ignore it. Why make choices at all? I shuffle from home to the office because that’s what one does. I can take comfort in the anonymity of the crowd. As long as I’m going along with prevailing fashions and life choices, I can avoid confronting my own responsibility for my choices. Kierkegaard writes scathingly about this renunciation of responsibility: “The crowd is untruth.”
Our freedom is unsettling because, at bottom, there are no “right” choices. Kierkegaard contrasts a universal realm of ethical principles, to which we’re all equally answerable, with the particularity of a life of faith. Faith, says Kierkegaard, is essentially irrational. It asks of us to make a leap—like existential anxiety, the idea of a “leap of faith” originates with Kierkegaard—beyond what reason can justify. Our choices, and our responsibility for those choices, go deeper than reasons can reach.
Kierkegaard didn’t just talk this talk. He seems to have experienced his own moment of anxiety in 1841. He was on a promising path to bourgeois respectability and engaged to Regine Olsen, a woman who was thoughtful, intelligent, and kind. But something inside of him recoiled against the path that lay ahead of him and he took a wrecking ball to the whole thing. He broke off his engagement, abandoned public life, and retreated to his home where he wrote furiously, producing over 30 volumes in under a decade.
What to read: Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling introduces the distinction between ethical and religious forms of life and the idea of a leap of faith through a vivid discussion of the story of Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac on God’s command. We get a detailed analysis of ethical and aesthetic forms of life in the much longer but even more readable Either/Or. Kierkegaard gives his analysis of existential anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety. And many regard his masterpiece to be the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The Hong and Hong translations from Princeton University Press offer an excellent combination of readability and scholarly rigour.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81)
The novel is a bourgeois artform. It arose in early modern Europe as a merchant class was coming into its own and the printing press and wider literacy created a reading public. Many of the great novelists of the nineteenth century—think of Austen, Dickens, Balzac, Flaubert—dealt with the struggles and strivings of the socially mobile in a world shaped increasingly by middle-class concerns.
So what role does the novel play in a country without a middle class? The novelists of nineteenth century Russia wrote in a very different social context than their western European counterparts. Social mobility couldn’t be a theme in a country that had very little of it. Instead, Russian novelists engaged vigorously with social and philosophical questions. Russia doesn’t boast a tradition of great philosophers like England, France, or Germany do. That’s because their greatest thinkers wrote novels.
Dostoevsky is the most philosophical of the Russian novelists. His early novella Notes from Underground (1864) offers a bitter denunciation of the optimism of nineteenth century progressives. The idea that life might become more orderly, more rational, more predictable is not grounds for hope according to the anonymous speaker. It’s a worldview that poses a direct threat to human freedom. To the Underground Man, freedom has to include the freedom to be wrong, to be stupid, to be spiteful. In prizing freedom over rationality, the Underground Man manifests what his close contemporary Edgar Allen Poe terms “the imp of the perverse.”
The theme of freedom runs throughout Dostoevsky’s novels. Raskolnikov, the central figure of Crime and Punishment (1866) commits a murder in order to test his theory that a great man can rise above morality. Dostoevsky’s last novel, Brothers Karamazov (1880) grapples with our faith in reason and the reasonableness of faith, and the possibility of morality in a world without God.
Despite the radical themes of his novels, Dostoevsky had a deeply reactionary streak. His antiheroes—the spiteful Underground Man, the misguided Raskolnikov, the atheist Ivan Karamazov—are not models for us to emulate. They’re warnings about a deepening sickness that Dostoevsky saw in a society that was losing its grounding in faith and tradition. It’s a tribute to the depth of his vision that Dostoevsky makes these antiheroes so compelling.
What to read: You can read Notes from Underground in a few hours and in the process witness the birth of modern literature. Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov require a bit more dedication but are well worth the effort. Also worth checking out are the other two novels of Dostoevsky’s mature period, The Idiot and Demons. The translation duo of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky first gained wide acclaim for their work on Dostoevsky.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Nietzsche saw himself as a prophet of sorts. In terms of genre, his idiosyncratic Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) is as close to religious scripture as anything else. Its central figure is the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra, better known as Zoroaster, founder of Zoroastrianism, and arguably the first person to conceive of the cosmos as structured by a struggle between good and evil. Since he was the first to think in terms of good and evil, Nietzsche reasoned, he’d be the first to get beyond these concepts. Nietzsche has Zarathustra proclaim that God is dead and foretell the coming of the Übermensch, or overman, who lives “beyond good and evil.”
Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God is much misunderstood. This isn’t a blunt, defiant assertion of atheism. If God never existed, after all, he couldn’t die. In proclaiming the death of God, Nietzsche instead warns of a profound shift in European values. For nearly two thousand years, European thought has been structured by the spiritual and ethical framework supplied by Christianity. But this framework has reached the point of exhaustion and new values are needed.
On Nietzsche’s analysis, Christianity is the agent of its own demise. At its heart is a resentful self-denial that rejects pleasure, joy, and vigour. The tremendous self-discipline this rejection requires gives Christianity its strength and attractiveness. But its lack of life-affirming values is ultimately self-defeating. Nietzsche sees modern Europe’s descent into atheism and nihilism not as a rejection of Christian values but as the ultimate fulfillment of its ascetic creed. The culmination of its spirit of self-denial is the denial of Christianity itself.
The news isn’t all bad. Nietzsche thinks the self-discipline that Christianity demands makes humanity interesting. By directing our violent impulses inward rather than outward, we separate ourselves from the other animals. But we need to imbue that self-discipline with positive values, with self-affirmation and an affirmation of life, rather than rejecting the world, as Christianity does, in favour of a spiritual afterlife.
What to read: Thus Spoke Zarathustra is brilliant and bizarre and unlike anything else that’s ever been written. More philosophically robust, and maybe better entry points to Nietzsche’s mature thought, are the three essays in On the Genealogy of Morals and the linked aphorisms of Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche’s late work Twilight of the Idols indicates directions his thought might have gone had he not suffered a complete mental and physical collapse in 1889, spending the last decade of his life in a catatonic state. There are more scholarly translations now available than the ones by Walter Kaufmann, but he does a magnificent job of capturing Nietzsche’s fervid tone and also provides helpful commentaries through the footnotes.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
René Descartes set the agenda for modern philosophy in his First Meditation by asking how we can know anything about the world at all. On Descartes’s framing, human beings are essentially thinking beings and our knowledge of the world is a matter of accurately representing the world “out there” to the conscious mind.
Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), turns the Cartesian picture inside out. Our access to the world comes primarily not by thinking but by doing. Heidegger describes Dasein, his term of art for human existence, as “being-in-the-world”: I’m not a detached knower apprehending the world from without but an engaged participant.
This approach brings with it a new way of thinking about meaning in life. Meaning isn’t primarily something we reflect on or reason about. It’s what’s manifest in the way we go about the business of living. What’s the meaning of my life? At every moment of my life, I’m answering that question whether I recognize it or not. What matters to me, what I give time and attention to, how I interact with the people and the world, all reveal the kind of sense I make of the world and the importance I attach to it. In other words, the meaning of my life is revealed in what I care about and the contours of that care. Heidegger says that “Dasein, in the ground of its being, is care.”
But what if I simply don’t care? There are moments when my busy engagement with the world comes unstuck, when all the things I was setting about doing suddenly cease to matter. Those moments can be unsettling, but they’re also profoundly revealing. This is the twist Heidegger puts on Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety. The moment of anxiety for Heidegger comes when I feel the significance of the world drain away. In that moment, I recognize that the significance of the world hinges on nothing more robust than my own investment in it. And with that recognition comes the awareness of my own responsibility for making sense of myself and my world.
Echoing Kierkegaard (whose influence he doesn’t fully acknowledge), Heidegger says the characteristic response to anxiety is to lose myself in a public world of shared thoughts, opinions, and forms of behaviour. As long as I go along with what everyone else is doing, the world seems to make sense. Why and how does the world matter? Well, social media and public chatter answer that question for me. But this response is inauthentic, says Heidegger, because it doesn’t own up to the unique responsibility each of us has for making sense of our own lives. Heidegger lays out an influential analysis of death as singling each of us out as unique and uniquely responsible.
What to read: Nothing Heidegger wrote makes for an easy read but if you want to struggle through Being and Time, there are helpful companions by Hubert Dreyfus, Stephen Mulhall, and William Blattner. There are currently two translations of Being and Time, both with their upsides and downsides, but the Macquarrie and Robinson translation is a bit more readable. There’s nothing basic about Heidegger’s writings but his Basic Writings collect some of his most influential shorter papers. Of particular interest with regard to the existential streak in Heidegger’s thought is “What Is Metaphysics?”
Albert Camus (1913–60)
Camus is the thinker on this list most closely associated with the French existentialism of Sartre and Beauvoir. So much so that he had to insist repeatedly that he wasn’t an existentialist, even though he was a friend and conversation partner with both during their existentialist phase. But Camus’s thought moved on a slightly different track. Around the time that Sartre was working out his existentialist philosophy in Being and Nothingness, Camus was working out a philosophy of the absurd.
Do you ever get struck by that odd feeling that the world just doesn’t make sense? This is the feeling Heidegger characterizes as anxiety. Camus vividly describes it as the feeling of the absurd. The people around you might come to seem like robots, mechanically going through their routines. Worse yet, you might come to seem like a robot to yourself. Or you might be struck by the relentless advance of time and the inevitability of death. Why is this my predicament?
Life doesn’t seem to make sense? Well you’re right, say Camus: it doesn’t make sense. The question is what you can do in the face of this absurdity. More to the point, what options are there besides suicide? Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus with the famous line: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”
Camus explores various ways we might live heroically and defiantly in the face of life’s absurdity. His model here is the mythical Sisyphus, condemned for all eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again. Sisyphus’s predicament is the human predicament, says Camus. We’re condemned to a life of pointless struggle. But if we can throw ourselves passionately into the struggle in full awareness of its pointlessness, we can embrace its absurdity rather than hiding from it or despairing. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Later in his career, Camus softened his line on the absurd, conceiving of ethical action and solidarity as ways of engaging meaningfully in the world. A spirit of irony and rebellion remains in his work but one gets the feeling that Camus cared too much about people to hold too austerely to the idea that nothing matters.
What to read: Camus is the second-youngest person ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (after Rudyard Kipling), which is just as well, since he died in a car crash at the age of 46. His fiction gives rich expression to the philosophical ideas he explores in his non-fictional writings. It’s worth reading The Myth of Sisyphus side-by-side with The Stranger, his reputation-making novel about the absurd hero Meursault. Likewise, his later more ethically engaged thought finds brilliant expression in his novel The Plague, as well as in his book-length essay, The Rebel.