[The following material includes parts of a lecture delivered by TA Andrew Irvine in 1998.]
Existentialism can be thought of as the twentieth-century analogue of nineteenth-century romanticism. The two movements have in common the demand that the whole fabric of life be recognized and taken into account in our thinking and acting. As such they express a form of resistance to reductionist analyses of life and its meaning for human beings. But there are also significant differences. Existentialism is typically focused on individual human lives and the poignant inevitability of suffering and choice for each individual whereas romanticism tended to be more oriented to the whole of nature and saw human beings as a part of that wider picture. Furthermore, romanticism flourished before the wars and genocides of the twentieth century whereas existentialism is born amid those horrors.
From one point of view, the existentialists divide roughly between writers (most famously, perhaps, Albert Camus) and philosophers. The philosophical existentialists divide roughly between the atheistic and the religious. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) ["the ultimate anti-Christianity Christian"] is often considered to be the father of them all, but Friedrich Nietzsche ["the ultimate anti-Christ philosopher"] is a crucial figure at the origins of the developing line of atheistic existentialism. Religious existentialists included both Jews such as Martin Buber (1878-1965) ["the Protestant Jew"] and Christians such as Paul Tillich (1886-1965) ["the Christian crypto-atheist infatuated with Being and God"]. Other religious existentialists include Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, and Karl Rahner. The atheistic existentialists include Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) ["the non-Christian atheist infatuated with Being and time"], though he denied that he was an existentialist, and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) [the ultimate atheist infatuated with Being and nothingness]. It is quite a cast of characters. And the classifications make less sense the better you know them, not least because it is hard to disentangle theism and atheism in the context of existential reflection on human life. The plan here is to examine a few themes commonly treated by existentialists and then to examine the thought of Kierkegaard more closely.
Here is a list of themes that are important in existentialism. They are not all taken up by every existentialist thinker and they are not entirely consistent with one another. But thats life, right?
1. Importance of the individual
The leading question in this case is "What does it mean to be existing as a human being?" This question leads out in a number of directions.
2. Importance of choice
We see this preeminently in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. But it is perhaps most colorfully expressed by Karl Rahner who described human beings as one giant decision (in his case, for or against God).
3. Anxiety regarding life, death, contingencies, and extreme situations
Tillichs formulation expresses this point beautifully: he speaks of our anxiety due to the "threat of non-being." The forms of non-being are many and various and each prefigures the ultimate loss of being that is death and the ultimate contingency of being that is birth. Both the chance events and extreme situations of life make evident the threat of non-being and cuase us anxiety.
4. Meaning and absurdity
Sartre spoke of an unfulfillable desire for complete fulfillment and thereby expressed the meaning of absurdity.
Sartres opposition to bad-faith (or self-deception) is an example of what is meant by authenticity; perhaps Heideggers expatiation of authentic existence is one of the most complete.
6. Social criticism
Many existentialists deconstructed social conventions and practices.
7. Importance of personal relations
It must be said that the existentialist imperative to be an individual is front and center but another imperative becomes important in some existantialists (especially Buber): be an individual-in-community!
8. Atheism and Religion
Here is one of the greatest disagreements among existentialists, testifying perhaps to the inescapable vagueness of the field of life within which human beings must make decisions that create meaning. Though the nature of that field of life and its ground are dramatically contested, all existentialists hold that a decision in relation to it is the key issue for human beings.
Religion is a deeply contested point within existentialism
Life and Works
He has been called the father of existentialism. This is appropriate even though he lived in the first half of the nineteenth century because his influence outside of Denmark was only pronounced at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Kierkegaard makes for interesting archetypal contrasts with other important thinkers, both before and after him. If Kant is the archetypal rationalist than Kierkegaard is the archetypal romantic. If Hegel is the archetypal systematician, resolving contradictions, Kierkegaard is the archtypal attender to details, relishing paradoxes. And while he shared with the atheist Nietzsche an impression of a harsh world, Kierkegaard thinks that God is the ground and end of the world and of every human longing.
The Three Stages
Kierkegaards great question was always "What ought I do?" His most famous answer to the question turns on a three-fold distinction of stages on lifes way.
Whereas Kant took everything, even God, to be consistent with the moral imperative (this is really his definition of rationality), Kierkegaard argued that the divine command is rationally unapproachable; we must just do it. The contrast between the moral and religious stages is movingly expressed in the discussion of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trmbling. Abraham becomes for Kirkegaard the one whose life of faith (the religious stage) transcends moral categories through obedience to God (even divine whims).
The movement from the aesthetic to the ethical to the religious is premised on a vision of the holiness, the unaproachability of God; morality derives from God, it does not rule God. This has a very Lutheran, and actually Scotist, accent. God has set us in a situation in which these choices (particularly regarding the second movement) cannot be made rationally but are finally criterialess; this is essential to the life of faith. This is the brutal situation of human life and draws our attention to the fundamental character of decision: ones very soul depends upon it.
Who Am I?
Who am I? They often tell me
Who am I? They often tell me
Who am I? They also tell me
Who am I? This or the other?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1944
What is Existentialism?
Professor Wildman has remarked that:
John Macquarrie has characterized existentialism as a style of philosophizing, rather than as a philosophy (John Macquarrie, Existentialism (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1972), 2). His intention is to recognize that a diversity of ideas, emphases, and conclusions are to be found among a group of various thinkers who, nevertheless, have enough in common in the way they think to warrant naming them together. Typically, existentialists take the existing human being as a starting point. The existing human being is distinct from objective nature as a whole because she is a subject, undetermined by laws of nature. She is distinct from previous modern, Western philosophical conceptions of the subject (e.g., the Cartesian) because she is subjective not just as a thinker but as one who acts. Again, she is distinct because she is preoccupied with the problematic finitude of her existing way of being. This last distinction is key. Existence understood as a distinctive way of being, is the common and fundamental concern of these thinkers. What does it mean to be an existing human being?
Existentialism has had at least as much impact through the arts, especially literature, as it has through philosophy. Albert Camus, author of LEtranger (The Stranger) and La Peste (The Plague), among other novels, is perhaps the most famous of the existentialist artists. Jean-Paul Sartre won Nobel Prizes in philosophy and literature. La Nausée (Nausea) is probably his best known work of fiction. For the interests of this class, philosophical existentialism may be roughly divided into irreligious and religious existentialism. However it is very difficult to delineate exactly where the division should be drawn. Macquarrie calls Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the great Christian existentialist (ibid., 6). Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ, (though his sense of his own relationship to Christianity is remarkably complex and deep), is a crucial figure in the development of existentialism, too. Other religious existentialists include Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, and Christian theologians Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner. Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers also line up in the religious camp. Sartre, and the German, Martin Heidegger, are explicitly atheistic in their philosophical work, although the role of Heideggers atheism in his life as a whole is an important topic among some students of his work.
Freedom and the necessity to choose
To be an existing human being means to be free. In contrast with most everything else in the world, a human being is not determined by laws of nature. The human being has a unique freedom to determine his or her own behavior. However, this freedom is in itself a kind of determination which we cannot escape. We are condemned to freedom. For the great majority, this tension is too great. As the pop group, Devo, put it in the 1980s, Freedom of choice is what youve got. Freedom from choice is what you want.
The lack of norms, and anxiety
Nature is an arena of facts, but the arena of human freedom is where norms and values feature. However, since nature does not supply them, our freedom is a freedom to make values and norms by which we will abide. The weight of this responsibility produces anxiety, also known as angst, or dread. For Kierkegaard, this is closely related to the guilt of a sinful existence.
Meaning and absurdity
Knowing that we are the ones who make the meaning of our lives also creates a tension when it comes to the validity of those meanings. There is a kind of bleak absurdity to the prospect of committing our lives to vales and meanings that we know ourselves to have invented.
Self-deception and authenticity
Nevertheless, to hide from the knowledge of our freedom and pass off our responsibility onto other people, ideas or institutions as if they can take care of our anxiety and absurdity is to engage in bad faith, to use a term used by Sartre. To exist as a human being means to be willing to take up the challenge of ones freedom. There is no exit (the title of one of Sartres plays) by which we could get ourselves off the hook.
The individual and they
The demand for authenticity also has a social and a political dimension. Some existentialists have been extremely individualistic, while some have been involved in liberation movements. Again, consider Sartre: his comment that, hell is other people is famous, as is his active support of the Algerian struggle for independence from France. Heidegger characterized the threat to authentic existence as they: for example, they say one should always floss before bedtimewho is they, really, and who is one? Where is the actual, existing person. On the other hand, Buber argued that authentic existence was impossible without a serious relationship with other persons.
Irreligion and religion
The viability of religion is a contested matter among existentialists. Sartre argued that the existence of a God who was free, and so religiously interesting, would entail the cancellation of human freedom; but humans are free, therefore God does not exist. Others saw God as the ultimate Thou who, by engaging in relationship with us, could give authentic meaning to our otherwise absurd existence. Tillich was sympathetic to such a position.
Kierkegaard is often considered the father of existentialism. Although he was active primarily in the first half of the nineteenth century, and dead shortly after it, he gained a sizeable audience outside his native Denmark only in our century.
SK was the youngest son of Mikael Kierkegaard, a quite wealthy merchant, and Anne Lund. His father was an important influence in his early childhood, inculcating expectations of intellectual depth, theatrical flair and emotive pietist religion. SK was academically gifted, but his appearanceskinny, awkward, and apparently with some spinal deformationmade him the victim of childrens cruelty. He could give as good as he got, though. Stories suggest he could reduce a bully to tears with verbal jibes and derision.
SKs youthful intention was to become a Lutheran pastor. He enrolled in theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1830. There, he encountered the Hegelian system, which reigned in Danish theological and philosophical circles at the time. The philosophy of Hegel is one of the most powerful intellectual influences upon SKs own thought. He often referred to it as simply, The System. He was deeply attracted to it at first, but came to be deeply offended by what he took to be its ignorance and disdain for a truth which is true for me, the idea for which I can live and die (Journal, Aug. 1, 1835). By the time his own writing career began, in 1841, the Systems influence was primarily as a peerless example of human arrogance and farce. However, the state-supported Danish Lutheran Church also failed to satisfy SKs want of a truth that was true for him. Desperate, going against the philosophical mode and religiously estranged from his father, SK commenced a period of rebellious, rakish living in Copenhagen. He found neither liberty nor consolation in this. Thus commenced a gradual return to Christianity. On his 25th birthday he thoroughly reconciled with his father, and a few days later had some kind of conversion experience. Shortly after these events his father died. SK resolved to return to the University and complete his studies in order to become a pastor. His Masters thesis, The Concept of Irony, gives an indication of SKs abilities. It was written ironically as well as being about irony. One of the readers commented to the effect that it was, perhaps, the most brilliant work he had ever read, and he hoped he would never see anything like it again.
Three highly public episodes in SKs life should be noted. The first is his relationship with Regina Olsen. In 1840, SK completed his degree and became engaged to Regina. However, he almost at once discovered a doubt about the fitness of the marriage. He came to believe that the marriage had received a divine veto, and eventuallyalmost a year after the engagement, returned the ring to her. Regina was unconvinced of his sincerity, and for two months, SK sought to break her attachment to him by misrepresenting himself as a scoundrel who had abused Regines affection. Only in this way, he believed, could he be sure to give her the strength to make her own way after such humiliation. Yet, he, too, hoped against hope that a marriage might yet be possible, and the argument of Fear and Trembling, one of two works written during those two months, reflects SKs passionate hope. He attributed his poetic vocation to Regina, and it was a poetic madness equaled by very few writers. His output, in volume and creativity, is prodigious. Some Kierkegaard scholars claim that he wrote himself to death (Anthony Imbrosciano, personal communication). The editors of Concluding Unscientific Postscript describe an example of his literary feats:
SK loved the street-life of Copenhagen, and was undoubtedly the most-widely known person in the city. But after publishing a short, critical piece on a popular weekly, The Corsair, in 1845, this enjoyment would be poisoned. He was relentlessly and mercilessly mocked and ridiculed, to the point that even in the countryside, former acquaintances retreated from him in suspicion or flung at him mockery and scorn. The Corsair was little else than a sophisticated scandal-sheet (Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard, Encyclopedia of Religion) at the best of times, and the fact that none of Copenhagens educated elite gave any support to SK, deepened his alienation from the Danish bourgeoisie. The affair marked a turning-point, away from pseudonymous writing to concentrate on a Christian authorship written in his own name, and a vehement public protest against Christendom. As part of this attack, SK sat outside churches on Sundays, reading the newspaper, and remonstrating with people not to go in. In 1855, SK collapsed in the street after delivering what proved to be the final issue of his magazine, The Moment, to the printer. He died a few weeks later, affirming his strong Christian faith but refusing to receive communion from a priest of the Danish church. He wished that his epitaph say of him only, That Individual. His wish was denied.
Genesis 22: 1-8.
Is Abraham a great soul, a beautiful soul? Is he perhaps a tragic ethical hero? Or is he something else instead?
Fides quaerens intellectum
SK has been criticizedor laudedby a number of commentators who call him an antiphilosopher. In the relation between theology and philosophy, SK may be considered as an opponent of the tradition of faith seeking understanding in this respect, that SK rejects any claim that it is possible to go beyond faith, that philosophical understanding can add anything to faith. This is basic to his disagreement with Hegel. Louis Pojman has argued that SK is not an antiphilosopher, that he does in fact have a positive conception of the role of philosophy in demonstrating some truths (Louis P. Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaards Philosophy of Religion (University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1984)). However, he also insists upon that role as involving the demonstration of the limits of reason, a debt linking SK to Kants epistemological position (Xxxxx, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt). Yet, Kierkegaard also disagrees with Kants decision to make the ethical the supreme expression of religious existence.
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus describes three stages of human development and possibility. This book is one of SKs finest statements of an answer to the great existential question, what ought I to do? The three stages are the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.
The Aesthetic Stage
In Hegelian speculation, morality and religion are partial recognitions of the movement of Spirit towards its final and absolute self-realization. Philosophy grasps Geist truly and completely, in the form of the absolute concept. The concept, strictly speaking, is neither a moral principle or stance, nor a religious belief or faith, but the content of consciousness that is conscious of itself. The System is reprehensible in SKs view because it dissolves the concreteness of individual existence, characterized by the necessity to choose. In its stead, the System claims to understand everything in its entirety. SK castigates this as the most dishonest, most comical pretense of the aesthetic way of living. The aesthete cares only about detached, objective enjoyment, free from any responsibility to actually engage with his existence as such. But existence cannot be detached and indifferent: Existence itself is a systemfor God, but it cannot be a system for any existing (existerende) spirit . Existence is the spacing that holds apart; the systematic is the conclusiveness that combines (SK, Postscript, 118). Within the spacing of existence lies the comical aspect of Hegels philosophy:
Hegel claims to objectively understand a conceptual necessity that explains everything in the unfolding saga of Spirits progress. SK counters that concepts are mere possibilities unless they are actualized by some individuals subjective decision, and decision as such cannot proceed from understanding but must be a matter of passion. Hegels achievement is monumental, but he has absentmindedly forgottenhimself, his own subjective opposition to the universal, objective system he has made. The system denies the true foundation of decision in absolute, irremediably finite, individual subjectivity:
The Ethical Stage
An actual aesthete find that her existence leads to boredom and eventually suicide, so there is an impulse to move to a form of life in which there is a concept of oughtness to discipline the aesthetes pleasure. This concept marks the ethical stage. It cannot be attained as a natural development out of the aesthetic stage, but involves a leap.
SK understands ethics under Kants influence. The ethical as such is the universal, and the goal of the ethical form of life is to reconcile, or resign, the individual and particular to the universal. Compare this with Kants formulation of the condition of possibility of ethical action: Act only on that maxim which one could will to be a universal law.
However, as mentioned above, the ethical is not the highest stage in Kierkegaards assessment. Whereas Kant took everything, even God, to be consistent with the moral imperative Kierkegaard argued that the divine command is rationally unapproachable; we must just do it (Wildman).
The Religious Stage
A movement into the religious form of life from the ethical is not possible, because the ethical life is one of reconciliation between the individual and the universal. The ethical persons existence is mediated through the universal. SK analyzes religiousness in two forms, in the Postscript, but we shall limit ourselves to considering the distinctive character of true religious life, which is faith. The ethical life is one of reconciliation. The life of faith is a life in paradox. According to Johannes de Silentio: The paradox of faith is this, that the individual is higher than the universal, that the individual (to recall a dogmatic distinction now rather seldom heard) determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal. The paradox can also be expressed by saying that there is an absolute duty toward God . (Fear and Trembling, 80)
Faith involves a teleological suspension of the ethical. Abraham:
acts by virtue of the absurd, for it is precisely absurd that he as the particular is higher than the universal. This paradox cannot be mediated; for as soon as he begins to do this he has to admit that he was in temptation, and if such was the case, he never gets to the point of sacrificing Isaac, or, if he has sacrificed Isaac, he must turn back repentantly to the universal. By virtue of the absurd he gets Isaac again. Abraham is therefore at no instant a tragic hero but something quite different, either a murderer of a believer (ibid., 67).
Truth is Subjectivity
The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones, that is, the only convincing ones (ibid., 109). Faith is the highest passion in a man. There are perhaps many in every generation who do not reach it, but no one gets further (ibid., 131). Becoming a Christian. The existing person who chooses the subjective way instantly comprehends the whole dialectical difficulty because he must use some time, perhaps a long time, to find God objectively. He comprehends this dialectical difficulty in all its pain, because he must resort to God at that very moment, because every moment in which he does not have God is wasted. At that very moment he has God, not by virtue of any objective deliberation but by virtue of the infinite passion of inwardness (Postscript, 200).
Truth is, an objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness (ibid., 203).
With regard to the essential truth, a direct relation between spirit and spirit is unthinkable. If such a relation is assumed, it actually means that one party has ceased ton be spirit, something that is not borne in mind by many a genius who both assists people en masse into the truth and is good-natured enough to think that applause, willingness to listen, signatures, etc. mean accepting the truth. Just as important as the truth, and of the two the even more important one, is the mode in which the truth is accepted, and it is of slight help if one gets millions to accept the truth if by the very mode of their acceptance they are transposed into untruth (ibid., 247).
Everything I have said today about Kierkegaard, about his thought, is a lie.
The information on this page is copyright ©1994-2010, Wesley Wildman (basic information here), unless otherwise noted. If you want to use ideas that you find here, please be careful to acknowledge this site as your source, and remember also to credit the original author of what you use, where that is applicable. If you want to use text or stories from these pages, please contact me at the feedback address for permission.