Except what is the existentialism tradition? That might be a good place to start.
The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life -- that is the heart of existentialism.
All right. Now that’s a philosophy I can get behind. So much of what I’ve already read seems remote in the extreme from actual life -- remote not just in the sense that it is inapplicable, but also in the sense that it is undecipherable; filled with its own cryptic and unexplained lexicon.
But the reality is that many of the featured philosophers in this volume are guilty of the same crime, whether Kaufmann wants to call them existentialists or not. The selections from Heidegger, Jaspers, and Kierkegaard, for example, are painfully difficult to get through. Here’s a sample paragraph from Jaspers:
The faith of spirit is the life of the universal Idea, where Thought is Being ultimately is valid. The faith of Existenz, however, is the Absolute in Existenz itself on which everything for it rests, in which spirit, consciousness as such, and empirical existence are all bound together and decided, where for the first time there is both impulse and goal; here Kierkegaard’s proposition, “Faith is Being,” applies.
Uh huh. And here’s a taste of the referenced Kierkegaard:
Innocence is ignorance. In his innocence man is not determined as spirit but is soulishly determined in immediate unity with his natural condition. Spirit is dreaming in man. This view is in perfect accord with that of the Bible, and by refusing to ascribe to man in the state of innocence a knowledge of the difference between good and evil it condemns all the notions of merit Catholicism has imagined.
I’ll be honest. I don’t know which is more frustrating: (1) the word-salad of undefined words and made-up terms; or (2) the presumption that Christianity is true and the verbal gymnastics that are needed to build a philosophy around it. This is existentialism? This is the “refusal to belong to any school of thought”? The “repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs”? The “marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life”? Walter, honestly, if you’re going to clutter up with volume with philosophers like these, then I truly don’t know what you’re talking about.
Art Not Philosophy
Except there is one lonely candle of clarity in the darkness of Kaufmann’s editorial choices. And to be fair to the good professor, it is he, himself, who lights it.
In the end, Rilke, Kafka, and Camus pose a question, seconded by Dostoevsky and by Sartre’s plays and fiction: could it be that at least some part of what the existentialists attempt to do is best done in art and not philosophy? [It sometimes happens, though this is assuredly no rule, that at some given time and place one of the arts, perhaps a single man, towers above the rest and says more adequately what the others say less well. In Italy around the time of 1300 Dante was that man, and two hundred years later it was, if not Michelangelo, in any case sculpture and painting. In Dostoevsky’s Russia it was the novel. In Denmark around 1850 it was a new and peculiar kind of prose: we think of Kierkegaard and Andersen. In Nietzsche’s Germany there was no poet and no novelist to rival him.] It is conceivable that Rilke and Kafka, Sartre and Camus have in their imaginative works reached heights of which the so-called existentialist philosophers, including Sartre, not to speak of Camus’ essays, have for all their efforts fallen short, if they have not altogether missed their footing in their bold attempts to scale the peaks and fallen into frequent error and confusion. Whether this is so or not, that is a crucial question which no student of this movement can avoid.
Is existentialism best done in art and not in philosophy? This part-time student of the movement would certainly think so, at least based on the selections that Kaufmann has included in this collection. Consider, for example, the section from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, in which the free agent of the individual chooses to rebel against the seeming determinism of the universe.
I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who do not understand a certain refinement of enjoyment. Though in certain circumstances these gentlemen bellow their loudest like bulls, though this, let us suppose, does them the greatest credit, yet, as I have said already, confronted with the impossible they subside at once. The impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.
“Upon my word,” they will shout at you, “it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she had nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall … and so on, and so on.”
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason, I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply, because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
As though such a stone wall really were a consolation, and really did contain some word of conciliation, simply because it is as true as twice two makes four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities! How much better it is to understand it all, to recognize it all, all the impossibilities and the stone wall; not to be reconciled to one of those impossibilities and stone walls if it disgusts you to be reconciled to it; by the way of the most inevitable, logical combinations to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache.
That ache. The ache of the feeling individual against the unrelenting determinism of the universe. If that isn’t existentialism, I don’t know what is. And all of its described without any word salad or verbal gymnastics.
It is a theme that Dostoevsky will develop in the next several pages, as the narrator continues an imaginary conversation with a skeptical multitude.
What man wants is simply an independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows that choice.
“Ha! ha! ha! But you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you like,” you will interpose with a chuckle. “Science has succeeded in so far analysing man that we know already that choice and what is called freedom of will is nothing else than---”
Stay, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself. I confess, I was rather frightened. I was just going to say that the devil only knows what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing, but I remembered the teaching of science … and pulled myself up. And here you have begun upon it. Indeed, if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices -- that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula -- then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ? What do you think? Let us reckon the chances -- can such a thing happen or not?
Now we seem to be getting to the meat of it -- to the unresolvable muddle that is man. For here, Dostoevsky is clearly saying that the knowledge that man is controlled by forces beyond his control, that he is an automaton or an “organ-stop,” means that he will stop being a man. This I question, uncertain what the impact of awareness would be on such a system, a system in which awareness itself is a vital part. Whether he “knows” it or not, after all, man is operating on the same deterministic principles.
And this is the place that Dostoevsky himself soon gets to -- switching his organ-stop metaphor to one of the piano-key.
And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object -- that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated -- chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all before hand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism! And this being so, can one help being tempted to rejoice that it had not yet come off, and that desire still depends on something we don’t know?
Man is determined to act as though he was not determined. That’s the tidy little paradox that lives at the center of this discussion. I’m not sure Dostoevsky ever really gets there. He seems to preserve a tiny shred of freewill at the core of man’s rebellious actions, but he may be right in that a true understanding of his determined existence may very well drive man mad -- just as he was programmed to do.
Fascinating and fun. And let’s not lose sight of the larger point here. Right or wrong, I find myself able to engage in my own philosophical discussion based on the words in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, just as I am not able to do with anything presented in this volume as written by Heidegger, Jaspers, and Kierkegaard. In this revelation, its seems not just that existentialism is better revealed in art than in philosophy -- existentialism may, in fact, be art and not philosophy.
Let’s look at a second example. Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story, “The Wall.”
“It’s like a nightmare, Tom was saying. “You want to think something, you always have the impression that it’s all right, that you’re going to understand and then it slips, it escapes you and fades away. I tell myself there will be nothing afterwards. But I don’t understand what it means. Sometimes I almost can … and then it fades away and I start thinking about the pains again, bullets, explosions. I’m a materialist, I swear it to you; I’m not going crazy. But something’s the matter. I see my corpse; that’s not hard but I’m the one who sees it, with my eyes. I’ve got to think … think that I won’t see anything anymore and the world will go on for the others. We aren’t made to think that, Pablo. Believe me: I’ve already stayed up a whole night waiting for something. But this isn’t the same: this will creep up behind us, Pablo, and we won’t be able to prepare for it.”
In “The Wall,” a group of political prisoners have been condemned to death by firing squad, and the story is largely each of them wrestling with the difficulty of their own deaths. In the excerpt above, Tom expresses the universal inability to truly comprehend non-existence. As he succinctly says, even the act of comprehension requires his existence. How can he understand something that he can never witness?
Later, Pablo, the protagonist, reflects on his situation.
A crowd of memories came back to me pell-mell. There were good and bad ones -- or at least I called them that before. There were faces and incidents. I saw the face of a little novillero who was gored in Valencia during the Feria, the face of one of my uncles, the face of Ramon Gris. I remembered my whole life: how I was out of work for three months in 1926, how I almost starved to death. I remembered a night I spent on a bench in Granada: I hadn’t eaten for three days. I was angry, I didn’t want to die. That made me smile. How madly I ran after happiness, after women, after liberty. Why? I wanted to free Spain, I admired Pi y Margall, I joined the anarchist movement, I spoke at public meetings: I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal.
At that moment I felt that I had my whole life in front of me and I thought, “It’s a damned lie.” It was worth nothing because it was finished. I wondered how I’d been able to walk, to laugh with the girls: I wouldn’t have moved so much as my little finger if I had only imagined I would die like this. My life was in front of me, shut, closed, like a bag and yet everything inside of it was unfinished. For an instant I tried to judge it. I wanted to tell myself, this is a beautiful life. But I couldn’t pass judgment on it; it was only a sketch; I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing. I missed nothing: there were so many things I could have missed, the taste of manzanilla or the baths I took in summer in a little creek near Cadiz; but death had disenchanted everything.
This is different from Dostoevsky’s philosophical musings on determinism and freewill. This is the raw emotion of a man wrestling with the limitations of his existence. There are no answers here, no wisdom for finding peace with the inevitable, just a tragic anger. But even then, it is more compelling, and more useful, than a treatise than uses unfamiliar terms in an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Reading these words, I feel Pablo’s despair and can recognize it as my own. Philosophically, this awareness has more utility than understanding.
The Cave of Inwardness
Despite the judgment I have previously rendered, there are a handful of useful tidbits in the many pages of straight philosophical treatise that comprises the bulk of this volume. Here’s a few that jumped out at me.
Nietzsche wrote in “Live Dangerously”:
Wherever there have been powerful societies, governments, religions, or public opinions -- in short, wherever there was any kind of tyranny, it has hated the lonely philosopher; for philosophy opens up a refuge for man where no tyranny can reach: the cave of inwardness, the labyrinth of the breast; and that annoys all tyrants. That is where the lonely hide; but there too they encounter their greatest danger.
Danger of isolation, yes, but Nietzsche will go on to explain that the greater danger is that of despair -- despair when his philosophical musings reveal the truth of the human condition.
Jaspers also speaks of danger of isolation within the Nietzschean Cave of Inwardness in his “Existenzphilosophie”:
The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals is a technically functioning organization, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls. The emptiness caused by dissatisfaction with mere achievement and the helplessness that results when the channels of relation break down have brought forth a loneliness of soul such as never existed before, a loneliness that hides itself, that seeks relief in vain in the erotic or the irrational until it leads eventually to a deep comprehension of the importance of establishing communication between man and man.
An existential paradox? A harbor safe from the tyrannies of mind and body, but also a trap from which no discovered truths can escape? I don’t know if Nietzsche chose the phrase with this allusion in mind, but it is very reminiscent of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, except here the cave is the place where the philosopher goes to find the truth, not that place that frames the tyrannical reality of everyone else.
Man Is Freedom
I’ll end with this from Sartre’s “Existentialism”:
The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism -- man is free, man is freedom.
We’re back where we started -- exploring determinism and freedom, but this time framing them against the philosophical existence of God rather than the materialistic universe. And how interesting is it that, despite the reference to Dostoevsky, Sartre seems to say that God has to be killed in order for man to be free. Dostoevsky, I think, saw a little more clearly through that philosophical lens. Just losing God is probably not enough to let man off the deterministic hook.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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