Abstract
This chapter looks at why existentialism is regarded in contemporary philosophy as outmoded. I argue that this goes back to Heidegger’s identification of existentialism with humanism in his Letter on Humanism. I also argue that a type of existentialism can escape this critique. It is shown how this is possible by developing, through engagement with other characterisations of existentialism, a meaning of existentialist thought as a ‘return to human being.’ I look at how such a return avoids humanism by rejecting the interiority of the subject. Finally, I intimate how a problem arising from this rejection, of maintaining a distinct meaning for the human, might be resolved by viewing human being as a perverse relation to something other than itself.
The statue lay in the mud of your contempt: but this precisely is its law, that its life and living beauty grow again out of contempt!
—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Of great events’ (p. 154. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as TSZ)
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- 1.
See Golomb, In Search of Authenticity, 145–146, for a discussion of the ‘subjective pathos of authenticity’ underlying existentialism and the threat posed to it by post-modernism.
- 2.
This is done, for instance, by analytic philosophers working on the problem of self-deception.
- 3.
Sartre, Search for a Method, preface, xxxiii.
- 4.
Cooper, ‘Existentialism as a philosophical movement’, in The Cambridge companion to Existentialism, 27.
- 5.
Albert Camus and Gabriel Marcel are two other figures regularly associated with existentialism.
- 6.
See Fromm, Marx’s Conception of Man.
- 7.
Gabriel Marcel first used the term in 1945 to describe Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. Nevertheless, most of those associated with ‘existentialism’ rejected the label. See Richard Schacht, ‘Nietzsche: after the death of God’, in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, 112–114.
- 8.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, preface, viii.
- 9.
Although even with these the issue is not necessarily always clear cut. And certainly other intellectual movements, such as phenomenology, structuralism, and analytic philosophy all have issues regarding the definitions and meanings of the terms.
- 10.
Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 11.
- 11.
See, for instance, Nietzsche’s criticism in Philosophy in the Tragic of the Greeks, 43, of philosophy ‘rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste”, at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost.’
- 12.
For instance, this can be seen in the application of the methods of conceptual analysis, phenomenology, or feminism.
- 13.
Judaken, ‘Introduction’, in Situating Existentialism, 1.
- 14.
Existentialists says Kaufmann, rejected ‘traditional philosophy ‘as superficial, academic, and remote from life’ (12), but does not elaborate on these points.
- 15.
Golomb, 88.
- 16.
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 129. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as UTM.
- 17.
See Heidegger, Being and Time, 149, Division one, Part one, section IV.
- 18.
A process satirised by Dostoyevsky in ‘The double’, and one of the reasons he is considered an existentialist.
- 19.
Golomb, 144.
- 20.
Golomb, 13.
- 21.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 132. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BG.
- 22.
‘Being towards death’ in Being and Time, and ‘profound boredom’ in the later The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, see Part Two, Chapter One, 169.
- 23.
See Nietzsche’s 1886 prefaces to the works of his middle period in particular for a discussion of the role of suffering and solitude as modes of experience which lead us toward the true self.
- 24.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 104.
- 25.
Golomb, 10.
- 26.
These characters occur, respectively, in Nausea, The Outsider, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, She Came to Stay, and Either/Or.
- 27.
See Sartre Nausea, 100.
- 28.
See Golomb, 18–33, for a development of this view, and for a reading of Sartre’s Nausea as being concerned with the discovery of authenticity. In a similar vein, Golomb also suggests that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is also an ‘existential hero’ pursuing and inspiring authenticity.
- 29.
In this respect an interesting comparison is with the ‘character’ of Jesus. As Nietzsche argues in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 98–99, the limitation of Jesus was that he wanted people to follow his example, rather than creating their own.
- 30.
Note: Golomb doesn’t explicitly try and define or characterise existentialism, nor is this his only goal. Nevertheless, he does interpret various figures associated with existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus) in terms of the pursuit of authenticity. As such, a certain understanding of what constitutes existentialism, and the existentialist thinker, is implicit.
- 31.
Golomb, 61.
- 32.
Golomb, 61.
- 33.
Kaufmann, 14.
- 34.
Dostoevsky, ‘Notes from the Underground’ in Notes from the Underground and The Double, Part 1, 3.
- 35.
Kaufmann, 13.
- 36.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 150.
- 37.
See Pattison, The Philosophy of Kierkegaard, 86, for the distinction between ‘universal ontology’ and ‘the concrete and immediate situation of individual existence.’
- 38.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, preface, xxiii.
- 39.
This figure emerges in Nietzsche’s ‘middle works’, starting with Human, All too Human, and persists through to Beyond Good and Evil. It arguably replaces or displaces the earlier idea, found in Untimely Meditations, of authenticity and individuality for its own sake.
- 40.
Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, 107.
- 41.
See Human, All too Human, I: Preface: SS3, 6.
- 42.
Human, All too Human, 7.
- 43.
Solomon, Existentialism, xi.
- 44.
Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 6.
- 45.
See Warnock, Existentialism, 1, for the view that existentialist thinkers are defined by ‘the interest in human freedom.’
- 46.
See, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism.
- 47.
Cooper, 29–30.
- 48.
Crowell, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, 5. Note that Kaufmann, 51, also suggests that a reconciliation between analytic philosophy and existentialism is possible.
- 49.
Webber, Rethinking Existentialism, 1, 18. Webber believes existentialism can be defined as a theoretical position, and that it can be used to support contemporary research in analytic philosophy, as well as other fields.
- 50.
See Webber, 1.
- 51.
Webber, 14.
- 52.
Webber, 3.
- 53.
Webber, 1.
- 54.
Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 49. Sartre criticises Husserl there for failing to explain why one would be motivated to conduct the phenomenological reduction.
- 55.
Merleau-Ponty, xxiii–xxiv.
- 56.
Merleau-Ponty, viii.
- 57.
Though the question of the cross-over between the goals of existentialism and phenomenology is too broad for the current work.
- 58.
Which was then published as ‘Existentialism is a humanism’. Chapter 4 of this work will discuss in more detail the political and historical context of this lecture, and why Sartre felt compelled to offer a simplified definition of existentialism, and his own existentialist philosophy, there.
- 59.
Webber, 189.
- 60.
Webber in fact argues that this more radical view of ‘existence precedes essence’ was only held by the early Sartre of Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism. De Beauvoir in The Second Sex, Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, and Sartre in Saint Genet, according to Webber, all adopt a more qualified view of freedom, and this phrase, which says that while we can ultimately change all our projects, and hence our nature, this cannot happen all at once. Rather, our values and projects become ‘sedimented’ and can only be fully changed gradually, and over a period of time. Further, this latter interpretation of ‘existence precedes essence’ is according to Webber the mature and ‘canonical’ form of existentialism.
- 61.
See Webber, 193. Webber states that ‘Empirical social psychology is converging on a similar conception of motivation’ to his theory of existentialism.
- 62.
Webber, 11.
- 63.
Sartre, Search for a Method, xxxiii.
- 64.
Merleau-Ponty, viii.
- 65.
Tillich, Theology of Culture, 77.
- 66.
Tillich, 87.
- 67.
See also Schacht, ‘Nietzsche: after the death of God’, for discussion of the priority of ‘Existenz’ in existentialism, 114.
- 68.
Tillich, 87.
- 69.
Tillich, 89.
- 70.
Tillich, 95.
- 71.
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Post-script to the Philosophical Crumbs, 100.
- 72.
Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, Preface SS7, 10.
- 73.
Adorno, ‘Resignation’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, 293.
- 74.
Concern with ‘human being’ is also often seen as linked to the hubris of past ‘continental philosophy.’
- 75.
Namely, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Lacan.
- 76.
Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 246.
- 77.
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 2.
- 78.
Evolutionary psychology, for instance, proposes a theory that current human being is the product of its evolutionary past.
- 79.
Heidegger , ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Heidegger: Basic writings, 148. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as LH. See also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, SS204, for a similar point regarding the subordination of philosophy to science.
- 80.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 68.
- 81.
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 19.
- 82.
Crowell, 9.
- 83.
Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy Heidegger and French Philosophy, xi.
- 84.
Combined with other factors, like the desire to topple Sartre as the ‘master thinker’ of French thought, see Rockmore, chaps. 4 and 5.
- 85.
Rockmore, 181, 136: in relation to Foucault.
- 86.
See Rockmore, 142, footnote138: for an account of Derrida’s attack on Sartre in ‘Les Fins de l’homme’.
- 87.
See Rockmore, 58, 136–137. As Rockmore points out, Foucault argues that the conception of the human being is ‘finished’, footnote 129.
- 88.
Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism. Sartre intended ‘humanism’ there in a different way to the ontological sense meant by Heidegger in the Letter. That is, he intended it in the ‘moral’ sense that for human beings ‘there is no legislator other than himself’, 53. Nonetheless, combined with the simplification of his thought that necessarily occurred in the attempt to give a generally accessible lecture, the ‘humanist’ label stuck, see 51–53. More will be said about this in Chap. 4.
- 89.
Sartre, ‘Intentionality: A fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1 (2): 4–5, 5.
- 90.
Tillich, 92.
- 91.
Sartre, ‘Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology’, 5.
- 92.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 4.
- 93.
This is the view that all that exists are ‘structures’; for example, of language and power.
- 94.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, xxvii.
- 95.
The exact connection between Husserl’s conception of intentionality and Sartre’s interpretation of it will be addressed in more depth in later chapters.
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Mitchell, D. (2020). Introduction: Existentialism and Humanism. In: Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43108-2_1
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