I want this to be an honest book. No disrespect to other scribblers and beekeepers of ideas, but honest in the sense that instead of serving up re-rehearsed intellectual history, I want to believe that I have absorbed and can pass along some wisdom from Søren Kierkegaard and other existentialists whom I spent much of my adult life studying. “He who studies with a philosopher,” the Stoic Seneca (4BC–AD65) tells us, “should take home with him some good thing every day; he should daily return home a sounder man, or on the way to becoming sounder.” The same holds for someone like me who has spent decades walking with Kierkegaard and those who followed him. Either I was made sounder or I was wasting my time. If the former, then I ought to be able to pass on a few nuggets of wisdom, and if the latter, then I should remain mum or restrict myself to simply charting the history of existential ideas.
Existentialism is a state in the union of philosophy, and philosophy is the love of wisdom—as opposed to knowledge—where wisdom might be understood as a pretheoretical understanding of how to live. At the end that was the beginning of this book, I started to feel that, neurotic as I am, I didn’t have anything worthwhile to impart, even secondhand. Yes, I know: there is nothing more irksome than an author writing about how hard it was for him or her to write their book. As though the word processor were Aleppo! But when I first sat at the keyboard, the blank page put me on the canvas, or rather in bed. Personally speaking, the attempt to write has always seemed like a confrontation with the void inside me, with my own emptiness.
For all my blessings, I’m a relatively haunted human being. In fact, I would have to place myself on the rather miserable end of the spectrum. Clinically speaking, I am a card-carrying depressive. To be fair to myself, I have tried to be a kind person. At least since my borderline-criminal days, I have made substantial efforts to nurture the lives of my students and others, but I am no more a moral hero or sage than I am a contented individual who sleeps soundly and rises in the morning eager to embrace the promises of the day.
My aim in this book is to articulate the life-enhancing insights of the existentialists. And yet their shimmering genius aside, the cast of characters introduced in these pages do not have much better grades on the happiness or moral curve than I do. In truth, to a man and woman, the existentialists are a veritable cadre of neurotics. So, who are they—or me, their apostle—to pass along life prescriptions?
At this juncture, you would be right to prepare for an “on the other hand” or “but still,” as in although I have undermined the very idea of this book, please read on! Well, you’re right: there is a “but still,” for all my foibles and problems the existentialists, and Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) in particular, helped me to endure. At the risk of seeming histrionic, there was a time when Kierkegaard grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back from the crossbeam and rope.
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and other existentialist thinkers faced life unblinkered and were nevertheless able to lead authentic lives and keep their heads and hearts intact. More than any other group of philosophers, they understood what we are up against in ourselves, that is, moods such as anxiety, depression, and the fear of death. Today, these inner perturbations are usually classified in medicalizing terms. But in their own inimitable, indirect manner, the existentialists remind of us of another perspective on these and other troublesome emotions. In the pages that follow, I will try to recover those reminders.
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and other existentialist thinkers faced life unblinkered and were nevertheless able to lead authentic lives and keep their hearts intact.
I am sure there are readers familiar with that exclamation point of an expression “existential threat,” but unfamiliar with existentialism. For those who might be tilting their heads, asking, “What is existentialism?” a survey of the movement is in order.
Existentialists have been perennially concerned with questions about the very meaning of life, questions that tend to come to the fore when we have become unmoored from our everyday anchorage.
The existentialism that helped sustain me is personal in nature. Representatives of this approach think about existence from the inside out, from a first-person perspective. There is much dispute about the roster of this motley crew of thinkers. With the exception of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), who was the only one to accept the label and only for a short period at that, scholars cannot agree on an official muster list. For instance, I edited Existentialism: The Essential Writings, an anthology that included Albert Camus (1913–1960), who, for reasons to be discussed, seemed a no-brainer, and appears in virtually every such collection. Then I thumbed through David Cooper’s excellent Existentialism, only to learn that the venerable professor denies that Camus is an existentialist because “unlike the rest of our writers, it is not at all his aim to reduce or overcome a sense of alienation or separateness from the world.”1 Strange, because I would have thought that the sheer attempt to articulate this sense of alienation would have been enough to warrant membership in the club.
Further complicating the issue, many of the writers classified under that heading did not in any way think of themselves as philosophers, even though for the most part you’ll only find courses on existentialism in philosophy departments. For instance, it would be fair to tab Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), a contemporary of Kierkegaard, an existentialist even though he is rarely included as one in anthologies or course syllabi.
Though we are without a body of unifying creedal convictions, a set of themes links this diverse group of intellectual pirates. Existentialists have been perennially concerned with questions about the very meaning of life, questions that tend to come to the fore when we have become unmoored from our everyday anchorage. It has been argued2 that the roots of existentialism were planted as science began to displace faith in what Max Weber termed “the disenchantment of nature.” Blame it on Copernicus, who awoke humankind from the dream that the Garden of Eden sits at the center of the earth, earth at the center of the universe with God out there watching the play of human history as though in a theater. Another cause for existential head scratching was the emergence of nation-states in Western Europe, which brought with it the breakdown of the tidy feudal ordering of society, where everyone understood his or her place both in the cosmos and society.
In the modern era, periods of cataclysms have always been a boon to existentialism. Following the abattoir of the First World War, many turned to writers who grasped that life was not dictated by reason, to help them understand, or at least come to grips with, the madness. Interest in existentialism rocketed after World War II and the Holocaust, when humankind once again proved what it is capable of.
And yet, in the mid-twentieth century, at the same time that existentialism was gaining popularity, analytic philosophy ruled the roost in Anglo-American universities. This mode of inquiry developed on the back of logical positivism, a movement that began in Austria with Rudolf Carnap and the conviction that any proposition that was not testable was not worth thinking about. Advances in formal logic also gave a fillip to this hard-nosed mentality, one that placed maniacal stress on logical form and clarity.
If we cleave to the biblical distinction between word and spirit, the spirit of the analytic philosophy was to cleanse philosophy of anything that smacked of metaphysics, unanswerable questions about the nature and foundations of being itself. So far as the fundamentalists of this school of thought were concerned, anything that could not be defined clearly was mumbo jumbo better left alone or to the poets.
I recall a graduate seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, a bastion of analytic philosophy in the early 1980s. Before the beginning of one class, our renowned professor read aloud a sentence from Kierkegaard, a sentence that will reappear more than once in the pages to follow. It is a sentence that encapsulates the leitmotif of this book: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”3 Putting down the text, he chuckled and wondered aloud with a tinge of genuine pity, “How could any reasonable person take this spaghetti plate full of words seriously?” Even though I was a fledgling and largely closeted student of the Dane at the time, I couldn’t deny that the spaghetti image was so compelling that even Kierkegaard might have cracked a smile over it.
If there was one judgment that united existentialists it was an antipathy toward academic philosophy, with the notable exception of Professor Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Though he took the equivalent of his doctorate in theology, Kierkegaard was never a professor. In fact, he expressed nothing but disdain for the academicians whom he perceived to be constructing castles of abstractions while living in doghouses next door. Kierkegaard dismissed professors as tapeworms who have nothing of their own to say, but feed off the thoughts of more creative spirits. The existential triumvirate of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus were prolific authors who did not draw checks from universities. Nietzsche, the man who very early on resigned his position as a professor at the University of Basel and rightly said of himself, “I am not a man, I am dynamite,”4 chided those with chalk in hand for their lack of courage and creativity, hurling insults like “conceptual mummifiers” at them.
There are at least two strands of existentialism. Existential phenomenology, one strand, has its taproot in epistemological worries about what we can and cannot know. It stems from the groundbreaking work of Jewish-German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). The epiphany that ignited phenomenology emanated from Husserl’s teacher Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Brentano observed that, unlike objects in the material world, mental events—ideas, thoughts, and feelings—are intentional; they always refer to something beyond themselves. For instance, the image I have of the pine tree beside my window refers to something outside of consciousness. In contrast, the pine tree itself just is and does not refer to anything. Bluntly stated, ideas point to something where as things themselves, objects, just are.
But how can you be sure that external objects exist when all you can know is the impression and idea of those objects? After all, contact with the world is mediated by ideas and you can’t get outside your ideas to check and see if they correspond to things in the so-called real world. This dilemma is what the philosophers call the “ego-centric predicament.” In an end run around questions of this sort, Husserl developed phenomenology, a term that derives from the Greek word for “appearance.” He implored us to remove our conceptual glasses and see the world afresh. His clarion call was “back to the things themselves.” Husserl’s intuition was to “bracket” the question of the existence of things and instead concentrate on delivering pure descriptions of the things themselves. After a fashion, Husserl bid us to glimpse the world as children again, without processing it through concepts. A devotee of Husserl, Sartre was both a philosopher in the traditional sense and a writer of fiction. In his novel Nausea, Sartre generates many examples of beholding the world à la Husserl, in its raw form. Midway in the book, Roquentin, the protagonist, is staring at the root of a nearby chestnut tree. Roquentin thinks to himself, “This root . . . existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence . . . I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a suction pump, to that, to that hard and thick skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, stubborn look.”5 The notion of a suction pump might help you grasp what all roots have in common but it does not explain the concrete particular in front of Roquentin, a particular that could be processed many different ways.
Because of his emphasis on concrete existence, Husserl earned a reputation as a forbearer of existentialism. Phenomenologists such as Sartre who followed him were riveted to the task of revealing the very structures of consciousness. In the thicket of his sometimes impenetrable tome Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes a man looking through a keyhole to spy on a woman. Suddenly the voyeur has the feeling that someone has come up behind him. In an instant, he is suffused by shame and immediately goes from feeling like a subject to feeling like an object, which, with some elaboration, Sartre assimilates as evidence that our being-with- and being-for-others is an integral aspect of the structure of consciousness.
Heidegger and Sartre were prime practitioners of the phenomenological method, a method not always appreciated by their Anglo-American brethren. Here is an almost random and, believe it or not, relatively straightforward excerpt from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness:
[C]onsciousness is an abstraction since it conceals within itself an ontological source in the region of the in-itself, conversely the phenomenon is likewise an abstraction since it must “appear” to consciousness.6
Sartre, who goes on in this manner for some six hundred pages, is claiming that consciousness is an abstraction because consciousness appears to itself as an object of consciousness. For my graduate school professors of the analytic persuasion, this sort of talk was, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “language gone on a holiday.” Now, existential phenomenologists might have replied to this insult by saying that the desiccated lingo of philosophical academe should get out of its straitjacket and take a holiday!
There is, however, another cadre of existential thinkers, to whom “existential” still implies attending to concrete existence who avoid floating off into abstract theories detached from reality. For the most part, the reflections in this book keep company with Kierkegaard, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Camus, and other literary exponents of the existential tradition. All else aside, the sheer ability of these writers to move the waters of language and their fierce engagement with the hurly-burly of real life provide a magnet for rapt attention and engagement.
Going back to the pre-Socratics (and still much alive in the dialogues of Plato), there has been an ongoing debate among the lovers of wisdom as to whether wisdom is best transmitted in the form of mythos, stories and poems, or in the form of logos, explanations and reason. As the reader will witness, the existentialists who inhabit the following pages delightfully combine elements of both poetry and reason. Most of the writers who have helped me to continue putting one foot in front of the other are logical enough, but tend to rely on stories to transmit their insights about how to live.
Søren Kierkegaard, the poet-philosopher or philosopher-poet of this book, possessed scintillating philosophical abilities; however, he primarily considered himself a poet in the Romantic tradition of a Goethe. For all the arguments Kierkegaard stitched into his sprawling authorship, he was more mythos than logos. Almost unique in detecting the question of how to deliver life-altering and -sustaining truths, Kierkegaard invented and practiced what he termed “the method of indirect communication.”
Kierkegaard believed that when it came to the essentials in life—say, how to be a righteous and faithful individual—we have all the knowledge we need. Integrity demands many things, but it does not depend on acquiring new knowledge. If—as Bob Dylan teaches—you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, you surely don’t need an ethics professor to teach you the difference between right and wrong. More than anything, what is required it does not depend on acquiring new knowledsired is a passionate relationship to our ideas—and even that sounds too flat, too abstract. This is where mythos comes in.
Kierkegaard believed that when it came to the essentials in life—say, how to be a righteous and faithful individual—we have all the knowledge we need. Integrity demands many things, but it does not depend on acquiring new knowledge.
Kierkegaard believed that ethico-religious communication, that is, communication that has to do with our moral and spiritual lives, was not a matter of conveying thought contents but of pricking conscience, of augmenting care for the right things. In one of his most poignant journal entries, penned when he was a twenty-one-year-old on vacation, the young Kierkegaard reminds himself, “Only the truth that edifies is the truth for Thee.” The hunger for truth ought to be something more than intellectual curiosity; it ought to be a hunger for truths that build you up, that make you a better human being, if not necessarily a happier individual. At the peril of preaching, these are the truths that we need to be true to for them to have purchase on our lives.
Your hunger for truth ought to be a hunger for truths that build you up, that make you a better human being, if not necessarily a happier individual.
Talk with people who identify themselves as philosophers and within moments they will demand, “What’s your argument?” Plato and his teacher Socrates believed geometrical proofs to be the model for an argument. With existentialism, argument often takes the form of a story or description, in which you either see yourself or you don’t.
The great Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) conjured up mind-boggling puzzles that philosophers have been trying to solve since his death. And yet, at the end of the day, he was content to leave these problems in his study to go and play billiards as though the conundrums he served up were nothing to lose sleep over. In contrast, the existentialists, like the Stoics, regarded philosophy as a way of life. They were deadly serious about their ruminations.
Camus, for example, began his singular philosophical treatise, The Myth of Sisyphus, with these welcoming sentences:
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.7
Answer what? The question of whether or not life is worth living. It is Shakespeare’s, “To be, or not to be?” A line down, the twenty-nine-year-old Camus pokes a finger in the reader’s chest, insisting that if the answer is “life is not worth living,” then we should—well—kill ourselves. Camus describes life as a collision between human beings who have an innate craving for meaning and a universe that is as indifferent as rock, utterly devoid of meaning. No matter, Camus counsels that we should put the revolver back in the drawer. Consciousness of absurdity is worth the candle, for as Camus pronounces, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” or laughter.
The analytic philosopher Thomas Nagel offered a rebuttal to Camus’s philosophy of the absurd. Judging Camus to be a mite hysterical, the unflappable Nagel explains that the experience of the absurd derives from the simple fact that we humans are unique in our capacity to take two different perspectives on our lives—the everyday view in which we go about our business, and another objective vantage point from which we can look at our lives sub specie aeternitatis. From this perspective, the workings of the world seem trivial, much ado about nothing. Perhaps clad in corduroys and with chalk dust on his pants, Professor Nagel prescribes a dash of irony to dispel the disquieting feeling of the absurd.
Again, unlike Hume and Nagel, the existentialists don’t quit their questions for a beer or a game of backgammon. In his Two Ages, Kierkegaard decrees that the objective thinker is actually a suicide,8 because we are actually spirits, and the person who continuously strives to think about life from a disinterested perspective systematically chokes the self-interest that is the animating force of his or her spirit.
As intimated earlier, the question of meaning is paramount, both in general (as in what is the meaning of life) and in particular. For instance, later in this book, we will find Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, reciting a litany of objective facts about death, but then grabbing the reader by the lapels and reminding us that all the facts in the world won’t offer a glimpse into the meaning of what it means that I will die. With this emphasis on the “I,” the scribblers once known for their berets and black attire, were uniquely inside-out first-person thinkers. Thinking from within the coordinates of my own existence earmarks the existential point of view.
As the subtitle of this book indicates, authenticity is a common theme. Thanks, to some degree, to the ever-presence of and pandemic addiction to social media, we live in an era in which appearances seem more important than reality. Today, there is little premium placed on being authentic. For example, I received an email from a friend who was ill and had to cancel lunch. At the bottom of the page were three boxes with alternative automatic responses: “Oh no. Get well soon.” “Thanks. I understand.” “I hope you feel better soon.” In a dither, I scrolled down and tapped the first alternative but I was embarrassed to respond in such an inhuman, inauthentic manner.
Kierkegaard rarely used the term authenticity and it was not a virtue Nietzsche lionized. However, it is not surprising that in the late fifties and sixties authenticity and existentialism would become terms married to each other. After all, existentialists of almost every ilk stressed honesty with oneself, walking your talk, becoming your true self. Novels like The Catcher in the Rye, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Death of a Salesman attest to the fact that Americans felt as though Big Brother was watching over them in a disguised but powerful demand for conformity. For all our professed individualism, there was a persistent worry about being a phony, about selling your soul so you could land a job with a company that would put your body in the right kind of car.
In 1946, in the most widely circulated essay ever published on the subject, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” Sartre proclaims that for humans “existence precedes essence.” Sartre explains that artifacts created by human design are constructed with an aim or purpose. The purpose is the essence of that thing. Sartre says, for example, take a pair of scissors. Scissors are made to cut. That is their essence. But with humans it is entirely different. Sartre has unshakeable faith that we were not created by God with a plan. So for Sartre, we are who we choose to be. We define ourselves by our choices, which, along with freedom, is another theme unifying the existentialists. Some philosophers have chided existentialists for being mere psychologists. There is a measure of truth to this accusation. They take moods and emotions much more seriously than most of the members of the American Philosophical Association. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus famously said “you can’t step into the same river twice”—everything is in flux. Much of the wisdom found in Western philosophy is faceted to the task of forming an inner compass, of finding something that will keep us constant and steady as the outer and inner world continuously shifts.
For philosophers such as Socrates (469/470–399 BC), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), reason is the compass, and moods threaten to distort our inner needle. Joy, depression, anxiety, and other affects imperil our inner stability. There are, however, philosophers who tip their caps to feelings. Aristotle (384–322 BC), who during the late–Middle Ages was referred to simply as “The Philosopher,” maintained that the recipe for being a virtuous individual entails having the right feelings in the right measure at the right time. Hume, of the razor-sharp mind, believed it was the feeling of sympathy, not reason, that gave wings to our better angels.
And yet the existentialists do more than acknowledge the felt aspect of life. They concentrate on the emotions. Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre argue that moods like anxiety are conveyors of self-understanding. And for Kierkegaard, depression can instruct us in our powerlessness and total dependency on God. Rather than working to override troublesome feelings, the existentialists directly address the likes of anxiety, depression, envy, and guilt. As Sartre’s essay notes, the intense focus on discomfiting feelings capable of bending the shape of our lives has invited critics to grouse that existentialism is too negative, too bleak.
Of course, most of us can be good Samaritans when it is nothing but green lights, but that is not how life usually goes. I once spoke with a young athlete who, crestfallen, confided that she had just been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Much of her identity and her ways of coping with anxiety had been built around having six-pack abs and sweating it out. Not being able to push herself as much physically is not the end of the world, but she will surely have to struggle to sustain a kind heart in the midst of her anger, her disappointment, and the anxiety that she can no longer leave behind in the weight room.
Saint Paul spoke of the “groaning of existence.” Our cast of thinkers recognize that our lives have everything to do with how we absorb the inevitable blows of life.
Once again, the existentialism that was my lifeline is a first-person way of thinking. For that reason, it seems only appropriate to briefly describe the personal circumstances in which Kierkegaard and company became my walking partners.
Saint Paul spoke of the “groaning of existence.” Our cast of thinkers recognize that our lives have everything to do with how we absorb the inevitable blows of life.
I grew up in a house of shouts, the clink of ice followed by Friday- and maybe Wednesday-night fights between my parents. One night my brother was just in time to stop my mother from stabbing my besotted father in the chest. Many people have overcome much higher obstacles. After all, there was no question of the love that my warring parents had for their children and of the sacrifices that they were willing to make for us. Nevertheless, growing up in a domestic battleground did not do a lot for me.
I was always in trouble in school and sometimes with the police, but as a young man in the early 1970s, I had just enough prowess in the pigskin arts to get recruited by Bowling Green State University, a Division I football program. Success on the diamond and gridiron were some of the few things that could put a little bounce in the step of my melancholic father. Pitching a no-hitter or scoring a touchdown were accomplishments that made me feel valued by him. And make no mistake about it, it is hard to grow in life without the sunlight of validation.
In my freshman year, thanks to a magician of a professor named Serge Kappler, I became enthralled by philosophy, Socrates, in particular. Socrates was famous for the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, but more than that, the Socrates of the Apology seemed to believe that it was equally exigent to examine everyone and everything. For me, Socrates’s dialectical method of interrogation, question, answer, question was like a new toy. Somewhat childishly, I brought it everywhere, even to the sidelines at practice. One afternoon, on a Tuesday after a loss, our freshman coach tried to jack us up and started screaming, “I want you to go out there and hurt somebody.” He was a kind enough man, and I am sure he only meant “hit somebody,” but I took him literally. Fancying myself a Socrates in a football helmet, I asked, “Coach, why would you want us to hurt someone?” He rolled his eyes, tapped his clipboard on his leg, and walked away.
During the second semester, Professor Kappler took me aside and told me he believed that I was an intelligent and creative student with a knack for philosophy, but I needed to train my mind with the rigor I was accustomed to in sports. Only in his midtwenties, the recently minted PhD could see that my train was running off the rails. In philosophy classes I acted like a bully in a barroom. Run-ins with campus police were becoming routine. Most academics would have discreetly brushed me off as a stereotypical jock. Instead, Serge, as I was invited to call him, trekked over to the administration building to check my high school records and test scores. He frequently had me over to his house, and though I was only a first-year student, he permitted me to participate in a graduate seminar on Plato. It took some doing, but eventually Serge helped me transfer to Columbia University.
I was an angry and insecure teenager from the Jersey Shore with bad habits. I had never lived in New York, and for an immature and imbalanced nineteen-year-old who could put on a good front as an urban pirate, I was a kid in a candy store of alcohol, drugs, and even violence. I had boxed in New Jersey as a teen, and rather than take advantage of the chance to build some mental muscle at Columbia, I was intimidated by my Ivy League classmates and retreated to the pain and sweat parlors of New York’s boxing gyms.
After a sparring session in which I more than held my own against a finalist in the NYC Golden Gloves, the manager of the gym signed me to a professional boxing contract. The April night that I signed, I was a man in full, striding down Broadway like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. A petite coed with long auburn hair and gimlet eyes sashayed by in the opposite direction. As the blues song puts it, she “walked like she had oil wells in her backyard.” I did a cartoonlike double take. She wheeled into a Baskin-Robbins, and I was right behind her. As she was waiting to be served, I sidled up to her and in my best James Dean voice said, “I’m going to marry you.” I don’t recall her exact response but “f off” was the general idea.
As the reader of this fractured fairy tale might have anticipated, a couple of years later we were married. I was unstable. Nikki had her own bevy of demonettes and they were not playing around. There was no limit to what Nikki could do to hurt herself. She was a cutter, but that wasn’t all. One night she was enraged to overhear a call from a former girlfriend of mine, and though Nikki was only ninety-eight pounds, she chugged a pint of bourbon in seconds. Not long after, I took it upon myself to separate her from some of her associates who were heavily involved in the drug trade. At three or four in the morning, when she was blitzed in some basement, unaware of how she landed there, she would call me high and hoot, “Jim Dandy to the rescue.” Not knowing what I was getting into, I would go over to fetch her. One time this involved banging on the door of a local drug dealer who, were it not for the fact that he thought I was an undercover cop, would have surely put a deadly ending to my Travis Bickle charade.
On another night, Nikki was in a dive, sitting at a big glass-covered table with a posse of minor desperados. One of them made a snotty remark. I immediately flipped the table over on them, shattered the glass, and started a war, which only ended when the bartender pulled out a .45 on me. By this time, I was so far down the drama rabbit hole that the black, shiny barrel pointed at my head was just barely enough to convince me to back off.
Meanwhile, aside from a couple of independent studies, I barely showed up to class at Columbia, and when I did I was absent while present. Academically I felt as though I were in over my head, so as if to compensate, I took a childish pride in my physicality. I would come to seminars wearing sleeveless T-shirts and the bling of a heavy silver chain around my neck. Sometimes I arrived in class with two black eyes earned sparring with some heavyweight or light heavyweight contender. The bruises gave me a certain cachet, but as a kind of freak show. When I said something in seminar that was modestly intelligent, my classmates reacted with surprise. During break, the other seniors would casually chat about choosing between graduate school at Harvard or Princeton, or about the law school they would be attending. By the end of my final semester at Columbia, I was lost in the badlands. I had no idea what I would be doing or even wanted to do. It was all street theater and minidramas with Nikki. I was a serious substance abuser who, this side of heroin, would take almost anything to mute the voices behind my brows, usually with prescription drugs, sometimes stealthily filched from the sample drawers at the mental health clinic.
After five years, I was approaching graduation. Existentially speaking, I was at sea and didn’t know what to do, so like a somnambulist I mindlessly applied to graduate school. Out of touch, I handwrote applications to some of the premier doctoral programs in philosophy and in return received nothing but skimpy envelopes of rejection letters.
My life was so splintered that it is a strain to put the shards of memory together into a coherent narrative. I floundered at odd jobs in construction, as a mover, a clerical assistant, and a bouncer. My only claim to fame that year was that I filled in for Jake LaMotta at a mobbed-up topless bar in Times Square when Jake went to Hollywood to help Robert De Niro play him in Raging Bull.
I don’t know whether I had a passion for philosophy or was just sticking with what was familiar. Most likely it was a mix of both, but on my second try I was admitted into a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania. There was an air of excitement and hope. Nikki was clean, in treatment, and earning a master’s degree in education. We made grown-up plans. She would finish her studies in New York, and I would paddle toward my doctorate in philosophy in Philadelphia. The plan was to get together on weekends. It seemed as though something good, something promising was about to happen. Maybe a quasi-normal life was possible after all.
We took out loans and found a cozy apartment on tree-lined West Philly street. There was a fireplace, white lace curtains. Nikki’s late grandfather was a famous heart doctor, and her grandmother vouchsafed us his massive mahogany desk with a glass covering, not unlike the one I smashed at the bar. I put it in the room with the fireplace and a comfy, blue reading chair that came down from my beloved Italian nonna. A pipe and slippers were all I needed. But as always, a foot was about to crash through the door—this time, my own.
On the first day of graduate studies at Penn, I was as nervous as a kindergartener. No more bling and T-shirts, I put on my khaki pants, stuck a pen in the pocket of my Oxford cloth shirt, and made my way to campus. It was a class in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. The other first-year grad students seemed so self-assured. Fifteen minutes into the seminar they were piping in with abstruse references and rehearsed arguments. As the big hand on the clock swept along, the thought began ticking that I was just a poseur, that I had no business in grad school. After a dizzying two-hour session, I shuffled around campus in a daze and then impulsively went to the registrar’s office and withdrew from the university, promising myself that I would soon return when I was better prepared. And ultimately I did just that.
I called Nikki to tell her what I had done. When I squeaked open the door to our apartment, she was effectively catatonic. “Nikki! Nikki!” I pleaded. “It’s all right. I have it all figured out.” She didn’t move an inch. I gently grabbed her hands and tried to explain. She was barely blinking. Then, out of nowhere, like some three-hundred-pound barroom brawler, she stood up and flipped the dining room table over, breaking the antique vase that was on it. An hour later, she left with the finality of a door slamming shut in the wind. Before departing, she made it plain that she wasn’t going to talk with me anymore or renegotiate our relationship. She was weak in some ways, but there was also something steely about her. She kept her word about not talking anymore. The only negotiation that was going to take place was me trying to internally negotiate this loss on my own.
For almost two years I was one of the walking dead, in and out of the hospital with excessive drinking and drug use. I wasn’t selective about which pills I would ingest. I gobbled handfuls. Sometimes in company I would show off by tossing valium in the air and catching those blue 10 mg tabs as though I were a seal. If one night I happened to get my pharmaceutical signals crossed and rode those pills out of existence, so be it.
Kierkegaard observed that, from a worldly point of view, despair seems like it is over something, like losing a spouse or not achieving your dream. But it only seems that way. As I will later explain, Kierkegaard taught that despair is always despair over the self, as in I don’t want to be myself, or I don’t want to be this self. When Nikki vanished, I was stuck with a self that felt like a stinking drunk sleeping on my shoulder on a long bus ride. I was hospitalized at St. Luke’s in Manhattan for depression. On the day I was released, I was given a prescription for MAO inhibitors and sternly warned, “Do not drink red wine with this drug!” A friend picked me up at the Upper West Side hospital. Before going a block, I insisted that we stop at a liquor store, where I bought a bottle of red wine and downed it. My unconscious still had dark plans for me.
I was faltering, and after a brief stint living with my parents in New Jersey I went to stay with my older brother Tom in Maine. There, I would park for hours, staring into a space occupied by images of hangings and other suicidal delights. On a blustery, gray winter afternoon, I was sitting on the floor in his cellar and peering over the lip of doom. Teary-eyed, my tender and honest brother put his palm on my shoulder and asked what I wanted him to do with my things if I took my life. A few days later, a zombie of sadness, I returned to my parents’ home.
One morning, my father drove me to New York for an appointment with Dr. Beatrice Beebe, a therapist I had been seeing for the past five years. If not for this bodhisattva of a shrink and my existentialist counselors, I would probably have accidentally on purpose slipped out of existence and I certainly would not be preparing to teach tomorrow. Her glimmering insights aside, Dr. Beebe taught me about the matchless healing power of relationships, something easily forgotten in an era of pharmaceutical fundamentalism.
That day, my father and I were early, so he dropped me off at a coffee shop, which was also a used bookstore. Numbly, I started browsing through the shelves, as though remembering a time when I had an intellectual life, when I had a life. I caught sight of a dusty blue-and-gray-covered text. I opened and read from Kierkegaard’s Works of Love:
If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. If we were to do so and do it out of fear lest we be deceived, would we not then be deceived? We can, of course, be deceived in many ways. We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true.9
I am not sure why, but it was a page of light. As though it were only natural, I slipped the book under my coat and walked out to my therapy session. Later that night, I cracked open my purloined philosophy and continued reading.
The writing was both gentle and to the bone. Kierkegaard’s words wrapped themselves around me. From the pages of the anxious and melancholy Dane, the idea bubbled up that psychological suffering was not an illness to be passively tolerated, but an action that you could perform either well or poorly. Whether it be from Kierkegaard or the existential psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, one of the gospel messages to be garnered from existentialism is that suffering can break a person or turn him or her into a rock, but suffering can also provide the impetus for spiritual movement.
From the pages of the anxious and melancholy Dane, the idea bubbled up that psychological suffering was not an illness to be passively tolerated, but an action that you could perform either well or poorly.
I remembered a woman from my stay at St. Luke’s. She had opened her wrists a number of times, but despite all her suffering she would bring me a cup of coffee in the morning and offer encouraging words. She could reach through her pain. Maybe that is what I was finding in Kierkegaard—the invocation to reach through the suffering, the anxiety, and inexplicable sadness instead of always looking for the express lane out of that numbing and ever-deepening feeling that nothing matters.
Around the time of this writing, I was flying back from California. Before takeoff there was a little dustup about seating. A cherubic thirtysomething guy with a flattop refused to move out of the aisle until he could exchange with someone for the seat he wanted next to his wife. The line of people boarding was held up, but there he was, with a much less than endearing grin, telling those of us laden with bags and waiting in the aisle, “It always works out.” At around the same time, I happened to peer down at my phone at images of Houston and the surrounding area under water from Hurricane Harvey. So far, there were five people dead and the rain was still torrential. No, my friend, it does not always work out.
The existentialists who make up the conversations in this book recognized that things don’t always work out for the best. They address life as it is. During the sixties and seventies, a gaggle of authors—such as Ernest Becker, Rollo May, Erik Erikson, and Paul Tillich, all distant students of Kierkegaard—firmly believed that through self-reflection we could make progress as human beings. These once-renowned philosopher-psychologists are now looked upon with a condescending smile for their naïveté. They were true believers in a kind of human progress that went beyond improved functioning and enhanced enjoyment. For all the mindfulness and yoga classes today, we have become more skeptical about a certain kind of personal human progress. We think of depression, anxiety, grief, and other disconcerting emotions as inner disturbances to be doused with pills and adjusted with other forms of lifestyle engineering. The thinkers between these covers do not offer a step-by-step plan for coping with our feelings of inadequacy, or a checklist of behaviors to avoid. Instead of detailing some strategy for assuaging our depression, they might tender advice on how to keep our moral and spiritual bearings when it feels as though we are going under.
At the same time, there are important topics that I could not catch up with in this jog through the terrain of existential ideas. Most troubling for me is the question of whether or not this is a guide for everyone, regardless of skin color or gender? Here I am tapped on the shoulder by Ralph Ellison, author of perhaps the greatest existential novel, Invisible Man. In his masterpiece, Ellison revealed that one of the symptoms of the poison of racism is that it renders people of color invisible. Is becoming yourself (if there is such a thing) the same kind of task for an undocumented Latina hotel maid as it is for a white professor? For reasons that will become clear, Kierkegaard would most likely answer “yes,” but I have to disagree with my sage. Finding and becoming yourself has to be a more complicated process for, say, African-Americans than for whites, as African-Americans have to burrow out of the inwardly appropriated suspicious gaze that tracks them up the aisles in the department store, and much, much worse.
The thinkers between these covers do not offer a step-by-step plan for coping with our feelings of inadequacy, or a checklist of behaviors to avoid. Instead of detailing some strategy for assuaging our depression, they might tender advice on how to keep our moral and spiritual bearings when it feels as though we are going under.
There are questions of identity that blacks—and, yes, women—have to grapple with that white men of a particular economic class can simply and safely ignore. I confess that I have grown weary of the terms “people of color” and “white privilege”; but make no mistake about it, being free of the task of fending off other people’s stereotypes is at the core of “white privilege.” Those of us who enjoy the liberty of not having to ask ourselves about the borderline between our skin color and our core identity sometimes find it hard to understand, feelingly, that we are privy to a space of reflection denied to our brothers and sisters. Perhaps our inability to grasp this essential truth is why we don’t yet know how to act upon it.
Though Kierkegaard’s bicentennial was in 2013, he and his epigones offer a new window through which to understand ourselves and the feelings that can threaten to uproot our ability to care. In the first leg of this book, I will distill existential insights on how best to understand and relate ourselves to the trials posed by anxiety, depression, despair, and death. In the second leg, I address more positive aspects of existence, namely, authenticity, faith, morality, and love—but with the caveat that these topics also pose daunting challenges.