2   The Universe

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special. (Stephen Hawking, Der Spiegel, 17 October 1988)

Existentialists don’t really have much to say about the universe as such, the stars and galaxies of the astronomers or the vastness of outer space. If they evoke the scientific notion of the universe at all, it is to reinforce their nihilistic claims about how lost and abandoned humanity is in the so-called grand scheme of things (what scheme?) and how ultimately pointless and absurd our futile, ant-swarm existence is on this speck of space debris we call Earth.

Neither are existentialists particularly concerned about whether or not there is intelligent life on other planets. Yes, it would be interesting even to an existentialist to discover aliens exist – more ‘other people’ to feel threatened by and anxious about – but it would not fundamentally change anything. The aliens would be equally lost and abandoned in a meaningless universe, equally devoid of ultimate purpose, equally condemned to be free, equally confused and perplexed by the series of cosmic accidents that bought them into existence on their own speck of space debris.

The existentialists’ lack of interest in the universe of the astronomers and astrophysicists is partly a result of their lack of faith in science. Existentialists are not anti-science or anti-scientific progress, they leave that to the Amish and the Luddites. They recognise that in many respects science has improved the way a lot of things work and are not averse to enjoying the benefits of science and technology. Sartre and de Beauvoir loved to travel by plane, train and automobile. But they also recognise in their very post-modern way that science cannot alter or abolish the fundamental existential truths of the human condition.

Science will never eliminate pain and suffering, for example. Okay, it has given us some pretty nifty antibiotics and painkillers, but it has also given us oil spills, global warming and nuclear holocaust, and doubtless it has further horrors up its nylon sleeve. Science has helped many people to live longer, to prolong their futile existence, but it will never allow us to live forever, and even if it could, would anyone still want to live forever after a few centuries of taking out the trash? A robot can take out the trash, I hear you cry. But why live if our servants can live for us? Science can attempt to alleviate our existential fears and anxieties but only by counselling us into phoney over-optimism or by prescribing courses of happy pills that transform us into two-dimensional Prozac-driven zombies.

However advanced technology becomes, however many useful little apps we have on our idiotic i-phones, -pads and -pods, it will never enable us to overcome our vulnerability, anxiety or mortality; our confusion about who we are and what we want. We will still be confronted each day with hard existential choices about what to do and who to be, about what to strive for and what to value. Science and technology can do nothing to change the existential truth that essentially humans can never be totally and permanently fulfilled and will always find something lacking. However many goodies the modern world offers, boredom and dissatisfaction will always rear their ugly heads.

The existentialist universe is a much more down to earth, non-scientific affair than that of the astronomer or cosmologist. It is the everyday world of the individual person who, confronted by obstacles, challenges and other people, must continually make choices about how she will or will not deal with these difficulties. In the classic writings of the existentialist philosophers, this universe, this succession of situations demanding a response, consists almost entirely of a series of dingy urban rooms occupied by angst ridden adults obsessing over their relationships; Parisian apartments and sleazy basement nightclubs thick with tobacco smoke where every sad customer is a drugged or drunken washout. Criticising existentialism, the philosopher Mary Midgley writes:

The impression of desertion or abandonment which existentialists have is due, I am sure, not to the removal of God, but to this contemptuous dismissal of almost the whole biosphere – plants, animals, and children. Life shrinks to a few urban rooms; no wonder it becomes absurd. (Beast and Man , pp. 18–19)

Certainly there is little or nothing of the natural world in classic existentialism – mountains, lakes, waterfalls, roaring oceans – and definitely no celebration of it. At most there are municipal parks where the trees are not pretty or shady but encapsulate the nauseating absurdity of brute, naked, superfluous existence. As Sartre writes in his cult existentialist novel, Nausea :

I was in the municipal park just now. The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root. Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the method of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, slightly bent, my head bowed, alone in front of that black knotty mass, which was utterly crude and frightening to me. (Nausea , p. 182)

Existentialists, perhaps, would have more inspiring notions of the physical universe if they got out of town more and met with the majesty of nature on a grand scale. But as they would argue, to speak of the majesty of nature is a value judgement, and probably a petty-bourgeois value judgement at that.

I must add, for what it is worth, that de Beauvoir and Sartre were fond of cycling and world travel, activities likely to put a person in touch with the natural world, although it depends where a person goes of course. For a lot of people, ‘world travel’ means flying to Disneyland, Florida to meet the real Mickey Mouse – something which, for many an existentialist, undoubtedly encapsulates the nauseating absurdity of brute, naked, superfluous existence.

Existentialists may not be interested in cosmology but they are interested in ontology – philosophical enquiry into the fundamental nature of existence or reality. They do not follow the physicists in postulating ever more fundamental particles and packets of energy, dark matter, silly string, whatever. For the existentialists, what there is, ontologically speaking, what there is fundamentally, is being , plain and simple. Certainly, in Being and Nothingness , a huge volume that many people refer to as the bible of existentialism, Sartre is very taken with the notion of being-in-itself . What there is fundamentally, according to Sartre, is not the universe of diverse and complex phenomena that we perceive all around us, but being-in-itself.

Also referred to as undifferentiated being, being-in-itself is the basis or starting point of the ontology of Sartre and his followers. Every phenomenon they go on to describe ultimately depends on being-in-itself for its existence. Consciousness, for example, or what they generally refer to as nothingness or non-being or being-for -itself, exists only as the negation or denial of being-in-itself. As such, consciousness is entirely dependent on being-in-itself because it is nothing but being-in-itself denied . Nothingness and consciousness are explored in detail in the next two chapters.

All that can really be said about being-in-itself is that it is . It is its own foundation. That is, it is founded upon itself and therefore not dependent upon anything else. It is that which exists fundamentally, in itself , in its own right, rather than being that which does not exist in itself and is dependent upon something else for its existence. It is self-sufficient, uncreated and unchanging.

It is tempting to suppose that being-in-itself has always been and will always be, and even Sartre refers to eternity in describing it. Being-in-itself, however, is eternal only in the sense of being timeless. There is no before or after, past or future, for being-in-itself. Time or temporality exists only for a being that is perpetually not what it was and not yet what it will be, namely consciousness. For much more on this see the chapter on time that follows the chapter on consciousness and lack.

It is also tempting to suppose that the existence of being-in-itself is necessary. However, to describe being-in-itself as a necessity is to characterise it as that which cannot not be, when it has no characteristics whatsoever other than being . Being-in-itself exists utterly, yet its existence is not necessary. It is , yet it need not be. It exists without reason or justification. This is the all important contingency, superfluity or even absurdity of being-in-itself that existentialists are so obsessed with, the absurdity that Sartre describes so powerfully in his aforementioned novel, Nausea . Contingency and absurdity are the focus of Chapter 18.

It is also tempting to suppose that because being-in-itself exists it must be the realisation of a possibility, that it must be derived from the possible. Possibility, however, exists only from the point of view of consciousness which cannot pre-exist being-in-itself, so being-in-itself cannot be identified or characterised as the realisation of what is possible. Being-in-itself is not derived from the possible and neither does it have possibilities.

For its part, consciousness has a future in which to realise and actualise its possibilities, but being-in-itself, as said, has no future, or past, and therefore possibility is not a quality that can be discovered in it or applied to it.

That being-in-itself has no characteristics leads some existentialists to describe it as undifferentiated being , a way of stressing that it is devoid of contrasts, divisions and differences. No part of it is any different from any other part of it, which is to say, it does not have parts. It is not a necessity, it has no possibilities, it is not temporal or even spatial. It should not even be thought of as an infinite block of physical stuff, although existentialists do sometimes refer to physical objects as beings in themselves in contrast to persons who are beings for themselves ceaselessly striving to be beings in themselves.

If being-in-itself were spatial it would be differentiated in the sense of having different regions, here and there and so on, but being-in-itself has no regions or parts just as it has no past or future. Unlike its negation – consciousness or being-for-itself – being-in-itself is never other than itself. It is what it is, whereas consciousness is perpetually and paradoxically what it is not and not what it is.

The philosopher Hegel, not an existentialist but a big early influence on existentialist thinking, argues that being is so undifferentiated and featureless that it is in fact indistinguishable from non-being or nothingness! For Hegel, there is neither being nor non-being but only becoming . Sartre, for one, disagrees with Hegel, insisting that being-in-itself is while non-being or nothingness is not . For Sartre, being-in-itself is logically primary. All else – i.e. non-being – is logically subsequent to being, dependent upon it and derived from it.

As said, being-in-itself has a negation in the form of consciousness. It is tempting to suppose that being-in-itself gave rise to its negation, as though giving rise to its negation was a project on the part of being-in-itself. Being-in-itself, however, because it is what it is and cannot be other than what it is, cannot have projects or conceive of possibilities. So, the question is, how did consciousness arise as the negation of being-in-itself?

Sartre insists, though not all scholars agree with him, that it is impossible to answer this question and that any attempt to account for what he describes as the upsurge of consciousness from being-in-itself produces only theories that can never be shown to be true or false. For Sartre, the upsurge of consciousness must be accepted as a fundamental, axiomatic truth, just as the being of being-in-itself must be accepted as a fundamental, axiomatic truth. A truth beyond which it is impossible to go.

As existentialist ontology is abstract stuff and can be rather mind-bending, here is a summary of the existentialist position regarding being-in-itself. being-in-itself is . It is not created, changing, temporal, necessary, physical or spatial. It has no characteristics other than being, and it is not differentiated in any way. It has a negation that Sartre describes as being-for-itself or consciousness, a negation that is entirely dependent upon being-in-itself for its borrowed being. The emergence or upsurge of this negation from being-in-itself is, for Sartre, an unfathomable mystery. All those phenomena that comprise the human world, many of which are explored in this book – change, time, possibility, spatiality, lack, freedom, love, death and so on – arise through the relationship between consciousness and being-in-itself and exist only from the perspective of consciousness.

So, the existentialist universe does not consist of atoms, electrons, quarks or whatever fundamental entities physicists are promoting this year. All that diversity and complexity comes later, from the point of view of the observer, from the point of view of consciousness. For existentialists, mankind is the measure of all things and apart from consciousness, human and animal, there is only undifferentiated being-in-itself. ‘Uncreated, without reason for being, without any connection with another being, being-in-itself is de trop for eternity’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 22). Existentialists have quite a mystical view of the universe for such down to earth philosophers.