INTRODUCTION

Gordon Marino

I came to existentialism on my knees, after a youthful divorce and in the cold grip of a withering depression. As a professor of philosophy, I realize that it is not fashionable and, philosophically speaking, almost vulgar to begin an anthology with a confession, but existentialism is a much more personal form of philosophizing than any other. In fact, some of the existential philosophers whom you will shake hands with in this book insist on working from the first-person perspective. And so I am within the tradition that I am presenting to confess that either by chance or grace, in the depths of a benumbing funk, I encountered the individual who is widely regarded as the father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard. I was in a used-book store, nervously flipping through texts, when I opened page one of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love:

If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing which we cannot see with our eyes, then first and foremost we 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. We can be deceived by appearances, but we can also be deceived by shrewdness, by the flattering conceit which is absolutely certain it cannot be deceived. Which deception is more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of one who does not see, or that of the person who sees and yet does not see? What is more difficult—to awaken someone who is sleeping or to awaken someone who awake, is dreaming that he is awake? Which is sadder, the sight that promptly and unconditionally moves one to tears, the sight of someone unhappily deceived in love, or the sight that in a certain sense could tempt laughter, the sight of the self-deceived, whose fatuous conceit of not being deceived would indeed be ridiculous and laughable if the ridiculousness of it were not an even stronger expression for horror, since it shows that he is unworthy of tears.

Today, orthodoxy has it that sudden psychological changes are chemical in nature, but there was a time when we still believed that an idea, or an interpretation of your experience, could turn the page of that experience. Kierkegaard’s Works of Love did that for me. In his Journals and Papers, Kierkegaard notes that “there is nothing worse than thinking of your own emotional life as twaddle.” And yet that is precisely how I felt on the long march under the black sun of depression—indifferent to almost everything, as though I had been struck by a meaningless kind of psychological leprosy. The famously depressive Dane went on to draw a distinction between despair and depression that has been paved over in the present age. While Kierkegaard would agree with modern psychology that depression is marked by inexplicable sadness and self-loathing, he explains that the depressed individual who is also in despair “sees quite clearly that this depression . . . is of no great significance but precisely that fact, that it neither has nor acquires any great significance, is despair.” And that is where I was calling from when Kierkegaard helped me to make the turn from thinking of suffering as a fever to regarding it as an action that could be carried out with dignity.

I was a graduate student in philosophy on leave from the university when I had this initial encounter with existentialism. It was the late seventies, a period in which most philosophy departments were controlled by the analytic tradition. Analytic philosophy placed great stress on clarity, precision, and logical form. Topics that could not be rigorously defined—and that was just about everything meaningful—were dismissed as pseudo-problems. Most philosophical talk during this era was about the way we talk. If you wanted to discuss the nature of the self you would first have to spend a couple of decades discussing the way we discuss the self, or so it seemed to me and many of my fellow students. It was, at the time, fashionable for analytic-type professors to begin a seminar by making a negative object lesson of one of the existentialists. The professor might read a line such as, “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself ” and then chortle, “Can you imagine anyone taking this gobbledygook for philosophy?” Comically enough, the professor might then go on to passionately treat some trivial academic footnote battle for the remainder of the seminar. I went into philosophy smitten with Socrates and the fantasy that intellectual reflection might actually make an important difference in my life. After all, the word “philosophy” derives from the Greek expression for love of wisdom. But much of the academic philosophy that I was muddling through as a graduate student was bloodless and far removed from both experience and wisdom. Kierkegaard, however, flung open the window and convinced me that at least the existential movement resonated with the ancient view of philosophy as a way of life, as a guide for the perplexed.

Like some of the films that young people admire today and assimilate into their self-understanding, existentialism does not dodge the fact that there is something disturbing going on in the basement of our cozy middle-class world. While there is a long tradition in philosophy of believing that knowledge must be grounded in experience, existentialism tries to get at experience from the inside out. For instance, listen to the gears of Kierkegaard’s mind clicking in his philosophical magnum opus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard is pressing the difference between an objective and a subjective perspective. He reflects on what it means to die. Kierkegaard explains that he knows “what people ordinarily know: that if I swallow a dose of sulfuric acid I will die, likewise by drowning myself or sleeping in coal gas etc. I know that Napoleon always carried poison with him, that Juliet took it.” The text continues, “I know that the tragic hero dies in the fifth act and that death here gains infinite reality in pathos but has no such pathos when an ale house keeper dies. I know that the poet interprets death in a variety of moods to the point of verging on the comic. I know what the clergy usually say. . . .” The catalog continues until Kierkegaard concludes, “Despite this almost extraordinary knowledge or proficiency of knowledge, I am by no means able to regard death as something I have understood. So before I go on to world history, about which I still must always say: God knows if it actually does concern you; I think it would be better to consider this, lest existence mock me for having become so erudite that I had forgotten to understand what will happen to me and every human being sometime—sometime, but what am I saying! Suppose death were insidious enough to come tomorrow!” And from there our urexistentialist goes on to discuss the task of subjectively appropriating the uncertain certainty of your own demise. Whereas other philosophers might have tried to formulate a general theory of personal identity, or perhaps a definition of death, Kierkegaard and then Martin Heidegger after him try to fathom the individual meaning of our mortality. In short, existentialism works at the level of personal meaning in contrast to general theory.

Consensus has it that the term “existentialism” did not come into currency until the mid-1940s. Though borrowing from Kierkegaard, the existential philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers was using the term “existence philosophy” after the First World War, but it was not until a couple of decades later that existentialism was officially baptized. Simone de Beauvoir recounts the day in 1945 that she believes existentialism was born:

During a discussion organized during the summer . . . Sartre had refused to allow Gabriel Marcel to apply this adjective [existentialist] to him: “My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even know what existentialism is.” I shared his irritation. . . . But our protests were in vain. In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us and used it for our own purposes.

Now, one of the problems with defining existentialism is the fact that almost everyone who was labeled an existentialist went to great lengths to deny that he or she was an existentialist. A member of the same café circle as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus insisted that as a novelist he was doing something quite different from the more highfalutin philosophy of Sartre and Heidegger and so was not an existentialist. Heidegger wrote an essay in which he denounced the suggestion that he was an existentialist as Sartre conceived of it.

On the other hand, Sartre took up the banner and formulated an existential creed. In his famous essay “Existentialism,” Sartre argues that if there were a God, it would be plausible to think that the essence of everything in creation inhered in the mind of the creator. Sartre, however, believes that it is obvious that God does not exist but claims that there is still at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. . . . Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.

Whereas a table is a table is a table, humans have no preexisting essence and so define themselves. According to Sartre, existentialists believe that we are all forced to sit for the final exam, “What does it mean to be a human being?” We answer this parent question of life in the ink of our choices and actions. Now, Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, and other non-atheist existentialists would disagree with Sartre’s claim that there is no underlying plan in our lives, but all the existentialists concur that it is through our choices that we become who we are.

Though they may disagree about the details, the existentialists are linked by their commitment to the common themes of freedom, choice, authenticity, alienation, and rebellion. A distant teacher of Karl Marx, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel argued that our states of minds are conditioned by historical circumstances. While the existentialists and especially Kierkegaard were inclined to argue against Hegel, who with his unconditional faith in reason was the great wizard of philosophical systematizers, there can be no doubt that the roots of an existential approach were grounded during the Enlightenment, at a time when the faith of people turned in varying degrees from God to reason and humanity itself. As the philosopher Charles Guignon (drawing on the work of Max Weber) has noted, the existential movement is a response to the disenchantment of the world, that is, to the sense that the history and social structure of the world are not God sanctioned. The Lord is not out there as in a theater, watching and giving meaning to our every move. Put in Sartrean terms, existentialism is born of the experience that we are, as it were, forlorn castaways, or as the guitar-strumming existentialist Bob Dylan has put it, “I was born here and I’ll die here against my will.”

And yet, it was not until the twentieth century that existentialism was recognized as a movement. After two world wars, everyone was ready for a philosophy that could nod to the irrational elements in life; hence, perhaps the immense popularity of both psychoanalysis and existentialism after the abattoir of the twentieth century. Thanks in large part to the fame that Sartre and Camus achieved in the post–World War II years, existentialism took flame in America in the late forties and fifties. Recognizing the influence that Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche worked on Heidegger and Heidegger on Sartre, the backward process of sanctification began. Scholars began to argue over whether or not this author or that was an existentialist. Some historians of philosophy followed the lineage of existentialists back as far as St. Augustine. Other scholars classified William Shakespeare, Blaise Pascal, and even St. Thomas Aquinas under the new rubric.

Existentialism is an interdisciplinary movement that finds expression in three genres: philosophy, literature, and psychotherapy. As a purely philosophical movement, the taproot of existentialism can be traced to the phenomenological work of Edmund Husserl. In his search for certitude, Husserl tried to take philosophy back to the analysis of concrete experience. Husserl’s phenomenology brackets the question of whether or not our experience points to anything beyond itself and sticks to the analysis of experience itself. While Heidegger was also drawing upon the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (both of whom became popular in Germany after World War I), his early work shows the impress of his teacher, Husserl. Examples of existential phenomenology can be found in the selections from Being and Time (Heidegger) and Being and Nothingness (Sartre). On the other hand, existentialism is a literary movement. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ralph Ellison, Camus, and Franz Kafka have all been classified as existentialists in part because of their profound influence on thinkers whom we have come to associate with existentialism, but also because they hammer out existential themes with existential presuppositions. Of course some existentialists, namely Marcel, Unamuno, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, wrote both novels and plays as well as philosophical tracts. Finally, the sixties saw the emergence of an existential school of psychology. The works of Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, and Ludwig Binswanger are the most representative of this movement, which focuses on helping the individual to own his or her own choices. Existentialism has even found a presence on the silver screen. Many of Ingmar Bergman’s films stand as studies in existentialism, and the same could well be said about Fight Club and The Matrix.

Before the curtain opens, a word of caution: Today we often connect the idea of education with an almost cozy notion of enlightenment and progress. Sometimes we forget that ideas can be dynamite. Plato and his teacher Socrates taught us that anything that has the power to help also has the power to harm. Depending on your existential coordinates, the voices collected in this book may unsettle your self-understanding and lead to a new awakening or they may simply produce more of the angst that attracted you to this cadre of thinkers to begin with. Take for unnerving example the Nietzchean question, what exactly is the value of value? Or put another way, are Western morals salutary or debilitating? Or again, for those cocksure of their faith, beware of Kierkegaard, who argues that Christians have made a point of forgetting what it really means to be a Christian. For Kierkegaard, most of the people who cross themselves at night and shake their heads over the poor nonbelievers are Christians in much the same way as country club members. In short, caveat emptor: The existentialists are not for people looking to read themselves to sleep.