Existentialism

Since I so often grumpily complain so often that intellectual activity doesn't pay much attention to real life, I have felt for some time that I ought to go into existentialism.

Simone De Beauvoir (1908-1986)

Roughly, If you have strong convictions but feel uncomfortable with labeling or categorizing yourself, if you doubt that human beings are simply the sum total of their parts, and if you believe strongly in personal responsibility, you might be an existentialist!

Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Simone De Beauvoir and others shared some basic ideas. They adhered to what we might call a "radical empiricism" in the face of what many of their contemporaries called "empiricism".

Empiricism, after all, is supposed to place experience at the center of philosophy. Yet, paradoxically, in the name of "empirical science" many began to argue that certain immutable facts about our experience were illusory, questionable, or even the product of human weakness. That I have free will, that my personhood is somehow unified over time, or even that there is a real table in front of me are things I would never question on the basis of experience. How, the existentialists asked, can anyone be an "empiricist" and still hold that these concrete experiences are illusory? A tension arose between science and empiricism.

To see why, consider the following. A central task of what we generally call "science" is to organize and classify objects and then to specify lawlike relations between them. Out of this process, a general world-picture tempts us: something that used to be called pan-objectivism. Under this view, everything is an object, capable of this kind of study. Even people.

This kind of extreme, reductive "scientism" is long-dead in academia, but its influence is so utterly pervasive in our general culture that it is almost invisible to us. Yet, if we stand back and reflect on just how often we are invited to categorize and classify ourselves, how often we are invited to see ourselves as products of history, biology, evolution, upbringing and peer-pressure, we can immediately see how scientistic pan-objectivism still works in our culture. Everywhere, we are asked to objectify ourselves. Each "fact" we discover about ourselves works to simultaneously comfort us and undermine our personal responsibility for who we are.

I am a human, therefore I desire food, shelter, and sex. I am male, therefore I am naturally aggressive. I am the eldest sibling, therefore I have the most confidence. I am personality type ENTP, therefore I am optimistic, innovative, problem-solving, darkly humorous, impulsive, multifaceted, clever, and fond of toys. I am young, therefore I am "liberal", but as I age I will become more "conservative". I was a child of divorce, therefore I am hostile to marriage and pessimistic about love. I am a member of "Generation X", therefore I resent the "Boomers". I am white. I am Irish-Canadian. I am left-wing. I am right-handed. I am left-brained. I am middle-class, I am able-bodied and I am thin. I am heterosexual.

Mountains of labels, mountains of "facts" each with its own associated, essential meaning. Endless invitations to join the world of objects, to become as predictable and classifiable as a stone. This is our culture's trajectory, and those who have seen it are rightly terrified. Humanity, freed from the yoke of ancient tyrranical monarchies, rushes to don a new set of manacles.

Existentialists oppose this trend and call for a radical empiricism, a return to the basic facts of experience. True, I do perceive that I am the product of many external forces, and there seem to be certain biological and psychological facts about me (my "facticity"). I also perceive that the world (my "situation") imposes limits on what I can do. But this is not the end of the story: I do not experience myself or other people simply as objects. Rather, in my experience I perceive a radical split between objects and persons, between things that act and things which do not.

Passive objects are the sum total of their "facts". But I have sovereignty over what my facticity means to me, what I choose to do with it. No fact about me has essential meaning. There is no situation in which I cannot choose to further define myself through action and interpretation. Sartre memorably insists that even a soldier in a war can always choose to desert or kill himself: he is never forced into combat as a stone is forced to fall to the earth.

This freedom is what makes us persons, and it imbues us with a terrible responsibility: we alone are responsible for ourselves and our values. There are no external excuses no matter how comforting they are. For example, a person abused in childhood can always choose to be kind to his children, and it is his fault if he lapses into violence, no matter how severe his past experiences were.

While we may debate their ultimate legitimacy, we cannot ignore that these ideas are a powerful antidote to the sickness of pan-objectivism. To see this, consider De Beauvoir's most fascinating idea:

Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties... Now, what peculiarly signalises the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where she is compelled to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilise her as an object. (The Second Sex, Introduction)

How much needless suffering do women endure by virtue of being forced to identify themselves with their bodies? How often are they told that various "facts" about their bodies determine not just their value as women, but the nature of their experience and identity? This problem has not gone away since De Beauvoir's day, and it is a profound strength of existentialist thought that it can diagnose it.

Each of us, whether we realize it or not, is a target of modern identity-encroachment, of countless forces (cloaked in the respectable garb of scientific inquiry) purporting to tell us who we are and provide us with an opiate for our guilt and our responsibility for ourselves. At the very least, we need existentialism as a remedy to this trend. A trend which, according to them, makes a mockery of humanity itself.