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The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible.
Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object.
But as a human being, I have no predefined nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.
Sartre put this principle into a three-word slogan, which for him defined existentialism: ‘Existence precedes essence’.
Sure enough, Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.
Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.
There is no traced-out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path. But, to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him.
From different ideological starting points, opponents of existentialism almost all agreed that it was, as an article in Les nouvelles littéraires phrased it, a ‘sickening mixture of philosophic pretentiousness, equivocal dreams, physiological technicalities, morbid tastes and hesitant eroticism … an introspective embryo that one would take distinct pleasure in crushing’.
Kierkegaard was well placed to understand the awkwardness and difficulty of human existence. Everything about him was irregular, including his gait, as he had a twisted spine for which his enemies cruelly mocked him. Tormented by religious questions, and feeling himself set apart from the rest of humanity, he led a solitary life much of the time.
For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the starting point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself. Moreover, my existence is mine: it is personal. Descartes’ ‘I’ is generic: it could apply to anyone, but Kierkegaard’s ‘I’ is the ‘I’ of an argumentative, anguished misfit.
It is not the fear of falling so much as the fear that you can’t trust yourself not to throw yourself off. Your head spins; you want to cling to something, to tie yourself down — but you can’t secure yourself so easily against the dangers that come with being free. ‘Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’, wrote Kierkegaard. Our whole lives are lived on the edge of that precipice, in his view and also in Sartre’s.
Kierkegaard thought that the answer to ‘anguish’ was to take a leap of faith into the arms of God, whether or not you could feel sure that He was there. This was a plunge into the ‘Absurd’ — into what cannot be rationally proved or justified.
The way to live is to throw ourselves, not into faith, but into our own lives, conducting them in affirmation of every moment, exactly as it is, without wishing that anything was different, and without harbouring peevish resentment against others or against our fate.
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the heralds of modern existentialism. They pioneered a mood of rebellion and dissatisfaction, created a new definition of existence as choice, action and self-assertion, and made a study of the anguish and difficulty of life. They also worked in the conviction that philosophy was not just a profession. It was life itself — the life of an individual.
Sartre was the bridge to all the traditions that he plundered, modernised, personalised and reinvented. Yet he insisted all his life that what mattered was not the past at all: it was the future. One must keep moving, creating what will be: acting in the world and making a difference to it.
The existentialists lived in times of extreme ideology and extreme suffering, and they became engaged with events in the world whether they wanted to or not — and usually they did. The story of existentialism is therefore a political and a historical one: to some extent, it is the story of a whole European century.
She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.
These philosophers, together with Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, seem to me to have participated in a multilingual, multisided conversation that ran from one end of the last century to the other. Many of them never met. Still, I like to imagine them in a big, busy café of the mind, probably a Parisian one, full of life and movement, noisy with talk and thought, and definitely an inhabited café.
His student (and later translator) Dorion Cairns recalled Husserl saying that his aim was always to work in whatever topic seemed the ‘most distressing and uncertain’ to him at any time — the ones that filled him with most anxiety and self-doubt.
So what exactly is phenomenology? It is essentially a method rather than a set of theories, and — at the risk of wildly oversimplifying — its basic approach can be conveyed through a two-word command: DESCRIBE PHENOMENA.
The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality.
Husserlian phenomenology never had the mass influence of Sartrean existentialism, at least not directly — but it was his groundwork that freed Sartre and other existentialists to write so adventurously about everything from café waiters to trees to breasts.
Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.
why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? For Heidegger, this ‘why’ is not the sort of question that seeks an answer from physics or cosmology. No account of the Big Bang or divine Creation could satisfy it. The point of asking the question is mainly to boggle the mind. If you had to sum up Heidegger’s opening sally in Being and Time in one word, that word might be ‘wow!’
Even in his most rarefied later writing — or especially there — Heidegger liked to think of himself as a humble Swabian peasant, whittling and chopping at his work. But he was never exactly a man of the people.
Heidegger is philosophy’s great reverser. In Being and Time, it is everyday Being rather than the far reaches of cosmology or mathematics that is most ‘ontological’. Practical care and concern are more primordial than reflection. Usefulness comes before contemplation, the ready-to-hand before the present-at-hand, Being-in-the-world and Being-with-others before Being-alone. We do not hover above the great rich tangle of the world, gazing down from on high. We are already in the world and involved in it — we are ‘thrown’ here. And ‘thrownness’ must be our starting point.
As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.
am familiar with my they-self, but not with my unalienated voice — so, in a weird twist, my real voice is the one that sounds strangest to me.
You might think that the decision would be to defy the siren song of the they-self in the public realm, and thus to resist intimidation and the general tendency towards conformity. You might deduce that the authentic voice of Dasein would call on you not to raise your arm as the march passes by. But that was not what Heidegger meant.
In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise.
Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.
Ever since 1945, philosophers and historians have tried to work out whether Heidegger’s thought is entirely invalidated by his Nazism, or whether it can be judged in isolation from his personal and political flaws.
Trees meant many things for Sartre: Being, mystery, the physical world, contingency. They were also a handy focus for phenomenological description. In his autobiography he also quotes something his grandfather once said to him: ‘It’s not just a question of having eyes, you have to learn how to use them. Do you know what Flaubert did to the young Maupassant? He sat him down in front of a tree and gave him two hours to describe it.’
She wrote in her notebook that his big fault was that ‘he is not violent, and the kingdom of God is for violent people’.
His dream was to pass through the world unencumbered. The possessions that delighted Beauvoir horrified Sartre. He too liked travelling, but he kept nothing from his trips. He gave away books after reading them. The only things he always kept by him were his pipe and his pen, and even these were not for getting attached to. He lost them constantly, he wrote: ‘they’re exiles in my hands’.
It seemed that Sartre would rarely be as relaxed and happy again as he had been as a prisoner of war.
Much as they liked Camus personally, neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. For them, life is not absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.
For Sartre, the awakened individual is neither Roquentin, fixating on objects in cafés and parks, nor Sisyphus, rolling a stone up the mountainside with the bogus cheerfulness of Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. It is a person who is engaged in doing something purposeful, in the full confidence that it means something. It is the person who is truly free.
Not surprisingly, this radical freedom makes people nervous. It is difficult enough to think of oneself as free at all, but Sartre goes further by saying that I am literally nothing beyond what I decide to be. To realise the extent of my freedom is to be plunged into what both Heidegger and Kierkegaard called ‘anxiety’ — Angst or, in French, angoisse.
In theory, if someone tied me down securely near the edge, my vertigo would disappear, for I would know that I could not throw myself off and could therefore relax. If we could try a similar trick with the anxiety of life in general, everything would seem a lot easier. But it is impossible: whatever resolutions I make, they can never tie me down like real ropes can.
In thus denying his freedom, he enters what Sartre calls mauvaise foi, or ‘bad faith’. There is nothing exceptional about this: most of us are in bad faith most of the time, because that way life is liveable.
For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control.
Sartre takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom. They form part of my ‘situation’, and this may be an extreme and intolerable situation, but it still provides only a context for whatever I choose to do next. If I am about to die, I can decide how to face that death. Sartre here resurrects the ancient Stoic idea that I may not choose what happens to me, but I can choose what to make of it, spiritually speaking.
We do not thrive in satiety and rest. Human existence means ‘transcendence’, or going beyond, not ‘immanence’, or reposing passively inside oneself. It means constant action until the day one runs out of things to do — a day that is unlikely to come as long as you have breath. For Beauvoir and Sartre, this was the big lesson of the war years: the art of life lies in getting things done.
Her response to America was the now usual mixture of wariness and bliss. She was seduced: America ‘was abundance, and infinite horizons; it was a crazy magic lantern of legendary images’. It was the future — or at least one possible version of the future. A rival version was offered by the Soviet Union, which also attracted her. But the United States was undoubtedly the stronger, at the moment. It was more confident; it was wealthy, and it had the Bomb.
As he was turning, Heidegger paid increasing attention to language, to Hölderlin and the Greeks, and to the role of poetry in thought. He also reflected on historical developments and on the rise of what he called Machenschaft (machination) or Technik (technology): modern ways of behaving towards Being which he contrasted with older traditions. By ‘machination’ he meant the making-machine-like of all things: the attitude that characterises factory automation, environmental exploitation, modern management and war.
It is a monstrous reversal — and for Heidegger humanity has become monstrous. Man is the terrible one: deinos in Greek (the word also featuring in the etymology of ‘dinosaur’, or ‘terrible lizard’). This was the word that Sophocles had used when he wrote his chorus about the strange or uncanny quality unique to man.
If we pay proper attention to technology, or rather to what technology reveals about us and our Being, we can gain insight into the truth of human ‘belongingness’. From this point, we may find a way forward — which, Heidegger being Heidegger, turns out to mean going backwards into the origin of history, to find a long-forgotten source of renewal in the past.
The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series Cosmos by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘a way for the cosmos to know itself’. Merleau-Ponty similarly quoted his favourite painter Cézanne as saying, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ This is something like what Heidegger thinks humanity contributes to the earth. We are not made of spiritual nothingness; we are part of Being, but we also bring something unique with us. It is not much: a little open space, perhaps with a path and a
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If one speaks of a human being mainly as an open space or a clearing, or a means of ‘letting beings be’ and dwelling poetically on the earth, then one doesn’t seem to be talking about any recognisable person. The old Dasein has become less human than ever. It is now a forestry feature.
