The key problems for Existentialism are those of man himself, of his situation in the world, and of his more ultimate significance:
Man and human relationships
Existentialist anthropology is strictly connected with its ontology.
The traditional distinction between soul and body is completely eliminated;
thus the body is a lived-through experience that is an integral part of
man's existence in its relationship with the world.
According to Sartre, "In each project of the For-itself, in each perception
the body is there; it is the immediate Past in so far as it still touches
on the Present which flees it. " As such, owever, the body is not reduced
to a datum of consciousness, to subjective representation. Consciousness,
according to Sartre, is constant openness toward the world, a transcendent
relationship with other beings and there by with the in-itself. Consciousness
is existence itself, or, as Jaspers says, it is "the manifestation of being."
In order to avoid any subjectivistic equivocation, Heidegger went so far
as to renounce the use of the term consciousness, preferring the term Dasein,
which is more appropriate for designating human reality in its totality.
For the same reasons, the traditional opposition between subject and object,
or between the self and the nonself, loses all sense. Dasein is always
particular and individual. It is always a self; but it is also always a
project of the world that includes the self, determining or conditioning
its modes of being. All of these modes of being thus arise,
as Heidegger shows in his masterpiece Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time,
1962), from the relationship between the self and the world. Heid egger
has regarded concern (in the Latin sense of the term) to be the fundamental
asp ect of this relationship, insofar as it is man's concern to obtain
the things that are necessary for him and even to transform them with his
work as well as to exchange them so as to make the m more suitable to his
needs. Concern demonstrates that man is "thrown into the world," into the
midst of other beings, so that in order to project himself he must exist
among them and utiliz e them. Being thrown means, for man, being abandoned
to the whirling flow of things in the world and to their determinism.
This happens inevitably, according to Heidegger, in inauthentic existence--day-to-day
and anonymous existence in which all behaviour is reduced to the same level,
made "official," conventional, and insignificant. Chatter, idle curiosity,
and equivocation are the characteristics of this existence, in which "One
says this" and "One does that" reign undisputed. Anonymous existence amounts
to a simple "being to gether" with others, not a true coexistence, which
is obtained only through the acceptance of a common destiny
All of the Existentialists are in agreement on the difficulty of communication; i.e., of well-grounded intersubjective relationships. Jaspers has perhaps been the one to insist most on the relationship between truth and communication. Truths are and can be different from existence. But if fanaticism and dogmatism (which absolutize a historical truth) are avoided on the one hand while relativism and skepticism (which affirm the equivalence of al l truths) are avoided on the other, then the only other way is a constant confrontation between the different truths through an always more extended and deepened intersubjective communication.
Sartre, however, denies that there is authentic communication. According to him, consciousness is not only the nullification of things but also the nullification of the other per so n as other. To look at another person is to make of him a thing. This is the profound meaning of the myth of Medusa. Sexuality itself, which Sartre holds to be an essential aspect of existenc e, fluctuates between sadism and masochism, in which either the other person or oneself is merely a thing. On this basis, the intersubjective relationship is obviously impossible.
--from Encyclopedia Britannica
The human situation in the world
Heidegger has pointed to the foundation of the intersubjective
relationship in dread. When a man decides to escape from the banality of
anonymous existence--which hides the nothingnes s of existence, or the
nonreality of its possibilities, behind th e mask of daily concerns--his
understanding of this nothingness leads him to choose the only unconditioned
and insurmountable possibility that belongs to him: death. The possibility
of death, unlike the possibilities that relate him to other things and
to other men, isolates him. It is a certain possibility, not through its
apodictic evidence but because it continuously weighs upon existence. To
understand this possibility means to decide for it, to acknowledge "the
possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all" and to live for
death . The emotive tonality that accompanies this understanding is dread,
through which man feels himself to be "face to face with the nothing' of
the possible impossibility of [his] existence."
But neither the understanding of death nor its emotive accompaniment
opens up a specific task for man, a way to transform his own situation
in the world. They enable him only to perceive the common destiny to which
all men are subject; and they offer to him, therefore, the possibility
of remaining faithful to this destiny and of freely accepting the necessity
that all men shar e in common. In this fidelity consists the historicity
of existence, which is the repetition of tradition, the return to the possibilities
from which existence had earlier been constituted, the w anting for the
future what has been in the past. And in this historicity participate not
only man but all of the things of the world, in their utilizability and
instrumentality, and even the totality of Nature as the locus of history.
Dread, therefore, is not fear in the face of a specific danger. It is rather
the emotive understanding of the nullity of the possible, or, as Jaspers
says, of the possibility of Nothingness. It has, therefore, a therapeutic
function in that it leads human existence to its authenticity. From the
fall into factuality into which every project plunges him, man can save
himself only by projecting not to project; i.e., either by abandoning himself
decisively to the situation in which he finds himself or by being indifferent
to any possible project--with regard to which Sartre says, "Thus it amounts
to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations."
The pivotal point of that conclusion--the conclusion most widely held
among the Existentialists and the one in fact often identified with Existentialism--is
the antithesis between possibility and reality. On the one hand, existence
is interpreted in terms of possibilities that are not purely logical possibilities
or manifestations of a man's ignorance of what exists but are, rather,
eff ec tive, or ontic, possibilities that constitute man as such; on the
other hand, contrasted to possibilities in this sense is a reality, a for-itself,
a world, a transcendence that is a factual presence, insurmountable and
oppressive, with respect to which possibility is a pure Nothingness. The
contradiction to which this antithesis leads becomes clear whe n the same
reality is interpreted in terms of possibility: when the being of things,
for example, is reduced to their possibility of being utilized; when the
being of other men is reduced to the possibility of anonymous or personal
relationships that the individual can have with them; and when the being
of transcendence, or of God, is reduced to the possibility of the relationship,
although ineffable and mysterious, between transcendence, or God, and man.
It has been said that a coherent Existentialism should avoid the constant
mortal leap between Being and Nothingness; should not confuse the problematic
character of existence with the fall into factuality; should not confuse
the finitude of possibilities with resignation to the situation, choice
with det erminism; freedom conditioned by the limits of the situation with
the acknowledgment of the omnipresent necessity of the Whole.
In this inquiry, it is held, Existentialism could well benefit from
a more attentive consideration of science, which it has viewed until now
only as a preparatory, imperfect, and objectifying knowledge in comparison
with the au th entic understanding of Being, which it considers to be a
more fundamental mode of the being of man in the world. Science, it is
submitted, offers today the example of an extensive and coherent use of
the concept of the possible in the key notions that it employs, especially
in those branches that are interdisciplinary--among them such notions as
indeterminacy, chance, probability, field, model, project, structure, and
conditionality. Some steps in this direction have been taken by Abbagnano
and by Merleau-Ponty. According to the latter, considerations of probability
are rooted in the being of man, inasmuch as he is situated in the world
and invested with the ambiguity of his events. Merleau-Ponty has written
in his Phenomenologie de la perception (19 45):
Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but is engaged with it.
The situation in which we live is open. This implies both that it appeals
to modes of privileged resolution and that it is of itself powerless to
obtain one of them. From this point of view, there is
always a certain freedom in situations, although its degree varies from
situation to situation.
-- from Encyclopedia Britannica
Significance of Being and transcendence
Among the thinkers most frequently mentioned here, the concept of the
necessity of Being prevails as the basis of their metaphysical or theoogical
orientations. Heidegger has come more and more to i nsist on the massive
presence of Being in the face of human existence, by attributing to Being
all initiative and to man only the possibility of abandoning himself to
Being and to the things th at are the modes of the language of Being. For
Heidegger, Being is interpreted better through the etymology of those words
that designate the most common things of daily life than through the analysis
of existential possibilities.
Jaspers has seen the revelation of transcendence in ciphers--i.e.,
in persons, doctrines, or poems--all of which can be interp reted as symbols
of existential situations and above all of limit situations, the insurmountability
of which, in provoking the total "shipwreck" of human possibilities, makes
man feel the prese nc e of absolute transcendence. In a less philosophically
elaborate form, Being has been understood as mystery by Marcel; as the
perfect actuality that guarantees the existential possibilities by Louis
Lavelle, a leader of the French philosophie de l'esprit; and as the absolute
value that man encounters in his own spiritual intimacy by Ren\'e9 Le Senne,
also of the philosophie de l'esprit.
-- from Encyclopedia Britannica
Problems of Existentialist theology
Existentialism has a theological dimension. Though Heidegger rejects
the label of atheist, he also denies to the Being of which he speaks the
essential qualifications of divinity, i nasmuch as it is not the ultimate
cause and the Good. But J aspers, in his last writings, emphasized more
and more the religious character of faith in transcendence.
Faith is the way to withdraw from the world and to resume contact with
the Being that is beyond the world. Faith is life itself, in that it returns
to the encompassing Whole and allows itself to be guided and fulfilled
by it. Jaspers has even develo pe d a theology of history. He speaks of
an axial age, which he places between the 8th and 2nd centuries before
Christ, the age in which the great religions and the great philosophers
of the Orien t arose--Confucius and Lao-tzu, the Upanisads, Buddha, Zoroaster,
the great prophets of Israel--and in Greece the age of Homer and of classical
philosophy as well as Thucydides and Archimedes. In this age, for the first
time, man became aware of Being in general, of himself, and of his limits.
The age in which man now lives, that of science and technology, is perhaps
the beginning of a new axial age that is the authentic destiny of man but
a destiny that is far off and unimaginable.
For Bultmann, thetheologian of the demythologization of Christianity,
inauthentic existence is tied to the past, to fact, to the world, while
authentic existence is open to the future, to the nonfact, to the nonworld;
i.e., to the end of the world an d to God. Thus, authentic existence is
not the self-projection of man in the world but, rather, the self-projection
of man in the love of and obedience to God. But this self-projection is
no lo nger the work of human freedom; it is the saving event that enters
miraculously through faith into the future possibilities of man.
In these theological speculations and in others that re comparable, the
common presupposition of the Existentialists is recognized--i.e., the gap
between human existence and Being. Th ere is either an acknowledgment of
that gap, with existence assum ing the role of the demonic (the alternative
that Sartre and others have all illustrated above all in their literary
works), or an acknowledgment of the hidden participation of human existence
in Being through a gratuitous initiative on the part of Being.
Kierkegaard had earlier distinguished three stages of existence between
which there is neither development nor continuity b ut gaps and jumps:
the aesthetic stage is the one in which one lives for the pleasure of the
moment; the ethical stage is the one based on the stability and continuity
of life in work and in ma trimony; and the religious stage is the one characterized
by faith, which is always a "dreadful certainty"--i.e., a dread that becomes
certain of a hidden relationship with God.
The ethical and religious stages correspond roughly to what Heidegger
and Jaspers call, respectively, the inauthenticity and the authenticity
of existence. Art is not as a rule recognized by conte mporary Existentialists
as an autonomous stage; it is almost always for them an essential manifestation
of existence itself. For Jaspers, it is a mode of reading in nature, in
history, and in m en the cipher of transcendence; i.e., the negative symbol
in which transcendence is revealed. According to Camus, it is an aspect
of man's revolt against the world. The artist tries to remake the sketch
of the world that is before him and to give it the style--that is to say,
the coherence and unity--that it lacks. For this purpose, he selects the
elemen ts of the world and freely combines them in order tocreate a value
that escapes man continuously but that the artist perceives and tries to
salvage from the flux of history.
From this point of view, art would be a way of reshaping the world
beyond its factual forms, in order that it might show their negative and
troublesome characteristics. The direct ions of contemporary art that have
deliberately forsaken the imitation of reality find their justification
in this point of view.
--from Encyclopedia Britannica