## 1. Nihilism and the Crisis of Modernity


We can find early glimpses of what might be called the
"existential attitude" (Solomon 2005) in the Stoic and
Epicurean philosophies of antiquity, in the struggle with sin and
desire in St. Augustine's *Confessions*, in the intimate
reflections on death and the meaning of life in Michel de
Montaigne's *Essays*, and in the confrontation with the
"dreadful silence" of the cosmos in Blaise Pascal's
*Pensees*. But it was not until the nineteenth century that
the ideas began to coalesce into a bona fide intellectual movement. By
this time, an increasingly secular and scientific worldview was
emerging and the traditional religious framework that gave pre-modern
life a sense of moral orientation and cohesion was beginning to
collapse. Without a north star of moral absolutes to guide us, the
modern subject was left abandoned and lost, "wandering," as
Nietzsche writes, "as if through an endless nothing" (1887
[1974], SS125). But it wasn't just the rise of modern science
and its cold mechanistic view of the world as a value-less aggregate of
objects in causal interaction that contributed to the anxiety and
forlornness of the modern age. The rise of Protestantism also played a
role. With its rejection of hierarchical Church authority, this new
form of Christianity emphasized subjective inwardness and created a
unique social configuration grounded in principles of individualism,
freedom, and self-reliance. The result was the loss of a sense of
community and belongingness rooted in the close-knit social bonds of
traditional society. And the Protestant shift intensified the Christian
attitude of *contemptus mundi* ("contempt for the
world"), contributing to feelings of loneliness and creating a
perception of public life as a domain that was fundamentally
inauthentic and corrupt (Aho 2020; Guignon 2004; Taylor 1989).


Along with these historical developments, social transformations
associated with the Industrial Revolution and the formation of the
modern state were emerging. With newly mechanized working conditions
and bureaucratic forms of administration, an increasingly impersonal
and alienating social order was established. When Ortega y Gasset
introduces his notion of "the mass man," he captures the
automation and lifeless conformism of the machine age, where everybody
"feels just like everybody else and is nevertheless not concerned
about it" (1930 [1993, 15]). In their conceptions of "the
public" (Kierkegaard), "the herd" (Nietzsche), and
"the They" (Heidegger), existentialists offer powerful
critiques of the leveled down and routinized ways of being that
characterize mass society. And the novels and short stories of
Dostoevsky, Camus, and Kafka capture the bourgeois emptiness and
boredom of the managerial class and the paranoia and distrust that
emerges when life is regulated and controlled by faceless
bureaucrats.


These social transformations created the conditions for nihilism,
where modern humanity suddenly found itself adrift and confused, unsure
of which path to take or where to look for a stable and enduring sense
of truth and meaning. The condition of nihilism involves the shocking
recognition that there is no overarching reason, order, or purpose to
our existence, that it is all fundamentally meaningless and absurd. Of
all the existentialists, Nietzsche was the most influential and
prophetic in diagnosing and conceptualizing the crisis. With the death
of God and the loss of moral absolutes, we are exposed to existence
"in its most terrible form ... without meaning or
aim" (Nietzsche 1887 [1974], SS55). And it is against this
anomic background that the question of existence, of what it means to
be, becomes so urgent. But it is a question that requires taking a
radically different standpoint than the one privileged by the
philosophical tradition. 


## 2. Engagement vs. Detachment


From Plato onward, Western philosophy has generally prioritized a
methodology grounded in a perspective of rational detachment and
objectivity to arrive at truths that are immutable and timeless. By
practicing what Merleau-Ponty disparagingly calls, "high-altitude
thinking" (1964 [1968], 73), the philosopher adopts a perspective
that is detached and impersonal, a "God's eye view"
or "view from nowhere" uncorrupted by the contingencies of
our emotions, our embodiment, or the prejudices of our time and place.
In this way the philosopher can grasp the "reality" behind
the flux of "appearances," the essential and timeless
nature of things "under the perspective of eternity"
(*sub specie aeternitatis*). Existentialism offers a
thoroughgoing rejection of this view, arguing that we cannot look down
on the human condition from a detached, third-person perspective
because we are already thrown into the self-interpreting event or
activity of existing, an activity that is always embodied, felt, and
historically situated. Existence, then, is generally grasped not just
through dispassionate theorizing but through a careful analysis of
first-person experience, of the concrete, flesh and blood particulars
of everyday life and the feelings, relationships, and commitments that
make us who we are. It is a philosophy that begins from the standpoint
of the *engage*, of the individual who is engaged in life
and who confronts the givens of existence.


### 2.1 Subjective Truth


The existentialist critique of theoretical detachment was pioneered
by Kierkegaard whose scorn was directed primarily at G.W. F. Hegel, a
philosopher who adopted the "perspective of eternity" to
build a metaphysical system that would provide complete knowledge of
reality. By taking a disengaged and panoptic view, Kierkegaard argues
Hegel's system invariably covers over the deeply personal project
of being human and the specific needs and concerns of the existing
individual. In his words, "it makes the subject accidental, and
thereby transforms existence into something indifferent, something
vanishing" (1846 [1941, 173]). In response, Kierkegaard reverses
the traditional orientation that privileges objectivity by claiming
that, when it comes to the question of existence, one's own
subjective truth is "*the highest truth attainable*"
(1846 [1941, 182]). This means the abstract truths of philosophical
detachment are always subordinate to the concrete truths of the
existing individual. "The real subject," writes
Kierkegaard, "is not the cognitive subject ... the real
subject is the ethically existing subject" (1846 [1941, 281]). And
subjective truth cannot be reasoned about or explained logically; it
emerges out of the situated commitments, affects, and needs of the
individual. For this reason, it does not disclose timeless and
objective truths; it discloses "a truth which is true for
me" (1835 [1959, 44]). For Kierkegaard, to live this truth
invariably results in feelings of anxiety and confusion because it is
objectively uncertain; it has no rational justification, and no one
else can understand or relate to it. It is an ineffable truth that is
felt rather than known. In this sense, the existing individual
"discovers something that thought cannot think"
(Kierkegaard 1844 [1936, 29]). But prioritizing the contingent and
unrationalizable truths of existence does not mean Kierkegaard is
forwarding a position of "irrationalism." He is claiming,
rather, that the standpoint of rational detachment cannot help us
access the self-defining commitments and projects that matter to the
existing individual. Truths of flesh and blood cannot be reduced to
systematic explanation because such truths do not provide us with
objective knowledge. Rather, they lay bare the passionate and urgent
sense of how we should live our lives. They tell the individual:
"what I am to *do*, not what I am to know"
(Kierkegaard, 1835 [1959, 44]).


### 2.2 Perspectivism


Nietzsche echoes Kierkegaard's misgivings about
methodological detachment and philosophical systems but he does so by
forwarding a pragmatic and perspectival account of truth. He argues
that philosophers don't discover objective truths by means of
detached reasoning because truth claims are always shaped by and
embedded in specific sociohistorical contexts. Truths, for Nietzsche,
are best understood as social constructs; they are created or invented
by a historical people, and they endure only so long as they are
socially useful. On Nietzsche's account, truths are passed down
historically for generations to the point where they are uncritically
accepted as "facts." But from the standpoint of
perspectivism, "facts are precisely what there is not, [there
are] only interpretations. [The world] has no meaning behind it, but
countless meanings" (Nietzsche 1901 [1968], SS481).
Nietzsche's genealogy is one that shows how the history of
Western philosophy is largely a history of forgetting how truths are
invented. "It is only by means of forgetfulness," he
writes, "that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to
possess a 'truth'" (Nietzsche 1889a [1990a],
SS93). This means human beings are already bound up in socially
constructed perspectives that they cannot disengage or detach from. To
exist, then, is to live in one's "own perspectival forms,
and *only* in them. We cannot see around our own corner"
(Nietzsche 1887 [1974], SS374). There is no aperspectival
"reality." The epistemological distinction between
"appearance" and "reality" is a pseudo-problem
that is always parasitic on the perspectival forms that we
inhabit.


Nietzsche goes on to suggest there is a psychological motivation in
our shared belief in objective truth. It shelters us from the
terrifying contingency and mutability of existence. Nietzsche
understands that human beings are vulnerable and frightened creatures,
and the belief in truth--even though it is an illusion--has
social and pragmatic utility by providing a measure of coherence and
reliability. We need these truths for psychological protection, to help
us cope with an otherwise chaotic and precarious existence.
"Truth," therefore, "is that sort of error without
which a certain species of life could not live" (Nietzsche 1901
[1968], SS493). 


### 2.3 Being-in-the-World


In *Being and Time*, Heidegger will expand on this critique
of detachment and objectivity by developing his own phenomenological
analysis of existence or "being-in-the-world"
(*In-der-Welt-sein*). Following the core maxim of phenomenology
introduced by his teacher Husserl, Heidegger's philosophy
attempts to return "to the things themselves," to not
explain but *describe* how things are given, reveal themselves,
and make sense to us in our average everyday lives. Employing the word
"Dasein," a colloquial German term that refers to the kind
of "existence" or "being" unique to humans,
Heidegger makes it clear he is not interested in a systematic
explanation of *what we are*, as if existence referred to the
objective presence of a substance--e.g., a rational animal, an
*ego cogito*, or an ensouled body. As a phenomenologist, he is
concerned with *how we are*. In his version of phenomenology,
Dasein is viewed not as a substance with what-like characteristics but
as a self-interpreting, meaning-giving activity. Dasein refers to
"the subject's *way of being*" (Heidegger 1927
[1982, 123]), someone who is always already involved and engaged with
the equipment, institutions, and practices of a shared world and that
embodies a tacit understanding of how to be in that world. 


Heidegger's conception of being-in-the-world articulates
three related ideas that will become central to twentieth-century
existentialism and phenomenology. First, it offers a thoroughgoing
rejection of the Cartesian view of the self or "I" as a
discrete mental container of "inner" thoughts and beliefs
that is somehow separate and distinct from "outer"
objects in the world. There is no inner-outer dualism because the self
is not a disembodied mind or consciousness. It is the activity of
existing, a relational activity that is structurally bound up in the
world. Thus, "self and world belong together in the single
entity, the Dasein" (Heidegger 1927 [1982, 297]). Second,
Heidegger compels us to rethink what we mean by "world."
From a phenomenological perspective, the world is not a geometrical
space nor is it the sum of objects. It is the relational setting of our
lives, the shared context of meaning that we are already involved in.
And our involvement in the world allows objects to count and matter to
us in particular ways. Third, Heidegger suggests that
being-in-the-world is a meaning-giving activity. When we engage with
and handle objects in the world, we give them meaning; we encounter
them *as meaningful*. What appears to us in the immediacy of
lived experience is always shaped by the public meanings we grow into.
The fact that our existence is "fraught with meaning"
suggests that experience has an intentional structure; it is always
directed towards objects; it is *about* or *of* something
(Heidegger 1919 [2002, 60]). The experience of hearing, for example, is
not a representation of bare sense data because sounds are invariably
colored by the context of meaning we are thrown into. We hear
some-*thing*: we hear "the thunder *of* the
heavens, the rustling *of* the woods, the rumbling *of*
the motors, the noises *of* the city" (Heidegger 1950
[1971, 65], emphasis added). Meaning, on this view, is not generated by
detached cognitive associations. It emerges against the background of
our functional involvement in the world, in the way we are situated and
engaged in a shared network of equipment, roles, institutions, and
projects. And this engagement reveals a kind of pre-reflective
competence or practical "know how" (*konnen*)
that can never be made theoretically explicit.


### 2.4 Embodiment


We see, then, that in their critique of third-person detachment
existentialists forward the idea that we are already "caught up
in the world" (Merleau-Ponty 1945 [1962, 5]). And an essential
aspect of being caught up in this way is the experience of one's
own embodiment and the crucial role that bodily orientation,
affectivity, perception, and motility play in our everyday
being-in-the-world. In this way, philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty,
Sartre, Beauvoir, and Marcel challenge the traditional interpretation
of the body. Against the standard "Cartesian account," the
body is not regarded as a discrete, causally determined object,
extended in space, and set apart from the disinterested gaze of the
cognizing mind. The body is not something I have. It is a site of
affectivity and meaning. It is who *I am*. And I cannot obtain
objective knowledge of my body because I am already living through it;
it is the experiential medium of my existence. "The body,"
as Sartre puts it, "is *lived* and not
*known*." (1943 [1956,
 427])[2]


By building on the analysis of the lived body (*corps
propre*, *corps vecu*, *corps vivant*,
*Leib*), existentialists reveal how our moods, perceptions, and
experiences are already bound up in worldly meanings, how we
internalize these meanings, and how this act of internalization shapes
the way we live, how we handle the tools of daily life, maneuver
through lived space, relate to others, and interpret and perform our
identities. In her pathbreaking work *The Second Sex*, Beauvoir
illuminates this point by showing how a woman tends to internalize the
dominant androcentric worldview, resulting in a representation of
herself as subordinate, weak, and inferior. She is the "second
sex" not because she is born with a particular biological body,
but because she inhabits, enacts, and embodies the oppressive meanings
and practices unique to her patriarchal situation. As Beauvoir famously
puts it, the woman "is not *born*, but rather
*becomes* a woman." This is because "the body is not
a thing; it is a situation... subject to taboos [and] laws...
It is a reference to certain values from which [she] evaluates
[herself]" (1949 [1952, 34, 36]).


The existentialist's distinction between the object-body and
the lived-body has made it possible for contemporary philosophers and
social theorists to engage the lived experience of those who have been
historically marginalized by the western tradition. By rejecting the
standpoint of theoretical detachment and focusing on the structures of
embodiment and being-in-the-world, influential thinkers such as Franz
Fanon (1952 [1967]), Iris Marion Young (1984 [2000]), and Judith Butler
(1990), among others, have explored different ways in which we enact
and embody forms of oppression and how this can shape our self-image
and inhibit the experience of movement, spatial orientation, and other
forms of bodily comportment. These investigations help to broaden and
pluralize our understanding of the human condition by shedding light on
a diverse range of embodied perspectives, from ethnicity and race, sex
and gender, and age and physical ability. And insofar as these analyses
help capture what is distinct about the meaning-giving activity of
humans, they illuminate what is arguably the unifying principle of
existentialism: "existence precedes essence." 


## 3. Existence Precedes Essence


This principle was initially introduced early on in
Heidegger's *Being and Time* when he writes, "The
'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence" (1927
[1962,
 42]).[3]
Sartre will later repackage this line with the pithy adage,
"existence precedes essence" (1946 [2001, 292]). What this
statement suggests is that there is no pre-given or essential nature
that determines us, which means that we are always *other than*
ourselves, that we don't fully coincide with who we are. We exist
*for ourselves* as self-making or self-defining beings, and we
are always in the process of making or defining ourselves through the
situated choices we make as our lives unfold. This is, according to
Sartre, "the first principle of existentialism," and it
"means, first, that man exists, turns up, appears on the scene,
and, only afterwards, defines himself" (1946 [2001, 292-3]). The
point here is that there can be no complete or definitive account of
being human because there is nothing that grounds or secures our
existence. Existence is fundamentally unsettled and incomplete because
we are always projecting forward into possibilities, "hurling
ourselves toward a future" as we imagine and re-imagine who we
will be. Existence, then, is not a static thing; it is a dynamic
process of self-making.


Acknowledging existence as a self-making process does not mean the
existentialist is denying that there are determinate aspects or
"facts" about our situation that limit and constrain us.
This is our givenness (or "facticity"), and it includes
aspects of our being such as our embodiment and spatiality, our
creaturely appetites and desires, and the socio-historical context we
find ourselves in. But what distinguishes us as humans is that we have
the capacity to rise above or "transcend" these facts in
the way we relate to, interpret, and make sense of them. If I am
compelled by a strong desire for sex, alcohol, or cigarettes, for
instance, I do not out of necessity have to act on these desires. I
have the freedom to question them and give them meaning, and the
meanings I attribute to them shape my choices and the direction my life
will take going forward. 


This means, unlike other organisms, we are self-conscious beings
who can surpass our facticity by calling it into question, interpreting
it in different ways, and making decisions about how to deal with it in
the future. This is what Kierkegaard means when he describes existence
as "a relation that relates to itself" (1849 [1989, 43]).
Existence is a reflexive or relational tension between
"facticity" and "transcendence," where we are
constrained by our facticity but simultaneously endowed with the
freedom to exceed or transcend it. The human being is, as Ortega y
Gasset writes, "a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in
nature, half transcending it" (1941, 111). We are not wholly
determined by our nature because our nature is always a question or an
issue for us. We have the capacity to reflect on and care about it. And
the way we care about our nature informs how we create ourselves.
Sartre will go so far as to say that human existence is fundamentally
"indefinable" and that "there is no human
nature" because there is no aspect of our facticity that can
fully describe us. Our facticity reveals itself to us only through the
self-defining meanings and values that we give to it. "If man
[...] is indefinable, it is because at first he is
*nothing*. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself
will have made what he will be" (1946 [2001, 293]). This idea
that facticity can always be nullified or negated by our choices
reveals the key to understanding the existentialist conception of
freedom.


## 4. Freedom


Recognizing that there is no pre-given essence that determines
existence, the existentialist makes it clear that it is up to the
individual to make his, her, or their own identity through choices and
actions. Sartre explains that the coward, for instance, is not the way
he is because of an unstable childhood or a particular genetic makeup.
The coward "makes himself a coward" by means of his
decisions (1946 [2001, 301]). In this way, the existentialist generally
affirms the view that the human being has free will, is able to make
decisions, and can be held responsible for their
 actions.[4]
But, as we will see,
this does not mean that we can do whatever we want. It means, rather,
that existence is structured by our capacity to give meaning to our
situation based on the actions and choices we make as our lives unfold.
Insofar as we exist, we are envisioning a certain kind of life,
assigning a value to our identity, and making ourselves into the kind
of person we are.


When we become aware of our freedom as an inescapable given of the
human condition, the awareness is often accompanied by anxiety because
we realize that we alone are responsible for our choices and the
projects we undertake. There is no moral absolute, divine will, or
natural law that can provide guidance or justify our actions. We are,
in this sense, condemned to be free because "there are no excuses
behind us nor justifications before us" (Sartre 1946 [2001,
296]).


### 4.1 The Anxiety of Choice


In the canon of existentialist literature, no writer captures this
idea better than Dostoevsky in his *Notes from the Underground*.
The nameless "underground man" rebels against an
increasingly scientized, rational, and mechanistic picture of human
behavior promoted by Russian social reformers in the 1860s, where
everything a person does was thought to be determined by causal laws.
For the underground man, this view reduces the human being to a
mechanical cog or "a piano key" (1864 [2009, 18]), and it
undermines the one value that gives existence its meaning and dignity,
that is, the capacity to choose and create our own
 lives.[5]
To affirm his freedom,
the underground man responds to this situation through self-immolating
acts of revolt, doing the opposite of whatever the determinations of
rationality, social convention, or the laws of nature demand. When he
has a toothache, he refuses to see the doctor; when he is at a party
with former school mates, he behaves in outrageous and humiliating
ways; when the prostitute Liza reaches out to him in tenderness, he
lashes out at her in rage. In this sense, the underground man is an
anti-hero. He recognizes that freedom is the highest value, the
"most advantageous advantage" (1864 [2009, 17]) for human
beings, but at the same time he realizes there is no way of knowing
what might come of our choices; they may, as they do for the
underground man, result in our own self-destruction. As Dostoevsky
writes: "What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever
that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And the choice, of
course, the devil only knows what choice" (1864 [2009, 20]).


This account of freedom suggests that my being (or identity) is
always penetrated by the possibility of its own negation because I can
always question myself and assign new meanings to and interpretations
of who I am in the future. My self-interpretation is always insecure or
unstable. I may interpret myself as a philosophy professor today, but I
am also *not* a professor insofar as I can freely choose to
reject this identity and resign from my job tomorrow. In this sense, I
am no-thing, a "being-possible." As Sartre puts it:
"human existence is constituted as a being *which is what it
is not* and *which is not what it is*" (1943 [1956,
107]). For the existentialist, anxiety discloses this predicament to me,
revealing that I've been abandoned to a realm of possibilities,
where I face a dizzying array of options, and I alone am answerable to
whatever options I choose. Understood this way, anxiety is not directed
at some external object or event in the world. If I am an incarnation
of freedom, it is directed *at me*; I am the source of it. 


### 4.2 Mediated Freedom


In *Being and Nothingness*, Sartre forwards an account of
"radical" or "absolute" freedom, an
unconditioned "freedom-in-consciousness" where we make or
create ourselves *ex nihilo*, through the sheer
"upsurge" of choice alone. But in the wake of Marxist
criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, his views changed; he realized that
this early account was far too abstract, interiorized, and influenced
by Cartesian
 assumptions.[6]
It failed to engage the social, historical, and
material conditions that invariably limit and constrain our freedom. He
came to recognize that our choices and actions are always mediated by
the world, by the sociohistorical situation we've been thrown
into. He sees that the idea of radical, unconditioned freedom "is
nonsense. The truth is that existence 'is-in-society' as it
'is-in-the-world'" (Sartre 1952 [1963, 590]). Freedom
must be understood as "freedom-in-situation." It is true
that we are free to create ourselves, but it is also true that we are
already created by our situation. "Man," is best understood
as "a totally conditioned social being who does not render back
completely what his conditioning has given him" (Sartre 1972
[2008, 35]).


Sartre's Marxist inspired conception of situated or mediated
freedom is one that had already been forwarded and developed by
Beauvoir in her major treatises *The Second Sex* and *The
Coming of Age* and in her novels such as *The Blood of
Others* (1945 [1970]) and *The Mandarins* (1954 [1991]). The
view is also developed by her compatriot Merleau-Ponty. In
*Phenomenology of Perception*, for example, Merleau-Ponty makes
it clear that the options we choose to act on do not emerge out of
nothing. They are already embedded in a sociohistorical situation
"before any personal decision has been made." (1945 [1962,
449]) The ways in which we create or make ourselves, then, are always
circumscribed by the meanings of our situation. We are simultaneously
self-making and already made. "We exist in both ways at
once," writes Merleau-Ponty. "We choose the world, and the
world chooses us." (1945 [1962, 453-454]). As we will see in
section 6.3, the recognition of the extent to which freedom is mediated
by the material conditions of our situation opened existentialism to a
broader engagement with the social sphere and the structures of
oppression and violence that shape our experience and
self-understanding.


## 5. Authenticity


Existentialism is well known for its critique of mass society and
our tendency to conform to the levelled-down norms and expectations of
the public. Rather than living our own lives, we tend to get
pulled along by the crowd, doing what "they" do. As
Heidegger writes, "We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they
*take* pleasure. We read, see, and judge about literature and
art as *they* see and judge ... we find
'shocking' what they find shocking. The
'they'... prescribes the kind of being of
everydayness" (1927 [1962, 126-7]). Living this way can be
comforting, creating the illusion that we are living well because we
are doing what everyone else does. But for the existentialist, this
conformist way of being is a manifestation of inauthenticity or
self-deception because it shows how we are unwilling or unable to face
up to the freedom and contingency of our condition; it reveals the
extent to which we are afraid of being an individual, of being true to
ourselves, and of making our own life-defining choices.


In *The Sickness unto Death*, Kierkegaard describes
inauthenticity in terms of fleeing from ourselves, of "not
wanting to be oneself, [of] wanting to be rid of oneself" (1849
[1989, 43]). Insofar as we let others decide our lives for us, we live
a life that is bereft of passion, a life of "bloodless
indolence," where we are unwilling or unable to "make a
real commitment." (Kierkegaard 1846 [1946, 266-67]). Similarly,
Heidegger will refer to this condition as a form of estrangement that
"alienates Dasein from itself," where we exist as a
"they-self" (*Man-selbst*) that drifts along in
lockstep with others. (1927 [1962, 254-55]) And this self-estrangement
is numbing or "tranquilizing" (*beruhigend*) because
it covers over the anxiety of own freedom and finitude.


Sartre and Beauvoir refer to inauthenticity in terms of "bad
faith" (*mauvaise foi*), where we either deny or
over-identify with one of the two aspects of human existence, either
facticity or transcendence. I am in bad faith, for example, when I
over-identify with my factical situation and deny my freedom to act on
and transform this situation. I am also in bad faith when I
over-identify with freedom and deny my past conduct and the fact that
my choices are limited and constrained by my situation. Sartre and
Beauvoir recognize that the self is never wholly free or wholly
determined; it is structurally unstable, it is a "double-
property ... that is at once a facticity and a transcendence"
(Sartre 1943 [1956, 98]). When we cling to one or the other of these
poles, we are denying this "double-property," and this is a
denial of the fundamental ambiguity and instability at the core of the
human condition.


### 5.1 The Power of Moods


For the existentialists, the possibility of breaking free from
engrained patterns of self-deception is generally not something that is
accomplished by means of detached reflection. It emerges in the wake of
powerful emotional experiences or moods. When the existentialist refers
to feelings of "nausea" (Sartre), "absurdity"
(Camus), "anxiety" (Kierkegaard), "guilt"
(Heidegger), or "mystery" (Marcel) they are describing
uncanny affects that have the power to shake us out of our complacency,
where the secure and familiar world breaks apart and collapses, and we
are forced to confront the question of existence. Jaspers refers to
these moments as "limit" or "boundary
situations" (*Grenzsituationen*)--situations
"when everything that is said to be valuable and true collapses
before our eyes" (1932 [1956, 117]).


Although terrifying, the existentialist makes it clear that we
should not close our eyes or flee from these experiences because they
are structural to the human condition. They are, as Jaspers puts it,
"impassable, unchangeable situations that belong to human
existence as such" (1913 [1997, 330]). Instead of turning away
from this basic anxiety, the existentialist asks us to turn toward and
face it, because it is amidst a collapsing world that the ultimate
questions emerge: *Who am I?* and *What now?* In this
way, the existentialist sees the experience of anxiety and its related
moods as an opportunity for personal growth and transformation.
World-shattering moods open me up to the possibility of being
authentic, of accepting and affirming the unsettling givens of my
condition, of being released from distractions and trivialities, and of
recognizing the self-defining projects that matter to me as an
individual.


### 5.2 Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith


For Kierkegaard, the authentic individual is someone that is
"willing to be one's own self." (1843 [1989, 43]) He,
she, or they recognize(s) that there is more to life than following the
crowd or chasing surface pleasures. Such a life is invariably scattered
and disjointed, pulled apart by temporal desires and the fleeting fads
and fashions of the public. Authenticity requires a passionate,
"personality defining" (*personligheds definerende*)
decision or commitment that binds together and unifies the fragmented
and disjointed moments of our life into a focused and coherent whole.
The "unifying power" of commitment is embodied in, what
Kierkegaard calls, an attitude of "earnestness"
(*alvor*), a sober recognition that existence is a serious
affair, not a pleasure-seeking masquerade. But authenticity cannot be
achieved simply by means of renouncing temporal pleasures and doing
one's duty according to some universal moral principle--such
as the Ten Commandments or Kant's Categorical Imperative. This is
because, for Kierkegaard, the subjective truth of the individual is
higher than the universal truths of morality. And this means there may
be times in our lives where we must suspend our obligation to the
ethical sphere and accept the terrible fact that it may be more
important to be authentic (to be true to oneself) than it is to be
moral (to do what is right.)


In *Fear and Trembling*, Kierkegaard draws on the biblical
figure of Abraham to make this point. As a father, Abraham has a moral
duty to love and protect his son, but when God demands that he break
this commandment and kill Isaac, he is confronted with a personal truth
that is higher than the universal. In committing himself to this truth,
Abraham becomes a "knight of faith" by
"leaping" (*springer*) into a paradox, one where the
truth of "the singular individual is higher than the
universal" (1843 [1985, 84]). As a religious existentialist,
Kierkegaard contends that this is what is required to enter the sphere
of faith and become a Christian. It has nothing to do with membership
in a congregation or obedience to doctrinal statements. It is, rather,
a willingness to commit to a truth that is fundamentally irrational and
absurd. How, for example, can one make rational sense of God's
command to Abraham to kill his own son? "The problem,"
writes Kierkegaard, "is not to understand Christianity, but to
understand that it cannot be understood" (1835-1854 [1959,
 146]).[7]
An
authentic or religious life, then, is always accompanied by anxiety and
loneliness because the leap individualizes us; it cuts us off from the
comforting truths of the public and its blanket conceptions of right
and wrong. It compels us to follow a path that no one else may
understand. Abraham's decision is, for this reason, fraught with
despair. In his willingness to suspend his moral duty, he appears
"insane" because he "cannot make himself understood
to anyone." (1985 (1843], 103) 


But with the despair of faith comes feelings of intensity, even
joy, as we recognize the absurdity of religious existence, that the
eternal or divine is not found in some otherworldly realm, it is bound
up in the temporal; that it is *this life*, the finite, that has
infinite significance. Freed from the temptations of the crowd and of
blind obedience to moral principles, the knight of faith "takes
delight in everything he sees" because he is now fully aware of
the majesty and richness of finitude. For him, "finitude tastes
just as good as to one who has never known anything higher" (1843
[1985, 69-70]).


### 5.3 Nietzsche's Overman


Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche is critical of our tendency to follow
the herd and cling to universal moral principles. He forwards a
conception of authenticity that accepts our nihilistic predicament and
rises above Christian values of good and evil. He sees these values as
representative of a tame and submissive way of being, a "slave
morality" (*Sklavenmoral*) that is subservient to
authority and bereft of any originality or style. Nietzsche contrasts
this with a "master morality" (*Herrenmoral*)
embodied in those who have the courage to face, even affirm, the cruel
and tragic aspects of life and the self-directed power to create their
own meanings and values against the backdrop of God's death.
Nietzsche refers to the individual who can overcome the meek and
slavish values of tradition for the sake of self-creation as an
"Overman" (*Ubermensch*), an aristocratic
figure who embodies the freedom, courage, and strength to be original,
that is, to "give style" to life. "Such
spirits," writes Nietzsche, "are always out of fashion or
explain themselves and their surroundings as *free*
nature--wild, arbitrary, fantastic, and surprising" (1887
[1974], SS290).


The key to living with style is, for Nietzsche, a radical
acceptance of one's existence and the world *as it is*,
embracing all our strengths and weaknesses and all the blessed and
cursed events that have been and will be. The Overman is a
"yes-sayer" who affirms every aspect of his life,
"every truth, even the simple, bitter, ugly, unchristian, immoral
truths" (1887 [1996], SS1). In *The Gay Science*,
Nietzsche captures this attitude with a famous thought experiment
called the "doctrine of eternal recurrence." Here, he asks
if we have the audacity to live the same life we are living now over
and over for eternity. "And there will be nothing new about
it," he explains, "but every pain and every pleasure, and
every thought and sigh, and everything unspeakably small and great in
your life must come back to you and all in the same series and
sequence." On Nietzsche's view, most of us would recoil in
horror at the prospect of eternally suffering through the same boredom,
failures, and disappointments. But overflowing with *amor fati*
(love of one's fate), the Overman welcomes this possibility,
proclaiming, "I have never heard anything more godlike"
(1887 [1974], SS341). Camus describes this attitude as a form of
rebellion against servile and conformist ways of being. Like the
Overman, "the rebel" is someone "born of abundance
and fullness of spirit," and he embodies "the unreserved
affirmation of human imperfection and suffering, of evil and murder, of
all that is problematic and strange in our existence. It is born of an
arrested wish to be what one is in a world that is what it is" (1951
[1956, 72]).


But not everyone has the inborn power to rebel against tradition
and creatively express their unique style of living. For Nietzsche,
only "the highest types" can manifest this kind of freedom
and capacity for self-overcoming. To this end, his account of
authenticity is unapologetically elitist and anti-democratic. Most of
us are too mired in self-deception, too frightened and weak to break
with the herd and become who we are. "Only a very few people can
be free," writes Nietzsche, "It is a prerogative of the
strong" (1886 [1998], SS29). 


### 5.4 Heidegger's Resolute Dasein


Heidegger devotes much of the second half of *Being and
Time* to an analysis of authenticity, employing the German term
*Eigentlichkeit*--formed from the stem of the adjective
*eigen* ("own" or "property")--that
literally means "being own's own" or
"ownnness." But he sets up his analysis of authenticity by
first claiming that self-deception or "inauthenticity" is
unavoidable; it is a structure of the human condition, one that he
refers to as "falling" (*Verfallen*). What this
means is that in our everyday lives we invariably conform (or
"fall prey") to the norms and values of the public world.
This results in a kind of complacency and indifference about the
question of existence, where we are not our own selves, where
"everyone is the other, and no one is himself" (1927
[1962, 128]). Falling creates the illusion that our existence (or
being-in-the-world) is secure and thing-like because we are doing what
everyone else does. But, for Heidegger, there is nothing that
fundamentally secures our existence. As a self-making activity, I am
not a stable thing. I am nothing, a "not yet" (*noch
nicht*) that is always unsettled, always in the process of
making myself. The awareness of our own unsettledness emerges in
moments of anxiety when the familiar and routinized world
"collapses into itself" (1927 [1962, 186]), and I
"die" (*sterben*) because I am no longer
able-to-be, that is, to understand or make sense of who I
 am.[8]


Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger interprets anxiety as an
individualizing mood, one that momentarily "snatches one
back" from the tranquilizing routines of "the They,"
leaving us vulnerable and exposed to confront our lives (1927 [1962,
384]). And this is potentially liberating because it can temporarily
free us from patterns of self-deception, providing insight, a
"moment of vision" (*Augenblick*) that can give our
lives a renewed sense of urgency and focus. But this experience of
individuation does not detach me from the world, turning me into a
radical subject or "free floating 'I'" (1927
[1962, 298]). Heidegger claims that our self-defining choices are
always guided in advance by our historical embeddedness, what he calls
"historicity" (*Geschichtlichkeit*). The meanings we
choose to give to our lives, then, are not created out of thin air;
they have already been interpreted and made intelligible by a
historical community or "people"
(*Volk*).[9]
The moment of vision
shakes me out of my fallen, everyday existence and allows me to come
back to my historical world with fresh eyes, to seize hold of the
publicly interpreted meanings that matter to me and make them
"mine" (*Jemeinig*). 


Heidegger refers to this authentic attitude in terms of
"resoluteness" (*Entschlossenheit*), where I
"pull [myself] together," giving life a sense of cohesion
and focus that was missing when I was lost and scattered in "the
They." But being resolute does not mean that I stubbornly cling
to whatever possibilities I happen to choose. For Heidegger,
authenticity demands an openness and flexibility with how I
interpret
 myself.[10]
Understanding that existence is a situated process of self-making,
whatever values or meanings I commit myself to, I must also be willing
to let go or give up on them depending on the circumstances of my life,
that is, to "hold [myself] free for the possibility of *taking
it back*" (1927 [1962, 308]). Resoluteness, on this view,
does not mean "becoming rigid" and holding fast to a chosen
identity because my self-understanding is always insecure; it can die
at any time. For this reason, authenticity requires
"readiness" or "anticipation"
(*Vorgriff*), where we passionately hold ourselves open and free
for the inescapable breakdowns and emergencies of life. It is, in
Heidegger's words, "an impassioned freedom towards
death--a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the
'They'" (1927 [1962, 266]). 


### 5.5 Self-Recovery in Sartre and Beauvoir




Sartre and Beauvoir follow Heidegger in viewing self-deception as
structural to the human condition. It is, as Sartre writes,
"an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human
being" (1943 [1956, 116]). Although I can certainly deceive
myself by over-identifying with freedom and denying the extent to which
my possibilities are constrained by facticity, the most common and
familiar form of bad faith is when I over-identify with my facticity,
as if I were a fully realized object or thing, a being
"in-itself" (*en-soi*). This form of self-deception
is understandable as it creates the consoling impression that there is
something secure and thing-like about my identity, that "I am
what I am," and there is nothing that can change me. But to
live this way is to deny my freedom and transcendence, that I am
self-making, that I live *for myself*--or, in the
vernacular of Sartre and Beauvoir, "for-itself"
(*pour-soi*). Human beings are, on their view, always in the
process of making or constituting themselves, modifying and negating
their being through moment-to-moment choices and actions. This means my
identity is never fixed or stable because I can always choose to take a
new path or interpret myself in other ways. Regardless of how I see
myself at a given time--as a professor, a father, or a political
activist--I am also "not" that person, because my
identity is never realized and complete; I am always free to negate a
given identity and define myself differently in the future. This means
I am "what I *am not*" (1943
[1956, 103]). And this situation appears to undermine the prospect of
authenticity altogether. If the self is always unstable, always in
question, how can I ever be genuine or true to myself?




In *Being and Nothingness*, Sartre provides an answer,
referring to authenticity in terms of a "recovery"
(*recuperation*) of a self or way of being "that
was previously corrupted" (1943 [1956,
 116]).[11]
 But this act of
"self-recovery" has nothing to do with creating or holding
on to a particular identity. It involves, rather, a clear-eyed
awareness and acceptance of the instability and ambiguity of the human
condition. And, along with this acceptance, a willingness to act in the
face of this ambiguity and to take responsibility, however horrible,
for wherever these actions might lead. As Sartre writes,
"authenticity consists in a lucid consciousness of the situation,
in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it
[...] sometimes with horror and hate" (1946 [1948, 90]). But
just because existence is fundamentally ambiguous does not mean that
our chosen projects are meaningless or absurd. My projects have meaning
and value because I chose these projects, but the meaning is
contingent; it is never enduring or stable. In *The Ethics of
Ambiguity*, Beauvoir explains: "The notion of ambiguity must
not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is
absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it
is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed" (1947
[1948, 129]). The point of authenticity, then, is not to be concerned
with *who I am*--because, at bottom, I am nothing. It is to
be concerned with *what I do*. As Sartre writes,
"Authenticity reveals that the only meaningful project is that of
*doing* (not that of being)" (1948 [1992, 475]). For
Sartre and Beauvoir, to be authentic is to recover and accept the
ambiguous tension of the self, that: *we are who we are
not*--and--*we* *are not who are*. And by
means of this recovery, recognize that the task of existence involves
acting and doing, that is, realizing our freedom through projects in
the world but also, as we will see, taking responsibility for how these
projects might enhance or diminish freedom for others.


## 6. Ethics




Existentialist ethics generally begins with the idea that there is
no external moral order or table of values that exists a priori.
"It must be understood," as Beauvoir writes in *The
Ethics of Ambiguity*, "that the passion in which man has
acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no
objective necessity permits of its being called useful." But this
does not mean that the existentialists are promoting a form of moral
nihilism. Beauvoir admits it is true that the human being "has no
reason to will itself. *But* this does not mean that it cannot
justify itself, that it cannot *give itself* reasons for being
that it does not *have*." It is human existence itself
"which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which
it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be
engaged." (1947 [1948, 12,
 15]).[12]
There is, then, a coherent account
of ethical responsibility grounded in freedom, not as a theoretical
abstraction but as a concrete expression of transcendence, and the
obligation to help others realize their own freedom so that I can
realize mine. When I acknowledge that freedom is my essence, I must
also acknowledge that it is the essence of others and work, to the best
of my ability, to help them realize it. My freedom, then, is not
free-floating; it is invariably bound up in the freedom of others. As
Sartre puts it: "We want freedom for freedom's sake and in
every particular circumstance. And in wanting freedom we discover that
it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that freedom of
others depends on ours [...] I am obliged to want others to have
freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom" (1945
[2001, 306]). 


### 6.1 Authentic Being-for-Others




Sartre and Beauvoir argue that we generally exist as "a
being-for-others" (*un etre-pour-autrui*), which is
to say that I understand or see myself in the way that I do through
"the look" (*le regard*) of the Other. And the look
has the power to strip away my freedom and turn me into an object.
Human relations, on this account, are best understood as a form of
conflict, a dyadic power struggle where I try to assert my freedom and
subjectivity by turning the Other into an object, while the Other tries
to do the same to me. "While I attempt to free myself from the
hold of the Other," writes Sartre, "the Other is trying to
free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other
seeks to enslave me... Conflict is the original meaning of
being-for-others" (1943 [1956, 475]). This struggle for
self-assertion leads to Sartre's famous claim in his play
*Huis Clos* (No Exit) that "Hell is--*other
people*" (1944 [1989, 45]).




But the struggle to objectify and possess the Other by stripping
them of their freedom is a manifestation of inauthentic
being-for-others. There is an authentic counterpart. Beauvoir, for
example, explores what it means to develop and cultivate freedom for
others with her account of "authentic love"
(*l'amour authentique*), describing it as a relationship
where we acknowledge and nurture the other's freedom and
transcendence while at the same time resisting the temptations of bad
faith, that is, to see the Other as an object or thing to be manipulated
and possessed. As a moral stance, authentic being-for-others is a form
of reciprocity that involves "the mutual recognition of two
freedoms [...] [where] neither would give up transcendence [and]
neither would be mutilated" (1949 [1952, 667]). In this way
authenticity and morality belong together, whereby we have a shared
obligation to liberate or free each other so that we can create
ourselves and take responsibility for the life we lead. Therefore, as
Beauvoir puts it, "to will oneself moral and to will oneself free
are one and the same decision" (1947 [1948, 24]).
 




Heidegger develops a similar idea in *Being and Time* with
his account of "liberating concern" (*befreiend
Fursorge*), a form of care where the central aim is to free
the Other from patterns of self-deception so that they can anxiously
face and create their own existence. It is a relational stance that
"helps the Other become transparent to himself in his care and to
become *free* for it" (1927 [1962, 122]). When we care in
this way, we resist the temptation to "leap-in"
(*einspringen*) for the Other, as if the Other were a dependent
thing or object that needs to be sheltered from the unsettling question
of existence. Heidegger refers to this sheltering tendency in terms of
a kind of tacit mastery or "domination"
(*Beherrschung*) that strips the Other of the anxious
responsibility they have for their own life. Instead of
leaping-in for the Other and disburdening them of their responsibility,
an authentic relation is one that "leaps-ahead"
(*vorausspringt*) of the Other, giving them back their anxiety
and the freedom to care for and confront their condition. As Heidegger
writes, we leap-ahead of the Other, "not in order to take away
his 'care' but rather to give it back to them authentically
as such for the first time" (1927 [1962, 122]). Here, we see the
development of an ethical maxim: to act in such a way as to will the
realization of your own freedom and the realization of freedom for
others.


### 6.2 The Ethics of Recognition




There is also heterodox current among some religious
existentialists, one that suggests that moral demands are placed on us
when we recognize ourselves not as voluntaristic subjects--or, in
the words of Iris Murdoch, "brave naked wills" (1983, 46)
severed from bonds of community and attachment--but as relational
beings who are fundamentally bound together in mutual vulnerability.
And this recognition may serve as the foundation for an ethics by
pulling us out of our everyday self-absorption and awakening us, not to
our freedom, but to our essential dependency.




Speaking through the religious elder Father Zossima in *The
Brothers Karamazov*, Dostoevsky offers a powerful indictment of
the "terrible individualism" that he sees as endemic to
modernity, where unfettered freedom and self-affirmation have become
the highest values. Such a view leads not to self-actualization but to
loneliness and despair. The modern man, says Zossima, "is
accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the
whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in
men and in humanity [...] but this terrible individualism must
inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how
unnaturally they are separated from one another" (1879 [1957-80,
279]). Against the vision of the willful subject who makes choices
without evaluative limits or constraints, Dostoevsky suggests it is
only in recognizing the Other as dependent and vulnerable that we can
come to recognize ourselves. True freedom emerges when we release
ourselves from the bondage of our own egoistic striving and adopt an
attitude of humility and self-sacrifice. The aim is to show that the
human being is not an isolated will but a frail and defenseless being
that is dependent on the self-less love, compassion, and charity of
others.[13]
When we free ourselves from the temptations of individualism in this
way, Zossima says a moral demand is placed on us, one where we begin
to see that "we are all responsible to all and for all"
(1879-80 [1957, 228). 



The Jewish existentialist Martin Buber expands on this idea in his
masterwork *I and Thou*. He claims that in our everyday lives we
generally relate to others from an instrumental and objectifying
standpoint, what he calls the "I-It" (*Ich-Es*)
relation, where the other is encountered as a thing (or
"it") to be manipulated and controlled for one's own
use. This relation is comforting because it creates the illusion that
we have control of our situation. But there are moments in our lives
when this illusion collapses, and we become vulnerable to the other,
not as an "it" but as a "you." In the
"I-You" (*Ich-Du*) relation, all the egoistic
defenses we rely on to conceal our essential dependency and openness to
the Other break down. Buber refers to this as an experience of grace,
where the Other is revealed to me as a whole person, defenseless and
exposed, and I am revealed in the same way. It is a moment where
"two human beings reveal the You to one another" (1923
[1970, 95]). In this way, anxiety isn't a radically
individualizing affair, where the forlorn subject is cut off from the
relational world to confront their own freedom. For Buber, exposure to
the I-You relation shakes us out of our own egoistic concerns and
awakens us to the fact that we are not isolated individuals but beings
who are always in living relation with others. With this experience
"the barriers of the individual are breached," and this
creates an affective union, a "bridge from self-being to
self-being across the abyss of dread" (1938 [1965], 201,
207]).


### 6.3 The Ethics of Engagement



The Nazi occupation of France, his own experience as a prisoner of
war, and the attacks on his philosophy from influential Marxist
critics, compelled Sartre to shift his focus from the individual to the
social. Following the war, he, along with Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir,
launched the influential journal of social criticism *Le Temps
Modernes* (Modern Times), and Sartre made his aims clear in the
first issue, writing: "Our intention is to help effect certain
changes in the Society that surrounds us... one is responsible for
what one is ... Totally committed and totally freed. And yet it is
the free man who must be *delivered*, by enlarging his
possibilities of choice" (Sartre 1945 [1988, 264-65]). Here we
see existentialists making the connection that for the Other to realize
their freedom, philosophy must engage the "bases and
structures" that limit and constrain them. This is because these
structures are not philosophical abstractions; they "are lived as
schematic determinates of the individual's future" (Sartre
1957 [1968, 94]). Society, here, is viewed not as an aggregate of
voluntaristic subjects; it is the mediating background of our lives,
and if we are going to create a situation of freedom and "enlarge
the possibilities of choice," we must recognize how this
background can be violent and oppressive--especially to
historically marginalized and undervalued people--and to act in
such a way as to transform it.




Of all the major developers of existentialism, it is unquestionably
Beauvoir who offered the most sustained and influential analyses of
oppression and of possibilities for emancipation, not only in her
feminist masterwork *The Second Sex*, but in her bleak account
of the dehumanization of the elderly in *The Coming of Age*
(1970 [1996]) and her reflections on the experience of Black
populations in the Jim Crow South in her memoir *America Day by
Day* (1954 [1999]). In these works, Beauvoir illuminates how
socioeconomic and political structures can restrict the human capacity
for freedom and transcendence, how they have the power to
"freeze" the Other, strip away possibilities for agency and
self-creation, and trap them in "immanence." But in these
works, Beauvoir makes it clear that this situation is not a destiny.
Human beings have no essential nature; no one is born inferior or
submissive. We are constituted intersubjectively by growing into,
internalizing, and enacting ready-made structures of oppression. But
insofar as these structures are constituted and maintained by the
choices and actions of individuals, they are not fixed and static. Like
human beings, they too are subject to change. Here we see how the
recognition that existence precedes essence moves from the ontological
realm to the ethical, it becomes a call to action, to engage and
transform the material conditions that limit the possibilities of
choice for those who are oppressed and marginalized.



In this way, postwar existentialism began to engage the realities of
the social sphere and the painful "isms"--classism,
racism, colonialism, sexism, anti-Semitism--haunting the western
world. It was a philosophy that had come to recognize, in
Sartre's words, that "the individual interiorizes his
social determinations; he interiorizes the relations of production, the
family of his childhood, the historical past, the contemporary in
institutions, and he then re-exteriorizes these acts and options which
necessarily refer us back to them" (1972 [2008, 35]). And insofar
as these social determinations are not fixed and timeless but
contingent human constructs, they can be resisted and transformed to
free others. 


## 7. Contemporary Relevance




Existentialism has had a profound impact on how philosophers
conceptualize and understand the human condition, with rich accounts
of affectivity and embodiment, facticity (or worldliness), and the
ways in which we are constituted intersubjectively. It has opened new
paths for philosophy to engage with concrete and acute human problems,
from sexuality, race, disability, and old age to broader issues of
social and political violence and oppressive relations in general. And
the movement continues to thrive in the academy today. Not only is the
Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP)
flourishing as the second largest philosophical organization in the
English-speaking world, with smaller research groups (or
"Circles") devoted to every major figure. There is a
cascade of scholarship published every year in leading journals and
academic presses that captures the enduring relevance of
existentialist thought, including important new work engaging the
significance of French existentialism as an ethical theory (Webber
2018), reframing our conceptions of virtue and human flourishing
(McMullin 2019), and even addressing current analytic debates in
philosophies of life-extension, anti-natalism, and transhumanism
(Buben 2022). Indeed, the core ideas and major figures of
existentialism are not just alive and well; they are shaping
developments in a diverse range of areas across the humanities and
social sciences.


### 7.1 Post-Structuralism



The legacy is most clearly present in the European philosophies that
proceeded it. Existentialism's critique of foundationalism and
the authority of reason as well as its rejection of universalism,
essentialism, and "grand narratives" (or metanarratives)
all had a decisive impact on post-structural philosophies in France.
Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular served as decisive influences on
the project of "de-centering the subject" in Jacques
Derrida's method of deconstruction and in Michel Foucault's
genealogy of power, demonstrating how the subject is not the privileged
center or origin of truth and knowledge. The subject is, rather, shaped
in advance by sociohistorical structures, an overlapping network of
norms and practices, linguistic conventions, and shared meanings, and
this shaping takes place in a way that we are never fully
conscious
 of.[14]
The
individual, on this view, is more of a placeholder or crossing point in
these anonymous structures, where the subject exists as "the
inscribed surface of events [...] totally imprinted by
history" (Foucault 1977, 148). Of course, existentialists reject
the idea that this historical imprinting or "decentering"
is total or absolute. They are, after all, still committed to the value
of freedom and authenticity, but they recognize that freedom is never
unconditioned. Beyond the philosophies of Heidegger and Nietzsche, we
see this recognition in Merleau-Ponty's conception of mediated
freedom, in Sartre's postwar account of
"freedom-in-situation," and in what Beauvoir calls
"*la force des choses*" (the power of
circumstances). The recognition of historicity as an impersonal force
that structures our identity had such an impact on Foucault's
work that he once remarked: "My entire philosophical development
was determined by my reading of Heidegger" (Foucault 1985, cited
in Dreyfus 1995, 9).


### 7.2 Narrative and Hermeneutic Philosophy




In viewing the self not as a substance or thing but as a
self-interpreting, meaning-giving activity that is always already bound
up in the world, existentialism has also informed key developments in
narrative and hermeneutic philosophy. Prominent anglophone philosophers
such as Harry Frankfurt (1971), Charles Taylor (1985), and Alasdair
MacIntyre (1981) have drawn on classical existentialism to illuminate
how we exist in the meanings and self-interpretations that we create
for ourselves. My sense of who I am is constituted by an ongoing
process of choosing, pulling together, and consolidating the roles,
projects, and meanings that matter to me and that are made available by
the sociohistorical situation I find myself in. On this view, the story
I create for myself is held together by the narrative unity and
cohesion that I give to it. This is what Taylor means when he says that
we can only understand or "grasp our lives in a narrative"
(1989, 47). And this conception of narrative identity not only offers a
response to overly reductive conceptions of the self that are grounded
in the substance ontologies of mind and body; it demonstrates an
attentiveness to the ambiguous tension of our condition, that our
choices are both self-fashioning and socially embedded, that we
simultaneously make ourselves and are already made. 


### 7.3 Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science



Beginning with Hubert Dreyfus's (1972) groundbreaking critique
of Artificial Intelligence (AI), philosophers of mind and cognitive
scientists have been drawing on existentialist
philosophy--especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty--to
challenge the overly mentalistic picture of selfhood and agency that
modern philosophy inherits from Descartes and Kant and to dismantle
traditional representational theories of knowledge. Key works by Shaun
Gallagher (2005), Thomas Fuchs, (2018), and Dan Zahavi (2005) have
replaced the picture of the disembodied mind with the now widely
accepted notion of the embedded, enactive, and embodied self. This is a
rejection of the long-held assumption that human action must somehow be
represented or "mirrored" in the mind. Existentialism
illuminates how--as a situated way of
being-in-the-world--human beings already embody a tacit
understanding of the world in a way that we are not and can never be
thematically conscious of. This means we do not understand things as
discrete objects. We understand things in terms of how we use and
handle them and in terms of the purposive, meaning-giving roles these
things play in our everyday lives. The traditional view of the mind as
something resembling the rule-governed processes of a computer program
have continually failed to capture this ambiguous and embodied sense of
being-in-the-world.


### 7.4 Critical Phenomenology



The attentiveness to conditions of oppression, subjugation, and
violence among postwar existentialists in France has had a decisive
impact on recent developments in critical phenomenology by giving voice
to those who have been historically marginalized or undervalued in the
western tradition. Beauvoir's pioneering account of the
woman's experience in *The Second Sex* is well known for
laying the conceptual foundations for second wave feminism, and her
late career phenomenology of aging broke new ground by shedding light
on the existence of older persons and exposing the toxic ageism in
contemporary capitalist societies. Together with Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty, her ideas would inform Franz Fanon's *Black
Skin, White Masks* (1952 [1967]), a seminal work that disclosed the
dehumanizing experience of colonized Black populations and helped give
birth to Africana critical theory or "black existentialism"
(Gordon 2000). The focus on the ways in which structures of
discrimination along with the limits of our own embodiment can
constrain our capacities for freedom and transcendence has, in turn,
influenced recent phenomenological accounts of intersectionality and
the lived experience of, among others, indigenous peoples, immigrants,
and exiles (Coulthard 2014; Ortega 2016), queer and trans identities
(Ahmed 2006; Salamon 2010), those who are imprisoned or in solitary
confinement (Guenther 2013; Leder 2016), and the elderly, disabled, and
chronically ill (Aho 2022; Reynolds 2022; Dickel 2022).


### 7.5 Comparative and Environmental Philosophy



Interpreting existence in terms of the situated activity of
being-in-the-world not only serves as a rejection of substance ontology
and the metaphysical dualisms (subject-object; mind-body; inner-outer)
that we inherit from Cartesian and empiricist epistemologies; it also
reveals deep affinities with the nonduality of Buddhism and other
incarnations of Eastern thought. (Loy 2018; Kalmanson 2020) And the
recognition of our enmeshment in the world has informed a range of
important advances in the philosophy of place, deep ecology, and
eco-phenomenology (Brown & Toadvine 2003; Malpas 2017; Morton 2016;
Rentmeester 2016). These endeavors have exposed the limitations of the
scientific worldview and our uncritical dependence on technological
innovation to address the current ecological crisis. Modern science
generally assumes a binary paradigm of the subject as separate and
distinct from a value-less domain of objects (or nature), a domain that
can, in turn, be mastered and controlled by technoscience. In this way,
it betrays our ordinary experience, that in our day-to-day lives we are
not atomistic, self-certain subjects but beings that are fundamentally
entwined with the world and the meaning and value that this
intertwining brings to our experience. For the existentialist, then,
extricating ourselves from environmental doom requires not a
technoscientific fix but an ontological transformation in our own
self-understanding, an awaking to the reality of our interdependence
with nature, that the earth is not *apart from* us but rather
*part of* us. 


### 7.6 Philosophy of Health and Illness




Outside of the humanities and social sciences, existentialism has
also had a deep and lasting impact on the allied health professions.
The role it has played in the development of existential and humanistic
approaches to psychotherapy (Cooper 2003; Spinneli 2007; van Deurzen
2015) and to phenomenological psychopathology (Parnas & Gallagher
2015; Ratcliffe 2015; Stanghellini et al. 2019) is well-known, but in
recent years we have seen its influence emerge in a range of different
areas, from narrative medicine to nursing, and from gerontology to
palliative care. To this end, existentialism has informed a move away
from the reductive and objectifying tendencies of modern biomedicine to
recover the first-person experience of health and illness, viewing the
body not so much as a biophysical machine that needs to be adjusted and
maintained but as the experiential and interpretative medium of our
existence. This shift has not only allowed clinicians to challenge the
emergent tendency to medicalize ever-expanding swaths of the human
condition; it makes it possible for the clinician to better understand
the patient's experience by getting a sense of "what it
means" and "what it feels like" to suffer when the
body breaks down (Aho 2018; Slatman 2014; Svenaeus 2022; Zeiler &
Kall 2014).


### 7.7 A New Generation



Beyond its ascendency in the healing arts, its myriad cultural
influences, and its wide-ranging impact on the humanities and social
sciences, the enduring legacy of existentialism is perhaps most visible
in the classroom. Existentialist-themed courses are often among the
most popular in the philosophy curriculum as young students confront,
for the first time, the unsettling questions of freedom and the meaning
of their own existence. And these questions have never been more
pressing as they develop against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate
change, species extinction, global pandemics, and the reemergence of
authoritarian and fascist politics. Amidst these planetary emergencies,
a new generation is facing the predicament of nihilism and the death of
God and owning up to the uncanny truth of the human condition: that
existence precedes essence.