Scholarly Essay. Phil-
I . V a l u e O r i e n t a t i o n
T h e O r d i n a r y M a n ’ s v a l u e s
In the fourth century before Christ, Aristotle declared that the ordinary man regarded the good life as a life of physical pleasure, wealth, or honor. In the seventeenth century Spinoza reaffirmed the validity of the Aristotelian formula for his own time, substituting only the word “fame” for the word “honor.” Nor is there any dearth of contemporary philosophers who would be willing to accept Spinoza’s generalization as valid for the twentieth century, provided only that a term such as “social approval” be substituted for the word “fame.”
Although the adequacy of such classifications of the ordinary man’s goals might be debated, there can be no question that philosophers who have seen fit to express themselves on this issue have almost unanimously endorsed such classifications. At the same time they have almost unanimously denounced the ordinary man’s pursuits in favor of some mode of life by which the frustrations and disillusionment which they believe inevitably to accompany these pursuits may be mitigated or overcome.
The existentialists are no exception to the general rule. In this respect they fall into a tradition almost as old as philosophy itself, and it is as the chief modern-day heirs of this tradition that they may be best understood. Their originality consists primarily in their sensitivity to certain human values which
18Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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not only the ordinary man but also the classical philosophical and religious tradition tended to overlook.
The reader who has dipped only casually into existentialist literature or who knows the existentialists only at second hand may be surprised to hear the existentialists represented as advocates of a class of human values. Are they not rather nihilists? He may also be surprised to hear that the existentialists are seeking to mitigate or overcome frustration and disillusionment. Is it not rather their belief that frustration and disillusionment are integral features of the human condition?
The subtlety of the existentialist position makes it difficult to cope adequately with these questions at this point. It should, however, be borne in mind that mankind has clung so long and so tenaciously to the ordinary man’s values that the negative side of any doctrine which denounces these values in favor of others will almost inevitably strike the uninitiated more forcefully than its positive side. Christ, for instance, was no nihilist; but the publican urged to abandon the flesh, the rich man asked to renounce his wealth, and the ostentatiously pious man enjoined to pray in privacy no doubt tended to think he was.
Moreover, from the fact that one denounces the ordinary ambitions of mankind as vain and preaches another way of life it does not necessarily follow that one will regard the abandonment of ordinary ambitions as a matter of little moment. Kierkegaard refused a parsonage which would have brought him a steady income, abandoned his fiancée together with the hope of a comfortable family life, and deliberately used his talent to bring ridicule upon himself—all in the conviction that comfort, money, and public approval are
19Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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inferior values. Nowhere, however, did he suggest that such sacrifices come easily. On the contrary, he would certainly agree with Spinoza, who said: “If salvation lay ready to hand and could be discovered without great labor, how is it possible that it should be neglected by almost everybody? All noble things are as difficult as they are rare.”
The point here is that salvation, however dearly purchased, is still salvation. The tragic sense of life which gives impetus to movements of salvation is far from being nihilistic. If the existentialists’ pronouncements on the bitterness of the human condition are to be regarded as evidence of nihilism, then logic requires that the same charge be leveled at Aeschylus and Shakespeare. Like the great tragic authors of the Western world, the existentialists have mastered the technique of reaffirming the value of life while boldly depicting its horrors. Two of the most popular pieces of existentialist literature are The Philosophy of Tragedy by Léon Shestov and The Tragic Sense of Life by Unamuno; but there are few works by existentialist authors which could not appropriately have borne these titles.
There is still a third consideration which may profitably be urged at this point to help dispel the popular prejudice according to which existentialism is a nihilistic philosophy of despair. The focal aims of the ordinary man of today may be the same as those of the ordinary man in Aristotle’s day—but they are not his only aims. Though inconsistently and imperfectly, the ordinary man of today has imbibed the values of the Western philosophical and religious tradition. These values figure less prominently in the actual conduct of his life than wealth, pleasure, and prestige; but he clings to them hardly less tenaciously. When, therefore, the existentialist
20Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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proclaims that the messages of salvation and consolation sanctioned by tradition are no less vain than the hope of fulfillment through wordly pursuits, the ordinary man is doubly offended. Not only his first, but his second, line of defense has been breached. He is in despair. With a logic which is wholly indefensible, though understandable enough, he cries: I am in despair, you have reduced me to despair, therefore you are in despair. But no! the existentialist answers. You were in despair in the first place. It is for that reason you have heard and understood me when I stripped you of your illusions. All that I have done is to make you fully conscious of your despair, and now if you will listen further I will help you master your despair.
If, of course, the existentialists’ uncompromising rejection of the so-called worldly values and of traditional messages of salvation is unwarranted or if their own message of salvation rests upon illusions peculiar to themselves, then the movement may properly be regarded as nihilistic in effect. But the movement is not nihilistic in intent.
V a l u e s i n T r a d i t i o n a l P h i l o s o p h y
In view of the richness and variety of the Western heritage, traditional philosophers’ criticisms of the ordinary man’s way of life are remarkably uniform, and the basic strategies by which they hoped to free themselves from the evils they believe to characterize that way of life, surprisingly few.
A life dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, wealth, and fame has been condemned on three grounds. First, the attainment of such goals depends only in small part upon the efforts of the individual himself. External circumstances almost too numerous to catalogue and almost wholly beyond the
21Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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individual’s control may thwart him at any moment. Second, no matter how successful the individual has been, he cannot be secure in his possessions. The caprice of a king, the cunning of an enemy, a natural catastrophe such as flood or earthquake may cause him to lose everything in a single day. Third, even if the individual attained and secured the goals he originally set for himself, the satisfaction he experienced would be short-lived and he would soon revert to a life of painful striving. There is no natural limit to the amount of wealth, fame, or pleasure which a man may covet, and the brief satisfaction he experiences upon the attainment of some degree of these goods only whets his appetite for more. The desire for these worldly or material goods is like an itch. There is a momentary satisfaction when the desire is apparently fulfilled, as there is when one scratches an itch. But it would be better to be without the desire altogether, as it would be better to be without the itch. A life dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, wealth, or fame is thus by its nature a life of frustration, insecurity, and painful striving—illuminated perhaps by moments of brief satisfaction but without lasting value.
Of the various techniques philosophers have recommended to emancipate oneself from the ordinary man’s round of desire, the simplest and most radical is that of the Stoics. Since the common source of frustration, insecurity, and painful striving is desire, one need only root it out. Suppress one’s desires and accept willingly whatever the external circumstances of one’s life may be. “Seek not,” says the Stoic slave philosopher Epictetus, “that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.” We cannot command goods such as wealth, pleasure, or fame; these
22Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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depend upon accident or good fortune rather than voluntary individual efforts. But we can command our hopes and fears, our desires and aversions, since these have their source within us.
The signs of resignation and world-weariness in the Stoic counsel are evident, and the great popularity of Stoicism during the Hellenistic period must be attributed in large part to the political disorders and economic uncertainties of that era in ancient history. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Stoicism as nothing more than a philosophy of resignation. There was nothing flabby or self-indulgent in the Stoics’ renunciation of worldly ambitions, as the common phrase “stoic heroism” rightly indicates. If the Stoics were pessimistic in their estimate of what man could achieve in the world, they were by no means pessimistic about what man could achieve within himself. Their goal was not merely quiescence or absence of desire, but also a sense of individual dignity to be achieved by rigorous self-discipline. Indifference or apathy with respect to the natural and social environment is only one side of their doctrine. The other side is the energetic pursuit of independence through a proud exercise of the human will; and it is this latter half of the doctrine which sets Stoicism apart from the more radical philosophies of resignation which until recent times prevailed in the Orient.
The second basic type of philosophy by which men have hoped to overcome the ills of ordinary life is in one sense directly opposed to that of the Stoics. For want of a more generic title, it will be referred to as the philosophy of the Enlightenment. This philosophy, like that of the Stoics, reflects the social conditions of the era in which it thrived and
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is utterly unthinkable in a society unacquainted with a well-advanced technology. Let it be granted, say thinkers of this school, that the individual cannot by his own efforts hope to attain and enjoy in security the goods of this world. It does not necessarily follow that the individual must adjust to this fact as an ultimate necessity. To be sure, an unfavorable physical environment may impede the achievement of the human desire for worldly goods, but by a concerted and rational effort men may and should reshape their physical environment so as to promote rather than impede the achievement of these desires. To be sure, political, economic, and social institutions may stand as obstacles in the way of individual fulfillment, but again concerted and rational efforts may and should be undertaken to devise institutions which will promote individual fulfillment. The part of wisdom is to act upon and to modify the world rather than to act upon and modify original human desires.
The Enlightenment outlook may seem very close to that of the ordinary man. In fact, however, the two outlooks are poles apart. More often than not the ordinary man’s political sentiments are avowedly conservative. And even in those cases where he formally favors political or social reform, his primary concern is happiness for himself during his lifetime and his field of action a narrow one. He takes his physical and social environment more or less for granted as a stable framework within which he seeks personal well-being. The Enlightenment philosophers, on the contrary, took it more or less for granted that individual well-being within the existing physical and social environment is impossible; and even the most optimistic of them were aware that the creation of a favorable environment would require the co-operative endeavors of many men over many generations.
24Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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Although, therefore, Enlightenment philosophers sanction the goal of worldly happiness and to this extent belong in the camp of the ordinary man, they are in reality much closer to the Stoics. For them it is mankind, not the existing individual, who can achieve worldly happiness. The existing individual lives in a world which must inevitably thwart his primary desires, and he must adjust to this fact, as did the Stoics, by a change of mind and heart. That change of mind and heart will produce a zeal for social reform and lead him to act upon the world, but it will not lead to the fulfillment of his personal desire for worldly goods. The happiness available to the existing individual is that of the generous idealist who can identify in imagination with the whole of mankind, thus vicariously enjoying the happiness of future generations. As these implications of the Enlightenment attitude became more evident, especially with the failure of the French Revolution, the movement itself was gradually transformed into a humanism, of which Auguste Comte’s religious cult of humanity in the nineteenth century was an extreme expression.
The third basic method by which philosophers have hoped to escape the frustration, insecurity, and painful striving which they believe to be part and parcel of the ordinary man’s life is by far the most common. The values of the ordinary man, it will be recalled, were rejected on the grounds that they are ephemeral and impossible of achievement without external aid. Why not, then, seek out an object of allegiance which is not ephemeral and to which man may relate with a minimum of outside help? In this case it is not a question, as with the Stoics, of suppressing all desire, nor, as with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, of creating an environment which permits the realization of worldly desires. The aim is rather to
25Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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redirect desire toward some eternal object, it alone being considered worthy of deep human concern.
The first of the great philosophers to take this path were Socrates and Plato, but their fellow travelers include almost all the major figures in philosophy up to and including Hegel. They are, in fact, so numerous and their quarrels among themselves occupy so important a place in the history of philosophy that it is only from the vantage point of the present day that the essential similarity begins to come into view, and even from the vantage point of the present day their differences remain as important as their points in common.
In the Symposium, one of Plato’s most remarkable dialogues, a group of Athenians have gathered together in order to celebrate a dramatic success of the host. At a certain point in the celebration the entertainers are sent away, and it is proposed that each of the guests, Socrates among them, make a speech in praise of love. The last of the speeches is by the wealthy, pleasure-loving, and popular Alcibiades. Unwilling to compete with Socrates on the theme of love, he decides instead to deliver a eulogy of Socrates. Ironically, he praises Socrates for his total indifference to pleasure, wealth, and honor, illustrating his theme with numerous examples from the life of the subject. The chief interest of the dialogue, however, is the speech of Socrates, in which indifference to the ordinary man’s values is explained and justified.
Socrates begins his speech by remarking that those who spoke before him were too extravagant in their praise of love. Love, he says, is a symbol of want or need, not of completion or fulfillment. To love is to desire, and to desire is to seek; but nobody seeks that which he already possesses. We seek only that which we lack. The lover may, of course, enter into
26Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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possession of the body of the beloved, but even then he is inflamed by the desire to perpetuate his good fortune and continues to seek a future happiness, which as future is beyond his grasp. Moreover, so long as the object of the lover is the beauty of another’s body, the lover is doomed to disappointment; for the beauty of the body soon fades. Even if the object of the lover is the beauty of another’s soul, he still faces inevitable disappointment. A beautiful soul may survive the decay of the body; but it, too, in its own way is a fragile and finite object. The lover can be secure only if the object of his search is the pure, simple, and eternal Idea of beauty itself—a transcendent object of which finite things are but perishable and imperfect copies.
A fuller understanding of these remarks on love is possible only within the framework of Platonic metaphysics. For Plato all things may be placed within one of two categories. On the one hand, there are things such as the Idea of beauty itself which are immutable, self-sufficient, and eternal. On the other hand, there are things such as the human body which exist in time and which are not sufficient unto themselves. The former alone belong to the realm of Being in the true sense of the word “Being.” The latter belong to the domain of Becoming. They come into existence and pass out of existence; and so long as they are in existence, they are subject to change through the impact of other objects. Although for Plato the principal items in the realm of Being are Ideas, the gods also people this realm. For this reason Socrates in his speech on love chastises the other speakers for referring to love as a god. It is ridiculous, says Socrates, that the gods should love; for to love is to lack, and a god lacks nothing.
27Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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Generalizations about Christian philosophy are always precarious, since Christianity has come to mean many different things to different people. It would none the less be substantially correct to regard Christian philosophy as a form of Platonism. Although the dualism of creator and creature replaces the dualism of Being and Becoming, the creator retains all the properties of Platonic Ideas (immutability, self-sufficiency, and eternity), while his creatures are invested with all the properties of objects in Plato’s world of Becoming (mutability, dependency, and finitude). And, as in Plato, salvation from the ills to which all flesh is heir can come only through a relationship to a reality which transcends the world.
It is true that in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, which has become the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church, the dualism is less stark than in Plato and the legitimacy of worldly interests partially restored. Similar remarks apply to Aristotle, Plato’s greatest disciple and St. Thomas’s principal source of philosophic inspiration. But for both St. Thomas and Aristotle wealth, honor, and pleasure are relatively insignificant values, and both of them regarded self-sufficiency, immutability, and eternity as the marks by which an object most genuinely worthy of human concern must be identified.
Aristotle insistently and expressly declared that the best of all possible types of life is the contemplative life, and for precisely the same reasons as Plato. The man who finds his happiness in contemplation is of all men the least dependent upon external circumstances, and he alone has access to the eternal. The fact that the proper objects of contemplation for Plato are transcendent Ideas of which individual things are
28Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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but imperfect copies whereas for Aristotle the objects of contemplation are essences whose proper locus is in the world must not be allowed to obscure the like-mindedness of the two philosophers with regard to the proper conduct of life. In locating Plato’s Ideas in the world and rebaptizing them “essences,” Aristotle took every precaution to preserve their eternity and immutability. Individual things as individuals are hopelessly implicated in the flux of the world or the domain of Becoming, and consequently cannot be known. But the essences of individuals, i.e., the properties which they share with other members of their species, are immutable and eternal, and they alone are intelligible objects of contemplation. The individual dies, but the species is fixed and lives on forever.
For St. Thomas the chief human good is rest in God. God alone is self-sufficient. He alone is the cause of himself: in scholastic terminology, God is the ens causa sui. Man, as a dependent creature who owes his very existence to God, can find fulfillment only by relating himself to the source of his being. Pleasure, wealth, and honor may come to us in the course of our lives as by-products of a life devoted to the worship of God, and if so, we may be grateful to God for the satisfaction they bring. But these satisfactions rank low in the hierarchy of human values, and they ought in no case to be the object of voluntary search. If taken as objects of deliberate pursuit, they distract us from our true vocation.
For the student of existentialism the most significant forms this third basic method for overcoming the evils of the ordinary man’s life have taken are those of Spinoza and Hegel, since it is most often with respect to these later thinkers that the existentialists define their own position.
29Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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Having convinced himself that all the evils which accompany the life of the man who lives for pleasure, wealth, and fame derive from the fact that the objects of his pursuits are finite, Spinoza tells us that he sought for a remedy like “a sick man struggling with a deadly disease, when he sees that death will surely be upon him unless a remedy be found.” Since, however, Spinoza believed neither in God as the Jews and Christians conceived him nor in Platonic Ideas, the remedies ready at hand were rejected as quackery.
One object and only one object, Spinoza declared, could be truly immutable and eternal. One object and only one was unquestionably the cause of itself. To that object Spinoza gave the names “Nature” and “God,” words which remain in his system strictly synonymous. But whichever term is used, the object designated is perfectly clear, viz., the totality of all that exists. Since by definition there is nothing outside the totality of what exists, there is nothing but itself from which it can draw its being. Inevitably it is an ens causa sui. Since there is nothing outside the totality of what is, there is nothing which can act upon it or induce it to change. By rigorous logical necessity, it is immutable. Finally, there being nothing outside the totality of what is which could be its cause, it must either have existed eternally or not exist at all. Since, however, it obviously does exist, it must have existed eternally.
From the fact that God or Nature, i.e., the totality of what is, has the characteristic of immutability, it follows that whatever happens happens according to strict necessity. Events which appear to be the product of accident are in fact rigidly determined. The wise man will, therefore, accept the counsel of the Stoics and, rather than seek that the things which
30Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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happen should happen as he wishes, will instead wish the things which happen to be as they are.
Fear, envy, regret, anger—all the disturbances of the mind—have their source in the desire that things be other than they are no less than in the finitude of their object. But once man recognizes that things cannot be other than they are, disturbing passions will no longer agitate him. We do not, says Spinoza, regret that we are born as infants rather than as adults, because we firmly believe that it could not be otherwise. If, however, most men were born as adults and only a few as infants, then the latter would no longer believe in the inevitability of their fate and would regret being subjected to the painful process of growing up. But all things are equally inevitable. If therefore you are angry and indignant because someone has robbed you, try to remember that this theft is a part of the divine or natural scheme of things and try to understand the infinite chain of causes which has made it happen. In doing so, your anger and your indignation will disappear. You, the theft, and the robber are all necessary parts of God or Nature.
The secret of happiness consists in enlarging our perspective, in viewing all things from the standpoint of God or Nature. In the terminology of Spinoza, all things should be seen sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity. The mind of man is ultimately one with God or Nature. It can therefore rise to the level of God or Nature and intimately participate in its eternity. By so doing it emancipates itself from attachment to finite objects and from the passions which such attachment entails.
Spinoza and Hegel are separated in time by almost the whole of the eighteenth century, which was marked by the beginning
31Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the Enlightenment, and a growing preoccupation with the idea of historical progress. Darwin’s theory of evolution had yet to be propounded, but the idea of historical progress had already inspired a number of thinkers to espouse the idea of a cosmic or natural evolutionary process. These eighteenth-century developments provide the clue to the differences between the two philosophers. For Hegel, as for Spinoza, the aim of the philosopher is “to free man from the endless crowd of finite aims and intentions” by making him conscious of his place within a unified and necessary scheme of things. Whereas, however, Spinoza speaks of God or Nature, Hegel speaks of the Absolute Spirit; and whereas Spinoza conceived of Nature statically, Hegel conceives of the Absolute Spirit as engaged in an eternal process of self-realization. The individual person participates in eternity as a moment in the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit.
The spirit of his times, which was one of revolutionary upheaval and continual warfare, also led Hegel to represent the Absolute Spirit as unfolding according to a pattern which he called “dialectical.” A given moment of historical development, called the thesis, would in time generate its opposite, called the antithesis. At a later moment, called the synthesis, both earlier moments would emerge in a new configuration which surpasses them while preserving what is valuable in each. In time the synthesis which has emerged becomes the thesis of another antithesis, and the process goes on indefinitely. The Absolute Spirit is not only the sum of all these evolutionary moments, but also the principle which “mediates” or reconciles the conflicts of life as expressed in theses and antitheses.
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Surprisingly enough, the attribution of process and change to the Absolute Spirit did not involve much of a departure from the Spinozistic tradition. The Absolute Spirit, though mutable in the sense that it is a process, remains immutable in the sense that nothing outside itself can act upon it or determine its direction. It is wholly self-generating and wholly ens causa sui. It also, of course, remains eternal, for it has no limits in time.
Notwithstanding Hegel’s importance in his own right, it is largely through Marx and Engels that his influence has been felt in the world of everyday affairs. Through his conception of an inevitable process of historical development of which individuals are but moments, Hegel provided the Marxists with a rationale by means of which the sacrifice of oneself and others for the sake of the community at large or future generations could be justified. Since the achievement of the historically determined goal was guaranteed, the sacrifice could not be useless; and by viewing the sacrifice sub specie aeternitatis, much of its horror could be mitigated. This wedding of Enlightenment ideas with Hegelian philosophy had the further advantage of securing Marx against the charge of superficiality, so often leveled at the early Enlightenment, and against the charge of sentimentality, so often leveled at nineteenth-century humanists and latter-day liberals.
E x i s t e n t i a l i s t V a l u e s
It was observed earlier that existentialism has often been understood as a philosophy of complete nihilism and utter despair. This misinterpretation was partially explained as a consequence of the fact that the reader of existentialist literature is often so overwhelmed by the existentialists’
33Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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rejection of traditional values, be they those of the ordinary man or those implicit in the philosophical positions just sketched, that he fails to hear the triumphant and positive note which runs through that literature like a Wagnerian motif. There is, however, another source of misunderstanding which was briefly indicated earlier and which must now be made more explicit.
Almost without exception the biographies of the great philosophers of the past reveal poignant personal tragedies. At an early age Plato was forced to abandon the political career for which he was by birth and social status destined, to sustain the loss through execution of his master and friend Socrates, and to go into exile from his beloved Athens. Later, his one practical political adventure, an effort to establish a sound and stable government in Syracuse, was a dismal failure. Epictetus was not only a slave by birth but was also lame. Spinoza was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam where he had passed his early life, was obliged to earn his living in the tedious occupation of lens grinder, and died relatively young of consumption. Hegel was slow to mature as a philosopher, and although he finally achieved great popularity, his climb up the academic ladder was extremely laborious and frustrating. In his student days he was even subjected to the indignity of being told that he had no aptitude for philosophy.
Each of these men had strong personal reasons for doubting the possibility of self-fulfillment through wealth, fame, and pleasure; and behind an often cold and impersonal mask traces of disappointment and bitterness are clearly discernible. If the die-hard ordinary man so chose, he could perhaps make out a plausible interpretation of the traditional philosophers’
34Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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value orientations as so many instances of sour grapes. The fact remains, however, that in the official expression of their ideas traditional philosophers tended to regard the values which they substituted for those of the ordinary man as sufficient to a complete and fully satisfying life. The sense of tragedy haunts their systems, but it does not ordinarily enter into them.
The existentialists by contrast mock the notion of a complete and fully satisfying life. The life of every man, whether he explicitly recognizes it or not, is marked by irreparable losses. Man cannot help aspiring toward the goods of this world, nor can he help aspiring toward the serene detachment from the things of this world which the traditional philosopher sought; but it is not within his power to achieve either of these ambitions, or having achieved them to find therein the satisfaction he had anticipated. Frustration, insecurity, and painful striving are the inescapable lot of humankind, and the only life worth living is one in which this fact is squarely faced; for, if the existentialists are right, a life of frustration, insecurity, and painful striving itself generates values, and the values so generated are the only ones actually realizable and genuinely worthy of human pursuit.
Total immersion in the quest after wordly goods betokens a misunderstanding of the human situation and succeeds only in turning what could be the noble tragedy of human existence into a petty game of hide and seek. Similarly, a single-minded dedication to the ivory-tower detachment of the traditional philosopher impoverishes the human personality by causing us to lose all that is distinctively human. The ordinary man’s way is inhuman, because the person who takes it loses himself in the welter of material things after which he quests.
35Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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But the way of the traditional philosopher is also inhuman, since the man who takes it loses himself in the ethereal never-never land of philosophic fictions. The history of mankind is a desperate adventure which began we know not why and will end we know not where. And although the same remark might be made with equal justice of the race of elephants, man alone among the animals is capable of knowing that the remark is true. Why should he refuse his birthright by trying to forget what he knows is the case?
It is not surprising that the existentialists should subject both the ordinary man and the traditional philosopher to the same charge of inhumanity. According to the existentialists the underlying motive is in both cases the same: the desire for some state of happiness or well-being which is not only impossible of achievement but which if achieved would reduce us to the status of unconscious brutes.
With the sublime contempt of a man who sees in England nothing but a nation of small shopkeepers Nietzsche once remarked: “Man does not seek happiness; only the Englishman does.” As if in anticipation of such an attack, the English utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill had remarked that it is far better to be Socrates unhappy than to be a contented pig. Unfortunately for the English and for the utilitarians, Mill’s remark passed unnoticed. “Englishman” and “utilitarianism” are still dirty words in the existentialists’ vocabulary. Even had Mill’s remark been noticed, it would have failed to satisfy the existentialists. It is one thing to say that the life of an unhappy Socrates is better than the life of a contented pig: it is something else again to claim that man never has had, does not now have, and never will have any other choice. And it is only this latter position which is truly
36Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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existentialist. Mill’s concession that nine-tenths of mankind lives in abject misery would not be enough for any of the existentialists, and his assertion that the misery of nine-tenths of mankind is due simply to “wretched social arrangements” would either infuriate or amuse them. For the existentialists it is neither external political circumstances, nor a lack of technological knowledge, nor a want of wisdom, nor an imperfect moral development of the race which prevents the attainment of human happiness. It is the human condition itself which does so. Man could not become happy without ceasing to be man.
The existentialist denial that man desires happiness or well-being has outraged many unfriendly critics, who see in it an obvious untruth and a flat contradiction. What could be more obvious than that man does seek happiness? And have not the existentialists themselves claimed that human happiness lies in certain values to be realized in the very heart of despair? Properly understood, the denial that man seeks happiness is neither an obvious untruth nor a contradiction of other existentialist doctrines. In the first place, terms such as “happiness” and “well-being” are ambiguous. They are sometimes used in a very general or abstract sense to denote that state of being which is most desirable for mankind, whatever the speaker may believe that state of being to be like. At other times these terms are used somewhat more specifically to denote a state of peace, harmony, proportion, calm, serenity, or contentment achieved through wealth, pleasure, and prestige or through detachment from worldly concerns. Now it should be clear that when an existentialist denies that man seeks happiness he is not denying that there is some state of being which is most desirable for mankind or that in fact all men do in some sense seek this state of being.
37Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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What he is denying is that men seek happiness as specifically conceived by the vast majority of common men and traditional philosophers. He is not, therefore, in any way prejudicing his claim that the most worthy and only realizable human values are those generated by a life of frustration, insecurity, and painful striving.
In the second place, the term “want” is ambiguous. On the one hand, in saying that a man wants something we may mean simply that he deliberately seeks after it in the conscious belief that it is worth pursuing. This is, of course, the most common meaning of the term. We may, however, mean that the object wanted is a legitimate object of pursuit whether the person involved is clearly aware of it or not, as when we say of someone that he thinks he wants A but in reality wants B. A man may, for instance, through stubbornness or fear of the unknown persevere in a chosen career and attempt to persuade himself that his original choice was for the best despite evidence to the contrary which only a madman could totally ignore. When, therefore, the existentialist says that man does not want happiness, it would be most uncharitable to interpret the statement as meaning that men do not deliberately seek happiness conceived as harmony, proportion, contentment, and so on, in the belief that it is worth pursuing. The existentialists spend a great deal of time complaining about this fact. Their intention is simply to deny that happiness so conceived is worthy of pursuit and to suggest that men who deliberately pursue this kind of “happiness” are obscurely aware of the futility of their quest. In this they may be mistaken, but they are not obviously mistaken.
38Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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The existentialists were not, of course, the first philosophers to make something out of the tragic sense of life or to discover value in suffering and struggle. In one very important branch of Christian philosophy, whose most notable representatives are Augustine and Pascal, the tragic sense of life appears clearly in the doctrine of man’s utter helplessness without the grace of God. For the German romantics of the movement known as Storm and Stress the positive value of strife was a basic credo. And Hegel, who was contemporary to these romantics, made of what he called “the unhappy consciousness” a necessary and valuable stage in the odyssey of the human spirit.
These precursors of existentialist thinking have not gone unrecognized. Christian existentialists rarely have a kind word for St. Thomas, but their praise of Augustine and Pascal is fulsome. Kierkegaard was fond of quoting the romantic Lessing, who claimed that if God were to offer him a life of complete fulfillment and well-being in the right hand and a life of eternal striving in the left, he would unhesitatingly accept the gift in the left hand. As for Hegel, his subtle analyses of various moments in the development of the human spirit have become the inspiration for many of the most brilliant pages in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. None of these precursors of existentialism, however, insisted so urgently as the existentialists upon the impossibility of attaining happiness or developed with anything like the completeness of the existentialists a picture of the values which follow upon a clear-sighted appreciation of the human tragedy. Moreover, in one way or another the mainstream of traditional philosophizing invariably pulled them along with it. By a judicious selection of texts a Catholic has little difficulty in reconciling St. Thomas and St. Augustine. And
39Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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although Hegel’s dialectical method permitted him to include just about everything within his system, it is generally agreed that the major outlines of his thinking are far more Spinozistic than existentialist.
The existentialists do not always agree among themselves either as to the precise nature or as to the relative ranking of the values which they say accompany a deliberate espousal of anguish and suffering. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, emphasizes freedom of choice and a certain type of individual dignity (although the term “dignity” is not used by Sartre), whereas Nicholas Berdyaev stresses personal love and creative endeavor. Generally speaking, however, freedom of choice, individual dignity, personal love, and creative effort are the existentialist values, and, generally speaking, the most important among these are freedom of choice and individual dignity. Furthermore, all existentialists without exception agree on three points with respect to the values for which they have opted, however different these values may be in other respects or however they may be ranked.
First, a resolute acceptance of anguish and suffering is a necessary condition of their being experienced at all. A man may pretend to have made a free choice without anguish, but if so it is only because the stakes are petty and in the true sense of the word he has not chosen at all. Without having known suffering a man may write a clever or a pretty poem, but not a great one. Similarly, a man may be in love without having known suffering, if to be in love is to be infatuated or simply to be a faithful husband and father. But in the former case what passes by the name of love is simply a nervous itch; in the latter case, a routine or habit. In its essence love is an attitude of care and concern for a being whose death or
40Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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desertion is always possible and would be an irreparable personal loss.
Second, in the experience of the ordinary man and the traditional philosopher who fail to face up to its inevitability, anguish takes the form of tedium or petty anxiety, apathy or craven fear. The function of existentialist values is to liberate man from these degenerate and unwholesome forms of anguish.
Third, existentialist values intensify consciousness, arouse the passions, and commit the individual to a course of action which will engage his total energies. As Kierkegaard put it, he wants a value by which he is prepared to live and for which, if necessary, he is willing to die. “Let others complain that the age is wicked,” he cried, “my complaint is that it is wretched, for it lacks passion.” Or, in the words of Nietzsche: “The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously.” It is not blindness to danger, but the intense awareness of danger which makes the blood mount.
In sum, existentialist values have a common source, a common function, and a common identifying characteristic. Their common source is an acute awareness of the tragedy inherent in the human condition. Their common function is to liberate us from the fears and frustrations of everyday life or the tedium of philosophical daydreaming. Their common identifying characteristic is intensity.
D e f e n s e o f E x i s t e n t i a l i s t V a l u e s
The existentialists’ critique both of the ordinary man’s way of life and of the traditional philosophical orientations is implicit
41Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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in the preceding sketch of their position. For the ordinary man and the Enlightenment philosopher the supreme value of life lies in the secure and tranquil enjoyment of worldly goods. For the Stoics the supreme value consists in a state of calm and independence produced by the suppression of desire. For the philosopher of the Platonic tradition it consists in release from concern about the things of this world and immersion in the eternal. But in every case the goal is “happiness,” i.e., a state of security, peace of mind, calm, or tranquility from which anguish, suffering, and strife are wholly absent. For the existentialist, on the other hand, the commanding value in life is intensity, as manifested in acts of free choice, individual self-assertion, personal love, or creative work. And according to him these various forms of intensely lived experience are impossible without anguish, suffering, and risk.
To make good his case the existentialist has recourse to two major types of arguments. The first is that the values of the ordinary man and the traditional philosopher are, contrary to their belief, impossible of achievement. The second is that even if those values could be achieved, their achievement would involve an unjustifiable sacrifice of superior values. The second type of argument is the more important in the sense that existentialists usually lay more stress upon it, but also in the sense that if this type of argument is sound the other is for all practical purposes superfluous. It is only on condition that one believes in the desirability of achieving a certain goal that the question of its feasibility becomes a matter of urgent personal interest.
In so far as existentialism is a philosophy of tragedy, however, the two types of arguments are not usually independent. The inability to achieve happiness is an
42Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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important part of what is meant by the tragedy of the human condition and also an important reason for asserting that intensely lived experience without happiness is the supreme value in life. Most of the existentialists grant that men do in some sense actually desire complete fulfillment or well-being and that, abstractly considered, a life of happiness plus the existentialist values is the highest of goods. Their sense of tragedy arises in great part out of their conviction that happiness is a purely abstract, i.e., concretely unrealizable, value. If, however, they should be proved wrong about this, they would have to reconsider their entire value orientation.
These points may be illustrated by considering existentialist attitudes toward the philosophy of the Enlightenment and its later modifications such as humanism and Marxism. The existentialists often attack one or another feature of this general movement by alleging the impossibility of achieving Enlightenment goals. Karl Jaspers, for instance, has done this in Man in the Modern Age:
Suppose that all the matter and all the energy in the world would be continually utilized without reserve. Population would be regulated by birth control. The sciences of eugenics and hygiene would see to it that the best possible human beings were being bred. Diseases would have been abolished. There would be a purposive economy wherein . . . the needs of all would be supplied. . . . Without struggle . . . the joys of life would be provided for all in unalterable allotments, with the expenditure of little labor and with ample scope for pastime.
43Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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In truth, however, such a condition of affairs is impossible. It is prevented by the working of incalculable natural forces. . . . There may be the specific misfortune of a failure of technique. Perhaps the persistence of the campaign against diseases, temporarily to all appearances overwhelming in its success, will rob human beings of their immunity, will deprive them of it so completely that an unanticipated pestilence will sweep away the whole race. . . . Eugenics will prove unable to hinder the survival of the weakly, and will fail to prevent . . . racial deterioration.1
Neither Jaspers nor other existentialists, however, are prepared to rest their case against the Enlightenment upon the mere impossibility of establishing the kind of society that Enlightenment thinkers apparently wanted. A few do not use this argument at all; and at least one, Berdyaev, explicitly affirms that the attainment of Enlightenment goals is a genuine possibility. The core of their argument is that the achievement of universal prosperity and general well-being for all would require the sacrifice of more important values. Berdyaev, for instance, appends to his declaration of faith in the possibility of achieving general well-being the remark that this is precisely what is to be feared. Aldous Huxley quotes him to this effect in the epigraph to Brave New World, and significantly the brave new world therein depicted is one in which planners have been forced to stifle passionate love and creative endeavor.
44Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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Since, however, most existentialists do believe in the impossibility as well as the undesirability of establishing universal well-being and since moreover freedom of choice is usually a greater existentialist value than love or creative endeavor, the following attack upon the Enlightenment by Dostoyevsky in Notes from Underground is more typical:
You see, you gentlemen have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and politico-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—and so on, and so on. So that the man who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would . . . be an obscurantist or an absolute madman. . . . But, you know, that is what is surprising; why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon up human advantages invariably leave one out? . . . The fact is, gentlemen, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages. . . . This advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of mankind for the benefit of mankind. . . . One’s own free unfettered
45Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. . . . What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.2
The dual line of attack in Dostoyevsky’s criticism of the Enlightenment is readily apparent. If men are free, the efforts of the social reformer will necessarily be thwarted by the unpredictability of human behavior. And if freedom of choice is supreme among human values, its sacrifice would be totally unjustified—even though its sacrifice would insure universal well-being. As noted above, the second of these arguments is the more important. An argument of this type, purporting to show that the achievement of Enlightenment goals would involve the loss of superior values, is common to practically all the existentialists; and if the man of the Enlightenment were convinced by an argument of this type, the truth or falsity of an argument designed to show the impossibility of achieving his goals would cease to be a matter of practical concern. As also noted above, when the two types of argument go together, as they normally do, they are not altogether independent. It is in part because Dostoyevsky does not believe in the possibility of achieving Enlightenment goals that he ranks freedom of choice so high in the scale of
46Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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human values. A value which cannot be achieved is by that very fact not a value, at least in so far as values are conceived as objects of deliberate and voluntary pursuit. The man who knowingly pursues an unrealizable value makes himself even more ridiculous than Dostoyevsky represents the gentlemen of the Enlightenment to be.
The same points could be illustrated by detailing existentialist arguments against the ordinary man’s values, against Stoicism, and against the Platonic tradition. For the most part, however, these arguments presuppose an analysis of the human condition which will be the subject matter of the following chapter and from which they follow so naturally that it will hardly be necessary to spell them out.
The important problem at this point has to do with the manner in which the existentialists hope to establish their dual claim that happiness is impossible and that intensity is the chief of human values. Most modern Anglo-American philosophers would tend to regard the first of the existentialist claims, to the effect that happiness is impossible, as a judgment of empirical fact which can in principle be decided but can only be decided by the method employed in behavioral sciences such as psychology and sociology. Ignoring refinements, this method consists in observing the reactions of human beings to various types of environmental situation. Once a regular pattern has been discovered to obtain over a certain stretch of time, a rule known technically as the principle of induction is invoked, whereby the observed regularity is postulated as a law of nature and used for the purpose of predicting human behavior in the as yet unobserved future. Basically this method is the one used by all men in the ordinary conduct of life. If, for instance, one wishes to know whether an
47Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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acquaintance is trustworthy one attempts to discover how he normally behaves in situations where he might profit by betraying others. If it is observed that he has regularly desisted from betraying others, one decides that he is trustworthy and bases one’s behavior toward him upon the belief that he will continue to be trustworthy in the future.
To some extent this method is also used by the existentialists when they argue against the impossibility of achieving happiness. Jaspers’ contention that medical science will probably not wipe out disease is a case in point. It has often been observed, so he argues in effect, that drugs which give us immunity against one disease kill bacteria which give us a natural immunity to other diseases, thus paving the way for an epidemic of these other diseases. Why should this not continue to happen in the future? Similarly, Dostoyevsky is using this method when he tells us that the plans of social reformers and lovers of humanity have always failed in the past and will therefore fail in the future.
In general, however, the existentialists disdain this method. None of them pretends to be a behavioral scientist or an ordinary man, and almost without exception they are contemptuous or condescending whenever they have occasion to refer to the behavioral sciences or to the common sense of the ordinary man. The reason is not far to seek. The existentialist arguments against the possibility of achieving happiness are usually of such a nature that the method of the behavioral sciences could not even in principle be helpful in determining their soundness.
The argument against the Enlightenment based on human freedom is typical in this respect. Behavioral scientists operate on the assumption that human behavior is predictable,
48Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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that men will behave in the future much as they have behaved in the past. But, say the existentialists, if man is free, then human behavior is not predictable; for to say that man is free is just another way of saying that men always can and frequently do act in such a way as to render many important facets of their behavior unpredictable. If, therefore, we wish to determine whether man is free, we cannot have recourse to the behavioral sciences; the validity of their conclusions depends upon the validity of their basic assumptions, among which is the premise that man is not free.
It might be countered that past successes in predicting human behavior show the validity of the behavioral scientists’ method and consequently of their basic assumption that man is not free. The existentialist would retort in roughly the following way: What behavioral scientist could successfully have predicted an event such as Abelard’s falling in love with Héloïse or Shakespeare’s writing Hamlet? And what behavioral scientist can predict with certainty that there will be a third world war or how it would start? Past successes in predicting human behaviour have rarely touched on matters of great moment either to the individual or to mankind, and when they have, the coefficient of probability has been so low as to render them hardly more than a guess. Most of the successes have been in inconsequential areas of human behavior. And these successes must be explained as a result of the fact that individuals have not bothered to exercise their freedom in these areas. Should, of course, the behavioral scientists succeed in predicting important aspects of individual and group behavior, their position would rest on more solid foundations. But as yet they have not done so. If, therefore, the question of human freedom is to be decided at all in the present, it must be decided on nonscientific grounds.
49Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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And until it has been decided, the validity of the procedures used by the behavioral sciences remains itself in question.
What, then, is the principal method by which the existentialists hope to establish that man is doomed to unhappiness? Roughly the answer is: by a direct intuition, induced by some intense emotional experience such as anguish, of various features of the human condition. The reliability of this method is sharply contested by most Anglo-American philosophers, and it will be necessary at a later stage to examine it more closely. The point of interest here is that even the obviously factual claim of the existentialists to the effect that man is doomed to unhappiness is based upon an alleged intuition of other facts about man and his relation to the world.
One of these facts about man which the existentialists say they intuit and which contributes to their argument is, of course, human freedom. There is, however, another directly intuited feature of the human condition which is more central to their argument. In fact, if it can be shown that the human condition is genuinely characterized by this feature, a detailed criticism of the various traditional routes to happiness becomes unnecessary. It will be recalled that Hegel spoke of “the unhappy consciousness” as a necessary stage in the unfolding of the human spirit; but for him it was only a stage. At a later moment the unhappy consciousness is surpassed. The existentialists, however, declare that consciousness is inevitably unhappy consciousness. Sartre, for instance, cites as a “self-evident truth” that the “human reality . . . is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.”3 In their own idiom Dostoyevsky and Unamuno have said the same thing. “Man
50Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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will never renounce real suffering,” declared Dostoyevsky. “Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.”4
“Suffering,” avers Unamuno, “tells us that we exist.”5 For those who do not themselves have a direct intuition of an inevitable liaison between suffering and consciousness, such statements will probably appear to be wholly dogmatic and unjustifiable. Be that as it may, the existentialists offer no scientific evidence in their support.
The second principal contention of the existentialists, that according to which intensely lived experiences such as free choice, love, and creative endeavor are the chief of human values, is a value judgment. Unlike the statement that man is doomed to unhappiness, which purports to assert simply that something is the case, this second statement asserts that something ought to be preferred. According to most Anglo-American philosophers, judgments of this sort have no scientific status at all, since the procedures of the behavioral sciences could not conceivably either confirm or invalidate them. By observation of human behavior one can tell what men do in fact desire or prefer, but never what men ought to desire or prefer. Such statements are therefore nothing more than an expression of individual preference or an exhortation to others to adopt one’s own preference.
This last point would be somewhat qualified by observing that when two persons or groups happen to share the same basic preferences, secondary value judgments may also express a factual claim about the means by which basic preferences or desires may be satisfied. To take a prosaic example, if two persons are known to have much the same taste in music, then when one says that the other ought to attend a certain concert he would normally be expressing the
51Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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belief that the other would in fact enjoy the concert. And to this extent his judgment could be objectively valid. Since, however, most Anglo-American philosophers believe that basic preferences are a product either of individual temperament or of social conditioning, they do not believe that value judgments relating to basic preferences could conceivably have universal validity.
The existentialists for their part have very little to say about the methods whereby value judgments may properly be established, and at times one has the impression that they, too, are dubious about the possibility of establishing value judgments as objective or universal truths. Heidegger and Sartre have gone so far as to say that they make no value judgments, even though terms such as “authenticity” and “inauthenticity” constantly recur in their writings. These terms, they say, are being used descriptively, not evaluatively. No one, however, has been deceived. Almost to a man, interpreters of Sartre and Heidegger have pointed to these declarations as instances of bad faith. A similar difficulty arises so far as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are concerned. Both of these men often said that they were writing only for persons who shared their basic preferences, that is to say for their own kind. At the same time, however, they made it clear that they and their own kind were superior beings since they alone had an adequate understanding of the human condition.
Despite the silence of the existentialists on questions of method as related to value theory and despite passages which could be taken as indicating skepticism about the possibility of establishing universal and objectively valid value judgments, the existentialists’ actual practice permits us to define their position. According to them value judgments may
52Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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have universal and objective validity, insofar as the essential features of the human condition, including the basic desires or aspirations of humankind, are themselves universal and objective facts. The person who has a thorough knowledge of the human condition and of basic human aspirations is in much the same position vis-à-vis mankind as is, vis-à-vis his friend, the person who knows that his friend likes the same kind of music he does and what kind of music to expect at the concert.
Individual temperament and social conditioning might influence the manner in which an individual executes his basic desires, but, the fundamental aspects of the human condition being everywhere the same, neither individual temperament nor social conditioning threatens the universal validity of basic value judgments. The position of the existentialists on this score is very nearly the opposite of that developed by Anglo-American philosophers. The latter argue that basic value judgments are conditioned by individual temperament and social conditioning and that only secondary value judgments made within particular groups bound by temperamental affinities or social custom can have any kind of objective validity. The existentialists, on the other hand, argue that preferences determined by temperament or social custom are always secondary and that it is only basic value judgments having their source in a sound appreciation of the universal features of the human condition which have any claim to objective validity.
It must be carefully noted that the existentialist position is acceptable only if the existentialists are right in asserting that the human condition is fundamentally the same for all individuals. It must also be pointed out that this latter
53Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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assertion is made to rest almost entirely upon intuition. None the less if the validity of intuition as a method of knowledge is granted and if it is further granted that there is a fundamental identity of human aspirations and of means whereby these aspirations may be realized, there remains no good reason for denying the existentialists the right to claim universal and objective validity for their own value orientation.
It follows from what has just been said that the second existentialist contention, that according to which the intense life is preferable to a life of moderation, is not radically different in kind from their first claim, that according to which happiness is an impossible ideal. The first assertion was a factual one to the effect that a state of security or contentment would involve a loss of consciousness and could therefore never be experienced. The second assertion, however, is also a factual one. In rough outline it could be formulated as follows: All men desire to live in the full light of consciousness, as evidenced by the fact that they prefer the life of Socrates unhappy to the life of a contented pig. Unamuno asks rhetorically: “Which would you find more appalling, to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your faculties on being pierced through with a white-hot iron, or to see yourself thus pierced through without feeling any pain?”6
But the desire to live in the full light of consciousness can be fulfilled only through intense experiences of the kind existentialists value, with all the risk, pain, and suffering that go with them. Consciousness is a function of suffering and intensely lived experience, and presumably it varies in direct ratio with the degree of suffering and intensely lived experience. It is this which explains what Unamuno calls “the horrible terror of feeling yourself incapable of suffering and
54Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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tears.” It is this also which explains the following text from Berdyaev:
The ethics of the ancients . . . considered man a being who seeks happiness, good, and harmony, and who is capable of achieving this goal. Such is also the point of view of St. Thomas Aquinas and the official Catholic theology. But in fact Christianity has shaken this view. . . . Not the worst but the best of mankind suffer the most. The intensity with which suffering is felt may be considered an index of a man’s depth. The more the intellect is developed and the soul refined . . . , the more sensitive does one become to pain, not only the pains of the soul but physical pains as well. . . . But for pain and suffering the animal in man would be victorious.7
To be incapable of suffering and tears is to be swallowed up in the dread nothingness of unconsciousness. In Camus’ play Caligula the hero’s mistress asks him: “Is this dreadful freedom still happiness?” His answer is that of a typical existentialist hero: “Be sure, Caesonia, that without it I would be a contented man. Thanks to it, I have conquered the divine clear-sightedness of the solitary man.”8
The position of the existentialist as it is represented in this rough sketch is, of course, debatable. Consider, for instance, their second contention. If our purview is limited to the Western tradition it is probably true that men have wanted to live in the clear light of consciousness. This generalization
55Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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applies even to the Stoics, as is shown by the fact that their indifference to worldly happiness was maintained through an effort of will which heightened consciousness of self and also by the ease with which Stoic doctrine has been incorporated into existentialist thinking. Sartre, speaking of Jean Genet, says: “It is in suffering alone that he can feel himself to be free, because it is the only feeling which can come from within himself. Unless one is a god, one cannot become happy without the cooperation of the universe; but to be unhappy, one needs only oneself. . . . He does not seek the motive of his . . . actions in an appetite for suffering: he wishes that his actions be the effects of an absolute will which draws its motive from itself alone and not from the world.”9
It is very doubtful, however, whether oriental philosophers have wanted to live in the full light of consciousness. Moreover, even within the Western tradition terms such as “consciousness” and “degrees of consciousness” have been variously conceived, and there is a wide variety of opinion with regard to the relationship between consciousness and other forms of human experience. According to traditional philosophers in the Platonic tradition, for example, consciousness means mind or understanding, and in their opinion intensely lived experience, passion, and suffering cloud the mind or obscure the understanding. An American philosopher once quipped that sub specie aeternitatis is Latin for sleeping. But for classical philosophers like Plato and Spinoza the degree of consciousness is equivalent to the range of one’s perspective as a knowing being, and true wakefulness is possible only for the person who frees himself from the passions to view the whole of being from the standpoint of eternity. Not they, but the passionate men, are
56Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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the ones who live in the murky twilight zone between waking and sleeping.
It may finally be necessary to conclude that the “insights” of the existentialists are nothing more than a set of prejudices reflecting their own temperamental bias or the social conditions of our time. But it would be a mistake to conclude that this is so on the basis of a brief introductory outline. The purpose of the preceding sketch of the existentialist position has been very limited, and the full story is yet to be told.
57Olson, Robert G.. An Introduction to Existentialism, Dover Publications, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lmu/detail.action?docID=1889281. Created from lmu on 2020-01-16 11:31:14.
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