An awesome introduction and commentary on Existentialism. Passages that stood out to me are as follows:
“The advocates of [existentialism] deny that reality can be neatly packaged in concepts or presented as an interlocking system.” (p. 01)
“[T]here is no common body of doctrine to which all existentialists subscribe, comparable, let us say, to those central tenets that held together idealists or Thomists in their respective schools. For this reason, existentialism has been described in the title of this chapter not as a 'philosophy' but rather as a 'style of philosophizing.' It is a style that may lead those who adopt it to very different convictions about the world and man's life in it. The three great existentialists […] Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger, evidence this diversity. Yet however different their outlooks may be, we see a family resemblance among them in the way that they do philosophy. It is this shared style of philosophizing that permits us to call them 'existentialists.'” (p. 02)
“[The existentialist] style of philosophizing begins from man rather than from nature. It is a philosophy of the subject rather than of the object. […] for the existentialist the subject is the existent in the whole range of his existing. He is not only a thinking subject but an initiator of action and a center of feeling. It is this whole spectrum of existence, known directly and concretely in the very act of existing, that existentialism tries to express.” (p. 02)
“Such themes as freedom, decision, and responsibility are prominent in all the existentialist philosophers. These matters constitute the core of personal being. It is the exercise of freedom and the ability to shape the future that distinguishes man from all the other beings that we know on earth. It is through free and responsible decisions that man becomes authentically himself. In John Macmurray's language, the 'self as agent' provides the central themes for existentialism, whereas traditional Western philosophy, especially since the time of Descartes, has concentrated attention on the 'self as subject' — and by 'subject' is understood 'thinking subject.'” (p. 04)
“It should perhaps be added that one limitation of the existentialist discussion of personal being is that for the most part this discussion has centered on the individual. […] Probably all the leading existentialists pay at least lip-service to the truth that man exists as a person only in a community of persons. But in the main they are concerned with the individual whose quest for authentic selfhood focuses on the meaning of personal being.” (p. 04)
“Sartre complains that the word existentialism has been virtually emptied of meaning.
Heidegger, Jaspers, and Marcel, though they would certainly need to be included in any discussion of existentialism, have all rejected the label. Roger L. Shinn observes: 'Almost any self-respecting existentialist refuses to call himself an existentialist. To say, "I am an existentialist," is to say, "I am one of that classification of people known as existentialists"; whereas the existentialist wants to say, "I am myself — and I don't like your effort to fit me into your classification.”’” (p. 06)
“Most existentialists are phenomenologists, though there are many phenomenologists who are not existentialists. A close tie has developed between these two types of philosophy because phenomenology seems to offer to the existentialist the kind of methodology that he needs if he is to pursue his investigation into human existence.” (p. 08)
“One rather sharp difference between Husserl and the existentialist phenomenologists arises from the fact that whereas Husserl lays the stress on essence and thinks of phenomenology as an eidetic science, the existentialist lays the stress on existence.” (p. 09)
“[A]lthough phenomenology does not offer proof or demonstration, its truth-claim is nevertheless open to testing. The test is to compare the description offered with our own first-hand understanding of existence, i.e., to confront the phenomenological account with the phenomena themselves as we have access to them.” (p. 12)
“The existentialist tends to turn inward for his data, and although the moderate empiricist will allow some weight to 'inner experience,' the radical empiricist tends to equate experience with sense-experience, so that his philosophical inquiry is turned outward on the world. Even man himself is to be known by empirical observation rather than from subjective experience. The difference between existentialism and empiricism at this point reveals itself as a difference between two modes of knowing. The existentialist stresses knowledge by participation, the empiricist knowledge by observation. The empiricist claims that the kind of knowledge that he seeks has an objectivity and universality about it such as confer on it a validity lacking in the more subjective assertions of the existentialist. But the latter will reply that in the case of the knowledge of man at least, the objectification and abstraction of empiricism distort the living concrete reality. Nikolai Berdyaev is specially critical of the objectifying tendency of the empirical approach, and claims that it brings these consequences: 'the estrangement of the object from the subject; the absorption of the unrepeatably individual and personal in what is common and impersonally universal; the rule of necessity, of determination from without, the crushing of freedom and the concealment of it; adjustment to the grandiose mien of the world and of history, to the average man, and the socialization of man and his opinions, which destroys distinctive character.'” (p. 12-3)
“Of course, it is very easy to exaggerate, and undoubtedly the polemic against objectification is exaggerated and does not take sufficient account of the fact that, within limits, the empirical and objectifying approach even to man brings its own virtues. But Berdyaev is certainly correct in insisting that we need more than an empirical approach. He believes that the existentialist understanding of man can safeguard many things that a pure empiricism loses from sight: communion in sympathy and love, and the overcoming of estrangement; personalism and the expression of the individual and personal character of each existence; a transition to the realm of freedom and determination from within, with victory over enslaving necessity; and the predominance of quality over quantity, of creativeness over adaptation.'” (p. 13)
“The word exist is used by the existentialist in a special way which differs from the traditional usage, and thus to say that man alone exists is far from any kind of subjective idealism.” (p. 15)
“[E]xistentialism and idealism differ in a way to which we have already briefly alluded. It is true that both existentialism and idealism are philosophies of the subject rather than of the object, but whereas the idealist begins from man as thinking subject, the existentialist begins from man's total being-in-the-world. The idealist (if it is permitted for a moment to generalize) begins from ideas, whereas the existentialist claims that we already begin with the things themselves. In a critique of Berkeley's idealism, Sartre writes: 'A table is not in consciousness — not even in the capacity of a representation. A table is in space.... The first procedure of a philosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness and to reestablish its true connection with the world, to know that consciousness is a positional consciousness of the world.' In other words, all consciousness is intentional and directed upon an object outside of itself. An appearance is not something that belongs to consciousness but something that belongs to an objective phenomenon.” (p. 15)
“The pragmatist's criteria for truth are biological and utilitarian, and there is little sense of that inwardness that is a mark of existentialism. Furthermore, the pragmatist is usually an optimist, concerned with success in some limited undertaking and very little aware of that tragic and frustrating side of life as expressed in most existentialist writings.” (p.15-6)
“After acknowledging that the pragmatist is correct in holding that truth is a function of life and that this criterion is acceptable when we are dealing with technical and scientific problems, Berdyaev goes on to say: 'Truth is nevertheless in direct opposition to pragmatism. A vitally flourishing state of affairs, success, profit, interest, all these things are marks rather of falsity than of truth. Truth is certainly not a useful and serviceable thing in this world; it renders no services, it may even be destructive and ruinous to the ordering of the things of this world; it demands sacrifices and has even led to martyrdom."” (p. 17)
“It seems to me that those existentialists who do come close to nihilism recognize its temporary character and try to move through it. Nietzsche believed that the West had come into a nihilistic period; and although he deplored this fact, he has usually been regarded as caught in this nihilism. Yet he was certainly looking for a way beyond nihilism. 'He knew that he was himself the nihilist he accused, but he believed that he differed by carrying nihilism to its final consequences and thereby initiating its conquest.’ Sartre has looked toward the other side of despair, and Camus has acknowledged the need to search for reasons that lead beyond absurdity. Yet perhaps all of these men would say that it is only after the total denial of conventional beliefs and standards that new possibilities can arise and a transvaluation of values take place. In similar fashion, the Christian existentialists are sometimes in total revolt against the traditional forms of faith; they claim that only through the rejection and denial of these forms and through the consequent painful experience of having nothing left can new faith arise. For the Christian too, there can be a radical transvaluation of values, not far removed from the experience of the nihilist.” (p. 17)
“[R]adical questioning and readiness to doubt are built into the existentialist position, and where faith does finally emerge, it will be the stronger for having looked into the abyss of nihilism.” (p. 17)
“This also helps to explain why existentialism has flourished in those lands where the social structures have been turned upside down and all values transvalued, whereas relatively stable countries (including the Anglo-Saxon lands) have not experienced this poignancy and so have not developed the philosophizing that flows from it.” (p. 40)
“Even so, however, there would still seem to be a fundamental division of opinion between two types of existentialism on this question of being-with-others. One type holds that the individual break with inauthentic society is the first step toward being free for genuine relations with others. The second type holds that all attempts at reaching an authentic being-with-others are doomed to frustration. This second point of view would seem to have been held by Sartre, at least at the time when he wrote Being and Nothing-ness. But the ambiguity of human relations and the tendency of one role to pass into its opposite need not lead to pessimistic con-clusions. Sartre's study of the sexual relation is in fact very much like a reminiscence of Hegel's subtle analysis of the master-slave relation.?1 What has to be remembered is that this particular relation was far from being the last word in the dialectic of spirit.
If the existentialists seem to show that interpersonal relations are usually at an inauthentic level and if they seem to recommend individualism as a revolt against this inauthenticity, this is by no means the last word in the analysis. It must be acknowledged, however, that in most of these philosophers, the shape of an authentic being-with-others is not adequately delineated.” (p. 92)
“Like Kant, the existentialist considers human knowledge to have a double root. There is the given, the data of the senses; and then there is our own mental contribution by which we organize the given in accordance with a priori forms. In the words of Berdyaev:
‘By its most profound nature, perception cannot be only an obedient reflection of reality, an adaptation to the data at hand; it is also an active transfiguration, giving meaning to being.'” (p. 97)
“For the existentialist, alienation is understood chiefly in inward terms. It is the existent's alienation from his own deepest being.
He is not himself but simply a cipher in the mass-existence of the crowd or a cog in the industrial system or whatever it may be.
How far is this alienation comparable to the religious idea of sin? Actually some Christian theologians have seen a considerable resemblance between the two. Paul Tillich, for instance, has used the idea of existential estrangement to elucidate the traditional concept of sin, though, as Paul Ricoeur has shown in his masterly study The Symbolism of Evil, alienation or estrangement is one among several images that are implicit in the Biblical idea of sin. An apparent difference between the Biblical and existentialist ideas is that sin is alienation from God whereas existential alienation is precisely what that phrase expresses-alienation from one's own being. Certainly the atheistic existentialist would not be willing to identify alienation with sin in the traditional religious sense. Yet even in atheistic existentialism (and perhaps this is more apparent in its literary than in its systematic forms) there is something like a sense of cosmic alienation, a not being at home in the world, reminiscent, as we have seen, of such earlier forms of belief as Gnosticism (see above, p. 27 f.).
But in spite of finitude, alienation, and even sin, man quests for his. true life. Existentialism in most of its forms is not just a cold analysis of the human condition but itself a passionate quest for authentic existence. Our next step is to consider the various ways in which true selfhood is to be sought.” (p. 160)
“The existentialist critique of society is not therefore to be dismissed as merely romantic aberration. It is rather a prophetic voice, seeking to enhance the sense of the humanity of man and to guard it against further erosion. It looks not to the pre-industrial past of an agricultural society but to the possibility of a post-industrial (perhaps automated) society of the future in which the values and dignities of life will be rated higher than they are at present.” (p. 188)
“Can we say more clearly what is meant by this Transcendence which encounters man on the boundaries of his existence? Is Transcendence, in Jaspers' usage, equivalent to God? Certainly there is a connection, but if one has some definite conception of God, for instance, as a personal God, then this would be no more than a cipher of Transcendence. Thus God and Transcendence are not identical. Transcendence cannot be thought or made the object of thought. This is because it belongs to the realm of the encompassing, that which comes before subject and object. Transcendence is indeed the encompassing of all encompassing. 'The eternal, the indestruct-ible, the immutable, the source, the encompassing of all encompassing
—this can be neither visualized nor grasped in thought.... When we cover it with categories such as being, cause, origin, eternity, indestructibility or nothingness, when we call it by these categorical ciphers, we have missed it already.'
Yet, having said all this, Jaspers goes on to say that Transcendence is not an indifferent limit that is thus missed in all thinking.
It is not something to which no eye or thought can reach, and which therefore does not concern us. It concerns us so much that no other source of light will make all being, ours included, transparent. Transcendence — which is not a cipher but something we relate to in the cipher language, something unthinkable which we must think all the same — is as much being as nothingness.” (pp. 195-6)
“Men are only too ready to be swayed by senseless passion, and it cannot be the philosopher's business to encourage this. However, existentialism at its best is neither irrational nor anti-rational but is concerned rather with affirming that the fullness of human experience breaks out of the confines of conceptual thought and that our lives can be diminished by a too narrow rationalism. In fairness to H. J. Paton, it should be said that to his harsh criticism of Kierkegaard he adds these words: 'It is reasonable enough to recognize the limits of human knowledge and to insist that in the religious life there must be a decision or commitment which is not the result of discursive reasoning.'
What is healthy and valid in the existentialist collision with rationalism is not the attack on logic or the exaltation of the absurd-these are in fact dangerous and negative characteristics that must be resisted in the name of reason. Rather what is valid is the insistence that there are many rich strands in human existence that ought not to be ignored or downgraded just because they cannot be fitted into the logic of mathematics or of the empirical sciences.
This is not to condemn logic or to embark on intellectual anarchy.
At its best, it is an attempt to develop a logic of persons in addition to our logic of things.” (p. 221)
“But it must be said that Kierkegaard introduced a very dangerous idea when he first talked of the 'teleological suspension of ethics.' I have acknowledged above that sometimes we have to take the risk of being exposed to this danger, otherwise we could never break out of the status quo. But here I want to register the seriousness of the matter and to say that the ambiguities of existentialist ethics constitute a weakness in existentialism. This weakness will not be overcome until there emerges a clearer and more affirmative account of the place of norms and guidelines in conduct — an account that might take the form of a dynamically conceived natural law' or 'law of existence.’” (p. 222)
“Although the man-centeredness of existentialism has provided a thrust toward technological exploitation, as we have seen in the existentialist understanding of the world, the personalism of the existentialist clashes with the growing impersonalism of technology, and sometimes gives rise to an escapist, nostalgic longing for a simpler mode of life, and occasionally to a cult of the primitive.
Again, while the existentialist penetration through all externals to the very springs of authentic existence consorts very well with some aspects of the democratic ideal, the very thrust toward authenticity and excellence encourages the ideal of the superman and depreciates the mass.” (p. 225)