Existentialism Introduced

Existentialism is the European philosophy that became, in the twentieth century, one of the dominant alternatives to the pragmatism Dewey worked in. Its starting point is human existence itself, not facts about the world or systems of thought. The article works through what existentialism is, why it grew out of the world wars, and what it would mean to take its claims seriously as an educator.

Origins of existentialism

Existentialism is a European philosophy in origin. It developed largely as a result of the two World Wars of the twentieth century. The wars destroyed the confident European assumption that human history was on a steady upward path. They produced a continent in which the inherited certainties no longer held: not religion, not politics, not the older confidence in reason and progress.

The philosophy responds to this loss of certainty. It does not try to restore the old certainties or to find new ones that would play the same role. It starts from the situation as it actually is: a human being confronted with a world that gives no automatic meaning, who has to make their own meaning through the choices they make about how to live. The starting point is bleaker than the older philosophies’ but, the existentialists argued, more honest.

The founder of existentialist philosophy is usually identified as Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish thinker. Kierkegaard wrote against the abstract systematic philosophy of his time (especially Hegel’s) and insisted that the question of how an individual person should live could not be answered by any abstract system. Each person had to face the question for themselves, in their own life, and answer it through their own choices.

The twentieth-century developers of existentialism (Karl Jaspers, who is the subject of the next chapter; Martin Heidegger; Jean-Paul Sartre; Simone de Beauvoir; Albert Camus) carried Kierkegaard’s starting point forward into the post-war European situation. They worked out the implications of putting individual existence first in a wide range of contexts: politics, ethics, art, and education.

Flashcard

What historical context produced twentieth-century existentialism?

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Answer

The two World Wars, which destroyed the European confidence that human history was on a steady upward path

The wars produced a continent in which inherited certainties no longer held: religion, politics, and the older confidence in reason and progress. Existentialism responds by starting from the situation as it actually is rather than trying to restore the old certainties. A human being confronts a world that gives no automatic meaning and has to make their own meaning through choice. Søren Kierkegaard, writing in the nineteenth century, is treated as the founder.

Defining existentialism

The central existentialist claims can be compressed into four lines, each of which contradicts a standard assumption of the older philosophies.

Reality is a shifting human condition requiring constant choice-making and self-definition. The older view treated reality as a stable order that the mind could come to know. The existentialist treats reality as something the person is continuously inside, having to respond to, having to make decisions about, having to define themselves in relation to. Reality is not a fixed object the mind contemplates; it is the situation the person continuously acts in.

Existence comes before any definition of what we are. This is sometimes called the existentialist slogan: existence precedes essence. The older view (going back through Plato and Aristotle to medieval and early modern thought) treated each kind of thing as having an essence that defined what it was. A human being was the kind of thing that fits the human essence; the essence came first, and individual humans were instances of it.

Sartre and the other twentieth-century existentialists reverse this. There is no human essence that defines what every human is. There is only the existence of particular human beings, each of whom has to make themselves through their own choices. What you are is the result of what you do; you are not first a kind of thing and then an instance of it. Existence first; essence (if there is one for you) second.

The nature of reality for existentialists is subjective and lies within the individual. The existentialist does not deny that there is a physical world outside the individual. The point is that the meaning of reality is not in the world; it is in the individual’s response to the world. A mountain has no meaning until a human being responds to it with awe or fear or indifference. A death has no meaning until the people affected by it make it meaningful through their grief or relief or numbness. The world supplies the materials; the meaning is built by individuals.

The physical world has no inherent meaning outside of human existence. The fourth claim follows directly. The universe, considered apart from the humans inside it, is meaning-free. Meaning is a human accomplishment, not a feature of reality the human merely discovers.

The four claims together describe a worldview that puts the responsibility for meaning squarely on the individual human being. There is no external authority that can supply meaning; no system of thought, no religious tradition, no political ideology, no abstract philosophical scheme. Each person has to make their own life mean what it means, through the choices they make about how to live.

Flashcard

What is the central existentialist slogan, and what does it mean?

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Answer

Existence precedes essence: there is no human essence that defines us before we make ourselves through choices

The older view treated each kind of thing as having an essence that defined what it was. A human being was an instance of the human essence. Sartre and other twentieth-century existentialists reverse this. There is no human essence that comes first; there is only the existence of particular human beings, each of whom has to make themselves through their own choices. What you are is the result of what you do.

The importance of choice

Choice is the centre of existentialism. Individual choice and individual standards are central, rather than external standards. We define ourselves in relationship to existence by the choices we make. We should not accept anyone’s predetermined philosophical system; we must take responsibility for deciding who we are.

The claim is not that no external standards exist. The claim is that an individual cannot live an authentic life by simply taking external standards as given. They have to evaluate the standards, decide which to accept and which to reject, and own the choice as their own. A person who lives by inherited standards without examining them is, in existentialist terms, living in bad faith: pretending that the choice was made by someone else, when in fact every continued acceptance of an inherited standard is a new choice the person is making in the present.

The same goes for predetermined philosophical systems. An existentialist refuses to accept a complete system handed down by an authority, whether the authority is religious, political, or philosophical. Even a brilliant system from a brilliant predecessor cannot substitute for the individual’s own working-out of how to live. The system can inform the working-out; it cannot replace it.

The implication is that responsibility for one’s own life is total. There is no excuse for who you have become, because you made yourself who you are through the choices you have made. The existentialists treat this not as a complaint but as a fundamental condition of being human. Freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin: you are free to make yourself, and you are responsible for what you have made.

This is heavy. The existentialist writers acknowledge that the weight of responsibility for one’s own existence is hard to carry. Some of their work explores the strategies people use to evade the weight (conformity, blind obedience, busyness, distraction, comforting illusions). The strategies are diagnosed as forms of bad faith. The remedy is to face the freedom and the responsibility directly, even though doing so is uncomfortable.

Flashcard

What does it mean, in existentialist terms, that 'individual choice is central rather than external standards'?

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Answer

An individual cannot live authentically by simply taking external standards as given; they must own each choice

External standards exist, but accepting them without examination is bad faith: pretending the choice was made by someone else when every continued acceptance is a new choice in the present. An existentialist refuses to accept a complete predetermined system from any authority. Each person has to work out their own way of living. Responsibility for who you have become is total, because you made yourself through the choices you have made.

Existentialism and youth

The existentialist writers paid particular attention to the moment when a young person realises, for the first time, that the choice of how to live is genuinely theirs. Jean-Paul Sartre called this the existential moment of youth. For young people, the existential moment arises when they realise, for the first time, that choice is theirs, that they are responsible for themselves.

The realisation is described as both liberating and frightening. It is liberating because the young person discovers that they are not just an extension of their family, their school, their culture; they are an existence in their own right, capable of making their own life. It is frightening because the realisation also brings the responsibility that comes with the freedom. The young person can no longer blame their parents, their teachers, or their society for what they become; they have to take ownership of the choices that are now visibly theirs.

The existential moment usually arrives in late adolescence or early adulthood, around the age that students are completing secondary schooling or entering university. The timing matters for an educator. The teachers of students in their late teens are working with people who are encountering this moment, often for the first time. The teacher’s response shapes how the student handles it.

A teacher who treats the student as still a child, with all the choices still made for them, fails the student at exactly the moment when the student is discovering otherwise. A teacher who treats the student as already a fully responsible adult, with no support for the difficulty of the transition, fails them in a different way. The right response is to recognise that the student is in the middle of a real transition, to support them through it, and to help them develop the freedom and responsibility that are coming with the existential moment.

The educational practices that fit this support take a distinctive shape, working out the choice-freedom-responsibility commitments in concrete classroom decisions.

Flashcard

What does Sartre mean by the *existential moment* of youth?

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Answer

The moment when a young person realises for the first time that choice is theirs and that they are responsible for themselves

The realisation is both liberating and frightening. Liberating: the young person discovers they are an existence in their own right, capable of making their own life. Frightening: they can no longer blame their parents, teachers, or society for what they become. The existential moment usually arrives in late adolescence. A teacher of late-teen students is working with people encountering this moment, and the teacher’s response shapes how the student handles it.