Existentialism
A philosophical thought that emphasizes existence rather than abstract ideas and asserts that human
reason is inadequate to explain the meaning of life. Existentialists believe that the universe is indifferent
to humans; that things in general exist, but they have no meaning for humans except the meaning that
humans create by acting on them.
“What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as
a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God
really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I
can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that
through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize
as the most important thing. (Kierkegaard)
Concepts of Existentialism
Existence Precedes Essence
A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the
actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called his "essence" instead of
there being a predetermined essence that defines what it is to be a human. Although it was
Sartre who explicitly coined the term, similar notions can be found in the thought of many
existentialist philosophers, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger.
Angst
Angst, sometimes called dread, anxiety or even anguish is a term that is common to many
existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be the experience of our freedom and
responsibility. The archetypal example is the example of the experience one has when standing
on a cliff where one not only fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing
oneself off. In this experience that "nothing is holding me back", one senses the lack of
anything that predetermines you to either throw yourself off or to stand still, and one
experiences one's own freedom.
Angst is often described as the drama an adolescent troubles with during their developmental
years. In pop-culture 'angst' is used to describe a particular attitude, often towards family or
governmental systems. In this light, the angst of popular teenage life could be used to describe
the often-theorized 'existential crisis' that is adolescence.
Freedom
The existentialist concept of freedom is often misunderstood as a sort of liberum arbitrium
where almost anything is possible and where values are inconsequential to choice and action.
This interpretation of the concept is often related to the insistence on the absurdity of the world
and that there are no relevant or absolutely good or bad values. However, that there are no
values to be found in the world in-itself does not mean that there are no values: each of us
usually already has his values before a consideration of their validity is carried through, and it
is, after all, upon these values we act.
Despair
Commonly defined as a loss of hope, Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to
the reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the "pillars" of one's self or identity. If one has
invested a lot of oneself in being something, a waiter or an "upstanding citizen," and one finds
oneself in a situation in which one has done something or had something happen to oneself that
compromises this being-thing, one would normally find oneself in a state of Despair, a hopeless
state. An athlete who loses his legs in an accident may despair if he has nothing to "fall back
on," for instance.
What sets the existentialist notion of Despair apart from the dictionary definition is that Despair
is a state one is in even when one isn't overtly in Despair: As long as one has based one's
identity on such pillars so that one is vulnerable to having one's world break down, one is
considered to be in perpetual Despair. As Kierkegaard defines it in his Either/or: "Any lifeview with a condition outside it is despair." In other words, it is possible to be in despair
without despairing.
Reason
Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as fundamental, existentialists oppose themselves to
rationalism and positivism. That is, they argue against definitions of human beings as primarily
rational. Rather, existentialists look at where people find meaning. Existentialism asserts that
people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them rather than rationally. The
rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of existentialist thought, as is
the focus on the feelings of anxiety and dread that we feel in the face of our own radical
freedom and our awareness of death. Kierkegaard saw strong rationality as a mechanism
humans use to counter their existential anxiety, their fear of being in the world: "If I can believe
that I am rational and everyone else is rational then I have nothing to fear and no reason to feel
anxious about being free."
The Absurd
The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world
beyond what meaning we give to it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or
"unfairness" of the world. This contrasts with "karmic" ways of thinking in which "bad things
don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a
good person or a bad thing; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a "good"
person as to a "bad" person. This contrasts our daily experience where most things appear to us
as meaningful, and where good people do indeed, on occasion, receive some sort of "reward"
for their goodness.
Most existentialist thinkers, however, will maintain that this is not a necessary feature of the
world, and that it definitely isn't a property of the world in-itself. Because of the world's
absurdity, at any point in time, anything can happen to anyone, and a tragic event could
plummet someone into direct confrontation with the Absurd.