Existentialism
An unexamined life is not worth living. -Socrates.
Welcome to the Universe
Human beings are born into this world a blank slate, innocent and helpless, and pretty much instantaneously, the people around us start imposing their norms, values, and ideas on us. We all live our lives inside of society, and the people around us are always keen to teach us how to be a functioning member, through means both direct and indirect. Humans have been predisposed as social beings to construct stories and narratives which help us wrestle with the fundamental questions that beguile us. All cultures have origin stories, mythologies, and narratives that aid us in making sense of our place in the world. Religions, traditions, and norms still play a huge role in giving people a sense of certainty and direction. But, as society has progressed, and especially in the past few centuries, our relationship with these old foundations has started to change, as more and more of us have grown skeptical towards these traditional philosophical foundations.
The Pursuit of Truth
Humanity’s relationship with knowledge really started to pick up steam about 500 years ago, with the development and refinement of the scientific method. Before long, we were tackling fundamental questions about the nature of reality head on. We started to get a sense of our place in the universe. Empirical science gave us the ability to peer behind the curtain and figure out the mechanisms that drove the natural world. We figured out that we live on a planet that is revolving around the sun whose orbital trajectory we could calculate. Evolution revealed to us that we were fashioned by the blind hand of natural selection, our ancestors being simple primates. We started thinking of better ways of organising society other than feudalism and absolute monarchy. Nothing seemed off limits for it to be understood by us. Our traditional narratives and mythologies started losing power as they offered nothing in comparison to the wonders of science and empirical rationalism.
The Nature of Knowledge
Knowledge is usually defined in philosophy as justified true belief. Knowledge can be of two varieties: One concerning the nature of the world, (What is objectively real?), and the other telling us how to live our lives, (What moral choices are correct?) The scientific revolution played a huge role in satiating our thirst for the first kind of knowledge. We figured out our origins, our place in the universe, and how the material world works. The second kind of knowledge though, cannot be provided by science—it cannot help you find out what is right or wrong. The only laws that we can discover through science are the laws of physics. For millennia, humans had relied on cultural constructions like religion to distinguish good deeds from sins, but then came science and smashed all those ideas into pieces. Although science could tell you what speed the Solar System is moving around the galactic central point, it could not prescribe whether or not you should steal from your neighbour. It could not tell you how to choose your moral assumptions. Thus, morality had lost its foundational basis, because traditional narratives had no place in the scientific recentering of knowledge.
Everything is Relative
It was clear that scientific materialism had no scope for anything that could not be measured, like spirits or Gods. Our morality and value systems had relied heavily on such concepts, which were rendered superfluous, leading to a crisis which revealed the constructed nature of our ethical attitudes. There were no eternal laws to guide us anymore, as each and every moral attitude assumes things which have no basis in objectivity. “If there is no God, then anything is permitted”, a quote by Fyodor Dostoevsky, illustrates this conundrum. For example: Is it really a bad thing to steal stuff from someone, if the concept of private property itself is a fiction? Or, why should one go to fight in a war in the name of their country, if the concept of nation states is just a cultural construction? We thus achieve the realization that everything is arbitrary and subjective, that there are no moral absolutes, and that every ethical system which remains is suspect. What is moral from one perspective could be immoral from another. Such a loss of moral certainty could even result in an individual starting to doubt the whole meaning or purpose of their life itself.
God is Dead! We’ve killed him
Nihilism is a philosophical attitude which became prominent in mid 19th century Europe, it constitutes the rejection of any and all objective truths. According to it, all the norms, values, ideologies, and narratives that are given to us by society are ultimately useless in the face of the inherent meaninglessness of life. “God is Dead! We have killed him.” the famous saying by Friedrich Nietzsche is commonly misconstrued as a celebration of the death of God, what Nietzsche really means is closer to a profound warning, at the loss of our philosophical foundations and our inability to deal with the crisis of this loss. After all, is there a point to life, if all we are is a way for DNA to perpetuate itself? This attitude is one usually accompanied by despair and directionless-ness. Yet, society still expects one to keep playing the game of life, and keep doing the things that are required for being a functional and productive citizen. Even if an individual decides to be a nihilist, most people around them still believe in norms, values, ideologies, and moral facts. How can an individual coincide their personal loss of meaning with the expectations of the society and people around them?
A Brief Recapitulation
A human being is dropped into the world innocent and like a blank slate, and for thousands of years traditional cultural narratives used to serve as the foundational bedrock for morality and meaning in an individual’s life. But ever since the Enlightenment, if a person really tries to understand their place in the world, they discover that there are no moral facts, because all ethical systems are nothing but cultural constructions with no inherent truth value, and that there is no universally ordained meaning of life, because from the universe’s perspective we are nothing but tiny specks of organic dust. This realization of our purposelessness can lead someone to despair, nihilism, or something even worse. But in actuality, even being a nihilist is not an easy thing because most people in society still believe in the prominent socio-cultural constructions in earnest, and society’s expectations from someone are not really responsive to one’s attitude towards the nature of life. One still has to live in their society and deal with others who believe things that are dubious. There is another barrier to being a nihilist which is that our psychology, shaped by both nature and nurture, is what drives us most of the time than our beliefs directly. A nihilist still feels all the pangs and emotions that come with being a human.
A New Hope: Existentialism
The individual who strived in search of certainty and purpose is left with nothing but dread, despair, and a sense of alienation, for they have discovered that life is quite absurd. Death is the ultimate blow which eventually reduces all our actions, motivations, feelings, desires, and memories into dust. Is there a way out of this labyrinth of meaninglessness? Various philosophical attitudes have been proposed which try to tackle these fundamental concerns. Existentialism is a set of ideas that originated in 20th century Europe through the work of writers, philosophers, and thinkers like, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and De Beauvoir among others. According to existentialist philosophy, once someone has embraced radical doubt and moral skepticism, they cannot just go back to the external sources of meaning automatically, be it religion, tradition, ideology, or authority, the only source of meaning that remains, is their own consciousness. We alone are the protagonists of our life and it is only in our hands in which direction to push ourselves.
Existence Precedes Essence
Existentialism addresses the inherent meaninglessness and purposelessness of human life by establishing that meaning ultimately originates from within one’s consciousness and not from any external source. It can be described as a movement that recenters the primacy of individual subjectivity as a lens to explore the human condition. It begins with the dictum: “Existence precedes Essence”, which expresses the basic fact that, human beings are entities that do not have any preordained essence that defines them, rather we create our own essence through our existence, i.e., by taking action according to our will. The realisation of the fact that life is inherently meaningless and that all our moral attitudes are constructed is not a negative thing, rather it’s an important step towards one starting to live a truly authentic life. Because, if nothing really matters than, the only things that matter are what you want to matter. The only person who is responsible for how you live your life is you. There is no need for us to remain constrained in any predefined attitude or schema. Humans are fundamentally and inextricably free. This radical freedom means that our purpose and meaning is in our own hands to craft.
Honesty and Consistency
It is our obligation to create our own personal meaning and purpose in life. But, most of us are guilty of delegating our personal choices and meaning making, to the templates that society provides us. According to Jean Paul Sartre, this is us living in “bad faith”, wherein we sacrifice our inherent ability to choose for ourselves what our essence really is. In truth, our essence is not what is assigned to us by society, but rather what we craft ourselves, by making our choices freely, with the realisation in mind that the only real authority is our own consciousness. Living in “good faith” is the act of rejecting the pressures of any and all external authorities, and imprinting our subjective intentions onto this inherently meaningless universe, by crafting our own meaning. Each choice taken in good faith is the choice that is most in line with one’s honest conception of what gives their life meaning and what purpose they are ultimately living for. It is not the easiest thing to do, but it is the most authentic, because ultimately the only person responsible for your actions is you. Thus, being honest with yourself about what really matters to you is vital.
Anguish and Angst
The acceptance of total and complete responsibility for one’s actions can cause one to feel anguish when trying to choose what to do in a world free of any absolutes, because when the authority and direction of external factors is lifted away, each decision in your life becomes a burden for only you to bear. How to free oneself from the anguish of deciding what to choose? Well, one must keep in mind that there is no “correct” way of choosing as long as they are being authentic to themselves. Sartre compared the act of living authentically to the process of an artist making a painting. There is no preordained correct place on the canvas to place a stroke, yet the artist still chooses a place for each new stroke. No one choice is correct or incorrect, as with each alternate choice, the artist would have created a different piece of art. Similarly, each action of ours is a stroke of meaning that we imprint onto the world, and through which we invent ourselves. Creating meaning through your actions is the act of ultimate creation, wherein one supplants the angst of meaninglessness with a purpose derived from living a truly authentic life.
Freedom and Responsibility
From the existentialists’ point of view, humans are condemned to be free. What exactly does that phrase entail? Jean Paul Sartre says in “Existentialism is a Humanism”, “When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men.” This is referring to the inter-subjectivity that is infused in an individual’s personal act of choosing. Every choice that you make in your life is entirely your own responsibility, and you have no other option but to choose. But when you accept your subjectivity as the source of your meaning, you discover that everyone else is also in the same predicament. So, you cannot logically make a choice that you wouldn’t approve anyone else making. Thus, when you choose freely how to live your life, or what attitude you should have, you imprint your own subjective intentions onto this world, while keeping the universality of your existential condition in your mind. You alone are the arbiter of what you should do in any situation, but this inherent freedom does not absolve you from the responsibility of being completely true to your conscience.
Existentialism is a Humanism
Existentialism eradicates any a priori values by which to judge our actions, yet there are some fundamental values and ethical preferences, that still emerge from this philosophy. It is inauthentic to live in bad faith, to be logically inconsistent, or to be dishonest with oneself about one’s choices. In existentialism, freedom is the fundamental value from which other values emerge, thus it is sacred. It is clear that despite one’s will to act freely, societal baggage infused in hierarchies of class, creed, gender, etc., prevents an individual from freely expressing themselves. Also, it is quite important to understand the fact that in a society no individual is free until everyone is. When an individual gives primacy to their own subjectivity, they discover that every other human being is in the same predicament as them. Simone De Beauvoir argued in her work, “The Ethics of Ambiguity” that, one’s greatest moral imperative is to create their own life’s meaning, while fighting for the freedom for others to do the same. Thus, existential living involves fighting with forces inside and outside oneself, in the quest for achieving true freedom and authenticity. By adopting the existentialist point of view, one starts engaging critically and authentically with their life’s choices, and once they start seeing the universality in their individuality, what emerges is a rational, empathetic, and transcendental way of living.