Homeless Scholar – WHAT IS LIVING AND WHAT IS DEAD IN EXISTENTIALISM

So, what exactly does this rather old-fashioned term really mean? Probably the simplest way to define it is with the statement, “Existence precedes essence.” That is to say, Meaning, in the broad philosophical sense, as it relates to a metaphysical totality or just to one’s personal life, is not something to be discovered, as religion would have it, not an “essence”, but something that must be created. First one exists, finds oneself “thrown into the world,” and through psychological struggle, comes up with a way to make sense of it all. Most atheists do not find this controversial, unless they have substituted a secular metaphysics for religion. At any rate, existentialism as a philosophical movement has been dead for decades, but some of its concepts have been conserved in the culture, especially in psychology.

Existential themes of anxiety and meaninglessness have been traced back to Pascal, Augustine, and even The Book of Job, but in more modern times, the precursors usually noted are Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was a dissident Christian who posited an absurd “leap of faith” as preliminary to the individual realization of “authenticity” as opposed to the conformist consciousness of the church-going crowd who embody “untruth”. Kierkegaard saw truth as subjective, coming from personal, individual experience, and facilitated by dread (Angst), not from an abstract, all-encompassing system of metaphysics such as that of Hegel’s “phenomenology of Spirit”. A few decades later, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the emergence of a “superman” (Ubermensch) who, amid the nihilistic detritus engendered by the death of God, will have the Will-to-Power to forge meaning from the void, having seized the abyss with eagle’s talons, and so on. Martin Heidegger was influenced by Nietzschean concepts, but even more so by Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the struggle for individual authenticity and on the role of Angst in the face of mortality as the mediator of said authenticity. For Heidegger, the question of Being is central to philosophical inquiry. Why, he famously asked, is there something rather than nothing? (Obviously, this is a non-starter if you think, as did the Anglo-American analytic philosophers, that the question itself is nonsensical.) All of this leads directly into the formulation of the modern doctrine of existentialism developed under the oppressive conditions of World War II.

According to Heidegger, by equating Being with time, we heighten awareness of our temporality and are brought into authenticity. This is mediated by the experience of existential anxiety. However, this idea of Being (or as he puts it, Dasein, the being-there) implies a certain relative passivity and willingness to negotiate with what is encountered whereas Existenz implies a decision to resist the ongoingness of Being, an active imposition of the person’s will onto present conditions. Thus, Heidegger refused the term, “existentialism” for his own philosophy. (Some philosophers will claim that he is unreadable. This goes too far, but not by much. And it didn’t help that he redefined words to suit his needs. It also didn’t help that he was a prominent member of the Nazi party. Needless to say, this background doesn’t strengthen the case for the doctrine of “accommodation”.

Albert Camus, whose friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre ended over politics, especially the Algerian crisis, also did not accept the term for his philosophy. But beyond politics, Sartre and Camus had a difference of opinion. Unlike Sartre, Camus views the world as intractable to rational understanding. Camus wants to “preserve” absurdity, to live with it rather than to resolve it or explain it away. Enjoying life in the face of it is the victory, he seems to be saying.

Sartre went on to become a Marxist, writing a tome called Critique of Dialectical Reason (short version: Search for a Method (recommended)) which attempts to synthesize existentialism and Marxism, with the former being seen as an “enclave” within the latter.

Existentialism as a movement was eclipsed by structuralism (which in turn was superseded by post-structuralism). Why did the former fizzle out and the latter emerge to succeed it? Structuralism, which focuses on the composition of the cultural system rather than on the individual, was actually developed in the 1930s, by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Sartre’s doctrine was a world view which, in full form, came about in the context of Nazi occupation and maintained momentum in the post-war years as a sort of lingering resonance of that massive international conflict with its shocking atomic denouement. The focus was on the heroic individual angrily and anxiously struggling against an indifferent universe, or, as Camus puts it, “an intelligence at odds with a reality that transcends it.” But by the time of seemingly revolutionary developments in France in 1968, a more systemic theory of social metaphysics was required, especially since the revolt against the powers that be failed. Historian Norman Cantor has written that “Structuralism proposed to transcend the conflict between the individual and society by giving priority to universal structures in which both were subsumed.”

More recently, there has been a resurgence of existentialism as philosophical inquiry (in contrast to its past as a cultural movement). It is noted that some philosophical writers since the 1990s, such as Judith Butler, Lewis Gordon, and John Haugeland have developed existential themes and that there is a Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy as well as numerous related more specialized groups. However, I would argue that its contemporary influence is more clearly seen in psychology, stemming from the work of, for example, Medard Boss, Irvin Yalom, and Emily van Deurzen. Yalom’s clinical work has focused on the so-called boundary conditions of death, meaninglessness, isolation, and freedom and their relation to mental distress. Many uncomfortable people seek supportive counseling/psychotherapy due to chronic, low-level anxiety and depression as symptomatic of what used to be called “existential neurosis,” a sense of the purposelessness and absurdity of their lives and perhaps of humanity in general as well.

Psychiatrist S.N. Ghaemi has made an interesting case for the use of existential psychotherapy for a certain type of depression. While “major” depression, in many if not most cases, would appear to require some sort of biological intervention (usually pills) in addition to counseling, milder depression is treatable by talk therapy alone. Various types of cognitive therapy, which is predicated on the notion of identifying “distortions of reality” in the client’s thinking and “correcting” them, is, Ghaemi argues, not appropriate in every case. Such depressed people are accurate in their judgments about themselves, and there is nothing to be corrected. This is the theory of depressive realism, which though controversial, has considerable empirical support to back it up; so much so, in fact, that the originator of cognitive therapy, Aaron T. Beck, had to backtrack a bit on earlier pronouncements. For this sort of realistic depression, Ghaemi argues that existential psychotherapy is perfectly suited, and I agree. As he puts it, the aim of such therapy is “to meet patients where they are, completely wholeheartedly, without any further agenda, a pure encounter of two souls in the travails of life, rather than a treatment of a sick person by a healthy one.” However, not everyone is equally well-positioned to create meaning and cope with the boundary conditions, many being economically oppressed and struggling to survive. One seldom hears about this aspect of the problem, especially in America, but that’s another story.

-Wm. D., 29 June 2014

REFERENCES: (1) Norman Cantor (1988). Twentieth Century Culture: From Modernism to Deconstruction. New York: P. Lang. (2) “Existentialism”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/ (3) Irvin Yalom (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. (4) S.N. Ghaemi (2007). Feeling and time: the phenomenology of mood disorder, depressive realism, and existential psychotherapy. Schizophr. Bull. 33(1). http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/pubmed/17122410

Posted by neuropsychsoc on June 29, 2014

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