That Existence Thing Again
One of the gifts I asked for and received over the holiday season was William Barrett's 1958 "Irrational Man", which was one of the most influential books in introducing Existential philosophy to America. Despite being written 45 years ago, like most philosophy books it retains much of its value, and if anything the intervening years have only underscored many of its points.
The basic thesis of Existentialism, as interpreted by Barrett, is that man has become a stranger to his god, nature, and his increasingly technological and bureaucratic society, and that he has become alienated from his own self.
Barrett sees two key moments in human history. The first occurs during the lives of Socrates and, especially, Plato, who are among the first to identify rational consciousness as a differentiated psychic function. For the first time, western man began to deal with concepts as the true basis of meaning, and thus gave birth to the western sciences and their view of nature as a vast pool of resources to first understand, and then exploit: an orientation which was unique among all major human cultures.
The second key moment was World War I. For those who lived through it, this terrible war represented the logical and inevitable conclusion of the dispassionate logic of the Greeks and the relentless march of science up to the Industrial Revolution. Rationality had separated us from morality and our very humanity, and left to its own devices, seemed very capable of demeaning and destroying human life on a massive scale.
For philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzche who laid the groundwork for Existentialism, the single basic fact about the evolution of western man was the decline of religion. Religion once surrounded man from birth to death, and was an omnipresent concern throughout his life. As rationalism and scientific inquiry grew, spiritual faith declined because it required not merely faith beyond reason, but faith that was often in direct contradiction to reason.
While it might be a very healthy thing for western man to shed the heavy mantle of Catholic guilt or druidic superstitions, those revelations came at a very dear price. For in freeing himself from his connection to his gods, man also cut himself lose from the hope of redemption and an afterlife, and the meaning and structure that the religious framework gave to his life. A spiritual man always has a ready answer to the question of the meaning of his life, whereas modern man weaves his way through a life that, because it is devoid of spirituality, seems equally devoid of ultimate meaning or purpose. This is one of the ways that western man has suffered alienation.
This same faith in science which supplanted man's spiritual groundwork also disconnected him from his place in nature. To the scientific mind, nature became a challenge to explore, an adversary to wrest secrets from, and finally a resource to exploit. Barrett says, "Technological man faces the objects in his world with no need or capacity for intimacy with them beyond the knowledge of what button has to be pressed in order to control their working." This attitude displaced man's reverence for nature and separated him from his place in the natural world, much to his own loss.
But if western man's passion for dispassionate logic led him to view nature as simply a collection of resources to be managed and exploited, it did the exact same thing to man himself. Our very lives are now governed in exactly the same way. We, as "human resources", are impersonally ordered, organized, allocated, manipulated, and efficiently disposed of by a society that is optimized for mass production and mass consumption -- not just of natural resources, but of human resources, as well. Kierkegaard held that the chief movement of modernity is a technocracy that strips modern man of the sense of his own individuality and his value as a human being.
Pascal observed that men escape considering their condition closely by means of the two sovereign anodynes of "habit" and "diversion". "Solidly ensconced in habit, the good citizen, surrounded by wife and family and secure in his job, need not cast his eye on the quality of his days as they pass." Barrett dispels the illusion that America has an answer for life's meaningful questions when he says, "Despite all its apparently cheerful and self-satisfied immersion in gadgets and refridgerators American life, one suspects, is nihilistic to its core. Its final 'What for?' is not even asked, let alone answered."
Most Americans dismiss Existentialism as a European fad because of the residual optimism of America's fresh start as a nation. Even today, most Americans remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that the scientific and industrial age, along with its many benefits, simultaneously divorced western man from his spirituality, subverted his morality, disconnected him from nature, and stripped him of his human dignity. Modern man is spiritually impoverished, and is left at a loss to describe the purpose of his life or of his society.
For the Existentialist, the only things that are sure are life and death, and by soberly accepting the inescapable fact of the latter, the Existentialist comes to appreciate the value of the former, moreso than most. The Existentialist, having accepted death, knows that he is empowered to create his own purpose and is committed to experiencing the value of each day. Barrett, speaking of Dostoevsky, says, "His grasp of nihilism as the basic fact in modern life was itself never nihilistic". The reason for Dostoyevsky's hope, and the part of Existentialism that is most powerful for man, is that "The only meaning he can give himself is through the free project that he launches out of his own nothingness". This empowerment is the basic fact that Americans fail to see about Existentialism: "Though terrifying, the taking of death into ourselves is also liberating: it frees us from servitude to the petty cares that threaten to engulf our daily life and thereby opens us to the essential projects by which we can make our lives personally and significantly our own."
In my own words, Existentialism is the freedom to decide you own life's ultimate purpose and meaning, and taking complete responsibility for that choice. I find that incredibly empowering, and as I've experienced it, it has been a very positive and rewarding philosophy of life.