Substantive issues in existentialism

Ontic structure of human existence

The fundamental characteristic of existentialist ontology is the primacy that study of the nature of existence gives to the concept of possibility. That priority dominated the philosophy of Kierkegaard and also was amply utilized by Husserl, who had explicitly affirmed the ontological priority of possibility over reality. Possibility, however, is not understood by the existentialists in the purely logical sense as absence of contradiction nor in the traditional metaphysical sense as potentiality destined to become actuality but, rather, in the sense of ontic or objective possibility, which is the very structure of human existence. It is thus the specific modality of the being of humans.

Another way of expressing that thesis is the affirmation of Heidegger and Sartre that “existence precedes essence,” which signifies that humans do not have a nature that determines their modes of being and acting but that, rather, those modes are simply possibilities from which they may choose and on the basis of which they can project themselves. In that sense, Heidegger said that “Dasein is always its own possibility,” and Sartre wrote: “It is true that the possible is—so to speak—an option on being, and if it is true that the possible can come into the world only through a being which is its own possibility, this implies for human reality the necessity of being its being in the form of an option on its being.”

As possibility, human existence is the anticipation, the expectation, the projection of the future. The future is its fundamental temporal dimension, to which the present and the past are subordinate and secondary; existence is always stretched out toward the future. As possibility, existence is also transcendence, being beyond, because all of its constitutive possibilities organize it beyond itself toward the other beings of the world and toward the world in its totality. To transcend thus means to move toward something that is not one’s own existence—i.e., toward things and toward other humans, with which the individual is related in every situation in which he finds himself.

Yet, for some existentialists, the being of those other entities has a modality that differs from the being of humans’ existence: their existence is not possible being but real or factual being. To existence, Heidegger contrasted the presence of the things in the world—a presence that assumes, as the individual takes notice of such things for his needs, the aspect of utilizability. But utilizability is not a simple quality of things; it is their very being. Analogously, Sartre distinguished the for-itself—the mode of being of humans’ existence that he identifies, following René Descartes and Husserl, with consciousness—from the in-itself, the being or reality of things that he identifies with their utilizability. According to Jaspers, over against the existence of the possible (humanity, Dasein) stands the world as the infinite horizon that encompasses within itself each possible existence and, therefore, cannot itself be encompassed by any one of them. It is a world that is a reality of fact, at the origin of which there is a Being that is pure transcendence and that, therefore, never reveals itself.

Similarly, the religious forms of existentialism insist on transcendence, considering it to be the property of the Being that is beyond the existential possibilities and that can enter among them solely under the form of mystery (Marcel) and of the extratemporal revelation of faith (Barth, Jaspers). Marcel, in that regard, contrasted Being, which is a mystery, with having, which is the condition of humans in the world. That is to say, the individual has objects before him that are foreign to his subjectivity. He tries to organize them and discover the bond that ties them together so as to control and use them.

In all such doctrines, there is the dominating theme of the contrast between the modality proper to existence, which is possibility, and the modality proper to Being, which is reality or facticity. As a result of that contrast, existence (as possibility) appears as the nothingness of Being, as the negation of every reality of fact. In a brief but famous work, Was ist Metaphysik? (1929; What Is Metaphysics?), Heidegger affirmed that “Human existence cannot have a relationship with being unless it remains in the midst of nothingness.” Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the movement known as logical positivism, in an equally famous essay, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch die logische Analyse der Sprache” (1931; “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”), criticized the hypostatization (or making real) of Nothingness as one of the grosser fallacies of metaphysics. In truth, Nothingness is, for the existentialists, possible existence, as the negation of the reality of fact. Sartre wrote: “The possible is the something which the For-itself lacks in order to be itself”; it is what the subject lacks in order to be an object; thus, it does not exist except as a lacking.

The same is true of value, which is such insofar as it does not exist. For even when value occurs or is perceived in certain acts, it lies beyond them and constitutes the limit or the goal toward which they aim. Analogously, knowledge, in which the object (the in-itself) presents itself to consciousness (the for-itself), is a relationship of nullification, because the object cannot be offered to consciousness except as that which is not consciousness. Furthermore, another existence is such insofar as it is not mine; thus, the negation is “the constitutive structure of the being-of-others.”

But the reduction of existence to Nothingness can lead in two directions: it can lead to insisting on the lack of meaning—i.e., on the absurdity of existence and of every possible project—as it does in Sartre, in Camus, and in atheistic existentialism; or it can lead toward the quest for a more direct relationship of existence with Being, beyond the constitutive possibilities of existence, so that Being reveals itself, at least partly, in existence—through language or through faith or through some mystical form of religiousness, as happens in the later phase of Heidegger’s thought, in Jaspers, and in all of the forms of theological existentialism.

Manner and style of human existence

Existentialism is never a solipsism in the proper sense of the term, because every existential possibility relates the individual to things and to other humans. Sometimes it is presented as humanism in the sense that it places human destiny in the hands of humans themselves. But that version is rejected by all of the currents of the movement that, starting with Heidegger, insist on the priority and the initiative of Being with regard to human existence. The opposition between those two points of view depends on how the different existentialists solve the problem of freedom.

The individual always finds himself in a situation in which his constitutive possibilities are rooted. For Heidegger and Jaspers, that situation determines the choice that he makes among the possibilities; for Sartre, conversely, the situation is determined by the choice. Thus, existentialism fluctuates between the concept of a destiny in which, like Nietzsche’s amor fati, one accepts what has already been chosen and the concept of a radical freedom whereby the choices are offered in an absolute indifference. From the first point of view, every project of life falls back on or is reduced to the situation from which it starts; thus, the possibility of being, of acting, of willing, of choosing is really, as Jaspers pointed out in his Philosophie (1932), the impossibility of being, acting, willing, and choosing in a manner different from the way things are—i.e., from the factual conditions of the situation. From the second point of view, the fundamental project, which is the primordial choice, has no conditions; as Sartre said: “Since I am free, I project my total possible, but I thereby posit that I am free and that I can always nihilate this first project and make it past.” From the first, or deterministic, point of view, the past determines the future and assimilates it to itself; from the second, or libertarian, point of view, the meaning of the past depends upon the present project. In the latter instance, freedom is a kind of damnation. As Sartre affirmed: “We said that freedom is not free not to be free and that it is not free not to exist.”

A choice, however, is offered even from the destinarian point of view: that between understanding and not understanding one’s own nothingness. According to Heidegger, a person achieves what he calls “authentic existence” when he understands the impossibility of all of the possibilities of existence—the impossibility of which the sign or term is death. Jaspers affirms, in his turn, that the only choice offered is that between accepting or rejecting the situation with which one is identified. The rejection of it, however, is a betrayal that plunges one back into the situation itself.

Existentialist ontology thus fluctuates between Being and Nothingness and concludes by regarding Nothingness as the only possible revelation of Being. In the atheistic version, it is the individual, as Sartre affirms, who “strives to be God” and consumes himself vainly in the effort. In the cosmological or theological version, it is Being that intervenes, in a way that is more or less mysterious or hidden, to redeem one from Nothingness.