An Existential Life

Facticity (throwness): We find ourselves existing in a world not of our own making and indifferent to our concerns. We are not the source of our existence, but find ourselves thrown into a world we don’t control and didn’t choose.

“Being an individual man is a thing that has been abolished, and every speculative philosopher confuses himself with humanity at large; whereby he becomes something infinitely great, and at the same time nothing at all….To be a particular individual is world-historically absolutely nothing, infinitely nothing — and yet, this is the only true and highest significance of a human being, so much higher as to make every other significance illusory….If initially my human nature is merely an abstract something, it is at any rate the task which life sets me to become subjective, the uncertaintly of death comes more and more to interpenetrate my subjectivity dialectically. It thus becomes more and more important for me to think it in connection with evey factor and phase of my life; for since the uncertaintly is there in every moment, it can be overcome only by overcoming it in every moment….An objective uncertaintly held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual…All knowledge about reality is possibility.  The only reality to which an existing individual may have a relation that is more than cognitive, is his own reality, the fact that he exists; this reality constitutes his absolute interest.”

This excerpt from The Concluding Unscientific Postscript by the danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard exemplifies quite nicely why Kierkegaard is often called the father of Existentialism. Kierkegaard emphasizes the importance of the individual’s subjective quest for truth, and condemns the attempt by many philosophers, especially the german idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to establish objective universal truths.

Traditionally, philosophers have spoken of two different kinds of truth: objective and subjective truth. Whereas the former has been usually approached systematically via reason, empiricism and logic, the latter rather deals with what is passionate, personal and practical. Hegel claimed that if one has a perfect understanding of a comprehensive system of logic, one gains an objective understanding of the whole of existence. Kierkegaard rejected the idea of an objective system to understand existence and shifted the focus towards subjective truth: “I always reason from existence, not toward existence.[…] Knowledge has a relationship to the knower, who is essentially an existing individual, and that for this reason all essential knowledge is essentially related to existence.” We can see here a precursor to Sartre’s claim that existence precedes and rules essence. For Kierkegaard, objectivity focuses on what is said, whereas subjectivity accentuates how it is said. Kierkegaard believed that “to exist” meant to realize oneself through self-commitment to the choices one makes as a free subjective individual. His method is moving away from a philosophy that is searching to accumulate a set of facts about the world and goes back to the socratic question of how to live one’s life. The way to answer this question must be completely subjective and personal, since ‘the crowd is untruth’ and that one cannot attain authentic truth if one does not look for it through ‘passionate inwardness’. In fact, to become an individual, one must move away from the crowd by making personal choices, since taking the choices of the crowd as an example moves oneself further away from subjective, autentic truth. One must become an individual to become a christian, and become a christian to become human.

Kierkegaard was deeply religious and ridiculed the tradition of religious philosophy to attempt to link faith to objectivity and reason. Faith, for Kierkegaard, is fundamentally absurd and cannot be reconciled with any objective truth even in principle. If one would attempt to justify faith via recourse to any objective practices like reason or science, it would defeat the purpose of faith. Faith can only be approached by the individual through the constant choice to passionately embrace the absurdity and the paradoxes that are at its very core. However, the absurd is both the origin of faith and is yet resolved by it:”When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd—faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd.” To become christian is an act of choice, that can only be made if one is aware of one’s own subjectivity, which leads to the ability to make the intensely personal and passionate decision to accept faith. For Kierkegaard, it is a process that is never finished and relies on one’s responsibility to always make choices. As Daniel Johnson put it in his analysis of Kierkegaard, to live subjectively is to live decisively.

“Christianity is spirit, spirit is inwardness, inwardness is subjectivity, subjectivity is essentially passion, and in its maximum an infinite, personal, passionate interest in one’s eternal happiness.”

Although Kierkegaard’s philosophy is very different from the other existentialist philosophers I will write on due to its religious nature, we can clearly see many themes in it that would be picked up by the atheist philosophers. The importance of subjectivity, choices and the quest for authentic individual truth. The essence of Kierkegaard’s view on truth is, that truth is not a set of propositions to be learned, but a process of choices to be made, which is never completed. Subjective truth is a ‘work in progress’ and impossible to be encapsulated in any absolute system. As Socrates said to Xenophon: “If I do not reveal my views on justice in words, I do so by my conduct”. For Kierkegaard and other existentialists, philosophy has to focus on what it is like to be an individual in this world, and how one must act accordingly.

…

(via existentialistchristmascalendar)