I have elsewhere, in all due modesty, blogged on the meaning of life (no less). I eschewed, and pitched it between, fundamentalisms and absolutisms and their antitheses, nihilisms and radical scepticism. I won’t repeat myself here, but the present effort should be understood in this context.
I have remained fascinated by the various forms of existentialism I encountered as an undergraduate at Surrey University, courtesy of philosopher Irene Brennan. We sampled a number of original texts, as students did then. It’s not that I accept these authors various formulations, rather that then and now they betrayed an engagement with life and living that could and still can easily go missing in much Anglo-Saxon language-based thinking.
The motive behind this blog is not to provide an exposition of existentialism, nor to critique it. What I have in mind is the challenges it lays down. Consider it as laying down metaphysical parameters for the human conditon, then peruse using this as a device to further think stuff through.
I offer my apologies to experts on existentialism.
Consider Heidegger’s notion of Dasein. For all the complexity of its unfolding usage by Heidegger, it can be said that it denotes the ‘thrown-ness’ of we humans into lives that are finite – we are born and we will die – but are without meaning. This, Heidegger insist, necessarily means that we live in a permanently anxious state. It is up to us, individually, to accomplish authenticity in this void.
Now let’s turn to Sartre, who was in the same book but on a different page. We are, he maintained, always ‘becoming’ (we are ever on the move, we are what we are doing and will do), and we can only be said to have as essence, or ‘being’, when we are no more. Moreover we are confronted with the terrifying reality of the freedom to decide what to do (next): and if we decide to do ‘A’ we necessarily turn our backs on ‘B-Z’.
Now here is my point: while I don’t, and we needn’t, buy into the existentialisms of either Heidegger or Sartre, each provides an incentive to contemplate what matters to us, and does so by reminding us of our finitude. As a reasonably relaxed atheist I’m personally reconciled both to this finitude and to necessarily culturally constrained constructions of the ‘meaning of life’, though I recognise that I might ‘falter’ (is that the word?) as death creeps closer (but that’s a matter for psychology rather than philosophy).
What Heidegger and Sartre do is compel (rather than invite) us to respond, and to come to terms with, the fact that we are what we do and not what we think or say we are. It is entirely reasonable to take this on board as a reminder to think stuff through. We are our actions and projects, that is, if we can be said to ‘be’ anything at all.
At birth we enter/find ourselves initiated into ‘society’. Society is the culmination of generations of structurally and culturally constrained agency; and agency entails reflexivity and, for each of us, a potential to ‘opt out’, to do/be different (remember Sartre’s Age of Reason and Matthieu’s stabbing himself in the hand, I think in a bar, to prove his free will; after all, he didn’t have to do it).
So while the writings of Heidegger and Sartre needn’t – indeed shouldn’t – sink us into the gloomy depths of anxiety at the ‘awful’, mind-retching freedom we necessarily have as humans at the mercy of finitude (just another species on planet Earth), they invite us to concentrate on and maybe rethink what matters to us and what is worthwhile. When we’re dead and gone it will be up to others to ‘sum us up’. Scary!