Lecture Notes on Continental Philosophy

Introduction

The distinction between continental and analytic philosophy has been one of the most
controversial issues in philosophy. Many philosophers have identified as a continental or an
analytic philosopher. On the other hand, philosophers of both camps have denied the existence
of, even the possibility of such a divide in philosophy. The split does not originate from
geography (though it roughly maps onto Europe vs. Anglo-American traditions), but from
philosophical style, methodology, and concerns.

According to Michael Beaney analytic philosophy is traced back to “the works of Gottlob Frege
(1848–1925), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), G.E. Moore (1873–1958) and Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889–1951) in the period from roughly 1880 to 1920.” Others like Martinich and Sosa also
argued that the contemporary form of analytic philosophy came into fruition with the
contribution of philosophical ideas from Germany and England that focused on the value of
analyzing propositions, language and logic and elementary foundational blocks of language.

Despite the difficulty of delineating the scope of these two strands of thought, Robert Solomon
believes that continental philosophy begins at the start of the nineteenth century, just before the
death of Kant. (“Modern” continental philosophy, in its usual designation, begins with Descartes
and covers the rich period up to and including Kant.) The dominant figure in early continental
philosophy, as we said, was Hegel, but Hegel was immediately preceded and surrounded by an
impressive array of “post-Kantian” philosophers who, like Kant, considered themselves
“Idealists” of one kind or another. The names of Johann Fichte and Friedrich Schelling are
particularly prominent, but there were many others besides. Arthur Schopenhauer, perhaps
Hegel’s most vocal nemesis, became the darling of the Romantics in mid-century. Other mid-
century critics included the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and a promising student
journalist at the University of Berlin, the young Karl Marx. Hence we can say that Continental
Philosophy includes a plethora of philosophical schools like phenomenology, existentialism,
German idealism, critical theory, and postmodernism. Some of the most influential figures in the
Continental tradition include Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger,
Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and Merleau-Ponty.

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This lecture note deals with three of the most influential schools in the history of Continental
Philosophy: Phenomenology, Existentialism and Postmodernism.

PART ONE- PHENOMENOLOGY

1.1. Edmund Husserl

Phenomenology is a philosophical movement that focuses on the structures of experience and

consciousness. Its central aim is to describe phenomena as they appear to consciousness, free
from presuppositions. Although such figures as Brentano and Meinong have contributed to the
development of Phenomenology, its effective founder is Edmund Husserl (1858-1938).

After having taken his doctorate in mathematics Husserl attended Brentano's lectures at Vienna
(I884-6) and it was Brentano's influence which led him to devote himself to philosophy. He
became professor of philosophy at Gottingen and subsequently at Freiburg-im-Breisgau where
Martin Heidegger was one of his pupils. We will try to make sense of Husserlian
Phenomenology by inspecting three concepts: intentionality, phenomenological reduction
(epoche) and lebenswelt (the Life-World).

The principle of intentionality was first coined by Franz Brentano and it asserts that
consciousness is always ‘consciousness about” something. This aboutness of consciousness
points to something outside the mind which is conscious of the object. The intentionality
principle underlines the fact that our everyday experiences are directed towards objects,
properties and states of affairs. At the same time, objects are revealed from definite perspectives.
There seems to be a contradiction between the definite directedness of consciousness and the
perspectivism of experiences.

Husserl argues that, though experience reveals its object from a perspective, we are intentionally
directed toward a full three-dimensional object. The different modes of consciousness we may
have when we love, hate, desire, present, wonder etc. are all about something. Hence all objects
of experience are presented to consciousness as transcending. They are presented as going
beyond the experience we have of them. Though all our experiences are perspectival, they also
present their objects to us as transcending the perspective. For instance, when we see a tree, we

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do not see a mere image of the tree or a packet of sense data, but we see the tree itself. Of course
the tree is seen from a definite perspective and only those parts of the tree that are visible from
our perspective are seen by us. But Husserl asserts that, the whole tree is given to the
consciousness as an intentional object. Hence phenomenology goes beyond mere empiricism. It
goes beyond the image theory proposed by empiricism.
In the work which in its English translation bears the title Ideas: General Introduction to Pure
Phenomenology, I913 Husserl calls the act of consciousness noesis and its correlative object,
which is meant or intended, noema. Further, he speaks of the intuition of essences. In pure
mathematics, for example, there is an intuition of essences which gives rise to propositions
which are not empirical generalizations but belong to a different type, that of a priori
propositions. And phenomenology in general is the descriptive analysis of essences or ideal
structures. There could thus be, for example, a phenomenology of values. But there could also be
a phenomenological analysis of the fundamental structures of consciousness, provided, of course,
that these structures are 'reduced' to essences.

A point insisted on by Husserl is the suspension of judgment (the so-called epoche) in regard to
the ontological or existential status or reference of the objects of consciousness. By means of this
suspension existence is said to be 'bracketed'. Suppose, for example, that I wished to develop a
phenomenological analysis of the aesthetic experience of beauty. I suspend all judgment about
the subjectivity or objectivity of beauty in an ontological sense and direct my attention simply to
the essential structure of aesthetic experience as 'appearing' to consciousness.

The reason why Husserl insists on this suspension of judgment can be seen by considering the
implications of the title of one of his writings, Philosophy as Strict Science. Like Descartes
before him, Husserl wished to put philosophy on a firm basis. And in his opinion this meant
going behind all presuppositions to that which one cannot doubt or question. Now, in ordinary
life we make all sorts of existential assumptions, about, for instance, the existence of physical
objects independently of consciousness. We must therefore prescind from or bracket this 'natural
attitude'. It is not a question of saying that the natural attitude is wrong and its assumptions
unjustified. It is a question of methodologically prescinding from such assumptions and going
behind them to consciousness itself which it is impossible either to doubt or to prescind from.

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Further, we cannot, for example, profitably discuss the ontological status of values until we are
quite clear what we are talking about, what value 'means'. And this is revealed by
phenomenological analysis. Hence phenomenology is fundamental philosophy: it must precede
and ground any ontological philosophy, any metaphysics.

As already hinted Husserl's employment of the epoche bears a resemblance to Descartes' use of
methodological doubt. And in point of fact Husserl saw in Descartes' philosophy a certain
measure of anticipation of phenomenology. At the same time he insisted that the existence of a
self in the sense of a spiritual substance or, as Descartes put it, a 'thinking thing' (res cogitans)
must itself be bracketed. True, the ego cannot be simply eliminated. But the subject which is
required as correlative to the object of consciousness is simply the pure or transcendental ego,
the pure subject as such, not a spiritual substance or soul. The existence of such a substance is
something about which we must suspend judgment, so far as pure phenomenology is concerned.

Finally we come to the concept of the Lebens-Welt (life-world). Husserl describes it ‘as a
horizon of experience common to human beings in every historical epoch’, he takes it to be the
world as it appears to human experience as opposed to the abstract experience of the world given
by modern science. After all science or naturalism is one of the themes of modernity which
Husserl blames for the forgetting of the life-world.

He attributes this forgetting to naturalism and historicism. By naturalism he simply means ‘the
philosophic position which resulted out of the mathematization of nature which reduces the
entire realm of nature, including human nature, to be comprised only of entities and processes
susceptible of quantitative analysis’. Historicism, on the other hand, is understood to be ‘the
tendency to regard the conceptual systems of both the natural and the human sciences as world
views whose presuppositions are determined by contingent historical transformations’. Both
themes tend to downgrade the human subject to mere object of empirical investigation.

Husserl believed that philosophy would restore the confidence in the rationality of our ordinary
intuitions about the life-world by showing that scientific accounts of nature are always dependent
upon the evidences of ordinary experience. He argued that scientific thinking and experiencing
form an integral part of the life-world, and accordingly that a phenomenology of the life-world is

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ipso facto a phenomenology of objective natural and cultural science as well. Husserl asserts
further that what started out as a phenomenology of the life-world becomes in the end the
universal science of sciences. Although the phenomenology of the life-world was clearly much
wider in scope than the phenomenology of the sciences, it certainly looks into them especially in
relation to the prior experiences and practices that made them possible.

It’s possible to enumerate a plethora of events that have occurred since Husserl’s departure
which confirm his assertion that scientific objectivism results in a forgetting of the world:

With regard to historicism, Husserl affirms the historicity of the life-world which, he goes on to
describe, as a ‘horizon of experience common to human beings in every historical epoch’. The
historical situatedness of the life-world indicates Husserl’s last gasp attempt to save ‘the other’
and consequently ‘inter-subjectivity’ from the transcendental rapier his earlier works had
subjected them to. The articulation of the life-world as a collective cultural and historical
context is an attempt to demonstrate the existence of other egos sharing common values and
goals. This horizon informs and contextualizes the perceived meanings of the world while
constantly being shaped by its inhabitants.

The life-world, for Husserl, is the condition of the possibility of experience insofar as
all objects are meaningful only to the extent that they exist within the referential
nexus established by the life-world. This notion of life-world does not specify what
those referential nexuses are: that would make the life-world relative in the same
way that a cultural world is relative. Instead, Husserl speaks about the a priori of the
life-world, or of what must be true of any world whatsoever in order to be
meaningful.

1.2. Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1889 –1976) was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the
Continental tradition, particularly within the fields of existential phenomenology and
philosophical hermeneutics. From his beginnings as a Catholic academic, he developed a
groundbreaking and widely influential philosophy.

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His best known book, Being and Time (1927), is considered one of the most important
philosophical works of the 20th century. In it and later works, Heidegger maintained that one's
way of questioning defines one's nature. He argued that Western thinking had lost sight of being,
and that by people finding themselves as "always already" moving within ontological
presuppositions, they lose touch with their grasp of being and its truth thus becomes "muddled".
As a solution to this condition, Heidegger advocated a change in focus from ontologies based on
ontic determinants to the fundamental ontological elucidation of being-in-the-world in general,
allowing it to reveal, or "unconceal" itself as concealment. He wrote extensively on Friedrich
Nietzsche and Friedrich Hölderlin in his later career.

To understand Heidegger’s thought we shall limit ourselves to his most important work viz.
Being and Time (with special emphasis on division one). Accordingly, this lecture note deals
only with the so called earlier but most influential thought.

Division One

The Question of Being

Heidegger is the most significant of all the phenomenologists and we shall try to get to the
bottom of his thought in order to bring his central concern into better view. Consider some
philosophical problems that will be familiar from introductory metaphysics classes: Does the
table that I think I see before me exist? Does God exist? Does mind, conceived as an entity
distinct from body, exist? These questions have the following form: does x (where x = some
particular kind of thing) exist? Questions of this form presuppose that we already know what ‘to
exist’ means. We typically don't even notice this presupposition. But Heidegger does, which is
why he raises the more fundamental question: what does ‘to exist’ mean? This is one way of
asking what Heidegger calls the question of the meaning of Being, and Being and Time is an
investigation into that question.

Many of Heidegger's translators capitalize the word ‘Being’ (Sein) to mark what, in the Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger will later call the ontological difference, the crucial
distinction between Being and beings (entities). The question of the meaning of Being is
concerned with what it is that makes beings intelligible as beings, and whatever that factor

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(Being) is, it is seemingly not itself simply another being among beings. Unfortunately the
capitalization of ‘Being’ also has the disadvantage of suggesting that Being is, as Sheehan (2001)
puts it, an ethereal metaphysical something that lies beyond entities, what he calls ‘Big Being’.
But to think of Being in this way would be to commit the very mistake that the capitalization is
supposed to help us avoid. For while Being is always the Being of some entity, Being is not itself
some kind of higher-order being waiting to be discovered. As long as we remain alert to this
worry, we can follow the otherwise helpful path of capitalization.

According to Heidegger, the question of the meaning of Being, and thus Being as such, has been
forgotten by ‘the tradition’ (roughly, Western philosophy from Plato onwards). Heidegger means
by this that the history of Western thought has failed to heed the ontological difference, and so
has articulated Being precisely as a kind of ultimate being, as evidenced by a series of namings
of Being, for example as idea, energeia, substance, monad or will to power. In this way Being as
such has been forgotten. So Heidegger sets himself the task of recovering the question of the
meaning of Being. In this context he draws two distinctions between different kinds of inquiry.
The first, which is just another way of expressing the ontological difference, is between the
ontical and the ontological, where the former is concerned with facts about entities and the latter
is concerned with the meaning of Being, with how entities are intelligible as entities. Using this
technical language, we can put the point about the forgetting of Being as such by saying that the
history of Western thought is characterized by an ‘onticization’ of Being (by the practice of
treating Being as a being). However, as Heidegger explains, here in the words of Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics, ‘an ontic knowledge can never alone direct itself ‘to’ the objects,
because without the ontological… it can have no possible Whereto’. The second distinction
between different kinds of inquiry, drawn within the category of the ontological, is between
regional ontology and fundamental ontology, where the former is concerned with the ontologies
of particular domains, say biology or banking, and the latter is concerned with the a priori,
transcendental conditions that make possible particular modes of Being (i.e., particular regional
ontologies). For Heidegger, the ontical presupposes the regional-ontological, which in turn
presupposes the fundamental-ontological. As he puts it:

The question of Being aim at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of
the sciences which examine beings as beings of such and such a type, and, in doing so, already

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operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies
themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations.

So how do we carry out fundamental ontology, and thus answer the question of the meaning of
Being? It is here that Heidegger introduces the notion of Dasein (Da-sein: there-being). To keep
‘Dasein’ on the right side of the ontological difference, then, we might conceive of it as
Heidegger's term for the distinctive kind of entity that human beings as such are. This fits with
many of Heidegger's explicit characterizations of Dasein, and it probably deserves to be called
the standard view in the secondary. That said, one needs to be careful about precisely what sort
of entity we are talking about here. For Dasein is not to be understood as ‘the biological human
being’. Nor is it to be understood as ‘the person’. Some people argue that Dasein is “a way of life
shared by the members of some community”, here a bit of analogy can be created with the
understanding of language as a communally shared way of speaking. This appeal to the
community will assume a distinctive philosophical shape as the argument of Being and Time
progresses.

The foregoing considerations bring an important question to the fore: what, according to
Heidegger, is so special about human beings as such? Here there are broadly speaking two routes
that one might take through the text of Being and Time. The first unfolds as follows. If we look
around at beings in general—from particles to planets, ants to apes—it is human beings alone
who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be (e.g., in moments of anxiety in
which the world can appear meaning-less, more on which later). More specifically, it is human
beings alone who (a) operate in their everyday activities with an understanding of Being
(although, as we shall see, one which is pre-ontological, in that it is implicit and vague) and (b)
are able to reflect upon what it means to be. This gives us a way of understanding statements
such as “Dasein is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue
for it”. Those who tend to pursue this way of characterizing Dasein, develop the idea by
explaining that while inanimate objects merely persist through time and while plants and non-
human animals have their lives determined entirely by the demands of survival and reproduction,
human beings lead their lives. In terms of its deep ontological structure, although not typically in
terms of how it presents itself to the individual in consciousness, each moment in a human life
constitutes a kind of branch-point at which a person ‘chooses’ a kind of life, a possible way to

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be. It is crucial to emphasize that one may, in the relevant sense, ‘choose’ an existing path simply
by continuing unthinkingly along it, since in principle at least, and within certain limits, one
always had, and still has, the capacity to take a different path. This can all sound terribly inward-
looking, but that is not Heidegger's intention. In a way that is about to become clearer, Dasein's
projects and possibilities are essentially bound up with the ways in which other entities may
become intelligible. Moreover, terms such as ‘lead’ and ‘choose’ must be interpreted in the light
of Heidegger's account of care as the Being of Dasein (more on this later), an account that blunts
any temptation to hear these terms in a manner that suggests inner deliberation or planning on the
part of a reflective subject. (So perhaps the above point that human beings are distinctive in that
they lead their lives would be better expressed as the observation that human beings are the
nuclei of lives laying themselves out.)

The second route to an understanding of Dasein, and thus of what is special about human beings
as such, emphasizes the link with the taking-as structure highlighted earlier. Some scholars
develop just such a line of exegesis by combining two insights. The first is that the ‘Da’ of
Dasein may be profitably translated not as ‘there’ but as ‘open’. This openness is in turn to be
understood as ‘the possibility of taking-as’ and thus as a pre-intellectual openness to Being that
is necessary for us to encounter beings as beings in particular ways (e.g., practically,
theoretically, aesthetically). Whether or not the standard translation of ‘Da’ as ‘there’ is
incapable of doing justice to this idea is moot—one might express the same view by saying that
to be Dasein is to be there, in the midst of entities making sense a certain way. Nevertheless, the
term ‘openness’ does seem to provide a nicely graphic expression of the phenomenon in
question. The second insight, driven by a comment of Heidegger's to the effect that the verbal
emphasis in ‘Dasein’ is to be placed on the second syllable, is that the ‘sein’ of ‘Dasein’ should
be heard as ‘having-to-be’, in contrast with ‘occasionally or contingently is’. These dual insights
lead to a characterization of Dasein as the having-to-be-open. In other words, Dasein (and so
human beings as such) cannot but be open: it is a necessary characteristic of human beings (an a
priori structure of our existential constitution, not an exercise of our wills) that we operate with
the sense-making capacity to take-other-beings-as.

The two interpretative paths that we have just walked are not necessarily in conflict: for “in
existing, Dasein occurs… as a transcending beyond beings into the disclosure of being as such,

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so that in this transcending not only its own possibilities of being [our first route] but also the
being of other beings [our second route] is disclosed”. And this helps us to grasp the meaning of
Heidegger's otherwise opaque claim that Dasein, and indeed only Dasein, exists, where existence
is understood (via etymological considerations) as ek-sistence, that is, as a standing out. Dasein
stands out in two senses, each of which corresponds to one of the two dimensions of our
proposed interpretation. First, Dasein can stand back or ‘out’ from its own occurrence in the
world and observe itself. Second, Dasein stands out in an openness to and an opening of Being.

As we have seen, it is an essential characteristic of Dasein that, in its ordinary ways of engaging
with other entities, it operates with a pre-ontological understanding of Being, that is, with a
distorted or buried grasp of the a priori conditions that, by underpinning the taking-as structure,
make possible particular modes of Being. This suggests that a disciplined investigation of those
everyday modes of engagement on the part of Dasein (what Heidegger calls an “existential
analytic of Dasein”) will be a first step towards revealing a shared but hidden underlying
meaning of Being.

Dasein is, then, our primary ‘object’ of study, and our point of investigative departure is Dasein's
everyday encounters with entities. But what sort of philosophical method is appropriate for the
ensuing examination? Famously, Heidegger's adopted method is a species of phenomenology. In
the Heideggerian framework, however, phenomenology is not to be understood (as it sometimes
is) as the study of how things merely appear in experience. Rather, in a recognizably Kantian
staging of the idea, Heidegger follows Husserl in conceiving of phenomenology as a theoretical
enterprise that takes ordinary experience as its point of departure, but which, through an attentive
and sensitive examination of that experience, aims to reveal the a priori, transcendental
conditions that shape and structure it. In Heidegger's Being-centred project, these are the
conditions ‘which, in every kind of Being that factical Dasein may possess, persist as
determinative for the character of its Being’. Presupposed by ordinary experience, these
structures must in some sense be present with that experience, but they are not simply available
to be read off from its surface, hence the need for disciplined and careful phenomenological
analysis to reveal them as they are. So far so good. But, in a departure from the established
Husserlian position, one that demonstrates the influence of Dilthey, Heidegger claims that
phenomenology is not just transcendental, it is hermeneutic. In other words, its goal is always to

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deliver an interpretation of Being, an interpretation that, on the one hand, is guided by certain
historically embedded ways of thinking (ways of taking-as reflected in Dasein's pre-ontological
understanding of Being) that the philosopher as Dasein and as interpreter brings to the task, and,
on the other hand, is ceaselessly open to revision, enhancement and replacement. For Heidegger,
this hermeneutic structure is not a limitation on understanding, but a precondition of it, and
philosophical understanding (conceived as fundamental ontology) is no exception. Thus Being
and Time itself has a spiral structure in which a sequence of reinterpretations produces an ever
more illuminating comprehension of Being.

On the face of it, the hermeneutic conception of phenomenology sits unhappily with a project
that aims to uncover the a priori transcendental conditions that make possible particular modes of
Being (which is arguably one way of glossing the project of “working out [the] fore-structures
[of understanding] in terms of the things themselves”). And this is a tension that, it seems fair to
say, is never fully resolved within the pages of Being and Time. The best we can do is note that,
by the end of the text, the transcendental has itself become historically embedded. What is also
true is that there is something of a divide in certain areas of contemporary Heidegger scholarship
over whether one should emphasize the transcendental dimension of Heidegger's
phenomenology or the hermeneutic dimension.

Being and Time deals at great length with the notion of Dasein with the view to getting a better
and clear understanding of Being, though this latter project has not been successfully
accomplished in this otherwise great work. Hence we proceed to a detailed analysis of Dasein.
With a view to getting to the bottom of Dasein we shall discuss Heidegger’s existential analysis
of Dasein focusing on the following points: Dasein’s Mode of Encounter, the Who of Dasein and
Dasein’s Modes of Disclosure Death and Authenticity.

Modes of Encounter

How, then, does the existential analytic unfold? Heidegger argues that we ordinarily encounter
entities as (what he calls) equipment, that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks (cooking, writing,
hair-care, and so on). Indeed we achieve our most primordial (closest) relationship with
equipment not by looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical

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study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner. Entities so encountered
have their own distinctive kind of Being that Heidegger famously calls readiness-to-hand.

Readiness-to-hand has a distinctive phenomenological signature. While engaged in hitch-free

skilled activity, Dasein has no conscious experience of the items of equipment in use as
independent objects (i.e., as the bearers of determinate properties that exist independently of the
Dasein-centred context of action in which the equipmental entity is involved). Thus, while
engaged in trouble-free hammering, the skilled carpenter has no conscious recognition of the
hammer, the nails, or the work-bench, in the way that one would if one simply stood back and
thought about them. Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger
claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged
carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes
absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and
against a world of objects. Crucially, it does not follow from this analysis that Dasein's behaviour
in such contexts is automatic, in the sense of there being no awareness present at all, but rather
that the awareness that is present (what Heidegger calls circumspection) is non-subject-object in
form. Phenomenologically speaking, then, there are no subjects and no objects; there is only the
experience of the ongoing task (e.g., hammering).

Heidegger, then, denies that the categories of subject and object characterize our most basic way
of encountering entities. He maintains, however, that they apply to a derivative kind of
encounter. When Dasein engages in, for example, the practices of natural science, when sensing
takes place purely in the service of reflective or philosophical contemplation, or when
philosophers claim to have identified certain context-free metaphysical building blocks of the
universe (e.g., points of pure extension, monads), the entities under study are
phenomenologically removed from the settings of everyday equipmental practice and are thereby
revealed as fully fledged independent objects, that is, as the bearers of certain context-general
determinate or measurable properties (size in metres, weight in kilos etc.). Heidegger calls this
mode of Being presence-at-hand, and he sometimes refers to present-at-hand entities as
‘Things’. With this phenomenological transformation in the mode of Being of entities comes a
corresponding transformation in the mode of Being of Dasein. Dasein becomes a subject, one

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whose project is to explain and predict the behaviour of an independent, objective universe.
Encounters with the present-at-hand are thus fundamentally subject-object in structure.

The final phenomenological category identified during the first phase of the existential analytic
is what Heidegger calls un-readiness-to-hand. This mode of Being of entities emerges when
skilled practical activity is disturbed by broken or malfunctioning equipment, discovered-to-be-
missing equipment, or in-the-way equipment. When encountered as un-ready-to-hand, entities
are no longer phenomenologically transparent. However, they are not yet the fully fledged
objects of the present-at-hand, since their broken, malfunctioning, missing or obstructive status is
defined relative to a particular equipmental context.

Thus a driver does not encounter a punctured tire as a lump of rubber of measurable mass; he
encounters it as a damaged item of equipment, that is, as the cause of a temporary interruption to
his driving activity. With such disturbances to skilled activity, Dasein emerges as a practical
problem solver whose context-embedded actions are directed at restoring smooth skilled activity.

Although Heidegger does not put things this way, the complex intermediate realm of the un-
ready-to-hand is seemingly best thought of as a spectrum of cases characterized by different
modes and degrees of engagement/disengagement. Much of the time Dasein's practical problem
solving will involve recovery strategies (e.g., switching to a different mode of transport) which
preserve the marks of fluid and flexible know-how that are present in ready-to-hand contexts. In
the limit, however (e.g., when a mechanic uses his theoretical knowledge of how cars work to
guide a repair), Dasein's problem solving activity will begin to approximate the theoretical
reasoning distinctive of scientific inquiry into present-at-hand entities. But even here Dasein is
not ‘just theorizing’ or ‘just looking’, so it is not yet, in Heidegger's terms, a pure disengaged
subject. With this spectrum of cases in view, it is possible to glimpse a potential worry for
Heidegger's account. It’s argued by some that the situation of wholly transparent readiness-to-
hand is something of an ideal state. Skilled activity is never (or very rarely) perfectly smooth.
Moreover, minimal subjective activity (such as a nonconceptual awareness of certain spatially
situated movements by my body) produces a background noise that never really disappears. Thus
a distinction between Dasein and its environment is, to some extent, preserved, and this

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distinction arguably manifests the kind of minimal subject-object dichotomy that is characteristic
of those cases of un-readiness-to-hand that lie closest to readiness-to-hand.

Being-in-the-World

What the existential analytic has given us so far is a phenomenological description of Dasein's
within-the-world encounters with entities. The next clarification concerns the notion of world
and the associated within-ness of Dasein. Famously, Heidegger writes of Dasein as Being-in-the-
world. In effect, then, the notion of Being-in-the-world provides us with a reinterpretation of the
activity of existing, where existence is given the narrow reading (ek-sistence) identified earlier.
Understood as a unitary phenomenon (as opposed to a contingent, additive, tripartite
combination of Being, in-ness, and the world), Being-in-the-world is an essential characteristic
of Dasein.

The Being-in dimension of Being-in-the-world cannot be thought of as a merely spatial relation

in some sense that might be determined by a GPS device, since Dasein is never just present-at-
hand within the world in the way demanded by that sort of spatial in-ness. Heidegger sometimes
uses the term dwelling to capture the distinctive manner in which Dasein is in the world. To
dwell in a house is not merely to be inside it spatially in the sense just canvassed. Rather, it is to
belong there, to have a familiar place there. It is in this sense that Dasein is (essentially) in the
world. (Heidegger will later introduce an existential notion of spatiality that does help to
illuminate the sense in which Dasein is in the world. So now, what is the world such that Dasein
(essentially) dwells in it? To answer this question we need to spend some time unpacking the
Heideggerian concept of an ‘involvement’ (Bewandtnis).

The German term Bewandtnis is extremely difficult to translate in a way that captures all its
native nuances. And things are made more complicated by the fact that, during his exposition,
Heidegger freely employs a number of closely related notions, including ‘assignment’,
‘indication’ and ‘reference’. Nevertheless, what is clear is that Heidegger introduces the term
translated by some as ‘involvement’ to express the roles that equipmental entities play—the
ways in which they are involved—in Dasein's everyday patterns of activity. Crucially, for
Heidegger, an involvement is not a stand-alone structure, but rather a link in a network of

14
intelligibility that he calls a totality of involvements. Take the stock Heideggerian example: the
hammer is involved in an act of hammering; that hammering is involved in making something
fast; and that making something fast is involved in protecting the human agent against bad
weather. Such totalities of involvements are the contexts of everyday equipmental practice. As
such, they define equipmental entities, so the hammer is intelligible as what it is only with
respect to the shelter and, indeed, all the other items of equipment to which it meaningfully
relates in Dasein's everyday practices. This relational ontology generates Heidegger's ‘strong
systematicity condition’, as given voice in Heidegger's striking claim that ‘taken strictly, there
‘is’ no such thing as an equipment’. And this radical holism spreads, because once one begins to
trace a path through a network of involvements, one will inevitably traverse vast regions of
involvement-space. Thus links will be traced not only from hammers to hammering to making
fast to protection against the weather, but also from hammers to pulling out nails to dismantling
wardrobes to moving house. This behaviour will refer back to many other behaviours (packing,
van-driving) and thus to many other items of equipment (large boxes, removal vans), and so on.
The result is a large-scale holistic network of interconnected relational significance. Such
networks constitute worlds, in one of Heidegger's key senses of the term—an ontical sense that
he describes as having a pre-ontological signification.

Before a second key sense of the Heideggerian notion of world is revealed, some important detail
can be added to the emerging picture. Heidegger points out that involvements are not uniform
structures. Thus I am currently working with a computer (a with-which), in the practical context
of my office (an in-which), in order to write this encyclopedia entry (an in-order-to), which is
aimed towards presenting an introduction to Heidegger's philosophy (a towards-this), for the
sake of my academic work, that is, for the sake of my being an academic (a for-the-sake-of-
which). The final involvement here, the for-the-sake-of-which, is crucial, because according to
Heidegger all totalities of involvements have a link of this type at their base. This forges a
connection between (i) the idea that each moment in Dasein's existence constitutes a branch-
point at which it chooses a way to be, and (ii) the claim that Dasein's projects and possibilities
are essentially bound up with the ways in which other entities may become intelligible. This is
because every for-the-sake-of-which is the base structure of an equipment-defining totality of

15
involvements and reflects a possible way for Dasein to be (an academic, a carpenter, a parent, or
whatever).

Moreover, given that entities are intelligible only within contexts of activity that, so to speak,
arrive with Dasein, this helps to explain Heidegger's claim that, in encounters with entities, the
world is something with which Dasein is always already familiar. Finally, it puts further flesh on
the phenomenological category of the un-ready-to-hand. Thus when I am absorbed in trouble-
free typing, the computer and the role that it plays in my academic activity are transparent
aspects of my experience. But if the computer crashes, I become aware of it as an entity with
which I was working in the practical context of my office, in order to write an encyclopedia entry
aimed towards presenting an introduction to Heidegger's philosophy. And I become aware of the
fact that my behaviour is being organized for the sake of my being an academic. So disturbances
have the effect of exposing totalities of involvements and, therefore, worlds.

As already indicated, Heidegger sometimes uses the expression ‘world’ in a different key sense,
to designate what he calls the “ontologico-existential concept of worldhood”. At this point in the
existential analytic, worldhood is usefully identified as the abstract network mode of
organizational configuration that is shared by all concrete totalities of involvements. We shall
see, however, that as the hermeneutic spiral of the text unfolds, the notion of worldhood is
subject to a series of reinterpretations until, finally, its deep structure gets played out in terms of
temporality.

Being-with

Heidegger turns next to the question of “who it is that Dasein is in its everydayness”. He rejects
the idea of Dasein as a Cartesian ‘I-thing’ (the Cartesian thinking thing conceived as a
substance), since once again this would be to think of Dasein as present-at-hand. In searching for
an alternative answer, Heidegger observes that equipment is often revealed to us as being for the
sake of (the lives and projects of) other Dasein.

The boat anchored at the shore is assigned in its Being-in-itself to an acquaintance who
undertakes voyages with it; but even if it is a ‘boat which is strange to us’, it still is indicative of
Others. The Others who are thus ‘encountered’ in a ready-to-hand, environmental context of

16
equipment, are not somehow added on in thought to some Thing which is proximally just
present-at-hand; such ‘Things’ are encountered from out of a world in which they are ready-to-
hand for Others—a world which is always mine too in advance.

On the basis of such observations, Heidegger argues that to be Dasein at all means to Be-with:
‘So far as Dasein is at all, it has Being-with-one-another as its kind of Being’. One's immediate
response to this might be that it is just false. After all, ordinary experience establishes that each
of us is often alone. But of course Heidegger is thinking in an ontological register. Being-with
(Mitsein) is thus the a priori transcendental condition that makes it possible that Dasein can
discover equipment in this Other-related fashion. And it's because Dasein has Being-with as one
of its essential modes of Being that everyday Dasein can experience being alone. Being-with is
thus the a priori transcendental condition for loneliness.

It is important to understand what Heidegger means by ‘Others’, a term that he uses

interchangeably with the more evocative ‘the “they” ’ (das Man).

Each society seems to have its own sense of what counts as an appropriate distance to stand from
someone during verbal communication, and this varies depending on whether the other person is
a lover, a friend, a colleague, or a business acquaintance, and on whether communication is
taking place in noisy or quiet circumstances. Such standing-distance practices are of course
normative, in that they involve a sense of what one should and shouldn't do. And the norms in
question are culturally specific. So what this example illustrates is that the phenomenon of the
Others, the ‘who’ of everyday Dasein, the group from whom for the most part I do not stand out,
is my culture, understood not as the sum of all its members, but as an ontological phenomenon in
its own right. This explains the following striking remark. “The ‘who’ is not this one, not that
one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the
‘they’ ”. Another way to capture this idea is to say that what I do is determined largely by ‘what
one does’, and ‘what one does’ is something that I absorb in various ways from my culture. Thus
Dreyfus prefers to translate das Man not as ‘the “they” ’, but as ‘the one’.

This all throws important light on the phenomenon of world, since we can now see that the
crucial for-the-sake-of-which structure that stands at the base of each totality of involvements is

17
culturally and historically conditioned. The specific ways in which I behave for the sake of being
an academic are what one does if one wants to be considered a good academic, at this particular
time, in this particular historically embedded culture (carrying out research, tutoring students,
giving lectures, and so on). As Heidegger himself puts the point: “Dasein is for the sake of the
‘they’ in an everyday manner, and the ‘they’ itself articulates the referential context of
significance”). Worlds (the referential context of significance, networks of involvements) are
then culturally and historically conditioned, from which several things seem to follow. First,
Dasein's everyday world is, in the first instance, and of its very essence, a shared world. Second,
Being-with and Being-in-the-world are, if not equivalent, deeply intertwined. And third, the
sense in which worlds are Dasein-dependent involves some sort of cultural relativism, although,
as we shall see later, this final issue is one that needs careful interpretative handling.

Critics of the manner in which Heidegger develops the notion of Being-with have often focused,
albeit in different ways, on the thought that Heidegger either ignores or misconceives the
fundamental character of our social existence by passing over its grounding in direct
interpersonal interaction. From this perspective, the equipmentally mediated discovery of others
that Heidegger sometimes describes (see above) is at best a secondary process that reveals other
people only to the extent that they are relevant to Dasein's practical projects. Moreover, it’s
argued that although Heidegger's account clearly involves the idea that Dasein discovers socially
shared equipmental meaning (which then presumably supports the discovery of other Dasein
along with equipment), that account fails to explain why this must be the case. Processes of
direct interpersonal contact (e.g., in learning the use of equipment from others) might plausibly
fill this gap. The obvious move for Heidegger to make here is to claim that the processes that the
critics find to be missing from his account, although genuine, are not a priori, transcendental
structures of Dasein. Rather, they are psychological factors that enable (in a ‘merely’
developmental or causal way) human beings to realize the phenomenon of Being-with (see e.g.,
Heidegger's response to the existentialist psychologist and therapist Binswanger in the Zollikon
seminars). However, one might wonder whether it is plausible to relegate the social processes in
question to the status of ‘mere’ enabling factors. If not, then Heidegger's notion of Being-with is
at best an incomplete account of our social Being.

THE WHO OF DASEIN

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Who is Dasein?

That may sound like a strange question, and in fact it’s. Not because the term ‘Dasein’ is a
strange one, but because the answer seems so straight forward. If Dasein is in each case ‘mine’,
then it would seem that, in my case anyway, the answer would be I myself, this person named
Abebe, this individual, this self or subject; I am who Dasein is in this case. And each of you
should be able to answer in the same way. What could be more obvious?

But Heidegger thinks this easy and familiar answer covers up or disguises the ontological reality.
To talk of self or subject is to fall prey to the temptation to suppose that I am a thing, a kind of
‘soul substance’ (perhaps the way Descartes thinks). But the Being of Dasein in its
everydayness is not lighted up by this kind of answer; rather it’s hidden. This question is then in
order: who is Dasein as it exists in its averageness?

Heidegger’s phenomenological answer to the question about the ‘who’ of Dasein in

everydayness is das Man. This phrase is based on an ordinary German term that occurs in
contexts like Man sagt, which can be rendered as ‘One says’, or ‘it is said that’ or perhaps as
‘They say.’

So Heidegger finds that Dasein in its everydayness is this ‘They’ or the ‘One.’ But what does
that mean? We have already seen that Others are ‘given’ along with the ready-to-hand (e.g. with
this shirt, which was cut and sewn in a factory somewhere.) And if our account is to be
phenomenologically adequate, it must record the fact that Others are encountered as themselves
Bing-in-the-world. The Others, too, exist with that same concernful Being-in-the-world as I do.

Moreover, the existence of others like me is not something that has to come as the conclusion of
an argument, as the old problem of other minds suggests. I do not start first with myself and then
conclude on the basis of similarity between observable facts of myself and Others thst they must
be persons too. That would not be an accurate description of my experience of others.

Being-with is, like Being-in-the-world, an existential- one of the characteristics that defines
Dasein’s Being. This means that Dasein could not exist without Others, anymore than it could
exist without the world. It’s part of Dasein’s very Being with Others-in-the-world. This is true
even when Dasein is alone or neglects the Others or is indifferent to them. The anchorite carries

19
the Others with her into the cave in her ability to speak a language, to think, to meditate in the
way she does; this carrying with is what it means to say that Being-with is an existential.

The discovery of Being-with is an important step. But it does not yet get us clearly to the
‘who’of Dasein. There is a clue, however, in the phrase, ‘those from whom…one does not
distinguish oneself.’ We could paradoxically put it this way: One is, oneself, one of the others. In
fact, Heidegger tells us, we are so much one of the ‘they’ that we are constantly concerned lest
we differ too much from them.

We can think of this as the existential foundation for the familiar phenomenon of ‘keeping up
with the Jonses.’ Heidegger calls it distantiality (another of those invented words) ; he uses the
term to signify the constant concern of Dasein that it might get too far away from the norm- from
what ‘they say,’ or what ‘one does.’ Either one doesn’t want too large a distance to open up
between oneself and the Others,or one takes care to preserve a certain ‘appropriate distance.’

Heidegger suggests that this phenomenon is ‘hidden from Dasein. And, indeed, I think that is so.
When I have suggested to young people that an enormous part of their lives is governed by
norms they participate in but hardly aware of, I usually get a lot f resistance. They all want to
think of themselves as unique, self-made individuals. But we all do many things the same way. If
one spells ‘existence’ as ‘existance’ then he’ll be corrected. We do as they do. When someone
strays, they are brought back in line, usually so gently that it is scarcely noticed, but forcefully if
necessary. Let’s take one of these ‘they’ phenomena from everydayness and examine it.:
consider the ‘proper’ distance to stand from someone you are talking with. Social scientists will
tell you that there is a ‘norm’ here based on your cultural background. You almost certainly
behave according to your cultural norm, and you are uncomfortable if it’s violated. Is this
something you decided? Certainly not. What is its ground, its reason, its justification- its logos?
There really doesn’t seem to be any. Is there a Platonic Form governing this matter? No. Is it
‘natural’? No, though it feels natural to us, just as other distances feel natural to people of other
cultures. Where does it come from, this ‘naturalness’- this ‘rightness,’ even- that we are
uncomfortable violating? Can there be any answer than ‘that is what we do?’ This is how it’s
done, how One does it. That is all the foundation it has.

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Along with distantiality, the phenomenon of averageness is an existential characteristic of the
One. And this involves a kind of leveling down, in which every kind of uniqueness, oddness, or
priority is smoothed out as much as possible. We noted the public character of the world as
manifest in ready-to-hand items. Now we see that the world is a common, public world in
another sense, too. The ‘way things are done’ is set by the One, not by each Dasein privately for
itself. The world of the Oneis a public world from the start. It’s into that world, moreover, that
Dasein comes from the very beginning; it’s the One that shapes it and makes Dasein’s ‘who’
what it is. We are all das Man. The public character of the world of the One- the world of
everyday Dasein (our world) – has an interesting consequence.

Who is responsible for the way everyday life goes? No one. It is just the way One does it. Dasein
conforms to this way of Being. Dasein falls-in-with-it. Notice that this is not – so far- something
for which Dasein is to blame; distantiality and averageness are existential; that is, they are
aspects of the very essence of Dasein’s existence. It couldn’t be otherwise for Dasein. And isn’t
this fortunate? T have to bear the burden of responsibility for the whole of the way one lives
would be too much; the’they’ is there to help out. In its average everydayness, Dasein does not
feel this burden because

It’s important to note that Heidegger distinguishes three modes in which Dasein can relate itself
to itself: inauthenticity, authenticity and an undifferentiated mode, which is neither. We have so
far been trying to describe the undifferentiated mode of Dasein’s existence, though the eagerness
with which Dasein accepts the ‘disburdening’ is a hint of what inauthenticity amounts to. As a
being for whom its own Being is always at issue, Dasein is always facing the decision between
existing inauthentically or authentically; it always exists predominantly in one mode or the other.
We will explore these modes more fully, but we can now say that authentic existence is not a
grasping of some nature or essence of oneself quite different from the ‘they-self’; it’s, rather, a
matter of coming to terms with the fact that this is what one is and that one is no more than this.
And inauthentic existence is a way of hiding this truth from oneself. Existing as ‘the one’ is not
yet inauthentic. But ‘the One’ constantly presents to Dasein the possibility of evading the
disquieting aspects of having to Be the being that it is by fleeing into the security of what ‘they
say.’ Thus the One is both a constitutive factor in Dasein and a temptation to inauthenticity.

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For now, though, we can see that the answer to the question about the ‘who’ of Dasein is this: in
its average everydayness, Dasein exists in the mode of ‘the One.’ Dasein (you and I in our way
of existing) belongs to ‘the they.’

MODES OF DISCLOSURE

What makes Dasein seem a promising entity to analyze, given that the meaning of Being is our
quarry, is the fact that Dasein’s Being is an issue for it. That means that Dasein has an
understanding of its own Being, though it’s not explicitly worked out. But what sort of
understanding is this? In what ways is Dasein already always disclosed to itself? Think of a dark
and dense forest, and in the midst of it imagine a clearing. The clearing opens up a space within
which flowers and trees appear; in fact it’s the clearing that is the condition for anything at all
being visible. And now with this in mind, let us ask is there such a clearing in the world? Does
Dasein exist in such a clearing? Not exactly, Heidegger answers. Rather, he wants to say, Dasein
is such a clearing.

A human being that was not in itself this kind of openness to beings and Being would not yet be
a Dasein; such a human would, perhaps, be a corpse. In any case, it would not be ‘there.’
Disclosedness is part of the existential condition of Dasein.

Heidegger discusses this ‘thereness’ of Dasein under three headings: attunement, understanding
and discourse.

Attunement

We are sometimes asked ‘how are you doing?’ The surprising thing is that we can always
answer. And in answering we report our mood. We say ‘fine’ or ‘awful’- I failed the exam.’
Heidegger claims that moods don’t just happen; they’re not just meaningless present-at-hand
items we undergo, the way our heart sometimes beats faster and sometimes slower. Moods are
cognitive. They are disclosive. But what do they disclose? They reveal how we are coping with
this business of having to exist, that is, how we are bearing the burden of having to be here.
Dasein is ‘attuned’ to its own being.

Moreover, moods are not experienced as private states or feelings, independent of the world out
there. Suppose you are in a bad mood, that (as we say) you got out of bed on the wrong side this

22
morning. Where, phenomenologically speaking, does this mood reveal itself? In your head, while
the world goes on its sunny way? Not at all. Nothing, you are likely to say, is going right.
Everything seems to be against you. Your world is dark. And why should it not be so, if your
Being is indeed Being-in-the-world? Moods are pervasive, coluring everything. Suppose you
have been watching a horror movie on a video all alone, late at night. Thereafter, every creak in
the house and every gust of wind takes on an ominous quality. You anxiously check the locks
and make sure the windows are closed. The world is now a scary place. How are you now
bearing the burden of having to be there? Not very well.

Dasein never exists without a mood. Even the flat, calm, easygoing character of an average day
is a mood. Dasein is, remember, its disclosedness. In revealing its ‘thereness,’ Dasin’s mood
discloses how Dasein is attuned to its world. In this disclosure is revealed a further aspect of
Dasein’s Being: thrownness. We find ourselves ‘thrown’ in the world in the following sense.
None of us chose to be born, nor did we decide to be born in the twentieth century, rather than
the thirteenth. Nor were we consulted about whether we would be American, Ethiopian or
Chinese, nor if we preferred to be male or female, nor black nor white. Nor were we consulted to
be born just to these parents in just that town with just those relatives with a certain very specific
kind of living condition. We just find ourselves in existence- in a world of a particular sort,
having one language rather than another and one characteristic way of looking at things, rather
than another. We are as Heidegger says delivered over to our there, to our world.

To put this idea differently, who we are is a very particular sort of One; there is no help for it, for
we are ‘thrown’ into one ‘they’ rather than another. Even if we eventually reject certain features
of this One, as characteristically happen when human beings mature, we do so drawing on the
resources available in this world; we cannot make use of, for instance, of the psychological and
technological discoveries of the 23rd century.

This thrownness is a fact. It’s a fact about our Being. So it’s an Ontological fact. Heidegger uses
two words for facts. Ordinary facts (that this material is written in English) he calls factual. Facts
about things present-at-hand are factual. Ontological facts about Dasein, facts about us not as
beings, but about our Being (or way of Being), he calls factical. Our being a ‘clearing’ for
instance, is factical; our Being-in-the-world is factical; our thrownness is part of our facticity. In

23
attempting a ‘fundamental Ontology’ of Dasein, then Heidegger is investigating its faticity: the
facts about its Being. The facticity of our being thrown is one the things that moods reveal.

A phenomenologist could go through mood after mood and display the character of each as
revealing an aspect of Dasein’s Being. But Heidegger focuses on one mood in particular, which
he thinks has far-reaching implications namely, anxiety.

Like all moods anxiety is cognitively significant; that is it discloses something. Anxiety is rather
like fear; but it would be big mistake to confuse them. Fear discloses the fearful: some particular
threat to a future possibility of Dasein (a charging bull, etc.). Anxiety by contrast reveals a very
general feature of Dasein’s Being. Anxiety is directed, not to particular threatening entity, but to
something more fundamental and far-reaching.

What is Being-in-the- world? We already know; it’s the most existential characteristic of Dasein.
So what Dasein is anxious-in-the-face-of is itself. Heidegger is suggesting that anxiety reveals in
a peculiarly conspicuous way Dasein’s having-to-Be. Ordinarily, average Dasein goes along
‘absorbed’ in the world of its concern, engaged in projects that seem unquestionably to have a
point and meaning. But if we remember that the self of everyday Dasein is the One, we can see
that these projects are those set down by the public world; they have their meaning dictated by
the ‘they.’ And normally Dasein does not notice this. In its average everydayness, Dasein is
delivered over to Being-in-the-public-world-of-already-assigned-significances. Dasein has
‘fallen-in’ with the world of what ‘One says,’ what ‘one does and doesn’t do.’

Anxiety, Heidegger suggests is unique among moods because it’s a disclosure of that world as
such. Unlike fear, in which some entity within the world is apprehended possibly detrimental, the
object of anxiety is no ‘thing’. If a person suffering from anxiety is asked what he is afraid of, he
replies ‘nothing’. And that Heidegger says is explicitly right; nothing in the world is the object of
this mood. Rather that whole system of assignments and references that makes up the worldhood
of the world becomes present and stands over against one. No longer caught up in it, Dasein
beholds it as something alien to itself. Dasein catches sight of itself as Being-engaged in this now
alien world of the One. And it shudders.

The meaningfulness of the world slips away. Significance vaporizes. The world doesn’t exactly
become meaningless; it’s still the world (i.e., a set of in-order-to’s). But in anxiety one is

24
detached from it; it means nothing to the particular Dasein that is gripped by anxiety. One can
still see others going through the motions, but it seems absurd. Anxiety distances us from our
everyday Being-in. It makes clear that how I am to be is a matter of choice, that the
responsibility lies squarely with me. As Heidegger says anxiety ‘individualizes.’ It separates us
out from the One.

Wrenched out of the familiar ‘falling-in’ with the way of the world, Dasein experiences itself as
not-at-home-in-the-world. Yet, it’s essentially nothing but Being-in-the-world. Dasein has no
other reality; it cannot repair to its own ‘substance’ or enjoy its own ‘essence’ apart from the
world. ‘Just be yourself’, we are often advised. But, if Heidegger is right, there is no one for us to
be apart from the world of the One. In anxiety then Dasein is made aware of that fact, but in the
mode of not being at home in it. There is no home but that home, yet, anxiously, we are
homeless.

On the one hand, anxiety reveals with the penetrating clarity the nature of Dsein’s Being. But on
the other hand, it provides a powerful motivation for Dasein to hide itself from itself--- to flee
back into the comfortable, familiar, well-ordered, meaningful world of the One, to avoid the
risky business of taking up responsibility for one’s own Being. That is why Heidegger says that
Dasein is anxious about its ‘authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world.’ Anxiety presents
Dasein with the clear choice between existing authentically or inauthentically. The temptation is
to flee back into the world, to be reabsorbed in it, to shut one’s eyes to the fact that a decision
about one’s way of life is called for.

The temptation is to think that our lives are as antecedently well ordered as the career of a
hammer---- that the meaning of life is given and doesn’t have to be forged. To flee back to the
pre-decided life of the One would ‘disburden’ Dasein and quiet anxiety. But such fleeing on the
part of Dasein would be ‘falling-away-from’ itself, the inauthentic kind of falling. Falling away
from oneself is the same as falling-prey-to the One. So Dasein ‘tranquilizes’ itself in the familiar
world of significance, fleeing away from its oneness and its-not-at-homeness into the world of
the One; thus it disguises from itself its true Being (that its Being is an issue). We crave a world
in which we can say, ‘I had no choice.’ And behold, in the world of the One, all crucial decisions
are already made, dictated by the norms of what One does and doesn’t do. The possibilities open
to Dasein are ‘disposed of’ beforehand. One’s life is settled. And anxiety is covered up.

25
Moods, then, are cognitively significant; they always tell us something about ourselves and, in
particular, about our Being. Among the moods, anxiety most clearly reveals the Being of Dasein-
--- that it’s thrown-Being-in-the-world-of-the-One. And in doing so, it both distances Dasein
from that Being and provides a motivation for falling back into that world in an inauthentic way.

Understanding

In one way or another, Dasein is always ‘attuned’ to its world. But every attunement carries with
it an understanding of that world (and every understanding has its mood) ; understanding, says
Heidegger, is equiprimordial with attunement (meaning that they come together and neither can
be derived from the other). We have already met understanding. Dasein from the beginning has
been held to be that being who--- simply by virtue of Being has an understanding of its Being.
To be ‘there,’ in fact, is to understand.

We can begin in a very familiar way by examining what we mean when we say Abebe
understands watches. We mean that he is competent with watches and that he can adjust and
repair them. He may not necessarily have the ability to write a book about them. If watches cause
us any trouble then Abebe can fix them and make them functional once again. His understanding
of watches goes beyond the mere ability to describe the current present-at-hand state of watches.
More precisely this means Abebe perceives the potential of watches--- a state which is not the
current state of the watches. Thus Abebe’s understanding of watches is a matter of being able to
bring them from a condition of not working to one of performance, a possibility not realized
now.

This notion of possibility is also involved in the existential understanding that belongs to Dasein.
For what does Dasein essentially understand? Itself, in its own Being. Suppose someone (God,
may be) had a list of everything factually true of you at this moment: every hair in your head, the
state of every neuron in your brain, and every thought and feeling. Would this list tell us who
you are? It would not, even if it listed every fact about you since you were born. Why not?
because you, as a case of Dasein, are not something present-at-hand, a mere collection of facts;
you are essentially what you can be. You are a certain potentiality-for-Being. Unless I
understand your possibilities, I will not understand you.

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Now let’s shift the perspective. Rather than thinking of what would be required for a third party
to understand you, think about what it would take to understand yourself. The answer is nothing-
beyond your Being there. To exist is to understand. Understanding (as an existential) is having
competence over one’s Being; that is not something added on by way of an extra. That is what it
is to exist. And this understanding is an understanding of possibility. Right now at this very
moment you are an understanding of your possibilities (e.g. The possibility of continuing to read
this material, graduating etc.) You exist these potentialities in your every thought and movement.
And this understanding, which you are, is not something that you need to conceptualize or
explicitly think about. It just is a certain competence with respect to your Being that you cannot
help manifesting.

How is it that understanding is a basic part of Dasein, not something added to it? Understanding
has the structure of projection. We are always projecting ourselves into possibilities. Again we
must be careful not to think of this as thinking about possibilities or having them in mind. It’s
more primordial than that. To understand a chair, for instance, is to be prepared to sit rather than
wear it. To understand oneself as a student is to project oneself into potentially mastering
Contemporary Philosophy, English or into the possibility of being a University graduate.
Understanding oneself as a student permeates one’s Being. To exist in a specific situation is to
have an understanding (or a misunderstanding) of the promise or menace that is impending.
Understanding in this fundamental sense is a matter of our Being. It’s an aspect of what it means
to exist. Since we are what we can be, possibility is more fundamental to our Being than the
actuality of the facts about us. And these possibilities are not something external to our Being.
They are possibilities that we are.

This understanding, as a kind of competence with respect to the potentialities of our Being, is
always there; just because it’s always there, however, it tends to be tacit. But it can be developed
more explicitly; it then takes the form of interpretation. Interpretation is not something different
from understanding; it’s understanding itself come to fruition. Consider the light switch in your
room, something you understand very well in one sense; you operate with it in such a familiar
way that you rarely notice it; you may not even tell me its colour. But suppose one day it fails to
function. Now its place in the functional world is disturbed; you had all along been taking its role
as equipment for granted i.e. understanding it implicitly. But now it comes to the fore, and now

27
you understand it explicitly--- as a device to transmit electricity. This ‘as’ structure is already
implicit in your everyday and familiar understanding. But now it’s expressed; it becomes explicit
in an interpretation. Interpretation always lays bare the structure of something as something.

The fact that interpretation (whether of a device, a text, the meaning of someone’s action, and so
on) is always founded on a prior understanding has an important implication for Heidegger.
There is no way we can disengage ourselves from our Being-in-the-world sufficiently to
guarantee a completely ‘objective’ view of something. Every interpretation always takes
something for granted; it’s worked out on some background that is not itself available for
inspection and decision. That does not mean that truth is unavailable to Dasein. But it does mean
that Dasein is involved in a kind of circle it cannot get out of. Interpretation is understanding ‘x’
as ‘y’--- for example, the switch as a device for controlling the flow of electricity. But
interpretation just makes explicit that prior understanding of it as a switch in the first place. That
understanding is a matter of having a certain competence with respect to it. Such competent
understanding is a matter of (largely unreflective) projection, of ways of behaving towards what
could be. And all this exists only on the background of our Being-in-the-world in general, which
involves understanding the potentialities of such equipment as light switches.

This circle is usually called the hermeneutic circle; all interpretation is caught up in what is
understood beforehand. It’s not a vicious circle, Heidegger maintains. But it’s one that should be
recognized.

The right way is to come without illusions (that is without imagining that one can get a bare look
at the object of interpretation) and to be as clear and explicit as possible about what one is
bringing to the interpretive task. Part of Heidegger’s conviction is that this background can never
be made completely explicit. For it’s this background that Dasein is.

To sum up, understanding, like attunement, is an existential. There is no Being-there that does
not involve understanding. The primordial mode of understanding is a kind of know-how or
competence with respect to things, particularly with respect to Dasein’s own Being. This is
largely implicit, but it can be spelled out in an interpretation. It’s just such an interpretation that
Heidegger is striving to construct with respect to the meaning of Dasein’s Being and ultimately
for the meaning of Being in general.

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Discourse

Because the world of Dasein is the world of significations (in-order-to-whichs, and for-the-sake-
ofs), Dasein exists in an articulated world, like a hen, it has ‘joints’ at which it can be carved.
The hammer is distinct from the nails but is for pounding them into the boards, which are a third
articulated item. In understanding how to use a hammer, Dasein displays a primordial
understanding of this articulation. As we have seen, this primitive kind of understanding can be
made explicit in interpretation. And now we must add that interpretation itself is a phenomenon-
in-the-world only in terms of discourse.

Discourse, Heidegger says, is equiprimordial with attunement and understanding. (Again this
means that while it cannot be reduced to either of them it’s equally basic.) Discourse too is an
existential. It’s an essential characteristic of Dasein. There is no Dasein that doesn’t talk. In talk
or discourse the articulations of the world of Dasein are expressed in language. Moreover, we
talk with one another, so discourse essentially involves Being-with. Discourse involves
communication.

Heidegger warns us against the Cartesian picture of the isolated subject shut up within the walls
of the mind and forced to find some way to ‘convey’ a message across an empty space to another
such subject. As Being-with, we already live in a common world with others--- the public world
of equipment and its structural articulation. In discourse we ‘take hold’ of this common legacy
and express it in language.

Falling- Away- Dasein’s Inauthenticity

With the analysis of the modes of disclosure, the general shape of Heidegger’s fundamental
Ontology is coming into view. Dasein is

- Being-in-the-world
- Being-with-the-others
- Falling-in-with-the-One
- Thrown
- A clearing, manifesting itself in attunement, understanding and discourse

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We also know that Dasein has the potentiality for existing in either authentic or inauthentic
fashion. We need to understand these alternatives more clearly. Let’s begin by discussing
inauthenticity.

Dasein is Being-in-the-world and as such ‘falls-in-with’ the ‘others’ who constitute the ‘One’.
Dasein has no secret, private essence out of which it could fail; nor is Dasein initially ‘innocent’,
later falling into sin. As long as we are talking about the first kind of falling i.e. falling-in-with---
questions of innocence or guilt are not yet in order. This kind of falling is a constitutive,
ontological characteristic of what it is to be Dasein.

In discussing anxiety, we noted that Dasein is tempted to flee its anxious homelessness and lose
itself in the tranquilizing security of the public world. But Heidegger now wants to go a step
further and claim that simply Being-in-the-world is itself tempting. For the world is, after all the
world of the One. And to understand why this might by its very nature tempt Dasein toward
inauthenticity, we need to understand the modes of disclosure characteristic of the One. How
does One understand? How are ‘they’ attuned to their Being? What sort of discourse is Dasein
thrown into as it takes up its Being-in-the-world?

Idle Talk

As we have seen, discourse has its Being in language, which expresses the articulations making
up the world. Discourse is essentially revealing, disclosing. It opens up the world. But in average
everydayness, discourse tends toward being just idle talk.

This is something you can test for yourself. Listen carefully to the conversations that go on
among your acquaintances ; see how much of their ‘everyday’ talk is just a matter of latching on
to ‘what-is-said’ as such, without any deep commitment to the subject being discussed or to the
truth about it. How much of it is just chatter? Or an attempt to impose opinions on others? How
much is what Wittgenstein calls ‘just gassing’? It’s into the idle talk of the One that Dasein is
thrown, when it’s thrown into the world.

Discourse is an existential; it’s one of the essential characteristics of Dasein. Dasein is a talking
entity. But when Dasein falls-in-with the others in its world, as it must, it also falls-in with this
degenerate form of discourse. Note that there is no possibility of extricating ourselves from idle

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talk. It’s the milieu in which we exist. The best we can do is to struggle against it---- from within
it and toward genuine understanding. But as long as we remain inauthentically content with
what-is-said, idle talk will cover over the meaning of Being, including the meaning of our own
Being. That is why Heidegger can say ‘Being-in-the-world is in itself tempting.’

Curiosity

Dasein, we have said, is in its Being a ‘clearing’ in the midst of the world. It’s a clearing because
understanding is an aspect of its essence. But in its average everydayness, understanding, too,
tends to become shallow and disconnected from Being. As long as we are absorbed in our work,
hammering away on the roof, our understanding is engaged in the project. But when we take rest
understanding idles. And then it becomes curiosity. Curiosity is a concern just to see---- but not
in order to understand what one sees.

Ambiguity

Because of the predominance of idle talk and curiosity, ambiguity pervades Dasein’s Being-in-
the-world.

Genuine understanding of something is, of course, difficult. It takes time, patience and careful
attention. But in a day when the results of the most mathematically sophisticated physics are
reported in the daily paper in a way that is supposed to inform the average person, who can tell
what is truly understood and what is not? Since understanding is the ‘light of nature’ in which
beings and Being are ‘cleared,’ and since understanding is essential to the very Being of Dasein a
deadly ambiguity seeps into Dasein’s existence.

Dasein, in its average everydayness is the One. But the average everydayness of the One is
characterized by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.

In falling-in-with the way of the world, Dasein tends to fall away from itself. While it’s
important to keep these two notions distinct, one gets the definite impression that Heidegger
believes the first invariably brings the second with it. Dasein falls away from itself by failing to
grasp its own Being clearly----- with understanding. It understands itself the way ‘they’
understand. It even takes its mood, its way of being attuned, from the One—what matters to
Dasein is what ‘they say’ matters. Dasein does not decisively seize itself for itself; it lets itself

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float, lost in the interpretations of the public ‘they’. It is this not being one’s own, belonging only
to the One, that is the heart of inauhtenticity. And we all are inauthentic in this way.

This idea is driven home by a further reflection about thrownness. To this point, we have talked
about being ‘thrown’ into the world as if it were an event that happened to us once, at birth. But
Heidegger maintains that we are constantly being thrown into the world.

Dasein remains in the throw as long as it is. We are constanly being thrown into the world, and
the world is always the world of the One. This has important implications for what authentic
existence might be. Authentic existence is not something that floats above falling everydayness;
existentially, it’s only a modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon.

Care

Heidegger’s interpretation of the Ontology of Dasein is rich and complex. We have explored
quite a number of the existentials, or ‘categories’ that define its way of Being. At this point
Heidegger asks whether this multiplicity of concepts is founded in a deeper unity. He thinks he
can point to a unifying ontological concept, in the light of which all the rest make sense.

The simplified, single phenomenon that lies at the root of Dasein’s Being, Heidegger tells us, is
Care. Care is understood as the ontological structure that makes possible Dasein’s everyday
concerns for its projects, its solicitude for Others, even its willing and wishing. In typical
Heideggerian fashion, Care is spelled out as

- Being-ahead-of-itself by projecting toward its possibilities, while

- Being-in-the-world, and
- Being engaged with entities encountered within-the-world

It’s important to note that Care is not some special ‘ontic’ attitude that Dasein might occasionally
display. Care is the Being of Dasein: without Care, no Being-there. Care is manifest in all
understanding, from the intensely practical to the most purely theoretical. It’s present in
attunement and in all discourse. Dasein is not fundamentally the rational animal, not basically the
ego cogito, not primarily a knower. What is most fundamental to Dasein’s Being is caring:
Dasein is the being for whom things matter. And that brings us right back to the very beginning,
where we noticed that Dasein is that being for whom its own Being is an issue.

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Heidegger supports this interpretation of the unity of Dasein’s Being by quoting an old Latin
fable about the creation of human beings by the gods:

“Once when ‘Care’ was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and
began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by. ‘Care’
asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted her name to be
bestowed upon it, he forbade this, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While ‘Care’
and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose and desired that her own name be conferred on the
creature, since she had furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn to be their arbiter,
and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: ‘Since you, Jupiter, have given its
spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you
shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it
lives.”

We have in Care, then, a single, unitary, simple foundation for all the complexities we have so
far discovered in the Being of Dasein.

Division 2

Death
As the argument of Being and Time continues its ever-widening hermeneutic spiral into Division
2 of the text, Heidegger announces a twofold transition in the analysis. He argues that we should
(i) pay proper heed to the thought that to understand Dasein we need to understand Dasein's
existence as a whole, and (ii) shift the main focus of our attention from the inauthentic self (the
they-self) to the authentic self (the mine-self). Both of these transitions figure in Heidegger's
discussion of death.

So far, Dasein's existence has been understood as thrown projection plus falling. The projective
aspect of this phenomenon means that, at each moment of its life, Dasein is Being-ahead-of-
itself, oriented towards the realm of its possibilities, and is thus incomplete. Death completes
Dasein's existence. Therefore, an understanding of Dasein's relation to death would make an
essential contribution to our understanding of Dasein as a whole. But now a problem
immediately presents itself: since one cannot experience one's own death, it seems that the kind

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of phenomenological analysis that has hitherto driven the argument of Being and Time breaks
down, right at the crucial moment. One possible response to this worry, canvassed explicitly by
Heidegger, is to suggest that Dasein understands death through experiencing the death of others.
However, the sense in which we experience the death of others falls short of what is needed. We
mourn departed others and miss their presence in the world. But that is to experience Being-with
them as dead, which is a mode of our continued existence.

What we don't have, then, is phenomenological access to the loss of Being that the dead person
has suffered. But that, it seems, is precisely what we would need in order to carry through the
favoured analysis. So another response is called for. Heidegger's move is to suggest that although
Dasein cannot experience its own death as actual, it can relate towards its own death as a
possibility that is always before it—always before it in the sense that Dasein's own death is
inevitable. Peculiarly among Dasein's possibilities, the possibility of Dasein's own death must
remain only a possibility, since once it becomes actual, Dasein is no longer. Death is thus the
‘possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all’. And it is this awareness of death as an
omnipresent possibility that cannot become actual that stops the phenomenological analysis from
breaking down. The detail here is crucial. What the failure of the ‘death of others’ strategy
indicates is that in each instance death is inextricably tied to some specific individual Dasein. My
death is mine in a radical sense; it is the moment at which all my relations to others disappear.
Heidegger captures this non-relationality by using the term ‘own most’. And it is the idea of
death “as that possibility which is one's own most” that engages the second transition highlighted
above. When I take on board the possibility of my own not-Being, my own being-able-to-Be is
brought into proper view. Hence my awareness of my own death as an omnipresent possibility
discloses the authentic self (a self that is mine). Moreover, the very same awareness engages the
first of the aforementioned transitions too: there is a sense in which the possibility of my not
existing encompasses the whole of my existence, and my awareness of that possibility
illuminates me, qua Dasein, in my totality. Indeed, my own death is revealed to me as inevitable,
meaning that Dasein is essentially finite. This explains why Heidegger says that death is
disclosed to Dasein as a possibility which is “not to be outstripped”.

Heidegger's account of Dasein's relation towards the possibility of its own not-Being forms the
backbone of a reinterpretation of the phenomenon of care—the ‘formally existential totality of

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Dasein's ontological structural whole’. Care is now interpreted in terms of Being-towards-death,
meaning that Dasein has an internal relation to the nothing. As one might expect, Heidegger
argues that Being-towards-death not only has the three-dimensional character of care, but is
realized in authentic and inauthentic modes. Let's begin with the authentic mode. We can think
of the aforementioned individualizing effect of Dasein's awareness of the possibility of its own
not-Being (an awareness that illuminates its own being-able-to-Be) as an event in which Dasein
projects onto a possible way to be, in the technical sense of such possibilities introduced earlier
in Being and Time. It is thus an event in which Dasein projects onto a for-the-sake-of-which, a
possible way to be. More particularly, given the authentic character of the phenomenon, it is an
event in which Dasein projects onto a for-the-sake-of-itself. Heidegger now coins the term
anticipation to express the form of projection in which one looks forward to a possible way to
be. Given the analysis of death as a possibility, the authentic form of projection in the case of
death is anticipation. Indeed Heidegger often uses the term anticipation in a narrow way, simply
to mean being aware of death as a possibility. But death is disclosed authentically not only in
projection (the first dimension of care) but also in thrownness (the second dimension). The key
phenomenon here is the mode of disposedness that Heidegger calls anxiety. Anxiety, at least in
the form in which Heidegger is interested, is not directed towards some specific object, but rather
opens up the world to me in a certain distinctive way. When I am anxious I am no longer at
home in the world. I fail to find the world intelligible. Thus there is an ontological sense (one to
do with intelligibility) in which I am not in the world, and the possibility of a world without me
(the possibility of my not-Being-in-the-world) is revealed to me. ‘[The] state-of-mind [mode of
disposedness] which can hold open the utter and constant threat to itself arising from Dasein's
own most individualized Being, is anxiety. In this state-of-mind, Dasein finds itself face to face
with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence’. Heidegger has now reinterpreted
two of the three dimensions of care, in the light of Dasein's essential finitude. But now what
about the third dimension, identified previously as fallen-ness? Since we are presently
considering a mode of authentic, i.e., not fallen, Dasein, it seems that fallen-ness cannot be a
feature of this realization of care, and indeed that a general reformulation of the care structure is
called for in order to allow for authentic Being. This is an issue that will be addressed in the next
section. First, though, the inauthentic form of Being-towards-death needs to be brought into
view.

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In everyday Being-towards-death, the self that figures in the for-the-sake-of-itself structure is not
the authentic mine-self, but rather the inauthentic they-self. In effect, the ‘they’ obscures our
awareness of the meaning of our own deaths by de-individualizing death. As Heidegger explains:
in ‘Dasein's public way of interpreting, it is said that ‘one dies’, because everyone else and
oneself can talk himself into saying that ‘in no case is it I myself’, for this ‘one’ is the ‘nobody’ ’.
In this way, everyday Dasein flees from the meaning of its own death, in a manner determined
by the ‘they’. It is in this evasion in the face of death, interpreted as a further way in which
Dasein covers up Being, that everyday Dasein's fallen-ness now manifests itself. To be clear:
evasion here does not necessarily mean that I refuse outright to acknowledge that I will someday
die. After all, as I might say, ‘everyone dies’. However, the certainty of death achieved by idle
talk of this kind is of the wrong sort. One might think of it as established by the conclusion of
some sort of inductive inference from observations of many cases of death (the deaths of many
others). But ‘we cannot compute the certainty of death by ascertaining how many cases of death
we encounter’.

The certainty brought into view by such an inference is a sort of empirical certainty, one which
conceals the apodictic character of the inevitability with which my own death is authentically
revealed to me. In addition, as we have seen, according to Heidegger, my own death can never
be actual for me, so viewed from my perspective, any case of death, i.e., any actual death, cannot
be my death. Thus it must be a death that belongs to someone else, or rather, to no one.

Inauthenticity in relation to death is also realized in thrownness, through fear, and in projection,
through expectation. Fear, as a mode of disposedness, can disclose only particular oncoming
events in the world. To fear my own death, then, is once again to treat my death as a case of
death. This contrasts with anxiety, the form of disposedness which, as we have seen, discloses
my death via the awareness of the possibility of a world in which I am not. The projective
analogue to the fear-anxiety distinction is expectation-anticipation. A mundane example might
help to illustrate the generic idea. When I expect a beer to taste a certain way, I am waiting for an
actual event—a case of that distinctive taste in my mouth—to occur. By contrast, when I
anticipate the taste of that beer, one might say that, in a cognitive sense, I actively go out to meet
the possibility of that taste. In so doing, I make it mine. Expecting death is thus to wait for a case
of death, whereas to anticipate death is to own it.

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In reinterpreting care in terms of Being-towards-death, Heidegger illuminates in a new way the
taking-as structure that, as we have seen, he takes to be the essence of human existence. Human
beings, as Dasein, are essentially finite. And it is this finitude that explains why the phenomenon
of taking-as is an essential characteristic of our existence. An infinite Being would understand
things directly, without the need for interpretative intercession. We, however, are Dasein, and in
our essential finitude we must understand things in a hermeneutically mediated, indirect way,
that is, by taking-as.

PART TWO- EXISTENTIALISM

2.1. Soren Kierkegaard

Schopenhauer was not the only one of Hegel’s opponents to rest his faith in the unsayable. Søren
Kierkegaard (1813–1855), in his attack on the prevailing Hegelian rationalism, sought to
undermine the claim that ‘the real is the rational and the rational the real’, and so to reaffirm the
value of that which, while real, lies beyond the reach of reason. But, lacking Schopenhauer’s gift
of argument, and being indeed more literary than philosophical in his inclination, he did not set
up any elaborate system of ideas whereby to postpone the recognition of his ultimate refuge.
There is, in Kierkegaard, no attempt to address the traditional philosophical problems and
present a partial answer to them, no attempt to explore the observable (if transient) world, in
order to renounce it more confidently for the realm of the unknowable. On the contrary, the
whole order of post-Kantian philosophical argument was dismissed, and while the result was a
species of irrationalism which, by its very nature, defies philosophical defence, there is no doubt
that, in retrospect, Kierkegaard must be seen as a significant thinker, if only because he grasped
the fact that the philosophical systems of his day could not be established by argument, and
therefore contained no authority that he was constrained by reason to accept.

Kierkegaard wrote much. His style was humorous, vivacious and often highly poetical, although
marred by the acute self-consciousness which led him also constantly to hide behind
pseudonyms, and to write long and tedious polemics (often against himself). His principal
interest was the vindication of the Christian faith, and he wrote always directly or indirectly
towards this end, inventing in the process the name, if not the philosophy, of ‘existentialism’, for
which achievement he is now chiefly known. His philosophy is a clear example of a reaction

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against idealism which is not also a form either of empiricism or scepticism. In the course of this
reaction, it is once again the subject that is reaffirmed, as the ground of all philosophical thought.
The first-person case comes to acquire just the same over-bearing significance that it had for
Descartes and Hume. The main difference is that Kierkegaard’s interest lies not in the properties
of the individual, nor in the knowledge of the world that might be derived from them, but in the
sheer fact of individual existence, conceived independently of all our attempts to bring it under
concepts.

The basis for this view was his assertion that no objective knowledge was possible because
things were always open to sceptical doubt and changing interpretation. In this way he came to
be seen as the first Existentialist philosopher, influencing later figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre.
From this point of view, the main question in life is not "What can we know?" or "What is
knowledge?", but "What shall we do?" Since it is possible to view things in different ways, the
emphasis is not on 'finding out' what things are like, but of choosing between various options.
Since this choice leaves us with feelings of overwhelming responsibility and doubt - or "dread"
and "despair" to use existentialist terms - the only real option is to have faith.
Accordingly, reason cannot provide a solution to our problems because there are no absolute
standards by which to judge whether we are correct (we might think of sceptical arguments such
as the "problem of induction", where things are only ever probable). Hence, faith is not reliant
upon propositions - such as "God will answer my prayers" (which, if it were taken as a
proposition or statement of fact, might lead us to think that God doesn't exist).
According to Kierkegaard faith is opposed to reason, i.e. he advocates fideism. Fideism is the
position that holds that objective reason is inappropriate for religious belief. For him faith, not
reason, is the highest virtue a human can reach, a trait necessary for the deepest human
fulfillment. There’s something fundamentally misguided in trying to base one’s religious belief
on objective reason. While reason can only give us approximate results, faith demands infinite
passion and subjective certainty.
Kierkegaard defends his fideism by highlighting the three stages of human existence: the
aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stages.
1- The Aesthetic Stage
In the first part of a two-part work called Either/ Or, we find the somewhat chaotic papers of an
unknown young man whom the editor of the volume (himself a pseudonymous character) elects

38
simply to call “A.” The fond desire of A’s life is simply to be something. This kind of complete
absorption, which we experience occasionally in pleasurable moments, seems wonderful to him.
If only the whole of life could be like that! If only he could evade reflection, self-consciousness,
thought, the agony of choice, and this business of always having to become something! If he
could just enjoy life in its immediacy. A’s dream is to live unreflectively a life of pleasure. But A
is a clever and sophisticated young man.
He realizes that this is not possible. For one thing, immediacy never exists where it is sought; to
take it as one’s aim or ideal entails directly that one has missed the goal. As soon as you think,
“What I really want is a life of pleasure,” you prove that you are already beyond simply having
such a life. You are reflecting on how nice that would be. No human, in fact, can attain the
placid, self-contained immediacy of the brutes. And it is clear to A that pleasure is not his life,
but the chief preoccupation of his life.
What, then, to do? To A, there seems to be one obvious solution: to make one’s life itself into a
work of art. Then one could enjoy it as one enjoys any fine aesthetic object. The pleasures of
immediacy may be vanishing, but the pleasures of aesthetic appreciation are all the more
available. The most damning comment on a movie or novel is—boring! So one wants above all
to keep life interesting.
Here we have an expression of the categories under which A organizes his life. Everything is
evaluated in terms of the pair of concepts, interesting/boring. The rotation method is a set of
techniques for keeping things interesting. Let us just note a few of the recommendations.
Variety, of course, is essential. But it is no use trying to achieve variety by varying one’s
surroundings or circumstances, though this is the “vulgar and inartistic method.”
What one must learn to do is vary oneself, a task that A compares to the rotation of crops by a
farmer. The key idea is a developed facility for remembering and forgetting. To avoid boredom,
we need to remember and forget artistically, not randomly as most of us do. Whoever develops
this art will have a never-ending source of interesting experiences at hand.
One requires absolute freedom to break away at any time from anything, lest one be at the mercy
of something or someone boring. Thus, one must beware of entanglements and avoid
commitments. The rule is no friendships (but acquaintances aplenty), no marriage (though an
occasional affair adds to the interest), and no business (for what is so boring as the demands of
business?). The key notion is to stay in control.

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 2- The Ethical
The bulk of the second part of Either/Or consists of long letters from a magistrate in one of the
lower courts, a certain Judge William. They are addressed to A. The main topic is love, but the
judge has his eye on a larger issue: what it means for an existing human being to be a self.
Taking his cue from A’s own preoccupations, the judge gives us an analysis of romantic love. Its
“mark” is that it is immediate. Its watchword is “To see her was to love her.” And indeed, that is
how we think about love, too; we talk about “falling in love”—something that can happen to one,
a condition in which one may, suddenly, just find oneself. Falling in love is not something one
does deliberately after reflection. This conviction, however, because it is based on something that
happens to one, is an illusion. If you can fall into love, you can fall out of it again. For this
reason, it is easy to make romantic love look ridiculous; it promises what it cannot deliver:
faithfulness, persistence, eternity. The judge notes that a lot of modern literature expresses
cynicism about love. The culmination of this cynicism is either (1) giving in to the transience of
nature, resigning the promise of lasting love, and making do with a series of affairs; or (2) the
marriage of convenience, which gives up on love altogether.
The judge deplores both alternatives. He believes A is right in valuing romantic love. But, he
says to A, what you want, you can’t have on your terms. The promise of eternity in romantic
love can be realized, but not if you simply “go with the flow” (as we say). What is required is
choice, a determination of the will that is precisely what one finds in conjugal love—that is, in
marriage. The bride and groom make promises to each other, including the promise to love. The
judge argues that what one hears from the Romantic poets, that marriage is the enemy of
romantic love, is simply false. For what romantic love seems to offer, but cannot deliver, is
exactly what the engagement of the will can provide: the continuity and permanence of love.
Marriage, as an expression of the will, is not the death of romantic love; it comes to its aid and
provides what it needs to endure. Without the will, love is simply inconstant and arbitrary nature.
It is true, the judge admits, that conjugal love is not a fit subject for art. Love stories usually go
like this: The handsome prince falls in love with the beautiful maiden, and after much opposition
and struggle (ogres and dragons, wicked uncles and unwilling fathers), they are married; the last
line of the story is “And they lived happily ever after.”
But, says the judge, these stories end just where the really interesting part begins. Nevertheless,
the marriage cannot be represented in art, “for the very point is time in its extension.” The

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married person “has not fought with lions and ogres, but with the most dangerous enemy—with
time.
The crucial difference between the aesthetic and the ethical is choice. In a certain sense, of
course, the aesthetic life is full of choices. But, with that clear-sighted irony that an intelligent
aesthete brings to his experience, A sees that none of them is a significant choice. Any choice
might as well have been the opposite—and can be tomorrow. After all, if your aim is “the
interesting,” you must not get stuck in commitments. None of these aesthetic choices really
means anything for the self doing the choosing.
The judge’s either/or, then, has to do with the categories under which things are evaluated. One
will lead a radically different life if everything is decided according to good/evil (ethical choice)
rather than interesting/boring (aesthetic choice). And the basic either/or, the really significant or
deep one, is not either one of these alternatives, but that which poses this question: aesthetic or
ethical?
Despite all the merits of the ethical stage, the inadequacy of reason to know and to do what is
right results in the return of the agony of the predicament of choice.
3- The Religious Stage
Upon reflection the belief that we can become ourselves by melding our immediate and
reflective aspects proves to be impossible. We are not willing to be ourselves and always want to
be something more or less. This necessitates the need for going beyond reason and make a’ leap
of faith’ since there’re no universal rules to provide guidance to the individual.
“What use is more determination to succeed in the task of being oneself if one continually
undermines this determination by one’s unwillingness to be oneself?”

He distinguishes two levels of religion: a basic level of religious consciousness (shared by pagan
figures such as Socrates and Old Testament patriarchs like Abraham) and a more intense level
distinctive, he thinks, of Christianity. One of his “authors” calls the first “religiousness A” and
the second “religiousness B.” Let us look at each in turn.
In a haunting little book by Johannes de silentio (John the silent) called Fear and Trembling, he
asks, Is there anything beyond the ethical? If so, what would it be like? Johannes meditates on a
story in Genesis 22, where God asks Abraham to take his only son, Isaac, to Mount Moriah and
offer him up as a sacrifice. Abraham does what God asks, and only at the last moment, as
Abraham raises the knife, is Isaac spared. If there is a stage of life beyond the ethical, this seems

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an appropriate story to contemplate. As Johannes makes clear, from a strictly ethical point of
view, Abraham is the moral equivalent of a murderer; he was willing to do the deed. Yet he is
remembered as the father of faith. What can this mean? Johannes says that he cannot understand
Abraham. Before Abraham he is “silent.” The reason is that Abraham seems to do two
contradictory things at once. On the one hand, he apparently gives up Isaac, resigns any claim to
him, emotionally lets him go; how else could he travel those three long days to Moriah? On the
other hand, he clearly continues to love Isaac as dearly as ever and even to believe that the
sacrifice of Isaac will not be required of him! The proof, Johannes says, is that Abraham was not
embarrassed before Isaac after having raised the knife—that he received him back with joy. How
could anyone do both things? It seems impossible, paradoxical, absurd.
But, Johannes suggests, this absurdity is precisely the secret life of faith. If there is anything
beyond the ethically human, it must be something like this. It must be a state in which one lives
in an absolute relationship to God, where even the universally human requirements of the ethical
drop away into relative insignificance. Yet it is not an escape from this world, but a life wholly
engaged in the concrete finitude of one’s earthly being.
Several points stand out in Kierkegaard’s explanation of faith. The first is that faith is not
something to be understood, not a doctrine to be memorized and accepted. Faith is something to
be lived. Second, the life of faith is not a particularly ascetic sort of life. There are, of course,
many sorts of lives that someone who is every moment making the movement of infinite
resignation would simply not be interested in, but it is definitely a life in the world. Third, it is
not easy to recognize a knight of faith. What distinguishes such knights from other people is not
external but a matter of their “inwardness”; it concerns not so much what they do but how and
why they do what they do. Fourth, because of its interiority, it may seem easy to “have faith”; it
may seem to be something everybody and her brother has already got. But that is an illusion. In
fact, no other sort of life is as difficult, as demanding, as strenuous as the life of faith. For,
Johannes tells us, faith is a passion, the highest passion of all.
But how could we come to accept ourselves as we are, knowing what we now know about
despair, about sin? What we require is forgiveness. And this, too, Christianity has a word about.
But it is a word that once more intensifies the passion, for it is the word about Christ, the God-
Man who makes our forgiveness possible. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms all agree that this
pushes the truth out beyond all understanding. If, with Socrates, the relation between an existing

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individual and the eternal truth had an element of paradox about it, Christianity makes it far
worse. If there is any truth in Christianity, it is absolutely paradoxical, paradoxical in itself. If we
know anything about God, we know God is not human. Yet Christianity proclaims our healing
through the life and death of the God-Man.
What does this mean? It means, Kierkegaard is certain, that faith should never be confused with
knowledge. (Philosophy is just confused, a subject for ridicule, if it thinks that by human reason
it can “go further” than faith; faith is not a matter of understanding anything, for the absolute
paradox rebuffs our understanding.) It means that proofs for the existence of God and evidence
for the divinity of Jesus are beside the point; faith is not a matter of accepting certain
propositions as true or understanding them, but of existing in a certain manner, of living a certain
form of life. It means that a life trusting in the forgiveness of sins, a life in imitation of Christ, is
inherently risky—that there are no guarantees that it will “pay off.” Such a life is the ultimate
risk, stretched as it is between recognition of one’s sinfulness and the paradox of possible
forgiveness. But such is the life of faith; for faith is the highest passion. But does Christianity
present us with the truth about ourselves, about our sickness and its healing—or not? That is not
a question Kierkegaard thinks he can answer for us. That is something we all have to answer for
ourselves. And answer it we will—one way or another—in our lives.

Christianity represents a more intense passion because it shows us how far away we are from a
true way of life. It proclaims our healing through the life and death of Christ- the God-Man, the
absolute paradox. Christianity is not about accepting certain propositions as true but of existing
in certain manner. It’s an existential communication representing an existential contradiction.
2.3. Friedrich Nietzsche
A study of a philosopher with whom he has often been compared suggests that this ethic of
‘subjectivity’ will always require literary gifts of a high order. These Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche (1844–1900) certainly possessed. Far from using his gifts in the defence of
Christianity, however, Nietzsche was guided in part by a hostility to that religion which some
have considered to reflect the insanity which in later life overcame him. In retrospect, this
hostility is likely to seem obsessive, if not tedious. But fortunately it is not the most significant
aspect of Nietzsche’s thought.

Nietzsche was a moralist, but one capable of considerable metaphysical ingenuity. He took as his
starting-point the famous apophthegm, ‘God is dead’. This remark was first given philosophical
significance by Max Stirner (1806–1856), in a striking book called The Ego and His Own

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(1845). Stirner belonged to that group of ‘Young Hegelians’ who reacted against the Hegelian
thesis that the individual achieves freedom and self-realisation only in the institutional forms
which ‘determine’ and therefore limit his activity. Stirner was the most extreme among them,
rejecting all institutions, all values, all religion, and indeed all relations, except those which the
individual ego could appropriate to itself. Stirner, a kind of atheistical Kierkegaard, found, like
Kierkegaard, the capacity to generate many words out of the inexpressible state of isolation
which he extolled. Nietzsche, by contrast, was more succinct and more subtle.

Nietzsche’s philosophy begins, like Kierkegaard’s and Stirner’s, in the individual; but unlike his
predecessors, Nietzsche remained profoundly sceptical that anything significant remained to the
individual when the veil of appearance had been torn away. He accepted the doctrine that all
description, being conceptual, abstracts from the individuality of what it describes. Moreover, he
regarded the description and classification of the individual as peculiarly pernicious, in that it
attributed to each individual only that ‘common nature’ which it was his duty to ‘overcome’.
Nietzsche tried to avoid the paradoxes involved in this stance by adopting a scepticism towards
all forms of objective knowledge. He repeated Hume’s arguments concerning causality, and
Kant’s rejection of the thing-in-itself. (The thing-in-itself is a fabrication of that vulgar common
sense with which every true philosopher must be at war.) Nietzsche sought for a ‘life-affirming
scepticism’ which would transcend all the doctrines that stemmed from the ‘herd instinct’, and so
allow the individual to emerge as master, and not as slave, of the experience to which he is
condemned.

Nietzsche affirmed, then, the ‘master’ morality against the ‘slave’ morality. This idea was
directed both against the orthodox Christian and egalitarian outlook of his day, and against the
conclusion of the ‘master and slave’ argument given by Hegel. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Nietzsche argued that there are no moral facts, only different ways of representing the world.
Nevertheless one can represent the world in, ways that express and enhance one’s strength, just
as one can represent it under the aspect of an inner weakness. Clearly it is appropriate for a
person to engage in the first of these activities, rather than the second. Only then will he be in
command of his experience and so fulfilled by it. This thought led Nietzsche to expound again
the Aristotelian philosophy of virtue, or excellence, but in a peculiarly modern form. Like
Aristotle, Nietzsche found the aim of life in ‘flourishing’; excellence resides in the qualities that
contribute to that aim. Nietzsche’s style is of course very different from Aristotle’s, being poetic
and exhortatory (as in the famous pastiche of Old Testament prophecy entitled Thus Spake
Zarathustra (1892)). But there are arguments concealed within his rhetoric, and they are so
Aristotelian as to demand restatement as such.

First, Nietzsche rejects the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as encapsulating a theological
morality inappropriate to an age without religious belief. The word ‘good’ has a clear sense when
contrasted with ‘bad’, where the good and the bad are the good and bad specimens of humanity.
It lacks a clear sense, however, when contrasted with the term ‘evil’. The good specimen is the
one whose power is maintained, and who therefore flourishes. The capacity to flourish resides
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not in the ‘good will’ of Kant (whom Nietzsche described as a ‘catastrophic spider’) nor in the
universal aim of the utilitarians. (‘As for happiness, only the Englishman wants that.’) It is to be
found in those dispositions of character which permit the exercise of will: dispositions like
courage, pride and firmness. Such dispositions, which have their place, too, among the
Aristotelian virtues, constitute self-mastery. They also permit the mastery of others, and prevent
the great ‘badness’ of self-abasement. One does not arrive at these dispositions by killing the
passions—on the contrary the passions enter into the virtuous character in a constitutive way.
The Nietzschean man is able to ‘will his own desire as a law unto himself. (Aristotle had argued
that virtue consists not in the absence of passions but in a right order among them.)

Like Aristotle, Nietzsche did not draw back from the consequences of his anti-theological stance.
Since the aim of the good life is excellence, the moral philosopher must lay before us the ideal of
human excellence. Moral development requires the refining away of what is common, herd like,
‘all too human’. Hence this ideal lies, of its nature, outside the reach of the common man.
Moreover the ideal may be (Aristotle), or even ought to be (Nietzsche), repulsive to those whose
weakness of spirit deprives them of sympathy for anything which is not more feeble than
themselves. Aristotle called this ideal creature the ‘great-souled man’ (megalopsuchos);
Nietzsche called it the ‘Übermensch’ (‘Superman’). In each case pride, self-confidence, disdain
for the trivial and the ineffectual, together with a lofty cheerfulness of outlook and a desire
always to dominate and never to be beholden were regarded as essential attributes of the self-
fulfilled man. It is easy to scoff at this picture, but in each case strong arguments are presented
for the view that there is no coherent view of human nature (other than a theological one) which
does not have some such ideal of excellence as its corollary.

The essence of the ‘new man’ whom Nietzsche thus announced to the world was ‘joyful
wisdom’: the ability to make choices with the whole self, and so not to be at variance with the
motives of one’s action. The aim is success, not just for this or that desire but for the will which
underlies them. (In Nietzsche we find the Schopenhauerian will reemerging as something
positive and individual, with a specific aim: that of personal dominion over the world.
Nietzsche’s early admiration for and subsequent passionate attack on Richard Wagner express
the same ambivalent relationship to Schopenhauer. This success is essentially the success of the
individual. There is no place in Nietzsche’s picture of the ideal man for pity: pity is nothing more
than a morbid fascination with failure. It is the great weakener of the will, and forms the bond
between slaves which perpetuates their bondage. Nietzsche’s principal complaint against
Christianity was that it had elevated this morbid feeling into a single criterion of virtue; thus it
had prepared the way for the ‘slave’ morality which, being founded in pity, must inevitably
reject the available possibilities of human flourishing.

To some extent we can see all this as a restatement in modern language of the Aristotelian ideal
of practical wisdom. When combined with Nietzsche’s theoretical scepticism, it led to the view
which is sometimes called pragmatism, according to which the only test of truth is a ‘practical’
one. Since there are no facts, but only interpretations, the test of the truth of a belief must lie in
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its success. The true belief is the one that augments one’s power, the false belief the one that
detracts from it.

This made it easy for Nietzsche to recommend belief in a metaphysical theory which presents
considerable obstacles to sober thought—the theory of eternal recurrence. For, however difficult
it may be to justify the assertion that everything happens again and again eternally, this belief is
certainly something of an encouragement to the ‘will to power’. If you believe in eternal
recurrence, it becomes easier ‘so to live that you desire to live again’. But why, in that case, stop
short of that most heartening of all beliefs, the belief in an omnipotent deity of whom it is said,
‘Ask and thou shall be given’? One cannot help feeling that Nietzsche’s passionate extension of
his egoism into the realm of metaphysics leads to more confusion than even his rhetorical gifts
were able to hide. Moreover, a philosopher who says, ‘There are no truths, only interpretations,’
risks the retort: ‘Is that true, or only an interpretation?’

In recent years, nevertheless, considerable interest has been expressed in Nietzsche’s

metaphysics and epistemology, which have partially eclipsed the ethical theory for which he was
earlier renowned. Nietzsche was acutely aware of the peculiar predicament of modernity.
Hitherto, he argued, our beliefs and the concepts used to formulate them, have had the
transcendental backing of religious faith. At no point in the conceptual scheme of civilisation has
the void been fully apparent behind the thin paste of our conceptions. Now, however, everything
is changing. People come into a world without certainties, and between the torn shreds of our
inheritance the abyss is ‘always visible. In such a condition human life becomes problematic;
without a radical re-construction of our world-view, which will permit the will to power on
which our enterprises depend, we shall enter a peculiar spiritual desert, in which nothing has
meaning or value—the world of ‘the last man’. Nietzsche has been accused of nihilism, but more
recent commentators tend to the view that he is trying—perhaps against the odds, given his
skeptical epistemology—to forestall nihilism and to provide us with the weapons against it.
Moreover, his acute social criticism, and his ability to sniff the ‘will to believe’ behind all our
ordinary beliefs and attitudes, have endeared him to radical critics of Western society, and
caused him to be conscripted to secular causes—feminism, socialism, egalitarianism,
‘multiculturalism’—which he himself would have greeted with cavernous laughter. For such
reasons Nietzsche, despite the brevity and impatience of his philosophical reasoning, is now as
influential as any nineteenth century philosopher.

Nietzsche gives an account of morality in non-moral psychological terms. He interprets moral

values and the history of their development in terms of the will to power. In this material, we
introduce Nietzsche’s challenge to morality, returning to the connection with human nature at the
end.

The Attack on Morality

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It is easy to misinterpret Nietzsche as rejecting everything about conventional morality. But he
says:
“It goes without saying that I do not deny unless I am a fool that many actions called immoral
ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged
but I think that the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than
hitherto. We have to learn to think differently in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even
more: to feel differently.”

So the extent to which his attack will lead to different ways of acting is unclear; his concern is
with the psychology of morality. Nietzsche has also been misinterpreted as attacking all values,
which would be a form of nihilism. But he calls this ‘the sign of a despairing, weary soul’, refers
to his new ideal as a morality, and speaks of the duties of free spirits and the new philosophers.
What Nietzsche finds objectionable about conventional morality is that our existing values
weaken the will to power in human beings. They are therefore a threat to human greatness. The
moral ideal is a person who is not great, but a ‘herd animal’, who seeks security and comfort and
wishes to avoid danger and suffering. Nietzsche’s aim is to free those who can be great from the
mistake of trying to live according to this morality.

And it is puzzling: isn’t what is valuable what is great, exceptional, an expression of strength and
success? So how did traits such as meekness, humility, self-denial, modesty, pity and
compassion for the weak become values? This is the question that Nietzsche wants to answer
with his ‘natural history’.
On ‘morality’
There are many particular existing moral systems Kantian, utilitarian, Christian, and the moral
systems of other religions; but Nietzsche spends little or no time defining their differences. He
attacks any morality that supports values that harm the ‘higher’ type of person and benefits the
‘herd’. He also attacks any morality that presupposes free will, or the idea that we can know the
truth about ourselves through introspection, or the similarity of people. But he also links these
together, explaining the theoretical beliefs in terms of the moral values, and values in terms of
favouring the conditions that enable one’s type to express its power.

So what does Nietzsche mean by ‘morality’, the morality he means to attack? There are four
ways we could try to categorize it:
1.By its values, e.g. equality, devaluation of the body, pity, selflessness;
2.By its origins in particular motives, esp. ‘ressentiment’;
3.By its claim that it should apply to all;
4.By its empirical and metaphysical assumptions, e.g. about freedom, the self, guilt.

PARTICULARITY OF MORAL SYSTEMS

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If there were universal moral values, they would be the same for everybody, and all that a history
of morality could do is tell us how we came to discover them and why people didn’t discover
them sooner. A ‘history’ of morality would then be like a history of science. Scientific truths
themselves don’t have a history, e.g. the Earth has always been round (since it existed at all). so
there is no history to this fact. But we can tell the history of how people came to believe that the
Earth is round, when previously they didn’t believe this. But a history of morality is not like this
we can tell the story of how values themselves changed. Not everyone accepts this. Many
philosophers argue that there are universal moral principles, e.g. that morality is founded upon
pure reason, or that it rests upon happiness, and that we can know this. Nietzsche rejects this, as
it assumes that there is no natural history of morality. In fact, this claim to universality is a
specific feature of the morality we have inherited it assumes that what is good and right for one
person is good and right for everyone. It does not recognise that there are different types of
people, that what is good for one type is not good for another. But it matters who the person is,
e.g. whether they are a leader or a follower. Nietzsche is particularly concerned with this
distinction.

FREE WILL AND INTROSPECTION

Nietzsche argues that each person has a fixed psychophysical constitution, and that their values,
their beliefs, and so their lives are an expression of this. A person’s constitution circumscribes
what they can do and become, relative to their circumstances. The will, then, has its origin in
unconscious physiological forces. A ‘thought comes when ‘it’ wants to not when ‘I’ want it to’,
and ‘in every act of will there is a commanding thought’.

So an act of will has its origins in something else. And in general, whatever we are conscious of
in ourselves is an effect of something we are not conscious of, e.g. the facts about our psycho-
physiological constitution. Introspection, then, cannot lead to self knowledge. And yet
conventional morality requires that we make moral judgments on the basis of people’s motives;
it presupposes that we can know, in ourselves or others, which motives caused an action. Even
when we have clearly formed an intention, it is not (just) this that brings about the actual action
we perform, but any number of other factors habit, laziness, some passing emotion, fear or love,
and so on.

The idea that the will is ‘free’ is the idea that there are no causes of an act of will (other than the
will itself) the person can will or not will. There is no course of events that leads to just this act
of will. The will is its own cause, a ‘causa sui’. But this ‘is the best internal contradiction ever
devised’. Our experience of willing does not have to lead to this idea; so we should ask what
purpose it serves.

One purpose is to defend our belief in ourselves and our right to praise. Another, more apparent
in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, is that we can and should hold people to

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blame for what is in their power. At the point of action, they could have chosen differently, we
think, so we can blame them for wrongdoing. The idea of freewill also relates to the idea that
values purely and on their own could be the basis for an act of will. The will is not conditioned
by anything of this world. The ‘moral law’ can determine the will itself. This locates moral
values outside the normal world of causes, in a transcendent world.

But Nietzsche’s attack on free will does not imply that the will is ‘unfree’ in the way that is
meant by determinists. Whenever someone talks of being caused to act, this serves the purpose
of denying any responsibility and reveals self contempt and a weak will. Free spirits experience
free will and necessity as equivalent real creative freedom, e.g. in art, comes from following
‘thousand fold laws’, a sense of necessity it must be just like this, not like that. We make a
mistake when we oppose freedom and necessity in the will.

Nietzsche tells several stories about how pity, self-denial and so on became values, how ‘herd
morality’ came to dominate. One is from the perspective of the ‘masters’; one is from the
perspective of the ‘slaves’. But a third explanation draws on the role of evolution in forming
human nature. The three stories should be seen as complementary, together building up the
whole picture.

Nietzsche writes that ‘for as long as there have been humans, there have also been... a great
many followers in proportion to the small number of commanders... obedience has until now
been bred and practised best and longest among humans’. He continues later, ‘the herd instinct of
obedience is inherited best, and at the cost of the skill in commanding’. In evolution, what does
not reproduce well does not survive in future generations. What enables a person to get on well
with many other people will favour most individuals and their reproductive success but these will
be ‘herd’ instincts and values, because by definition, the majority are the ‘herd’. What is
exceptional, what is great, is rare. So evolution opposes greatness and favours what is common.
The kind of ‘commanders’ the herd favours are tame, modest, hardworking and public-spirited,
commanders who actually serve the herd rather than commanding them.

Nietzsche develops the point further: to communicate with and understand other people, we have
to share experiences with them. What thoughts and feelings words immediately bring to mind
reflects our values. So people of different types will have difficulty understanding each other.
People who are commanders will be hard for other people, the ‘herd’, to understand. And so they
rarely procreate. If we are to breed new philosophers, and new philosophers are to breed the
human race to become greater, we will have to draw on ‘enormous counterforces’ since we are in
conflict with the natural forces of evolution.

However, the constraint placed on the will to power by ‘herd’ morality has been creative; it is
‘the means by which the European spirit was bred to be strong, ruthlessly curious, and

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beautifully nimble’. This tension drives free spirits to overcome the ascetic ideal and prepare the
conditions for new philosophers.
Nietzsche on master and slave morality

Beyond Good and Evil describes the fundamental division between the moralities of the ‘herd’
and of ‘higher’ people. While the contrast is stark, Nietzsche says, at the outset,

“I would add at once that in all higher and complex cultures, there are also apparent
attempts to mediate between the two moralities, and even more often a confusion of the two
and a mutual misunderstanding… - even in the same person.”

So his descriptions are ‘idealized’, while identifying the diverse origins of our actual
morality.

Master Morality

In a master or noble morality, ‘good’ picks out exalted and proud states of mind, and it
therefore refers to people, not actions, in the first instance. ‘Bad’ means ‘lowly’, ‘despicable’,
and refers to people who are petty, cowardly, or concerned with what is useful, rather than
what is grand or great. (Notice that none of this depends on the idea of free will.) Good-bad
identifies a hierarchy of people, the noble masters or aristocracy and the common people. The
noble person only recognises moral duties towards their equals; how they treat people below
them is not a matter of morality at all. The good, noble person has a sense of ‘fullness’ – of
power, wealth, ability, and so on. From the ‘overflowing’ of these qualities, not from pity, they
will help other people, including people below them.

Noble people experience themselves as the origin of value, deciding what is good or not. ‘Good’
originates in self-affirmation, a celebration of one’s own greatness and power. They don’t need
others to say they are good. They revere themselves, and have a devotion for whatever is great.
But this is not self-indulgence: any signs of weakness are despised, and harshness and severity
are respected.

A noble morality is a morality of gratitude and vengeance. Friendship involves mutual respect
and a rejection of over-familiarity, while enemies are necessary, in order to vent feelings of
envy, aggression and arrogance.

All these qualities mean that the good person rightly evokes fear in those who are not their
equal and a respectful distance in those who are.

Slave Morality

Slave morality begins with the rejection of master morality. It does not and cannot stand on its
own. The traits of the noble person are evil (not ‘bad’), and what is good is their absence. Its
focus is the relief of suffering – whatever is useful or opposes oppression is morally good. So

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pity, altruism, and a lack of interest in oneself are good. In opposing the noble morality, it also
encourages humility and patience. It questions the apparent happiness of the noble person,
rejects hierarchy, and argues that morality is the same for all. But it is pessimistic about the
human condition, doubting the goodness of this life, and so it sees people as weak and pitiful.
So it must look to the future and believe in ‘progress’, in things getting better. It lacks respect
for the past, for traditions and ancestors. Finally, when slave morality dominates, there is a
tendency for ‘good’ people and ‘good’ actions to be thought of as ‘stupid’ or simple-minded.

The ‘slave revolt’

If societies in Europe began with a noble morality, at some point, slave morality became
dominant. How and when did this revolution in values occur? Nietzsche’s third historical
account, this one from the perspective of the slaves, identifies the Jewish prophets as the origin.
It was they, he says, who ‘fused “rich”, “godless”, “evil”, “violent”, “sensuous” into one entity,
and were the first to mint the word ‘world’ as a curse word’. Worldly success (what was ‘good’)
indicates moral failure (is now ‘evil’). But the Jewish prophets were only the beginning – it is
Christianity which carried forward the revolt. (While it is important that – at its origins – real
class differences between these groups and the Greek and Roman aristocracy existed, as usual,
Nietzsche is more interested in the psychological story. There is nothing specifically Jewish
about a slave morality, and Nietzsche is uninterested in the differences between Jew, Christian
and slave in this account.)

What drove this ‘revaluation of values’? Nietzsche says the slave’s ‘manifold hidden suffering
rages against that noble sensibility which seems to deny suffering’. The Roman rulers seemed,
and valued being, free-spirited (reinterpret: wicked), self-confident (decadent), care -free (lazy),
tolerant (unruly). They viewed slaves with contempt, pity, and disdain, causing hatred that could
not be expressed directly. And so it turned into what Nietzsche calls elsewhere ressentiment, a
kind of resentment. In someone with a slave mentality, the feeling grows as no action is taken.
Instead of a political revolt, revenge took the form of a moral revolt. The pent- up feelings of
resentment were expressed through blame, an idea that has little place in a noble morality.

A slave morality therefore centres on the question of blame, and not just for actions, but also for
being who and how one is. This requires the idea that one could act or be different, and makes
guilt (for not being or doing ‘better’) the heart of morality. Guilt causes suffering, but the slave
has known only suffering, tyranny, being commanded – so morality becomes unconditional
commands, e.g. of a God.

Ressentiment is a reactive rather than creative attitude towards the world, focusing on others,
rather than oneself. It tends to produce self-deception – the slave morality must cover its
origins carefully, not least because it disapproves of the very motives, of envy, hatred and
ressentiment, that drive it. The sacrifice that morality requires is seen not as tyranny or
revenge, but as an act of love. In contrast to the simplicity of the original nobles, it was

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through ressentiment, Nietzsche says, that ‘the human soul became deep’ (The Genealogy of
Morals), and certain kinds of cultural expression became possible, e.g. in response to the deep
guilt people felt about themselves.

2.3- Jean Paul Sartre

Born on June 21, 1905, in Paris, France, Jean-Paul Sartre was a pioneering intellectual and
proponent of existentialism who championed leftist causes in France and other countries. He
wrote a number of books, including the highly influential Being and Nothingness, and was
awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964, though he turned it down. He had a relationship with noted
intellectual Simone de Beauvoir.

In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in an account of the first 10 years of his life. Literature, he
explained, functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In
October 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He declined the prize, becoming
the first Nobel Laureate to do so.

Sartre’s principled mode of living involved few possessions. He remained actively committed to
humanitarian and political causes until the end of his life, including participation in the Paris
demonstrations of 1968.

Sartre's physical condition deteriorated in the 1970s, and he became almost completely blind in
1973. He died in Paris on April 15, 1980, from pulmonary edema. Jean-Paul Sartre is buried at
Montparnasse Cemetery; he shares a grave with life-long partner Simone de Beauvoir.

Coming directly to Sartre’s work we find his lecture called ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’- the
complete lecture is included in this material without any further elaboration.

It is difficult to say just what existentialism is, because the existentialists are so varied in their
points of view. But that they represent, in different ways, challenges to traditional morality is
evident.

For example, the Danish philosopher Saren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) taught the "'teleological
suspension of the ethical," according to which the individual is enabled to transcend ordinary
ethical norms and receive his or her commandments immediately from God. The German
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) rejected Christianity as involving a "slave-morality" and called

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for a "transvaluation of values" according to which "the will to power" as the basic principle of
life will lead to the development of a higher type of humanity. Surely the best-known existen-
tialist is the contemporary French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In addition to
authoring works with ponderous titles such as Being and Nothingness, he wrote an essay entitled,
simply, "Existentialism." This little work is often regarded as the best introduction to the
philosophy of existentialism, and certainly it represents yet another existentialist's challenge to
traditional morality.

According to Sartre, existentialism turns on its head any philosophy (think especially of Plato)
which teaches that everything is what it is by virtue of a transcendent essence: Essence precedes
existence. No, says Sartre. We begin with the individual, the concretely existing human being,
the subject. The central tenet of existentialism, in any of its forms, is that existence precedes
essence. What is first given is the existence of a particular thing; only after that does its essence
appear. Or, to say it another way, subjectivity must be the starting point. However, in its atheistic
form, which Sartre himself espouses, existentialism finds nothing outside, above, or beyond the
individual to which the individual can leap for its essence, definition, or meaning. God is dead,
all objective and transcendent values have disappeared with him, and the individual is alone.
"condemned to This is the meaning of Sartre's famous pronouncement that we are "condemned
to be free." Here, to be "free" means to be unconditioned by any moral law or eternal values.

What then do we do? Answer: we must accept the full burden of our freedom, and through our
choices and commitments contribute to the evolving essence of humanity. What we choose for
ourselves, that we become. And what we become, that we contribute to the definition or essence
of humanity, for each of us is part of humanity. If, then, we care about the essence of humanity—
what it is and will become—we must have a care about our own individual commitments. This
aloneness and personal responsibility is the source of the emphasis by Sartre and other
existentialists on the anxiety, dread, and despair of the "conscious" individual, the individual
who knows the score.

You may be tempted to see another version of subjectivism, but there is a difference. In its
crassest form, subjectivism denies that any value or ideal is any better than another. Clearly
Sartre is not saying this. It is true that there is no divine or transcendent foundation of values, and
that is precisely why Sartre shifts the responsibility to individuals. Human beings in their
freedom (in Sartre's existentialist sense) are themselves the basis of values, and in this sense
values are real—evolving, developing, on the move, but real. In place of God or a transcendent
source of values, ideals, meaning, etc., this philosophy is truly humanistic, in that humanity
stands center-stage as the criterion of all meaning and value. It is important to see how this
differs from the sort of relativism or subjectivism we considered in the previous section. That
philosophy denied any objective or common values, locating them instead in individuals. This
philosophy, on the other hand, affirms objective values, but locates them in humanity. The
difference between subjectivism and humanism is caught by the two claims,

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• A man is the measure of all things.

• Man is the, measure of all things.

HUMANISM
As is evident from the word itself, humanism is the exaltation of humanity as the source and
criterion of all value and meaning.

In the following, from his essay "Existentialism," Sartre explains the general nature of this
philosophy, and the moral implications of his version of it.

“What is meant by the term "existentialism?"

Most people who use the word would be rather embarrassed if they had to explain it, since, now
that the word is all the rage, even the work of a musician or painter is being called existentialist.
A gossip columnist in Clartes signs himself The Existentialist, 'so that by this time the word has
been so stretched and has taken on so broad a meaning, that it no longer means anything at all. It
seems that for want of an avant-garde doctrine analogous to surrealism, the kind of people who
are eager for scandal and flurry turn to this philosophy which in other respects does not at all
serve their purposes in this sphere.

Actually, it is the least scandalous, the most austere of doctrines. It is intended strictly for
specialists and philosophers. Yet it can be defined easily. What complicates matters is that there
are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian, among whom I would include
Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both Catholic; and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists,
whom I class Heidegger, and then the French existentialists and myself. What they have in
common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity
must be the starting point.

Just what does that mean? Let us consider some object that is manufactured, for example, a book
or a paper-cutter: here is an object which has been made by an artisan whose inspiration came
from a concept. He referred to the concept of what a paper-cutter is and likewise to a known
method of production, which is part of the concept, something which is; by and large, a routine.
Thus, the paper-cutter is at once an object produced in a certain way and, on the other hand, one
having a specific use; and one cannot postulate a man who produces a paper-cutter but does not
know what it is used for. Therefore, let us say that, for the paper-cutter, essence- that is, the
ensemble of both the production routines and the properties which enable it to be both produced
and defined- precedes existence. Thus, the presence of the paper-cutter or book in front of me is
determined. Therefore, we have here a technical view of the world whereby it can be said that
production precedes existence.

When we conceived God as the Creator, He is generally thought of as a superior sort of artisan.
Whatever doctrine we may be considering, whether one like that of Descartes or that of Leibnitz,

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we always grant that will more or less follows understanding or, at the very least, accompanies it,
and that when God creates He knows exactly what He is creating. Thus, the concept of man in
the mind of God is comparable to the concept of paper-cutter in the mind of the manufacturer,
and, following certain techniques and a conception, God produces man, just as the artisan,
following a definition and a technique, makes a paper-cutter. Thus, the individual man is the
realization of a certain concept in the divine intelligence.

In the eighteenth century, the atheism of the philosophes discarded the idea of God, but not so
much for the notion that essence precedes existence. To a certain extent, this idea is found
everywhere; we find it in Diderot, in Voltaire, and even in Kant. Man has a human nature; this
human nature, which is the concept of the human, is found in all men, which means that each
man is a particular example of a universal concept, man. In Kant, the result of this universality is
that the Wildman, the natural man, as well as the bourgeois, are circumscribed by the same
definition and have the same basic qualities. Thus, here too the essence of man precedes the
historical existence that we find in nature.

Atheistic existentialism, which I represent, is more coherent. It states that if God does not exist,
there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can
be defined by any concept, and that this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What
is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists,
turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist
conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be
something, and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus, there is no human nature, since
there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also
only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism. It
is also what is called subjectivity, the name we are labeled with when charges are brought
against us. But what do we mean by this, if not that man has a greater dignity than a stone or
table? For we mean that man first exists, that is, that man first of all is the being who hurls
himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future. Man is
at the start a plan which is aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a
cauliflower; nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man will be what he will
have planned to be. Not what he will want to be. Because by the word "will" we generally mean
a conscious decision, which is subsequent to what we have already made of ourselves. I may
want to belong to a political party, write a book, get married; but all that is only a manifestation
of an earlier, more spontaneous choice that is called "will." But if existence really does precede
essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, existentialism's first move is to make every man
aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we
say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own
individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.

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The word subjectivism has two meanings, and our opponents play on the two. Subjectivism
means, on the one hand, that an individual chooses and makes himself; and, on the other, that it
is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity. The second of these is the essential
meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one
of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men.
In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does
not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. To choose to be this or
that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil.
We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

If, on the other hand, existence precedes essence, and if we grant that we exist and fashion our
image at one and the same time, the image is valid for everybody and for our whole age. Thus,
our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.
If I am a workingman and choose to join a Christian trade-union rather than be a communist, and
if by being a member I want to show that the best thing for man is resignation, that the kingdom
of man is not of this world, I am not only involving my own case—I want to be resigned for
everyone. As a result, my action has involved all humanity. To take a more individual matter, if I
want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances
or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. Therefore,
I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my
own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man.

This helps us understand what the actual content is of such rather grandiloquent words as
anguish, forlornness, despair. As you will see, it's all quite simple. . . .

When we speak of forlornness, a term Heidegger was fond of, we mean only that God does not
exist and that we have to face all the consequences of this. The existentialist is strongly opposed
to a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible
expense. About 1880, some French teachers tried to set up a secular ethics which went
something like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis; we are discarding it; but, meanwhile,
in order for there to be an ethics, a society, a civilization, it is essential that certain values be
taken seriously and that they be considered as having an a priori existence. It must be obligatory,
a priori, to be honest, not to lie, not to beat your wife, to have children, etc., etc. So we're going
to try a little device which will make it possible to show what values exist all the same, inscribed
in a heaven of ideas, though otherwise God does not exist. In other words—and this, I believe, is
the tendency of everything called reformism in France—nothing will be changed if God does not
exist. We shall find ourselves with the same norms of honesty, progress, and humanism, and we
shall have made of God an outdated hypothesis which will peacefully die off by itself.

The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all
possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas-disappears along with Him; there can no longer
be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it

56
written that the Good exists, that we must be Honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we
are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoyevsky said, "If God didn't exist, everything
would be possible." That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is
permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor
without does he find anything to cling to. He can't start making excuses for himself.

If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a
fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is
freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to
which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us,
nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.

That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned,
because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the
world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

We have already distinguished Sartre's humanistic existentialism from subjectivism.

Nonetheless, Sartre's position has been attacked with criticisms similar to those which we saw in
the previous section leveled against subjectivism. After all, if individual existence precedes the
essence of humanity, and nothing at all precedes or conditions the individual's choices, then what
is to prevent those choices from being purely arbitrary and, thus, the evolving essence of man as
well? That is, if you don't begin with any meaning, how can you end with any?

This is the point of one of Sartre's loudest critics, Gabriel Marcel (1889- 1973), whom Sartre
mentioned as a Christian existentialist in the above selection. (That Marcel is called an
existentialist by Sartre himself, and yet attacked the very basis of Sartre's philosophy, reminds us
of what a variety there is among existentialists.) Marcel represents the way in which one might
be faithful to the existentialist thesis that subjectivity must be the starting point but, beginning
with subjectivity or the concreteness of personal existence, might move to a theistic or
transcendent basis of value and meaning. This, says Marcel, is exactly what we must do, for
values are not chosen but discovered. They are given. They are objective. According to Marcel,
the Sartrean approach bogs down in a hopeless contradiction: It claims that outside our own
commitments there is no basis for moral choices, but then turns right around and insists that
some choices are better than others. You cannot have it both ways, and you cannot give up (can
you?) the view that some choices are better than others. We must, says Marcel, grant the
givenness of values and meaning. And given by whom, except God? From Marcel's The
Philosophy of Existentialism:

“From [Sartre's] standpoint, values cannot be anything but the result of the initial choice made by
each human being; in other words, they can never be "recognized" or "discovered." "My
freedom," he states expressly, "is the unique foundation of values. And since I am the being by
virtue of whom values exist, nothing—absolutely nothing—can justify me in adopting this or

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that value or scale of values. As the unique basis of the existence of values, 1 am totally
unjustifiable. And my freedom is in anguish at finding that it is the baseless basis of values."
Nothing could be more explicit; but the question is whether Sartre does not here go counter to
the exigencies of that human reality which he claims, after all, not to invent but to reveal.

Not to deal exclusively in abstractions, let us take a concrete case. Sartre has announced that the
third volume of his Les Chemins de la Liberte (the Ways of Freedom) is to be devoted to the
praise of the heroes of Resistance. Now I ask you in the name of what principle, having first
denied the existence of values or at least of their objective basis, can he establish any appreciable
difference between those utterly misguided but undoubtedly courageous men who joined
voluntarily the Anti-Bolshevik Legion, on the one hand, and the heroes of the Resistance
movement, on the other? I can see no way of establishing this difference without admitting that
causes have their intrinsic value and, consequently, that values are real. I have no doubt that
Sartre’s ingenuity will find a way out of this dilemma; in fact, he quite often uses the words
“good” and “bad,” but what can these words possibly mean in the context of his philosophy?

The truth is that, if I examine myself honestly and without reference to any preconceived body of
ideas, I find that I do not “choose” my values at all, but that I recognize them and then posit my
actions in accordance or in contradiction with these values, not, however, without being painfully
aware of this contradiction. . . It should perhaps be asked at this point if it is not Nietzsche who,
with his theory of the creation of values, is responsible for the deathly principle-of error which
has crept into speculation on this subject. But although I am the last to underrate the objections to
Nietzsche's doctrine, I am inclined to think that his view is less untenable than that of Sartre, for
it escapes that depth of rationalism and materialism which is discernible, to me as to others, in
the mind of the author of L'Etre et le Neant [Being and Nothingness].

I would suggest in conclusion that existentialism stands today at a parting of the ways: it is, in
the last analysis, obliged either to deny or to transcend itself. It denies itself quite simply when it
falls to the level of infra-dialectical materialism. It transcends itself, or it tends to transcend itself,
when it opens itself out to the experience of the superhuman, an experience which can hardly be
ours in a genuine and lasting way this side of death, but of which the reality is attested by
mystics, and of which the possibility is warranted by any philosophy which refuses to be
immured in the postulate of absolute immanence or to subscribe in advance to the denial of the
beyond and of the unique and veritable transcendence.”

2.4. Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondavi, French Algeria. His pied-noir family
had little money. Camus's father died in combat during World War I, after which Camus lived
with his mother, who was partially deaf, in a low-income section of Algiers.

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Camus did well in school and was admitted to the University of Algiers, where he studied
philosophy and played goalie for the soccer team. He quit the team following a bout of
tuberculosis in 1930, thereafter focusing on academic study. By 1936, he had obtained
undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy.

Camus became political during his student years, joining first the Communist Party and then the
Algerian People's Party. As a champion of individual rights, he opposed French colonization and
argued for the empowerment of Algerians in politics and labor. Camus would later be associated
with the French anarchist movement.

At the beginning of World War II, Camus joined the French Resistance in order to help liberate
Paris from the Nazi occupation; he met Jean-Paul Sartre during his period of military service.
Like Sartre, Camus wrote and published political commentary on the conflict throughout its
duration. In 1945, he was one of the few Allied journalists to condemn the American use of the
atomic bomb in Hiroshima. He was also an outspoken critic of communist theory, eventually
leading to a rift with Sartre.

The dominant philosophical contribution of Camus's work is absurdism. While he is often

associated with existentialism, he rejected the label, expressing surprise that he would be viewed
as a philosophical ally of Sartre. Elements of absurdism and existentialism are present in Camus'
most celebrated writing. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) elucidates his theory of the absurd most
directly. The protagonists of The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947) must also confront the
absurdity of social and cultural orthodoxies, with dire results.

As an Algerian, Camus brought a fresh, outsider perspective to French literature of the period—
related to but distinct from the metropolitan literature of Paris. In addition to novels, he wrote
and adapted plays, and was active in the theater during the 1940s and '50s. His later literary
works include The Fall (1956) and Exile and the Kingdom (1957).

Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He died on January 4, 1960,
in Burgundy, France. Camus married and divorced twice as a young man, stating his disapproval
of the institution of marriage throughout. With this little introduction to the life of Albert Camus,
we shall pass to his work where he discusses suicide as a solution to the absurd.

If a philosopher wishes to discuss such themes as human freedom, authenticity, self-commitment

and personal relationships, his treatment is inevitably abstract and expressed in terms of general
or universal concepts. Karl Jaspers, for instance, made a sharp distinction between the scientific
objectification of man and the philosopher's endeavour to illuminate man's inner awareness
of his freedom with a view to clarifying for man his basic possibilities of self-transcendence.
But even Jaspers had to write about man, employing universal concepts, even if he insisted on
the need for special categories for this purpose. It is therefore understandable if in addition to

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their more professional philosophical writings certain thinkers, such as Sartre and Marcel, have
published plays and, in Sartre's case, novels too, in which they have been able to exhibit
'problems of life' in terms of the actions, predicaments, options and relationships of individuals.
Such works may give concrete and dramatic expression to themes which have already been
treated in a more abstract way, or, as in Marcel's case, they may precede the more abstract and
philosophical expression. In both cases however the two kinds of works have a recognizable
relationship to one another which is lacking in cases in which a writer sets his philosophy aside
and produces popular detective stories to augment his income.

If however the thought of Sartre is discussed in accounts of French philosophy; it is because of

the writings which profess to be and are philosophical works, not on account of plays such as
The Flies or In Camera, even if the latter stand in a recognizable relationship to the former. And
the question arises whether one is justified in including mention of literary figures who are
commonly thought of as having philosophical significance but who not only did not publish
philosophical works in the academic sense but also refrained from making any claim to be
philosophers. It is difficult to determine rules to which no exception can reasonably be taken. If
we think of philosophy as a science which is concerned with proving that certain propositions are
true, we shall be unlikely, for example, to include a treatment of Dostoyevsky in a history of
Russian philosophy. And though mention of his name occurs fairly frequently in, for instance,
the work by N. O. Lossky, he is mentioned incidentally and not listed among Russian
philosophers. At the same time it is possible to take a wider view of philosophically significant
writing; and no great surprise would have been caused if aspects of Dostoyevsky's thought had
been considered. In fact, the Encyclopedia of Philosophy edited by Paul Edwards contains an
article devoted to the great Russian novelist.

In regard to recent French thought similar questions can be raised in regard to A. Camus.! He
was not indeed a professional philosopher, nor did he ever claim to be. But in view of the themes
of which he wrote he has been commonly mentioned in accounts of existentialism in France,
even though he denied that he was an existentialist. And the insertion of some remarks about him
seems defensible, though not obligatory.

Camus is well known for his statement that 'there is only one really serious philosophical
problem, that of suicide. To judge that life is or is not worth the trouble of being lived, this is to
reply to the fundamental question of philosophy. On the face of it this may seem a very eccentric
view of philosophy. The presupposition however is that man-seeks a meaning in the world and in
human life and history which would ground and support his ideals and values. Man wants to be
assured that reality is an intelligible teleological process, comprising an objective moral order.
To put the matter in another way, man desires metaphysical assurance that his life is part of an
intelligible process directed to an ideal goal, and that in striving after his personal ideals he has
the backing and support, so to speak, of the universe or of reality as a whole. The great religious

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leaders and creators of metaphysical systems and world-views have tried to supply this need. But
their interpretations of the world cannot stand up to criticism. In the end the world is revealed, to
the clear-sighted man, as without any determinate purpose or meaning. The world is not rational.
Hence arises the feeling of the absurd (Ie sentiment de l'absurde). Strictly speaking, the world is
not absurd in itself: it simply is. 'The absurd arises from this confrontation between man's appeal
and the irrational silence of the world. The irrational, human nostalgia and the absurd which
arises from their confrontation, those are the three personages of the drama. The feeling of the
absurd can arise in a variety of ways, through, for example, the perception of Nature's
indifference to man's values and ideals, through recognition of the finality of death, or through
the shock caused by the sudden perception of the pointlessness of life's routine. Some thinkers
understand the absurd but then pursue a policy of escapism. Thus Karl Jaspers leaps from the
'shipwreck' of human longings to the Transcendent, while Leo Chestov makes a similar leap to a
God who is beyond reason. But the man who, like Nietzsche, is able to look the absurdity of
human existence in the face sees the meaning of the world disappear. Hence the problem of
suicide. For 'to see the meaning of this life dissipated, to see our reason for existing disappear,
that is what is unbearable. One cannot live without meaning.

Suicide is not however the action recommended by Camus. In his opinion suicide means
surrender to the absurd, capitulation. Human pride and greatness are shown neither in surrender
nor in the sort of escapism indulged in by the existential philosophers (les philosophes
existentiels, such as Jaspers) but in living in the consciousness of the absurd and yet revolting
against it by man's committing himself and living in the fullest manner possible. There are
indeed no absolute standards which permit us to dictate to a man how he should live. As Ivan
Karamazov says, all is permitted. But it does not follow that the absurd 'recommends crime. This
would be puerile....If all experiences are indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other.
One can be virtuous by caprice. The man of the absurd (1'homme absurde) can take various
forms. The Don Juan who enjoys to the full, as long as he is able, experiences of a certain type,
while conscious that none of them possesses any ultimate significance, is one form. So is the
man who recognizes the meaninglessness of history and the ultimate futility of human action but
who none the less commits himself to a social or political cause in his historical situation. So is
the creative artist who sees clearly enough that both he and his works are doomed to extinction
but who none the less devotes his life to artistic production. And in La peste Camus raises the
question whether there can be an atheist saint. The man of the absurd lives without God. But it
by no means follows that he cannot devote himself in a self-sacrificing manner to the welfare of
his fellow men. Indeed, if he does so without hope of reward and conscious that in the long run it
makes no difference how he acts, he exhibits the greatness of man precisely by this combination
of recognition of ultimate futility with a life of self-sacrificing love. It is possible to be a saint
without illusion.

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In maintaining the meaninglessness of the world and of human history (in the sense that they
have no goal or purpose which is given independently of man) Camus is substantially at one with
Sartre, though the latter does not dwell so much as the former on the theme of 'the absurd'. Sartre
is not however the source of Camus' assumption. We should not of course speak as though an
original writer such as Camus simply borrowed his ideas from a predecessor. But it was clear
that it was Nietzsche who provided a stimulating influence. Camus believed that Nietzsche had
rightly seen the advent and rise of nihilism; and, like the German philosopher, he looked to man
as the only being capable of overcoming nihilism. At the same time it does not follow that
Camus can be properly described as a Nietzschean. For one thing, Camus came to be more and
more concerned with injustice and oppression in human society in a manner in which Nietzsche
was not. Camus did not indeed renounce his belief 'that this world has no ultimate meaning'; but
he came to lay more and more stress on revolt against injustice, oppression and cruelty rather
than on revolt against the human condition as such. Indeed, he became convinced that the feeling
of the absurd, taken by itself, can be used to justify anything, murder included. 'If one believes in
nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible
and nothing is important. ... One is free to stoke the crematory fires or to give one's life to the
care of lepers: In point of fact revolt presupposes the assertion of values. True, they are man's
creation. But this does not alter the fact that if I revolt against oppression or injustice, I assert the
values of freedom and justice. With Camus, in other words, cosmic absurdity, so to speak, tends
to retreat into the background; and a moral idealism comes to the fore, a moral idealism which
did not call for the production of an elite, an aristocracy of higher men, at the expense of the
herd, but which insisted on freedom and justice for all, real freedom and justice moreover, not
oppression or enslavement masquerading under these honoured names.

Camus was no admirer of bourgeois society. But he became acutely aware of the way in which
revolt against the existing order can end with the imposition of slavery. 'The great event of the
twentieth century was the forsaking of the values of freedom by the revolutionary movement, the
progressive retreat of socialism based on freedom before the attacks of a Caesarian and military
socialism.' Man cannot play the part of a spectator of history as a whole; and no historical
enterprise can be more than a risk or adventure for which some degree of rational justification
can be offered. It follows that no historical enterprise can rightly be used to justify 'any excess or
any ruthless and absolutist position'. For example, killing and oppression in the name of the
movement of history or of a terrestrial paradise to be attained at some indefinite future date are
unjustified. If absolute nihilism can be used to justify anything, so can absolute rationalism, in
which God is replaced by history. In regard to their consequences, 'there is no difference between
the two attitudes. From the moment that they are accepted, the earth becomes a desert: a We
have to get away from absolutes and turn to moderation and limitation. 'Absolute freedom is the
right of the strongest to dominate" and thus prolongs injustice. 'Absolute justice is achieved by
the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom. It is on behalf of living human
beings not on behalf of history or of man in some future age that we are called upon to rebel

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against existing injustice and oppression, wherever it may be found. 'Real generosity towards the
future lies in giving all to the present.'

As has already been noted, the publication of The Rebel (L'homme revolte) led to a breach of
relations between Camus and Sartre." The latter had been coming closer to Communism, though
without joining the party, and he was already engaged in the project of combining existentialism
and Marxism. Camus, while disclaiming the label 'existentialist', was convinced that the two
were incompatible, and that Marxism, with its secularization of Christianity and substitution of
the movement of history for God, led straight to the death of freedom and the horrors of
Stalinism. As for bourgeois democracy, which replaced eternal divine truths by abstract
principles of reason, the trouble has been, according to Camus, that the principles have not been
applied. In the name of freedom bourgeois society has condoned exploitation and social
injustice; and it has sanctioned violence. What then does Camus wish to put in the place of
Communism, Fascism, Nazism and bourgeois democracy? Apart from some remarks about the
benefits to man which have been obtained through trade unionism, he gives no clear picture. And
Sartre of course sees him as criticizing various movements but offering only vague and abstract
ideas. Camus however has no intention of offering a blueprint. His philosophy of revolt is mainly
concerned with moral values and the development of moral responsibility; and he insists that
though the rebel must act because he believes that it is right to do so, he must also act with the
recognition that he might be wrong. The Communist will not entertain the idea that he might be
wrong. Hence his ruthlessness. The only hope for the future is an open society, in which the
passion of revolt and the spirit of moderation are in constant tension.

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