Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre

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Gary Cox interview

Gary Cox is the author of several books on existentialism and general philosophy. The 10th anniversary edition of his bestselling self-help book How to Be an Existentialist was published recently. Gavin Smith talks with him about existentialism.

Gary Cox: Existentialism is not for the faint-hearted. Not all existentialism is atheistic, but most of it is, and as Sartre said in his autobiography, Words, “Atheism is a cruel, long-term business”

And the reason for this is not all that hard to discern. No God? Then "all things can be rationalized". And that's just pertaining to "what would Jesus do"? on this side of the grave. Crueler still for most atheists, however, is the part where "somehow" they have to handle the part where we die and "I" is obliterated for all of eternity.

Existentialism is for people who demand the truth however dark and uncompromising that truth may be.

And what truth is particular might that be?

It is often thought that, because it dwells on harsh realities – anxiety, absurdity, death, and so on – existentialism is a pessimistic, nihilistic philosophy, but this is to profoundly misunderstand it.

Unless, of course, those are precisely the things that you do dwell on. Unless, of course, as an existentialist, you are yourself a cynical, pessimistic nihilist. The point being that existentialism is no less a frame of mind -- a philosophy of life -- rooted subjectively in dasein rooted in all of the many, many very, very different lives that we can sustain as individuals.

Or, perhaps, there are existentialists among us who insist that, as with IC and his True Christians, there are in fact True Existentialists as well. And I'm not one of them.

How to Be an Existentialist seeks to show how it is possible to live a worthwhile and rewarding life on the basis of a full recognition of the tough existential truths.

This is the part where I remind everyone that while a particular philosophy of life can be very important to some, for others what is of far greater importance is the actual day to day to day circumstances that they encounter in the course of living that life.

So, philosophically, you can be cynical and pessimistic. You can champion nihilism. But if you have a fantastic job, a fantastic family, a fantastic collection of friends, a fantastic collection of music and art...so what? If you are in good health, financially secure, and basically live your fantastic life on your own terms, how hard can it really be to put that grim philosophy on the back burner?

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Gary Cox interview

Gary Cox is the author of several books on existentialism and general philosophy. The 10th anniversary edition of his bestselling self-help book How to Be an Existentialist was published recently. Gavin Smith talks with him about existentialism.

If religion is often about wishing, then existentialism is about willing. It is about getting real and acting decisively towards reasonable, worldly goals.

Willing what? Given what set of circumstances? And, given this context, how do philosophers go about the task of differentiating real from unreal reactions? Are they our reasonable worthy goals or theirs?

Instead, the author stays up in the intellectual clouds...

As I wrote in the book, “You have to build your life on an understanding and acceptance of how things really are, otherwise you will always be fooling and deluding yourself as you hanker after impossibilities like complete happiness and total fulfilment. Ironically, existentialism is saying, if you want to be happy, or at least be happier, stop struggling to achieve complete happiness because that way only leads to disappointment.”

How could this not mean [at times] very different things to very different people? Instead, from my own frame of mind, the distinction here is between moral objectivism and moral nihilism. Between sustaining the comfort and consolation of being on the One True Path and feeling fractured and fragmented. At least in regard to conflicting goods.

Then just more of the same "general description" assessment...

Existentialism is not in the business of replacing religion. Unlike religion, existentialism does not tell people how to live, what to eat, what to wear, who to marry. It instead urges people to recognise that they and others are inalienably free, and to embrace their freedom in a positive, courageous, and moral way rather than act in bad faith and deny their freedom. The most rewarding thing for me about writing How to Be an Existentialist is the wealth of correspondence I have received over the past decade from people who tell me it has helped them to find or recover their self-esteem, to confront reality, and to get their life together.

Okay, I'll try to contact the author and see how he does react to my points here.

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Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

This is an eclectic collection of extracts, as befits the decision of the editor, Robert C. Solomon, not to define ‘existentialism’ tightly.

Tightly defined? What does that mean? For many, I suspect, it presumes their own definition of existentialism encompasses what it does in fact means.

Objectively?

The dictionary defines existentialism as "a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will."

How tightly does your own definition of existentialism correspond with human interactions that do come into conflict over value judgments?

Existentialism is undoubtedly tricky to define, but Solomon must have had something in mind when he put together this collection other than just following what people habitually call ‘existentialism’.

In fact, down through the decades, lots of different people came to lots of different conclusions regarding what it means to live one's life as as existentialist. For some, it included leaps of faith to God, while for others leaps of faith to No God. For some the focus is always on the individual, while for others existentialism and Marxism are entirely compatible. Then those like Freud and Jung and Reich who introduced components revolving around the nature of human psychology and the role that sex plays in sustaining repression.

At any rate, it includes those philosophical giants most associated with existentialism – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty – as well as slightly less famous philosophers similarly implicated – de Unamuno, Marcel, de Beauvoir, Hazel Barnes, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Keiji Nishitani, Colin Wilson, Viktor Frankl – and finally those whose existentialist credentials are embedded in more literary genres – Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Rilke, Kafka, Camus, Márquez, Beckett, Borges, Pinter, Heller, Roth, Miller.

What would all of them either agree or disagree about regarding "the for all practical purposes" interactions of men and women, given their own "rooted existentially in dasein" subjective assumptions about existentialism?

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Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

Going where angels, and even Solomon, fear to tread, I shall take a stab at defining existentialism.

Again: define! define! define!

Whereas I am far more intrigued with how any particular definition given to words of this sort are then shown to be applicable to actual human interactions that come into conflict over value judgments.

The dictionary defines existentialism as, "a philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will."

Given this definition, however, doesn't enable individual existentialists to pin down what "for all practical purposes" it means to be free and responsible in any particular set of circumstances. If those at both ends of the political divide insist that being "authentic" revolves around sharing their own set of assumptions regarding the morality of human interactions, then what?

The core of existentialism is a recognition of inescapable personal responsibility.

In other words, in the absence of a demonstrable moral font [God or No God], agreeing on the definition of existentialism won't make the conflicts go away. Nor, in my view, does it make the arguments I post here pertaining to dasein any less relevant.

Instead, what is agreed upon among existentialists all up and down the social, political and economic divides is that they are acting freely and responsibly.

That, and keeping one's assessment of existentialism up in the theoretical clouds...

It involves the realisation that the human individual is irredeemably free and responsible for choosing his outlook on the world, for his conduct in it, for essentially who or what he is, and that no appeal to external authorities such as God, or to rational philosophical systems, or to a predetermined ‘self’, or to the norms that surround us, or to science, can remove this and do the job for us if we wish to live as fully authentic human beings and not as ‘things’ enslaved by the world.

The force of existential choice comes charging home to us when we feel alienated from the mass of norms by which most people around us govern their lives, but which to the enlightened existentialist are ‘absurd’ and ungrounded.

Let's take this to the abortion wars, or the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. And my own focus is on the part where, in the absence of God, existentialists are able to sustain a moral and political philosophy that is not "fractured and fragmented".

Solomon is right: this view of existentialism leads not to a body of doctrine, but to a pervasive way of thinking about the human condition, a comportment to the world, fired by integrity.

Integrity. Another word that can be defined. But those all up and down the moral and political spectrum can claim to embody it. Did Hitler embody it? Is liberal integrity more or less authentic than conservative integrity?

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Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

Most of the above writers are well known, so I’m going to focus on one in the collection who deserves far greater attention than he usually gets. For among the most welcome additions to the second edition of this book is an extract from Colin Wilson’s substantial essay ‘Anti-Sartre’. This is written with all the engaging clarity that one would expect, and facilitated by illuminating analogies.

Start here?

"The book [The Outsider] is structured in order to mirror the Outsider's experience: a sense of dislocation, or of being at odds with society. These are figures like Dostoyevsky's 'Underground-Man' who seem to be lost to despair and non-transcendence with no way out.

Characters are then brought to the fore (including the title character from Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf). These are presented as examples of those who have insightful moments of lucidity in which they feel as though things are worthwhile/meaningful amidst their shared, usual, experience of nihilism and gloom. Sartre's Nausea is herein the key text – and the moment when the hero listens to a song in a cafe which momentarily lifts his spirits is the outlook on life to be normalized.

Wilson then engages in some detailed case studies of artists who failed in this task and try to understand their weakness – which is either intellectual, of the body or of the emotions. The final chapter is Wilson's attempt at a 'great synthesis' in which he justifies his belief that western philosophy is afflicted with a needless pessimistic fallacy." wiki

The great synthesis? Or, as with Nietzsche and his Übermensch, did Wilson blink?

Colin Wilson has been unjustly neglected by academia, in the case of philosophy almost totally so. This may be because he has worked outside the university system almost all his life, and therefore attracts an irredeemable suspicion of not really being ‘sound’.

Why wouldn't that surprise me? Academic philosophy with their Hallowed Halls and their "world of words" dictums.

One does not have to agree with every turn in his writings in general to believe that his specifically philosophical work is in fact of significant value. The core of his philosophical ideas is contained in ‘The Outsider’ series of books, headed up by the first in the set, titled The Outsider. These ideas are condensed in his The New Existentialism and further explored in Below the Iceberg, in the latter of which the full text of ‘Anti-Sartre’ appears.

Here we go again. To revolt or not to revolt? I or we? Political economy or "the market"? In other words, the individual in society and where to draw the line. Sartre accepting that Marxism is clearly relevant to human interactions down through the ages. Where to draw the line there: https://www.google.com/search?q=marxism ... s-wiz-serp

Where do you draw it? Me? I'm no less fractured and fragmented here as well.

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Existentialism edited by Robert C. Solomon
John Shand enjoys a collection of essays about existentialism.

Wilson’s criticism of Sartre echoes Nietzsche’s charge that what are presented by philosophers as universally valid conclusions based on cool reasoning may often be “…an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.”

On the other hand, what on Earth does that mean? What does it mean in regard to your own interactions with others?

For me, what an observation like this really revolves around is dasein. Because each of us as individuals might accumulate many, many different experiences, the "very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts" that we attest to often come into conflict. And once the death of God begins to sink in, any number of ethicists have to find another foundation in which to anchor objective morality. Ideology, philosophy, biological imperatives, science etc., provide some with an alternative to God in regard to the "best of all possible worlds".

Even if we regard this as an exaggeration, it is a reminder of the way in which non-rational factors may be the dominant process leading someone to a belief and others to accepting it, a process made dangerous when what is really doing the work is hidden behind a façade of poor reasoning that we are assured is its true origin.

Same thing. What "on Earth" does this convey to each of us as individuals given the assumptions I make above. That, in my view, in a world teeming with conflicting goods centuries and centuries after the birth of philosophy, why haven't philosophers been able to pin down human interactions demonstrated to be either the most and the least rational?

According to Wilson, nothing could be truer of Sartre. What seems to be a complex, thought-out position in fact manifests the drive of personal psychology that was going to take him to that result anyway – and, moreover, to a position concerning the human condition that is false.

Is this actually true? How about if an attempt is made at intertwining the positions Sartre conveys in Being and Nothingness with events that unfold from day to day "in the news".

On the other hand, here we go again: philosophers who claim to rationally differentiate the right from the wrong assessment of the "human condition" itself. These parts:

Capitalism vs. socialism, big government vs. small government, I vs. we, genes vs. memes, religion vs. atheism, idealism vs pragmatism, might makes right vs. right makes might vs. democracy and the rules of law.