Existentialism Redivivus

Existentialism was the first philosophy I actually studied on my own. I was a senior in high school, a self-styled intellectual rebel and classroom instigator who liked to give my teachers a hard time. I recall this now with neither shame nor pride, since it was a fairly typical form of teenage rebellion back in the early sixties, and considering what some of my contemporaries were up to, I imagine my teachers were not particularly troubled by my antics. But one result was I spent a good deal of time in the local branch of the public library looking for difficult books to read. That was how I stumbled upon James Joyce and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a book I assumed would address my situation exactly. (I still have the copy I eventually bought for myself, one of my earliest hardbacks.) One day while scanning the philosophy shelves I came upon another book whose title spoke to me: Being and Nothingness, by Jean-Paul Sartre. His fundamental question, inspired (as I learned) by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, was "why are there essents rather than nothing?" This struck me as the essential question, if you'll pardon the obvious pun, and I wondered why more people weren't discussing it.

Well, I was a kid all of eighteen years old, and precisely how much I was getting out of these heavy philosophical tomes is a question open to speculation. Not a lot, I suspect. But then the fundamental assertions of existentialism aren't really that complicated, which most likely accounts for its popular appeal. I would later learn that while phenomenology had earned a more or less respectable place in departments of philosophy, its existentialist offspring never really found a comfortable home there. Perhaps that was owing to the refusal of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (the two most associated with the emergence of existentialism) to surrender to academic respectability. Perhaps also it was owing to the fact that some of the most influential existentialist books were novels, like Sartre's Nausea and Albert Camus's The Stranger. (Later I would read both of those books in their original French, so drawn was I to this notion of existentialism.) In fact, here in the U.S. existentialism found its academic home in departments of literature more than in departments of philosophy.

All of this has lately come back to me since reading Sarah Bakewell's Existentialist Cafe (2016). I read a review of the book last year in the New York Times and thought I would like it. I remembered how much I had enjoyed her earlier book, How to Live: a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (2010), one of the best biographies of Montaigne I've read. And her book on the existentialists is just as entertaining and instructive. I came away remembering both why I had been attracted to them, and also why eventually my early enthusiasm began to fade. There's a certain tension in such a world view between a recognition of the obvious and a surrender to the inevitable, and no matter how many times I try to understand what is truly authentic and what is bad faith, I always seem to come away either disappointed or confused. Yet there is still a basic appeal in the notion that we are each free agents, responsible for our lives, our choices, our actions, despite what modern genetics and neuroscience have tried to tell us about the ways our biology has determined our existence. And that, I suppose, is why I continue to admire Sartre and de Beauvoir. Despite the confusion they often fostered with some of their choices, they never wavered in their commitment to take responsibility for their own lives.

As one ages, looking backwards and forwards, one confronts some of those fundamental questions that once held a certain philosophical or theoretical interest if not with a greater sum of wisdom, then perhaps with acquired understanding from lived experience, and perhaps a more nuanced appreciation for the difficulty of making definitive decisions with the nearer approach of the moment of truth, or at least of finality. It's natural, we are told (and can observe in our own lives as well as in literature), to ponder the meaning of existence. Indeed, why are there beings rather than nothing? And even more mysterious, why is there knowing rather than not knowing? What is all this knowing for? And after all this time, what can we say with any certitude that we really know? These and similar questions have often been asked, and many answers proffered. Once we acquired the ability to ask questions and seek meaning, we began to find answers, and some of those answers have brought us comfort (as well as warfare, love and hate). Perhaps that is all we need so far as ultimate questions are concerned. With regard to less ultimate questions, such as why does everybody want you to be just like them? Well, I guess I'm as clueless as Bob on that one. Last time I checked, nobody wants to work on Maggie's farm no more.