Transcendental Existentialism
Aristotle says that “all men by nature desire to know”[1] but this desire stems not just from a childlike curiosity. We are driven, we are compelled to know. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge, and have awoken both to the beauty and the harshness of the world, both to the comprehensibility and unfathomability of being. We have reached the “dizzying heights of freedom”, bringing with it both a sense of liberation and a crushing isolation.[2] It is the anxiety in the uncertainty of our condition that drives us. We must find a way out. That is why we seek to know. We need to know something that will make being okay, or be something that will make knowing okay.
It is in beginning to ask ‘why’ that we are confronted, as Camus says, with the absurdity of our need for meaning and the “unreasonable silence of the world”.[3] Somehow, we have knowledge of what ought to be, and yet what we confront in the world leaves us mortally dissatisfied. Our innocence shatters in this inevitable confrontation between what we long for and what we encounter in the world and in ourselves. Philosophy is borne out of this encounter.
But if fear is the beginning of wisdom,[4] it certainly does not end here. Camus is quick to take the silence of the world as definitive proof of its meaninglessness, but once we acclimatize to the shock, we find something else hidden here. There remains a light that the darkness cannot extinguish. Alongside the fear there is a hope. Even if philosophy awakens in fear, it then orients itself towards this innate, inborn hope. This is the eschatological and teleological spirit that runs through metaphysics: life is inherently meaningful, that even if the tortured arc of history runs exceedingly long, it bends towards a meaningful culmination. Still, this hope is not strong enough to eradicate doubt, and we are left, struggling under this dichotomy. This is the paradoxical nature of the human condition. It is therefore, to disagree with Camus, not absurdity but rather uncertainty that is the fundamental problem for philosophy.[5]
The deep-seated anguish that underpins philosophy arises in our encountering of the gap between what is and what ought to be. Uncertainty contains both an existential dread that this gap is unbridgeable and an existential hope that it is possible to transcend it. To experience uncertainty is to experience both sides simultaneously, and this feeling is one of anxiety. This uncertainty demands a response from us, and all of philosophy can be seen as an attempt at responding to this anxiety. Though concern for the paradoxical nature of the human condition and this existential need to respond to this primordial anxiety runs through all philosophy (as it does through theology and psychology) and can be found in every serious thinker, existentialism is the tradition that most formalized this, along with psychoanalysis which took up and expounded upon these themes.
The responses from existentialism (along with psychoanalysis) can be divided along two distinct lines: how to manage this anxiety, or how to transcend it. If we believe that the gap is unbridgeable, and yet do not choose to give into despair, we will focus our attention on how to manage our expectations, on how to live with our anxiety, on that which is still under our control: ourselves. If we believe that the gap is bridgeable, we will focus our attention on how to reach across the divide, on how to transcend this anxiety, on that which is outside ourselves. For the management existentialist, the central themes are being, freedom and revolt. For the transcendental existentialist, while he also accepts those themes, he adds to them a higher counterpart: becoming over being, love over freedom, and transformation over revolt.
For certain management existentialists such as Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre, in order to become authentic and embrace our total freedom, we must accept that the gap we encounter is unbridgeable, and we must free ourselves from any comforting illusions that would tell us otherwise. Transcendent hope is rejected outright on the grounds that it is irrational, yet the very hope that they deride in their transcendental counterparts is nonetheless hidden in their philosophy. It is because man is free that transcendence is possible. Kierkegaard’s leap is a leap not only of faith (or to faith), but a leap of freedom. While there is certainly more to life than that which is rational, there is no reason to think transcendence is irrational, for it has always been a part of nature.[6] All of life — like Aristotle’s acorn — is imbued with potentiality and always in a process of becoming. If choice is a fundamental aspect of the universe, if we are imbued with freedom, there is no reason to think we are forever doomed to our eternal sentence, for it is in this freedom that we become cocreators of the world. We are not just powerless playthings of the gods; we are life in the process of bridging the gap.
For the management existentialists, meaninglessness is accepted as a fundamental aspect of the human condition. In order for us to take responsibility for our own agency and in this way create our own meaning, we must face up to this difficult truth: that man is condemned to the tragic conditions of existence. Yet, even though they resign themselves to the notion of an unbridgeable gap between the world we encounter and the world that we long for, they nonetheless commit to act (at least certainly the case with Sartre) as if by their actions, life becomes meaningful, which is for all intents and purposes the same thing. Life is meaningful, even if the meaning is in potential, waiting for consciousness to breathe meaning into the universe. If we can create meaning, and we are part of the universe, then we cannot say that the universe has no meaning. The universe becomes meaningful because of us, and because of us it has always been meaningful. If we can breathe meaning into the world, then we cannot say that life is meaningless, for we are part of life.
The contribution of the management existentialists was to remind us of our capacity for choice. But while this emphasis on freedom elevated the individual, it was still not enough to quell our anxiety, only to repress it. Freedom has never been enough to suffice for the meaning of being. In order to transcend the condition of anxiety that attends being, being is in need of something beyond itself. For the management existentialists, being appears to us as it is, fully made and fully on its own. But for the transcendental existentialists, being is in the process of becoming, and in a dynamic relationship with an existence also in a process of becoming. The meaning of being then cannot be found only within being itself, but in its relation with what is outside of it.
Looking inwards and analyzing ourselves is not enough to understand the meaning of being for the path to becoming fully human runs through the other. For certain transcendental existentialists, such as Levinas and Buber (though he rejected the existentialist label), the self can only be fully understood in its relation with the other. But whereas for Levinas the other has primacy over the self (following in the Hebrew tradition of a God that is wholly other and in an asymmetrical relationship with man), Buber — though also of Jewish background — proposes a relational approach reflective of the Christian trinitarian tradition, a paradoxical symmetry which is nonetheless hidden in Levinasian ethics where the self is other to the other, where “each is other to each”.[7] For Buber, for whom reality is a dialogue, the existential condition of man is transcended through a relationship where man becomes more than man (or rather, where man becomes fully human). Buber puts it this way: “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”[8]
This is the position taken up by certain of existential psychoanalysts such as Frankl and Fromm, for whom our connection with others is the means through which we transcend our existential condition. Frankl, who even after having endured the terrors of the German concentration camps, still did not reach the conclusion of the management existentialists (that life is ultimately meaningless and all we have power over is how we respond to that meaninglessness), instead continued to believe that no matter the condition of the world, there would always be a meaning that we could find and fulfil, the greatest of which is to be found in loving another being. What the mystics and the poets had long known, the transcendental psychoanalysts reaffirmed, that “the salvation of man is through love and in love”.[9] Love is the only thing that can suffice for the meaning of being, the only real cure for our anxiety. As Fromm puts it, “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”[10] If fear is the introduction to philosophy, love is assuredly its conclusion.
[1] Aristotle: Metaphysics
[2] Kierkegaard: The Concept of Anxiety
[3] Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus
[4] [“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” Proverbs 9:10a]
[5] For Camus, absurdity is established in the “impossibility of knowledge” which we respond to with “everlasting nothingness” and “irremediable despair”. Camus provides us with a disclaimer: “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.” This phrase ‘just now’, is of particular importance. This gap may ‘just now’ be impossible to bridge, but if we describe absurdity as simply a transient condition, that would render the ‘irremediable despair’ unwarranted. [Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus]
[6] Swenson, who translated Kierkegaard into English, explains this leap with the analogy of H2O becoming water and water becoming ice. Just as H20 transforms into water by a qualitative leap, so too might we transcend the gap between what is and what ought to be by taking a leap, by faith, or to faith. [Swenson: “The Anti-Intellectualism of Kierkegaard”]
[7] “An individual is other to the other. One is not the other. Each is other to each. Each excludes all others.” [Levinas: Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other]
[8] Buber: I And Thou [ Reflective of the verse: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Matt. 18:19–20]
[9] Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning
[10] Fromm: The Art of Loving
