An introduction to existential philosophy that answers all the questions that have been lingering in my mind recently.

The existential psychotherapy emphasizes a conflict that flows from the individual’s confrontation with the givens of existence—certain ultimate concerns, certain intrinsic properties that are a part, and an inescapable part, of the human being’s existence in the world.

Specifically, four basic issues: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.

Death: We live now, but one day we will die, there is no escape. One day all my life’s endeavors will come to an abrupt end, everything will be over, and my existence will be a passing smoke, and I will soon be forgotten by everyone. Realizing this, how am I supposed to live?

Freedom: The human being does not enter (and leave) a well structured universe that has an inherent design. Family, nation, society, history, freedom, justice…if people did not artificially construct and give meaning to the world, then the universe ifself would actually have no meaning and purpose, and would be nothing more than longly cold existence.

Isolation: No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, unbridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is thus the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole.

Meaninglessness: The human being, a meaning-seeking creature, is thrown into a universe that has no meaning. Why are we alive? What is the meaning of life? If there is no pre-ordained design for us, then each of us must construct our own meanings in life. Yet can a meaning of one’s own creation be sturdy enough to bear one’s life?

There are only two ways to deal with the brutal existential facts of life—anxious truth or denial—and either is unpalatable. Which would you have, wise madness or foolish sanity?

An existential therapeutic postition rejects this dilemma. Wisdom does not lead to madness, nor denial to sanity: the confrontation with the givens of existence is painful but ultimately healing.

If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

Death

The biological life-death boundary is relatively precise; but, psychologically, life and death merge into one another. Death is a fact of life; a moment’s reflection tells us that death is not simply the last moment of life. “Even in birth we die; the end is there from the start.”

Although the physicality of death destroys man, the idea of death saves him. The idea of death may save man, and arrived at the important insight that the awareness of our personal death acts as a spur to shift us from one mode of existence to a higher one.

Heidegger believed that there are two fundamental modes of existing in the world: (1) a state of forgetfulness of being or (2) a state of mindfulness of being.

Ordinarily one lives in the first state. Forgetfulness of being is the everyday mode of existence, in which one is unaware of one’s authorship of one’s life and world, in which one “flees”, “falls”, and is tranquilized, in which one avoids choices by being “carried along by the nobody”. When however, one enters the second mode of being (mindfulness of being), one exists authentically (hence, the frequent modern use of the term “authenticity” in psychology). In this state, one becomes fully self-aware—aware of oneself as a transcendental (constituting) ego as well as an empirical (constituted) ego; one embraces one’s possibilities and limits; one faces absolute freedom and nothingness.

Death is the condition that makes it possible for us to live life in an authentic fashion.

Defenses against Death

There are tow fundamental defenses against death: one is the pursuit of specialness, and the other is the faith of an ultimate rescuer.

The human being either fuses or separates, embeds or emerges. He affirms his autonomy by “standing out from nature”, or seeks safety by merging with another force. Either he becomes his own father or he remains the ternal son.

Overall the ultimate rescuer defense is less effective than the belief in personal specialness. Not only is it more likely to break down but it is intrinsically restrictive to the person.

It is dangerous to venture. And why? Because one may lose. Not to venture is shrewd. And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in evey the most venturesome venture,…one’s self. For if I have ventured amiss—very well, then life helps my by its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all—who then helps me? And moreover, if by not venturing at all in the highest sense (and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of oneself) I have gained all earthly advantages…and lose myself. What of that?

Kierkegaard

Death Anxiety

Death is a primary source of anxiety.

Though we hopes to alleviate crippling levels of anxiety, we do not hope to eliminate anxiety.

Life cannot be lived nor can death be faced without anxiety. Anxiety is guide as well as enemy and can point the way to authentic existence.

The task is to reduce anxiety to comfortable levels and then to use this existing anxiety to increase one’s awareness and vitality.

It is a matter of no small importance that one be able to explain and order the events in our lives into some coherent and predictable pattern. To name something, to locate its place in a casual sequence, is to begin to experience it as under our control. No longer, then, is our internal experience or behavior frightening, alien or out of control; instead, we behave (or have a particular inner experience) because of something we can name or identify. The because offers one mastery (or a sense of mastery that phenomenologically is tantamount to mastery). I believe that the sense of potency that flows from understanding occurs even in the matter of our basic existential situation: each of us feels less futile, less helpless, and less alone, even when, ironically, what we come to understand is the fact that each of us is basically helpless and alone in the face of cosmic indifference.

Freedom

To the philosopher, “freedom” has broad personal, social, moral, and political implications and consequently encompasses a wide terrain. Moreover, the issue is intensely controversial: the philosophical debate concerning freedom and causality has not ceased for two thousand years.

Throughout history free will has always managed to offend the prevailing world view. Though the controversy regarding free will has continued without cessation, the opponents of the concept have changed over the centuries. The Greek philosophers had no term for “free will”; the very concept was incompatible with the prevailing belief in eternal recurrence. The Stoic fatalists, who believed that whatever is or will be “was to be”, rejected the idea of a freely willing agency in man. Christian theology could not reconcile the belief in divine providence, in an omniscient, omnipotent god, with the claims of free will. Later, free will clashed with scientific positivism, with Isaac Newton’s and Pierre Laplace’s belief in an explicable and predictable universe. Still later, the Hegelian idea of history as a necessary progress of the world spirit clashed with a free-will ideology that, by its very nature, rejects necessity and holds that all that was or is done could, as well, not have been done. Lastly, free will is opposed by all deterministic systems whether they be based on economic, behavioristic, or psychoanalytic principles.

The relationship between environment and personal freedom is extraordinarily complex. Do individuals carve their own destinies, or are they entirely determined by environmental contingencies.

Generally in a debate between a determinist and a libertarian (one who believed in freedom of the will) logic and reality seem to be on the side of the determinist; the libertarian is “softer” and appeals to unmeasurable, emotional argument.

Not even the most fanatical determinist can contend that we are determined by our environment to alter our environment; such a position obviously leads to an infinite regress. If we manipulate our environment, then we are no longer environmentally determined; on the contrary, the environment is determined.

A vast body of empirical research supports the position of reciprocal determinism.

The phrase that creates vast problems for the libertarian is that the behavior of people immersed in water will be “remarkably similar”. The issue, of course, is “behavior”. How was it determined that behavior should be the criterion by which choice or freedom is measured?

One’s attitude towards one’s situation is the very crux of being human, and conclusions about human nature based solely on measurable behavior are distortions of that nature. It cannot be denied that environment, genetics, or chance plays a role in one’s life. The limiting circumstances are obvious: Sartre speaks of a “coefficient of adversity”. All of us face natural adversities that influence our lives. But that does not mean that we have no responsibility (or choice) in the situation. We are responsible still for what we make out of our handicaps; for our attitudes toward them; for the bitterness, anger, or depression that act synergistically with the original “coefficient of adversity” to ensure that a handicap will defeat the individual.

When all else fails, when the coefficient of adversity is formidable, still one is responsible for the attitude one adopts toward the adversity—whether to live a life of bitter regret or to find a way to transcend the handicap and to fashion a meaningful life despite it.

Responsibility

The world acquiresd significance only through the way it is constituted by the human being.

The heart of Kant’s revolution in philosophy was his position that it is human consciousness, the nature of the human being’s mental structures, that provides the external form of reality. Space itself is not something objective and real but something subjective and ideal; it is, as it were, a schema issuing by a constant law from the nature of the mind for the coordinating of all outer sensa whatever.

The human being is not only free but is doomed to freedom. Both to constitute (to be responsible for) oneself and one’s world and to be aware of one’s responsibility is a deeply frightening insight. Nothing in the world has significance except by virtue of one’s own creation. There are no rules, no ethical systems, no values, there is no external referent whatsoever; there is no grand design in the universe. In Sartre’s view, the individual alone is the creator (this is what he means by “man is the being whose project is to be god”.

To experience existence in this manner is a dizzying sensation. Nothing is as it seemed. The very ground beneath one seems to open up. Indeed, groundlessness is a commonly used term for a subjective experience of responsibility awareness. Many existential philosophers have described the anxiety of groundlessness as “ur-anxiety”—the most fundamental anxiety, an anxiety that cuts deeper even than the anxiety associated with death.

One avoids situations (for example, making decisions, isolation, autonomous action) that, if deeply considered, would make one aware of one’s fundamental groundlessness. Thus one seeks structure, authority, grand designs, magic, something that is bigger than oneself.

To be taken in by any of these devices that allow us to flee from our freedom is to live “inauthentically” or in “bad faith”.

Willing

The guileless expectation that an individual will change as a result of this approach stems directly from the moral philosophical belief that if one truly knows the good, one will act accordingly.

However, “will power” constitutes only the first layer, and a thin layer at that, of “willing”.

When I look back at the three or four choices in my life which have been decisive, I find that, at the time I made them, I had very little sense of the seriousness of what I was doing and only later did I discover what had seemed an unimportant brook was, in fact, a Rubicon.

W. H. Auden

The important choices that one makes in life are not consciously experienced as choices. In fact, only after the fact is one able to deduce that one has actually made a choice. This realm of will maybe thought of as a subterranean life current that has direction but not discrete objects or goals. It provides propulsion to the individual but eludes immediate and direct scrutiny.

The second realm of will is the conscious component: it is experienced during the event. The second realm of will presses toward some specific object and is utilitarian in character.

The second realm of will is approached through exhortations and appeals to will power, effort, and determination. The first realm is impervious to these enjoinders and must be approached obliquely.

Wish, the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occuring, is the first step of the process of willing.

“Wish” gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the child’s play, the freshness, and the richness to “will”. “Will” gives the self-direction, the maturity, to “wish”. Without “wish”, “will” loses its life-blood, it’s viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only “will” and no “wish”, you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan man. If you have only “wish” and no “will”, you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot man.

Wishing requires feeling

The wish-blocked individuals has enormous social difficulties. They have no opinions, no inclinations, no desires of their own.

One’s capacity to wish is automatically facilitated if one is helped to feel. Wishing requires feeling. If one’s wishes are based on something other than feelings—for exmaple, on rational deliberation or moral imperatives—then they are no longer wishes but “shoulds” or “oughts”, and one is blocked from communicating with one’s real self.

Choices and decisions

Some peoples can proceed untroubled by proceeding blindly, believing they have traveled the main highway and that all intersections have been with byways. But to proceed with awareness and imagination is to be affected by the memory of crossroads, taking neither path because they cannot take both, cherishing the illusion that if they sit there long enough the two ways will resolve themselves into one and hence both be possible. A large part of maturity and courage is the ability to make such renunciations, and a large part of wisdom is the ability to find ways which will enable one to renounce as little as possible.

Isolation

It is the knowledge of “my death” that makes one fully realize that no one can die with one or for one.

The longliness of being one’s own parent. To the extent that one is responsible for one’s life, one is alone.

Responsibility implies authorship; to be aware of one’s authorship means to foresake the belief that there is another who creates and guards one.

Deep loneliness is inherent in tha act of self-creation, a lonely dread that is a wind blowing from one’s own desert place—the nothing that is at the core of being.

Right Path

The major buttress against the terror of existential isolation is thus relational in nature.

Yet aloneness can be shared in such a way that love compensates for the pain of isolation. A great relationship breaches the barriers of a lofty solitude, subdues its stict law, and throws a bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe.

On the one hand, one must learn to relate to another without giving way to the desire to slip out of isolation by becoming part of that other. But one must also learn to relate to another without reducing the other to a tool, a defense against isolation. But, it is the facing of aloneness that ultimately allows one to engage another deeply and meaningfully.

If we are able to acknowledge our isolated situation in existence and to confront them with resoluteness, we will be albe to turn lovingly toward others. If, on the other hand, we are overcome with dread before the abyss of loneliness, we will not reach out toward others but instead will flail at them in order not to drown in the sea of existence.

Need-free love

A relationship, at its best, involves individuals who relate to one another in a need-free fashion.

One lets go of self-consciousness and self-awareness. One must relate with one’s whole being: if part of oneself is elsewhere—for example, studying the effect that the relationship will have upon some third person—then to that extent one has failed to relate.

To care for another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible. If one relates selflessly, one is free to experience all parts of the other rather than the part that serves some utilitarian purpose. One extends oneself into the other, recognizing the other as a sentient being who has also constituted a world about himself or herself.

With one’s full knowledge, gleaned from genuine listening, one endeavors to help the other become fully alive in the moment of encounter.

Mature caring is not without its rewards. One is altered, one is enriched, one is fulfilled, one’s existential loneliness is attenuated. Through caring one is cared for. Yet these rewards flow from genuine caring; they do not instigate it. The rewards ensue but cannot be pursued.

Wrong Paths

Dependency

The human being’s “universal conflict” is that one strives to be an individual, and yet being an individual requires that one endure a frightening isolation.

Individuals whose major orientation is toward fusion are generally labeled “dependent”.

One may also shed one’s isolating sense of self by fusing, not with another individual, but with a “thing”—a group, a cause, a country, a project. There is something enromously compelling in merging with a larger group.

One knows only that one cannot be alone, that one desperately wants from others something that one is never able to obtain and that, try as one might, something always goes wrong with one’s relationship.

Yet another solution lies in the direction of sacrificing selfhood: one gains relief from isolation anxiety through immersion in some other individual, cause or pursuit. Thus, individuals are, as Kierkegaard said, twice in despair: to begin with, in a fundamental existential despair, and then further in despair because, having sacrificed self-awareness, they do not even know they are in despair.

Sex

Sex may be used in the service of repression of death anxiety. If we make love to a woman without relating to her spirit we are fetishists, even if in the physical act we use the proper body orifice.

One is in love with passion, one collects excitement and trophies, one warms oneself “at the blaze at the what has fallen to his lot”—but what one does not do is to relate authentically to oneself or to another.

A full caring relationship is a relationship to another, not to any extraneous figure from the past or the present. Transference, parataxic distortions, ulterior motives and goals—all must be swept away before an authentic relation with another can prevail.

Meaninglessness

What is the meaning of life? Why do we live?

The human being seems to require meaning. To live without meaning, goals, values, or ideals seems to provoke considerable distress. In severe form it may laed to the decision to end one’s life. Individuals facing death are able to live “better” lives, live with fullness and zest, if they are possessed of a sense of purpose. We apparently need absolutes—firm ideals to which we can aspire and guidelines by which to steer our lives.

Yet the existential concept of freedom posits that the only true absolute is that there are no absolutes. An existential position holds that the world is contingent—that is, everything that is could as well have been otherwise; that human beings constitute themselves, their world, and their situation within that world; that there exists no “meaning”, no grand design in the universe, no guidelines for living other than those the individual creates.

How does a being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

Camus stated that we are moral creatures who demand that the world supply a basis for moral judgment—that is, a meaning system in which is implicit a blue-print of values.

Camus started from a position of nihilism—a position in which he despaired at the lack of meaning (and, thus, lack of purpose and values) in the world—and soon generated, gratuitously, a system of personal meaning—a system that encompasses several clear values and guidelines for conduct: courage, prideful rebellion, fraternal solidarity, love, secular saintliness.

Sartre arrived at a position in his fiction that clearly values the search for meaning and even suggests paths to take in that search. These include finding a “home” and comradeship in the world, action, freedom, rebellion against oppression, service to others, enlightment, self-realization, and engagement—always and above all, engagement.

Engagement

On this one point most Western theological and atheistic existential systems agree: it is good and right to immerse oneself in the stream of life.

The more we explicitly search for pleasure, the more it eludes us. Pleasure is a by-product of meaning, and that one’s search should be directed toward the discovery of meaning.

Meaning, like pleasure, must be pursued obliquely. The more we rationally seek it, the less we find it; the questions that one can pose about meaning will always outlast the answers. A sense of meaningfulness is a by-product of engagement.

The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

Engagement is the therapeutic answer to meaninglessness regardless of the latter’s source. Wholehearted engagement in any of the infinite array of life’s activities not only disarms the galactic view but enhances the possibility to one’s completing the patterning of the events of one’s life in some coherent fashion.

To find a home, to care about other individuals, about ideas or projects, to search, to create, to build—these, and all other forms of engagement, are twice rewarding: they are intrinsically enriching, and they alleviate the dysphoria that stems from being bombarded with the unassembled brute data of existence.