EXISTENTIALISM
By
Prof. P. NAGARAJA RAO. M.A., D. Litt.
(Gujarat
College, Ahmedabad)
The
two contemporary systems of philosophy in the West are (1) Logical Positivism,
and (2) Existentialism. Existentialism is the most popular system on the
continent. It has almost become a rage with the intellectuals of our day. Its
popularity is in no small measure due to the literary modes of expression
adopted by several existentialists, the most prominent among them being Jean
Paul Sartre. His novels and dramas have served to popularise the doctrines of
Existentialism. They entertain the feeling that what cannot be expressed, and
yet can be sympathetically felt in the vicarious reliving of experience, can be
best expressed by the use of imagination, in fiction and by dramas enacted in
theatres. This method achieves a directness and a minimum of tedium. Fiction
and drama have proved the most perfect vehicles for the exposition of the
doctrines of the system.
Existentialism
is not all one doctrine, or one system. It is a complex heritage. Some trace
the system back to Descartes and thus build for it an impressive ancestry.
Among the Existentialists there are two sections, (a) the theistic section
believing in God and religion, prominent among them being Kierkegaard, Jasper
and Marcel; and (b) the atheistic section who do not believe in God.
Prominent among them are Heideggar and Sartre.
Existentialism
stands for the recovery and the restoration of the dignity of the individual
and his personality. It is opposed to all those forces and currents of thought
that threaten to pulverise and submerge the individual. It sets itself against
all those collectivist political ideologies like Marxism, Absolutism, Idealism
and the Unconscious of Freud which is supposed to determine all our conscious
behaviour. It is wedded to the resolute, radical affirmation of the personality
of man. It resists all forms of delerminism and opposes all those
schools of thought that seek to resolve man into a number of functions. In
short, it is a glorious kind of Personalist Philosophy of life.
The
subject matter of Existentialism is the analysis of human experience, to find
out what is truly encountered in experience. They seek to find out the truly
real and significant in experience. The things that men encounter in their
several experiences are of great importance to the Existentialists. We get a
penetrating analysis of crisis, anguish, care, remorse, despair, and dread.
In these situations men make their decisions, in the shadow of inevitable
death. Existentialists exhort men to make authentic choice in a crisis
by the use of their total freedom. The human being is the centre of this
philosophy. He is sharply distinguished from the world of things. The things of
the world are merely what they are and
are not completely self-subsistent. In Sartre’s words, they are en-soi. Man
alone is pour-soi. Man alone is for himself. He has
the consciousness of some want. It is this want that makes him create Values.
Man is not a determined and completed thing. He is making himself by his
choices. Every moment of his life, he wills his future by choosing freely.
Even the irrevocable past is re-made by our choices and rejections. Thus, the
fundamental doctrine of the system is, “We are free, so profoundly free that
our being is our freedom.”
Freedom
is our inalienable destiny. It is our triumph and tragedy. In our choice we
should never treat ourselves or others as en-soi but treat them as pour-soi.
Our choice must be authentic. To be authentic, we must choose with the
essential element in our being. We should make no choice which we do not think
appropriate to all other selves who are, or might be, situated in like
positions. We should always renew our responsibility in our choice. It is this
responsibility element that distinguishes man from the rest of creation. It
makes morality not a matter of caprice or whim, or mechanical or determinist.
It makes morality an active creative choice.
The
central datum of this school is man and his Freedom. Man has no given character.
There is a self-transcending and self-creating nature in man. He is free; what
he makes of himself depends on himself and his free choice.
Values are not there independent of man. They are his creations. The foundation
of all values is liberty. Sartre cried out, “I am my
liberty; man is condemned to be free.”
The
self of man is not an enclosed consciousness. The world of objects is the field
of the self’s realisation. There is no insurmountable dualism. Man’s existence
precedes his essence. Man has no essence antecedent to his existence.
His essence is what he freely creates himself. Man is not in this world to
fulfill prophecies and fit into puzzles.
Essence
is the constant concatenation of properties. Existence is the effective
presence in the world. In the case of man existence comes first. It means roan is
before he is this or that. Existentialism defends the glory
of man by affirming his freedom, and liberating him from all forms of
determinism.