Existentialism
Definition
Existentialism is a philosophical movement, chiefly European and chiefly twentieth-century, organised around the claim that human beings have no given essence or predetermined nature, and are therefore responsible for making themselves through their choices.
Jean-Paul Sartre's formula — "existence precedes essence" — states the position. A paper-knife has an essence before it exists: a maker conceived its purpose and then produced it. A human being exists first, encounters themselves, and only afterwards defines what they are.
Principal Figures
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) are the precursors: the first on anxiety, faith and the individual before an absolute; the second on the death of God and the necessity of creating values. Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) supplied the analytic apparatus, though he rejected the label. The movement proper is Parisian and postwar: Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) and Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946); Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949); Albert Camus, who also rejected the label, on the absurd; Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, in Phenomenology of Perception (1945); and Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel in a religious register.
Key Ideas
- Radical freedom and responsibility. If nothing determines what a person is, every choice is theirs, including the choice not to choose. Sartre's phrase is that we are "condemned to be free."
- Anguish, abandonment, despair. The affective consequences of freedom without external justification.
- Bad faith (mauvaise foi). Sartre's term for the self-deception by which people deny their own freedom — pretending that a role, a nature, a circumstance or an obligation left them no choice. His waiter who is playing at being a waiter is the standing example.
- The look. Being seen by another converts one from a subject into an object in someone else's world. Sartre's analysis of shame and objectification under the gaze is among the movement's most cited passages.
- Situated freedom. Beauvoir's substantial correction to Sartre. Freedom is real but always exercised within a situation, and situations are not equally free — a point she develops into an account of how women are made rather than born, in the founding text of modern feminist philosophy.
- Authenticity. Living in acknowledgement of one's freedom and finitude rather than in flight from them.
Criticism
The movement has been faulted for individualism that underweights social structure, for a vocabulary that resists testing, and — in Sartre's early work — for a conception of freedom so absolute that it cannot account for constraint. Beauvoir's situated version answers much of this. Structuralism largely displaced existentialism in French intellectual life from the 1960s, on the argument that the sovereign chooser was itself an effect of systems.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Existentialism's central claim is directly at stake in this field. If there is no fixed human essence, then the objection that technological modification is "against human nature" has no ground to stand on — a point that cuts both for and against enthusiasm. Bad faith is equally applicable: "the algorithm decided," "everyone is on it," and "the technology made this inevitable" are all ways of disowning a choice. And Sartre's account of the look is the most precise available description of what it is to live under an interface that watches; see panopticon and extended avatar.
