What is Existentialism? Part I: The Subject, Truth, and Knowledge

Picking a point to begin defining existentialism is akin to picking a particular strand of hay to begin defining a hay bail. By the time you reach the hay bail to begin analyzing it, it is (of course) already a fully formed hay bail. Thus, the beginning strand is next to impossible to clearly identify.

Regarding existentialism, a wide variety of methods and themes of analysis have been built up over the history of philosophy which can be roughly labeled "existentialist". Existentialism also tends to have its own style of writing, which is often less dry and less interested in abstract formula. However, for all the expressive freedom open to it, existentialist writing also has a tradition of using language in clunky, counter-intuitive, and sometimes downright obscure ways. Its literature thus runs the gamut from some of the most accessible to some of the least accessible philosophical works.

There are some more or less "cannon" conclusions that most existentialists take for granted, though there is nothing approaching a solid foundation of unquestioned propositions that one has to affirm to be an "existentialist". For instance, it is typically taken for granted within existentialist philosophy that there is no god, there are no moral facts built into the universe, and that each person is free to determine their own way of being. However, there are philosophers who have been identified as existentialist but who disagree on some or all of those propositions.

In fact, it is even debatable as to whether or not the terms 'existentialist' and 'existentialism' actually refer to any current philosophers. The vast majority of existentialist philosophers have been philosophers whom others have described as being existentialists; most either never heard the term or else didn't think of themselves in that way. The term and its loosely defined philosophical tradition may well be relics of the past; ones that influence modern philosophy without actually being practiced anymore. However, even if existentialism is a fixed part of the dead past, it still eludes a simple formulation.

Now, I do consider myself to be an existentialist. And, furthermore, I think all good, valuable, relevant philosophy is going to either be explicitly existential or else have existential themes within it. This, I know, is a rather bold claim; one that I will not be articulating in this particular post.

So as I see it, the tradition is not dead, nor should it be thought of as a relic of the past. It is instead still a viable field of analysis that can help us find philosophically relevant truth.

What I'd like to do, then, is isolate some of the common methods and themes of analysis which I think can be found. I want to give you an impression of what sort of questions existentialism tends to deal with, as well as what some of the most common (though not necessarily exclusive) answers to those questions are generally taken to be.

One of the starting points of existentialism acts as both theme and conclusion. This starting point is the idea that there is no transcendental subject. I think this is an essential idea, and one that has direct implications for how we think about our lives. So set's break that idea down first. Before we can fully digest it, we need to specify just what we're talking about when we say "subject", and so that is what this first little essay is going to be about.

What is the subject?

You. Me. Any self-aware consciousness, really.

The "subject" is the individual mind, the consciousness, the ego, the "I". However you wish to name it, the subject is that-which-knows-and-knows-itself. For a consciousness to be a true subject, it is crucial that it knows that it knows; that it has self-awareness, not just brute awareness of the external world.

Show me an AI that "knows" how to play chess, and I'll say that's not a subject; its just a complicated set of algorithms that crank out responses which we see as being rational. In truth, though, it is still a thing, an object, and not a subject. The AI does not know that it exists, does not know that it is playing chess, and does not know what a "pawn" is. It simply is programmed on how to manipulate symbols in algorithmic response to symbolic input from another player.

But show me an AI that can play chess and (somehow) actually knows of itself as a chess player? Has a concept of "I am"? Maybe even has opinions about chess and whether or not its a fun game? Now we're talking about a subject in the existentialist sense.

Now, within existentialist philosophy (and most other philosophy that deals with questions of mind), a key term to know is "intentionality". In philosophy, intentionality is the "aboutness" of consciousness. That is, it is what consciousness is conscious-about in a given moment. If I am thinking of a lamp, then my intentionality is the mental image of a lamp. If I'm scrutinizing a physical lamp, then my intentionality is directed towards the lamp in front of me.

Long ago, philosophers noted that consciousness never exists apart from its object; it never exists without being in some intentional state. Consciousness is always consciousness of something else. Intentionality isn't just something consciousness can do, it is an ever-present, vital, necessary element of what consciousness actually is. It is the state of being a self-aware representational about-ness of things. (See? Clunky, counter-intuitive language. No you know we're doing existentialism.)

Existentialism took the fact that consciousness always exists in a directed state and really ran with it. While other philosopher's and other branches of philosophy kept trying to find a way to purify consciousness, existentialists agreed to meet it on its own terms; in the messy, complicated, sometimes irrational real world of subjective experience. Existentialism does not take seriously the idea of a conscious observer who is wholly detached from engagement with the world. There is no consciousness that is purely rational and purely, objectively contemplative. Instead, all consciousnesses are already in the trenches, so to speak. Existentialism wants to deal with consciousness as it exists, embedded within certain specific contexts.

Real, actual consciousness is messy. It is always already-directed towards an environment to interact with: things to remember, things to want, things to love or hate, things to do. It is a self-knowing thing that is already invested in activities and grappling with the world by the time it realizes that it can analyze itself. Whatever consciousness is, it obviously is not purely rational and detachable from the enmeshed situations it finds itself within. This embedded, personal experience of engagement with the world is the subjectivity of consciousness.

To bring it down to earth, you and I are subjects not because we are merely conscious in some abstract sense, but rather we are subjects because we are specific persons. We have personal histories which have given us us mental content and, thus, mental character. Furthermore, we occupy different conditions- we live in different neighborhoods, have different interests, different jobs, different friends, are in different areas of space/time, etc. We have different bodies with different brains that process information in somewhat different ways. Our embedded personal experience of existence is our subjectivity.

The Problem with the Subject

So (and do please pardon the clunky language here) all consciousness is subjectively constituted as a certain self-aware position of being-in-the-world.

But because consciousness is always embedded within these particular positions, or contexts, it is doomed to always be limited. There will simply always be more to the world than you are perceiving at any moment; more than you could ever perceive in your short, limited existence. This means that we will always be acting with some amount of ignorance (usually quite a vast amount) baked into our perceptions of the world.

This is a problem for people who crave absolute certainty because it means that there is no transcendental subject. A transcendental subject would be consciousness refined to the point where it transcends all particular contexts and becomes pure knowing-as-such. Such a subject would be able to look at the world in a purely objective way, and make judgments that were absolutely grounded in reality and not contaminated by any personal bias because it had transcended its all of its personal contexts.

But of course, such a subject does not exist. It cannot exist. It is metaphysically impossible for consciousness to be non-positional, which is just a way of saying that the it is impossible for there to be a conscious subject who isn't at least partially rooted in a personal subjective context, which means also partially rooted in some amount of ignorance. To be a truly transcendental observer (a non-positional consciousness) would mean to observe from no particular point of view at all, which makes it dubious to suppose that any knowledge could be gained from such a vantage point even if it were possible.

Why does this matter?

By and large, it doesn't. Most people, when they are engaged in the ordinary tasks of living, have no reason to be dubious about their conscious position. The real implications of the lack of a transcendental subject are for epistemology (the study of knowledge) and ethics (the study or moral behavior).

For ethics, the lack of transcendental subjectivity means that there is no ultimate vantage point for us to determine objectively what true moral goodness or evilness really is, let alone which given event is morally good or evil. We are left in a state of constant discursive flux as we continue to debate how we should judge actions, and all the reasons we can reach for are local, contextual reasons that are also a part of that historical flux. For a certain type of person, this is maddening.

For epistemology, the loss of the transcendental subject means the loss of absolute knowledge. We cannot break out of our contingent contexts to claim that we have found something timelessly and eternally true. We can know things in context, but this falls far short of the lofty ideals of absolute knowledge that is never subject to doubt or change.

Why is this important to Existentialism?

Existentialist philosophy is often accused of being overly vague in its language, relying too much on subjective assessments, and lacking rigorous logical argumentation. Sometimes, it is even accused of making the argument for a world without facts. The presumption against existentialist philosophy is that if we are as precise as possible, use objective analysis, and adhere to strict logical argumentation, we can know the facts and reach the truth with certainty.

But this notion that we can find precise, logically valid, factually sound answers to all (or even most) of the problems that really matter to us appears to be a simplistic myth. The world does not seem to work that way. It is messy and complicated, as are human beings. Our context is always shifting and evolving, both as individuals and as a species. Data is always flowing into our situation and changing its nature. Our brains imperfectly store and imperfectly retrieve whatever data we're able to possess, which means that even if we observe the same facts, different people will remember, think, and process them differently.

This does not mean that there isn't a use for things like specificity, (attempted) objectivity, and logic. All three are valuable tools for analysis. It also does not mean that facts don't exist. Instead, it means that the task of analysis is not simple, and is never finished. There is no subject that we can "close the book on". We will always be grappling with ethical dilemmas, epistemic vagueness, and a general lack of knowledge as to how to best live our lives.

Because of this, existentialists have a job to do. Existentialism remains a viable philosophical school precisely because we need to have people who are prying apart our ordinary lives and looking at the weirdness, the contradictions, and the false assumptions we make every day. This includes things we take vary seriously, like our moral judgments and the way we live our lives (two things we like to think of as being sound and beyond reproach).

It also means that existentialist "style" has its value. Since there is no final, absolute vantage point from which we can clearly articulate objective truth, we simply have to approach problems from as many vantage points as possible and hope that something approximating truth emerges from this process. That means that different styles for discussing and contemplating problems are valuable, because you never know which style is going to be best suited for you, or for anyone else, when it comes to that "ah ha!" moment when grappling with a problem.

(For example, I find analytic philosophy's counterfactual-example mode of argumentation good for analyzing and discussing political events, while I find existentialism's mode of engaging with experience to be great for analyzing and discussing social conflict that underlies those political events.)

So, to all my fellow hobby-philosophers who fancy themselves as existentialists, take heart. We've a lot of work ahead of us.