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Existentialism

Author(s): F. C. Copleston

Source: Philosophy , Jan., 1948, Vol. 23, No. 84 (Jan., 1948), pp. 19-37

Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3747384

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EXISTENTIALISM

The Rev. F. C. COPLESTON, S.J., M.A.

To treat existentialism as a philosophy is no more possible than to
treat idealism as a philosophy. The reason is obvious. Jean-Paul
Sartre is an existentialist and Gabriel Marcel is also an existentialist;
but the philosophy of Sartre is not the same as the philosophy of
Marcel. One can no more speak of the philosophy of Kierkegaard,
Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel and Berdyaev, as though they
maintained the same system, than one could speak of the philosophy
of Plato, Berkeley and Hegel, as though one philosophy was common
to the three thinkers. Of course, if one took idealism in the sense in
which the Marxist uses the term, as meaning the doctrine that mind
is prior to matter, i.e. as opposed to materialism (with the suggestion
that realism and materialism are equivalent), one would have a
definite theme to consider; but one would be forced to recognize as
idealists thinkers who would never call themselves by that name and
who would not be generally recognized as such. Similarly, if one said
that existentialism is the doctrine that man is free and that what he

makes of himself depends on himself, on his free choices, one would
doubtless have mentioned a doctrine which is common to the exis-

tentialists and which they insist upon; but one would at the same
time be forced to include in the ranks of the existentialists philo-
sophers whose inclusion would be manifestly absurd. It is very
difficult, then, to assign to existentialism any doctrinal content which
would be common to all those who are generally recognized as
existentialists, but which would at the same time be peculiar to
them. M. Sartre has asserted that existentialism “is nothing else
but an attempt to draw all the consequences from a consistent
atheist position,”2 while Berdyaev is reported to have exclaimed,
“L’existentialisne, c’est moi!” But Berdyaev is no atheist, while
Sartre is not Berdyaev: the positions are obviously incompatible.
According to Sartre, that which all existentialists have in common
is the fundamental doctrine that existence precedes essence;3 but
though this may be a doctrine common to all existentialists, it does
not seem to be peculiar to them, if one regards its essential meaning.
It means in effect that man has no given character which determines
his actions, but that he is free, and while this doctrine would dis-
tinguish existentialism from all forms of determinism, it would not
distinguish it from other philosophies which also deny determinism.

This paper represents a lecture given at Oxford on May 23, I947.
z L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme. p. 94. 3 Ibid., p. I7.

I9

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PHILOSOPHY

M. Sartre may say, and indeed does say, that his meaning is that
man has no essence antecedently to his free choices, to the essence
he creates freely; but since he is able to delimit man as the object
of his existential analysis in such a way that chickens are excluded,
it is difficult to take him altogether seriously or to suppose that the
proposition, “existence precedes essence,” amounts to much more
than an emphatic assertion of liberty and an emphatic denial of any
form of physical or psychological determinism. In the case of M.
Sartre the proposition is certainly bound up with atheism, in the
sense that he denies the existence of any archetypal idea or divine
idea of man, which is realized or unfolded on the plane of created
existence; but if the proposition is understood in a sense which would
be acceptable not only to Sartre and Camus, but also to Marcel, it
can hardly involve atheism, though it would involve the rejection
of that determinism which seems to be implied by certain theistic
systems, by that of Leibniz, for example.I
Nor does it seem that we can define existentialism in general in

reference to what one might call “personal thinking.” Kierkegaard
was certainly a personal thinker, in the sense that he philosophized
on the basis of his personal experience (a knowledge of his relations
with his father and with Regina Olsen is by no means irrelevant to
an understanding of his thought), and so far from attempting to
construct an “objective system,” he directed a great deal of his
polemic precisely against “the System” and against “objectivity;”
but one could hardly say the same of Heidegger, who sets out in
Sein und Zeit to construct an ontology, to investigate the problem
of being. In a letter to Jean Wahl, Heidegger protested that his
philosophy was not Existenzphilosophie, that his investigation of
human existence or of the being of human existence was but a
preparatory stage to an examination of being in general, and that
his philosophy should not be confused with that of Karl Jaspers who
considers the concrete possibilities open to the human being, without
aiming at the development of any general theoretical ontology. It is
true that Jaspers has declared that it is the task of the philosopher
to awaken man to the possibilities of choice and that existentialism
as a general theory, is the death of the philosophy of existence; but
he is much more of an observer, a philosopher of philosophies, than
a personal thinker in the sense in which Kierkegaard was a personal
thinker.

Nevertheless, even if it is difficult to find a doctrinal content
which is common and at the same time peculiar to the existentialist
philosophies, we all know that the word existentialism has objective
reference and that it is not unreasonable to group together Kierke-

I Leibniz defended “liberty,” it is true; but not all would recognize as
liberty what he regarded as such.
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EXISTENTIALISM

gaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Marcel, however great
and however important the differences between their respective
philosophies may be. I suppose that in the first place one can link
them together by their common rejection, explicit or implicit, of all
forms of “totalifarian” philosophy, using the word “totalitarian”
not in its political sense (primarily at least), but as signifying any
philosophy which minimizes the position and importance of the
individual as the free, self-transcending subject and as the central
datum of experience. One does not need to labour the point that
Kierkegaard, for whom, owing to the circumstances of his university
education, philosophy meant the Hegelian system, revolted against
the Hegelian exaltation of the Idea or Absolute at the expense of
the individual and against the Hegelian insistence on mediation and
on the synthesis of opposites. The primary fact is the individual,
and it is simply comical if the individual strives to strip himself of
his individuality and to merge himself in the universal consciousness
or cosmic reason. True philosophy is not objectivity, but it is the
fruit of passionate interest; in other words, thinking is personal, not
impersonal, and its value lies in its clarification of choice and its
appeal to choose, the ultimate object of choice being the self in its
relation to the Transcendent, to God. Similarly, Jaspers insists that
the function of philosophy is not to teach a Weltanschauung, but to
make clear to the individual the possibilities of choice and what
authentic choice is. In the limiting situations, particularly in face of
contingency and death, man recognizes the enveloping presence of
the Transcendent; but the deciphering of its nature depends on an
act of choice, and the study of the life and thought of men like
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche serves to make clear the personal charac-
ter of the choice of Weltanschauung. It might seem that Martin
Heidegger constitutes an exception since, as already remarked, he
sets out to develop an ontology; but in point of fact since he actually
starts with man and ends with man, he falls into line with the other
existentialists. Heidegger lays his emphasis on authentic choice,
though for him this choice is really the choice of the self as the being
doomed to death, das Sein-zum-Tode. As to Sartre, although he gives
as the subtitle of L’Etre et le Neant Essai d’ontologie phenomenolo-
gique, the emphasis is on man as projet, as the being which creates
itself by free choice, as the possibility of its own transcendence, and
this theme reappears in plays like Les Mouches and novels like
Les Chemins de la Liberte. Although Sartre makes considerable use
of Hegel in L’Etre et le Neant, particularly in regard to the power of
the negation, he is at one with the other existentialists in insisting
on the individual. He declares that his starting-point is the sub-
jectivity of the individual (and that for strictly philosophical reasons),
and that the first and basic truth is the Cogito, la verite absolue de la

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PHILOSOPHY

conscience s’atteignant elle-meme.I For Camus, again, though he
insists at length on the absurdity of the world and of human life
(as in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, L’ltranger, Le Malentendu, Caligula), the
real problem is how the individual is to conduct himself in an absurd
world. Of Marcel’s philosophical writing one can say that a great
part of it is devoted to revealing to man what he is and what his
spiritual activities, his truly human activities, imply.
Although it is not formally true of Heidegger, it is actually true

of all the existentialists, therefore, including Heidegger, that they
take man as the central theme of philosophy, and that by man
they mean the free, self-creating, self-transcending subject. Looked
at under this aspect existentialism may be regarded as a revolt
against absolute idealism (at least so far as Kierkegaard is con-
cerned, and the same is partly true, I believe, of Marcel) and as
a revolt against positivism, materialistic determinism and psycho-
logical determinism, against any form of philosophy which would
reduce man to an item in the physical cosmos, so far as this would
imply determinism, and against any form of philosophy which
excludes a consideration of man’s inner life and destiny. (To assign
as the central theme of philosophy man’s inner creation of himself
by his free choices is to turn one’s back on logical analysis, for
example, as a sufficient subject for the philosopher.) Again, exis-
tentialism, by insisting on the individual, on the free subject, is also
a reaction against the tendency to resolve the individual into a
number of functions, such as citizen, taxpayer, voter, worker, trade
unionist, civil servant, etc. This theme is developed particularly by
Gabriel Marcel. In other words, existentialism is the re-assertion of
the free man against the totality or the collectivity or any tendency
to depersonalization, and in this respect it is akin to personalism and
pragmatism.
Before proceeding further it might be as well to anticipate an

objection against the mode of treatment of existentialism adopted
in this paper. I can well imagine a Marxist saying that existentialism
is the philosophy of the dying bourgeoisie, the last convulsive effort
of an outmoded individualism, and in point of fact M. Naville
(though I do not think that the latter is a Marxist) suggested to
M. Sartre that his philosophy was really a resurrection of radical-
socialism adapted to present social conditions. La crise sociale ne
permet plus l’ancien liberalisme; elle exige un liberalisme torture,
angoisse.2 The Marxists have called M. Sartre the philosopher of the
misfits, I’ecrivain des rates, and they wonder what the phenomeno-
logical analyses of L’Etre et le Neant have to do with history. More-
over, many critics, whether Marxists or not, might be tempted to
observe that it is a mistake to treat existentialism abstractly, that

I L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, pp. 63-64. 2 Ibid., p. I07.
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EX I STENTIAI, ISM

one should treat it in relation to its historical and political circum-
stances, in relation, for example, to the fall and liberation of France
and the ensuing social and political conditions, or even that one
should treat it as a literary, and not as a philosophical phenomenon.
However, while it is doubtless legitimate to treat a philosophical
movement in relation to political and social circumstances, it is also
legitimate, and in my opinion a good deal more relevant, to treat
any philosophy which professes to be a philosophy as a philosophy,
i.e. abstractly. Anyone who is prepared to allow the possibility of
attaining philosophical truth must admit this. Moreover, the con-
sideration of political and social conditions is more relevant to
explaining the popularity and vogue of a philosophy than to settling
the question of its truth or falsity. Existentialism cannot be explained
simply in terms of the last war, if for no other reason than that
Marcel was writing long before the war began, while Sartre published
La Nausee in 1938; but it may very well be that recent and present
conditions in France help to explain the vogue of existentialism, the
interest it has aroused. It would certainly be absurd to exclude the
social and political approach as altogether illegitimate; but if one is
entitled to treat dialectical materialism as a philosophy and not
simply as the transient expression of passing historical circumstances,
one is also entitled to consider the thought of M. Sartre from the
point of view of its truth or falsity rather than as affecting or not
affecting the welfare of the proletariat. As to the literary approach, I
would remark that the use of the drama and the novel by Sartre,
Camus and Marcel certainly helps to explain the wide interest taken
in existentialism; but the significance of those plays and novels for
the philosopher consists in their philosophical import, and any
student of Sartre is aware that his popular productions can be
properly understood only in the light of his general philosophy.,
To return, then, to my abstract treatment of existentialism. It

seems to me that the existentialist starting-point, man as free
subject, is a legitimate starting-point, considerably more legitimate
than some principle which is postulated as ultimate, though its
existence cannot be known a priori and though to presuppose it is to
presuppose a whole philosophy. The excuse for starting with an
ultimate and presupposed ontological principle is that if the philo-
sophy built on it or deduced from it constitutes a complete and
coherent account of reality, its justification is evident. But apart
from the fact that this seems to involve a further presupposition
concerning the character of reality and the power of the human
mind, the history of philosophy appears to show that facts of ex-

I In the case of Gabriel Marcel special consideration should indeed be given
to his idea of the relation of drama to philosophy; but I cannot embark on
that subject here.

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PHILOSOPHY

perience are not infrequently distorted or slurred over in order to
fit in with the preconceived principle, and not the least important
of these facts is precisely the human consciousness of personal
freedom. It may be objected that the existentialist presupposes
freedom, whereas it ought to be demonstrated; but in view of the
initial consciousness of freedom, it is the determinist, not the main-
tainer of freedom, who should be called upon to demonstrate his
position. M. Sartre deals with certain determinist arguments in
L’Etre et le Neant, the argument, for example, that motives deter-
mine conduct, and he attempts to show that a conscious being must
be free, that the pour-soi, as opposed to the en-soi, must be free
owing to its ontological structure, that it does not simply possess
liberty, but is its liberty–does not Orestes say in Les Mouches, “I
am my liberty?”-but in any case he evidently thinks that liberty
is a datum of immediate experience and that the determinists are
trying to evade the recognition of a truth of which they are, to some
extent at least, inevitably aware; they are in mauvaisefoi, they are
les ldches.

Secondly, I think that it is to the credit of Heidegger and Sartre
that in their insistence on the free ego they do not at the same time
create the Cartesian gulf between the ego’s self-consciousness and
its knowledge of the world and of other selves. Their datum is not
the self-enclosed consciousness, but the self in the world. Dasein or
la realite humaine comes to know itself in and through its experience
of the milieu and of other persons, and to separate off the conscious-
ness of the ego from the original total experience, in such a way
that it becomes necessary to prove the existence of extramental
objects and of other selves, is, they recognize, to create an artificial
problem which is hardly capable of a satisfactory solution, since the
premisses are themselves unsatisfactory. Par le je pense, contrairement
d la philosophie de Descartes, contrairement a la philosophie de Kant,
nous nous atteignons nous-memes en face de l’autre, et l’autre est aussi
certain pour nous que nous-mmrnes. Whatever one may think of M.
Sartre’s protracted discussion of our knowledge of other selves and
the phenomenon of le regard,3 it is a matter for rejoicing that he does
not allow his insistence on the Cogito to blind him to the artificiality
of Descartes’ procedure. If the free self in M. Sartre’s philosophy
tends to be a closed self, this is due, not to any adoption of the
Cartesian gulf between the self-enclosed consciousness and the
external world, but rather to the fact that he tends to concentrate
on those activities which turn the person into a thing and which
render impossible true personal relations, those activities which

Cf. L’Etre et le Ndant, pp. 508 ff.
2 L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, p. 66.
3 L’Etre et le Ndant, Part 3, Chap. I, L’Existence d’Autrui.

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EXISTENTIALISM

belong to the sphere of what Marcel calls Avoir, as distinct from the
sphere of Etre. Marcel, who also avoids the Cartesian gulf by his
insistence on the primary fact of incarnation, embodiment, con-
centrates on those spiritual activities of man, such as love and
fidelity and hope, which involve the relationship of person to person,
thus revealing the self-transcending subject or self as essentially
“open,” not as self-enclosed.
The starting-point of existentialism may, therefore, be called a

realist starting-point; M. Sartre insists that knowledge is always
knowledge of something and consciousness always consciousness of
something; neither knowledge nor consciousness creates its object.
The world is the object of knowledge and is not created by the
knower in regard to its being. The world is phenomenal in the sense
that what we mean by the world is that which appears; but it does
not follow that we can reduce the being of phenomena to percipi.
If the being of phenomena consisted in percipi, the percipient
would exist outside himself, since to perceive is to perceive something
and this implies a distinction between subject and object. One can
speak, therefore, of the trans-phenomenal being of phenomena (in
the sense that the object has being independently of the percipient),
though this transphenomenal being is simply the phenomenon in
itself, not an unknowable noumenon underlying the phenomenon.
But though Heidegger and Sartre are to that extent realists, their

realism is none the less a post-Kantian realism, in that they both
emphasize the part played by the subject in the constitution of the
world of experience. For Heidegger the organization of the world
into a system of relations depends on the interests, the preoccupa-
tions (Besorgen) of the subject. Man, Dasein, is essentially orientated
towards the other than himself, and each object appears as a Zeug
or tool, its meaning or essence residing in its tool-relation, its relation
to the preoccupation of the subject. According to the interest or
preoccupation of the subject there is the world of the physicist, the
world of the ethician, the world of technique and so on; but all these
worlds are included in a total system, of which we have a kind of
preview or anticipation. This concept of world in general, of an
intelligible totality, an inclusive Umwelt, is the creation of Dasein;
it is the system of relations created by the multiple possibilities of
Dasein, the unified field of those possibilities, though it is due, not
to an a priori category of the understanding, but to the first charac-
teristic of Dasein, its being-in-the-world, its orientation towards the
other than self in terms of interest and development of possibilities.
This view of the world is obviously strongly reminiscent of Fichte’s
conception of the world of objects as the field for the self-realization
of the ego, the field of the ego’s moral activity, though Heidegger
does not mean to imply that the brute existence of things is con-

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PHILOSOPHY

stituted by the ego (he is not an idealist in that sense), but that the
intelligible being of things, their meaning, their organization in an
intelligible system, is constituted by man’s possibilities of self-
transcendence. Dasein and Umwelt are really two aspects of one
reality, being-in-the-world. To interpret the world is to construct the
world, but this power of construction is limited by the very finitude
of man.

The same theme is present in the philosophy of Sartre. It is man,
la realite humaine, who makes the world to arise, as an organized
and intelligible system. Consciousness (le pour-soi) does not create
being as such, unconscious being (I’en-soi), but it organizes it into a
system, marking off, as it were, individual objects, and determining
their mutual relations in terms of its own interests. Distance, being
far away or near, really depends on the interests of the pour-soi:
America, for instance, is far away to the displaced person in Germany
who would like to go there but cannot, while it is nearby to the
millionaire who can go there by plane whenever he likes, while to a
person who has no interest at all in America it is neither near nor
far, it is simply “there”. Similarly, the future can be understood only
in terms of the possibilities of man: c’est par la realite humaine que le
futur arrive dans le monde.’ In itself l’en-soi is opaque, gratuitous,
unintelligible: it owes its differentiations and its intelligibility to
consciousness, to le pour-soi.
But if the Kantian and Fichtean elements in the philosophies of

Heidegger and Sartre, together with their peculiar insistence on
liberty, might lead one to class them as (partly) idealist philosophies,
there is another important element in virtue of which they are more
akin to materialism. Original being, I’en-soi, is, according to M.
Sartre, non-conscious; it is simply itself, opaque, self-identical:
1’etre est ce qu’il est. We really cannot say anything about it except
that it is; the ideas of activity and passivity, for example, are human
ideas, and being in itself is beyond activity and passivity. Moreover,
we are not entitled to apply the category of necessity and say that
it is the necessary being, the Absolute. It did not create itself, it is
true; but it is simply there, gratuitous, de trop. In fine, all we can
say of l’etre en-soi is that it is and that it is what it is. Perhaps it
cannot be formally described as material, but that is obviously
what it is to all intents and purposes. The shade of “father Par-
menides” can be discerned in the background.
Being-in-itself is thus gratuitous, de trop; but how does conscious-

ness, le pour-soi, arise? At this point Hegel is dragged in from the
wings to take his place on the stage. As for Hegel being, emptied
of determinate content, passes into not-being and gives rise to the
category of becoming, so for Sartre consciousness arises from non-

L’Etre et le Neant, p. I68.
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EXISTENTIALISM

conscious being through the power of the negation. Consciousness
means distance from and presence to at the same time; it is the
negation of being-in-itself, but it presupposes being-in-itself and is
separated from it by … nothing. Being-in-itself contains no nega-
tion; it emerges (i.e. le teant) only through consciousness, which
secretes its own nothingness. To be conscious means to exist at a
distance from oneself as present to oneself, and this distance from
oneself is no thing: consciousness, then, arises only through a
“fissure,” a negation, being introduced into being, and it is le pour-
soi itself which introduces this negation, so that it is in this sense
its own foundation. That there is consciousness at all is a contingent
fact, for which the “ontologist” can give no certain explanation;
but we may say that being-in-itself, which is gratuitous, attempts
to found itself (that it is projet de se fonder) and that it can do so
only through the emergence of consciousness which aims at becoming
its own cause or adequate foundation, at attaining the status of
l’en-soi-pour-soi. In plainer language we may say that brute being
has an aspiration to overcome its gratuitous and contingent character
by becoming the conscious Absolute, and human consciousness
emerges as the means of realizing this aspiration. But this aspiration
is doomed to frustration: consciousness is being constantly grasped
by the en-soi, by that contingency which it cannot escape. Man is
a passion, a desire to escape from his original contingency, a flight
before the past (with its invasion of facticite) …