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In the previous installment, I discussed my favorite way of characterizing existentialism: Existentialists believe that human beings are importantly made up of both being (facticity, temporality) and becoming (transcendence, eternity), and understanding human existence requires understanding the tension between these two aspects.
The only real downside of this, as a defining criterion of existentialism, is that it leaves out Nietzsche. It is not really so much that Nietzsche thinks of humans as just being or as just becoming. Rather, he refuses to offer a fundamental characterization of human existence at all. For a perspectivist like Nietzsche, an ontological description of humans is just one story or way of talking about things.
Of course, Nietzsche was a great influence on 20th-century existentialists. So I felt justified in including some Nietzsche on the syllabus for by existentialism course, even though I didn't think he was an existentialist.
While teaching the course, however, I saw a way to think of 'existentialism' so that Nietzsche could come to the party (rather than merely standing on the front stoop and watching the festivities through the window.) Consider:
Existentialists believe that there is no value or moral significance prior to the appearance of valuing creatures like human beings. Humans invent rather than discover value.This describes Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, and many of the usual suspects. The reject the spirit of seriousness, the view that there are preexisting values that we are morally obligated to recognize.
The fact that values are invented doesn't make them unreal. The view is not nihilism or absurdism.
This characterization excludes writers like Hemingway (an absurdist, I think) and Emerson (a quirky kind of serious man).
It also raises some interesting conceptual issues. We can ask about the minimal conditions for being valuing creature. Can homo sapiens fail to be sources of value? What about dogs, emus, or dolphins?
We can ask whether you are the only source of values for yourself or whether you should recognize the values projected by other people, too. Sartre and de Beauvoir disagree on this: He says that we are each inevitably forlorn, but she insists that moral solipsism is an ethical shortcoming.
Yet, this characterization also suffers a categorical failure: Kierkegaard!
Kierkegaard's insistence that "truth is subjectivity" only means that the divine moral scene is not a systematic, rational thing. God might want us to do things like sacrifice our first born. If it was right for Abraham to kill Isaac, it wasn't just because Abraham freely structured the situation thus.
So now I have two characterizations of existentialism, each of which excludes one of the movement's 19th-century progenitors. Do you want the syphilitic German or the hunchbacked Dane? One might insist that both criteria are necessary conditions for being an existentialist, so that neither of them are included. One might chisholm the definition further to write the canon of existentialism in platonic ink, but I don't really see the point. I don't see anything wrong with having two definitions of existentialism, provided that they both reward reflection and disagree about categorizing only boundary cases.
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