In my second essay for the philosophy paper I took last semester I tackled John-Paul Sartre's existentialism. I found that there was actually a lot of merit in Sartre's ideas, but took issue with Sartre's insistence on a fundamental connection between atheismand existentialism. The essay is, I think, somewhat incomplete. I haven't actually read Sartre's Being and Nothingness. As this essay follows my first essay on Plato, there could be a third essay which simply clarifies what a Christian existentialism would look like, and how it would still address Sartre's very valid concerns about human freedom, responsibility and dignity.
I have two versions of this essay. The version published below is the shorter version. A longer version actually summarises in detail the content of Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism, which I am responding to. If the reader would like a more in-depth understanding of Sartre, that essay can be uploaded from Geocities.
Existentialism is a Humanism… is an Atheism?
“Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) earned his fame as the first person to popularise the term existentialist in the wider world of philosophy, in Existentialism is a Humanism (1945). Sartre published his magnum opus Being and Nothingness in 1943, the same year that Gabriel Marcel coined the term Existentialist (Cooper, 1999). As a member of Marcel’s circle of philosophers, and a regular contributor with Albert Camus to the Combat magazine, Sartre was among those coming under increased critique for this new brand of philosophy. Sartre set out to appease the critics by delivering a lecture that has been described as one of the most pivotal philosophical works of the 20th Century (Shaw, 2009). The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Existentialism is a Humanism has been described as a “quasi manifesto for the Existentialist movement,” by “arguably the best known philosopher of the twentieth century” (Zalta, 2002).
Yet Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, and the nature of its public reception, seems to have given away with one hand what it most certainly gained with the other. Sartre’s work was recognised as the first clearly and explicitly articulated argument for a priority of existence over essence in any conception of human nature. Existentialism is a Humanism defended with great success this concept of human nature in terms of its implications for human morality, and in doing so introduced a groundbreaking metaphysic: the paradox of responsibility in existential freedom. However, despite these great gains, Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism served also as a platform for defining Existentialism in purely atheistic terms, thereby sending post-war Existentialism down a narrow path resulting in its marginalization and ambiguity, from which it has never recovered. It is my belief that something of value was introduced to the discipline of philosophy in Existentialism is a Humanism, in terms of Sartre’s core metaphysic of responsibility in existential freedom. This essay is an attempt to recover this aspect of Sartre’s Existentialism, but to do so in a way that is more inclusive, and not constrained by an atheistic dogmatism.
Why Sartre?
One might ask, if Existentialism is a Humanism is such an incomplete and aberrant work, why not simply throw it in the scrap heap and start again? Sartre’s work is important because it is the first work to step back and take a broad view of Existentialist philosophy (Spade, 1996). Furthermore, Sartre supposes in his work to represent a broad range of existentialist thinkers – including, controversially, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Marcel, and also a group he describes as the “French Existentialists” among whom it can probably be safely assumed he located the noted Camus, and of course Sartre’s lover Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre, 1968, p289). When Sartre delivered his famous lecture at the Club Maintenant in Paris on 29 October 1945, he left an impression on an impressionable post-war world of an authoritative Existentialism that was rigorous in doctrine and on the cutting edge of European thought.
Sartre’s Existentialism made a profound mark on popular thought at the time, yet within five years Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel and Camus had all repudiated any association with Sartre and his Existentialism. Jasper later described the movement as a “phantom” created by the public (Jaspers, 1957, p75). Even Sartre himself is recorded as saying this lecture was the only publication he ever regretted seeing in print (Zalta, 2002). Indeed, later interpreters have sought to broaden the definition of Existentialism much more widely than is set out on Existentialism is a Humanism, acknowledging a diversity which in some way refers to thinkers influenced by some mixture of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Husserl & Heidegger (Zalta, 2008). Yet Existentialism is a Humanism continues to be the major introduction to Existentialism for the general public (Zalta, 2004), and Sartre’s central argument – that Existentialism is a Humanism – remains justified by his thesis.
Is Existentialism an Atheism?
If one were to read Sartre’s conclusion alone, they would think the purpose of Sartre’s lecture was entirely to establish why Existentialism is consistent with atheism. Yet the body of the lecture is overwhelmingly devoted to countering the “reproaches” of Existentialism’s critics, none of which require an atheistic response in order to be repudiated. And so, while Sartre achieves philosophical coherence to resolve the paradox of responsibility in existential freedom, he at the same time isolates a wide range of potential Existentialist cohorts with his narrow atheism. And so one of the critiques he seeks to dispel – that he “gives away with one hand he pretends to gain with the other” – is at least half correct. My lament is that he has given away not that which he pretended to gain, but which was certainly gained – a useful metaphysic for the paradox of responsibility in existential freedom – in exchange for an atheist club of Neitzschians seeking sympathy from a burgeoning Humanist movement.
Existentialism today receives little respect from established academic philosophy. Analytic schools see figures such as Heidegger as “a joke figure,” while regarding Kierkegaard, Nietzsche & Sartre as “mere psychologists” (Shaw, 2009). If Sartre had been slower to speak, and the post-war media less quick to listen to him, a more developed acquaintance with his Existentialist peers might have seen a very different, more inclusive and less dogmatic Existentialism introduced to the 20th Century Western academy. Thankfully philosophy is never entrenched in any particular epoch, and the existentialist endeavour continues today – admittedly without the impressionable climate that was to Sartre’s advantage in 1945. One may hope that a more tempered existentialism might find currency in a post-modern and post-secular age. Whether or not that hope has any foundation will depend to some degree on whether existence precedes essence in its entirety, or whether existence has merely some ontological priority in the mystery that is human nature. It is because Sartre’s metaphysic of human freedom infers existential priority not in entirety, but rather to some degree, that I assert Existentialism is a Humanism provides an ontological breakthrough, not for atheist Existentialism, but for Existentialism in general. More than that, it provides at best a platform for the development of a Theistic Existentialism, and at worst plenteous room for Theism in Existentialism.
Existentialism is a Humanism
Existentialism is a Humanism is framed largely as a response to its critics, as discussed by Sartre in the first few paragraphs. He lists the various criticisms of Existentialism as: a) “An invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair”; b) an underlining of “all that is ignominious; c) an ignorance of “the solidarity of mankind”; and d) a denial of “the reality and seriousness of human affairs.” This amounts to a critique of Existentialism as a) Quietistic; b) Pessimistic; c) Individualistic; and d) Relativistic. Sartre argues that, on the contrary, “Existentialism is a doctrine that renders human life possible.” He argues the excessive protests of his critics make him suspect “that what is annoying them is not so much our pessimism, but much more likely, our optimism” (1968, p287-289). In order to prove his point, Sartre spends the first part of his lecture outlining the central doctrines of Existentialism as it pertains to notions of responsibility, human nature, anguish, abandonment and despair. With this established, he then systematically shows that Existentialism is indeed a Humanism, as an active and optimistic doctrine that entails capacity both for solidarity and for judgment in human affairs.
One of Sartre’s chief concerns in all of his work is coming to an understanding of human freedom. This comes through clearly in Existentialism is a Humanism, but with it comes an overwhelming concern for human responsibility. Sartre states “For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom” (p295). Further, while doing away with the idea of a universal human nature, Sartre nonetheless establishes a universality of what he calls “the human condition” – “all the limitations which á priori define man’s fundamental situation in the universe” (p303). And so, Sartre can argue, that “Since we have defined the situation of man as one of free choice, without excuse and without help, any man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions, or by inventing some deterministic doctrine, is a self-deceiver” (p307). And so, while some accuse Existentialism of promoting a sort of relativistic permissiveness, Sartre can show that his concern is quite the opposite. For if man’s essence is truly an undetermined freedom, transcending not only biology but even some idea of a spiritual concupiscence, then he cannot excuse himself, body or soul, from responsibility for his deeds. Sartre’s Existentialism is thus successfully presented as morally superior to the determinism of much philosophy – both scientistic and theistic – of his time.
Existentialism & Hope
My contention is that, while Sartre’s atheistic Exstentialism claims to maximize human freedom, it is most certainly at the expense of hope. Sartre argues that an Existentialist can retain an optimism about future events only where we rely upon “that which is within our wills, or within the sum of the probabilities which render our action feasible” (p298). However, Sartre admits that in any consideration of “men whom I do not know,” “I cannot base my confidence upon human goodness or upon man’s interest in the good of society, seeing that man is free and that there is no human nature which I can take as foundational” (p299). The implications of this for the potential of trust and mutuality between human beings where familiarity is lacking are obvious. According to Sartre, the only assurance we can have that a stranger will act towards our good is if they have arrived at some existential consciousness of good faith. And if religious, cultural or political dogma and ritual qualify for Sartre as “bad faith,” then this leaves the existentialist with few friends in the world – hence the accusations of pessimism and hopelessness.
In Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Warriors and Adventurers Shaped Globalization (2007), Nayan Chanda, professor at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalisation, discusses the way in which cultural barriers were overcome by relationships of trust and mutuality in the development of a world economic system. And, as any student of history might suggest, religion played a vital role in this process. It cannot be overstated how, for many individual missionaries, a conviction that within all human beings lay some potential for trust and benevolence was vital to their willingness to serve in their missionary endeavour. And, time and again, with persistence, those missionaries saw that their hope was indeed well-founded. If a missionary were to adopt Sartre’s attitude – that “I cannot base my confidence upon human goodness or upon man’s interest in the good of society” on the basis of Sartre’s atheist existentialism, there would indeed be little hope for the poor, the sick and the marginalized among those people groups unknown to the existentialist.
Or, perhaps more poignantly, one may consider the effect of Sartre’s non-essentialism upon situational ethics, where the violent intentions of a stranger are thought to be anticipated in advance. For example, any member of a recognizable ethnic group with whom my people are at war appears in my village – given that this man’s actions are outside of the range of my will, or any sum of probabilities that could render passive intervention feasible, and given that I cannot base my confidence upon his goodness for want of any such thing as human essence, as an atheist existentialist I may take it upon myself to shoot to maim or kill the man in the interests of minimizing risk. A theist view of existentialism, however, makes room for something of essence, despite the logic of giving some priority to existence, and might instead ask that I love my enemy (Bible, Matt 5:43-48). It might suggest that if he’s hungry I give him something to eat, if he’s thirsty give him something to drink (Prov 25:21; Roms 12:20).
Of course, Sartre’s Existentialism does have the potential to provide room for such an ethic. For Sartre, all human beings are capable of understanding freedom as constitutive of the human being. Sartre states that “when once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, in that state of forsakenness he can will only one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values” (p307). Thus an atheistic Existentialist can hope that by his example of not conforming to the expected essence of his identity as enemy, the intruding foreigner might too be startled into confronting his own self-imposed existential limitations. However, a paradigm that explicitly embraces a notion of human essence that affirms inherent capacity for goodness, benevolence, pro-sociality, love – while at the same time explaining aberrations from this ideal – would be more conducive to trust and mutuality between the unfamiliar and the alien.
Nonreductionistic existentialism
On one hand Sartre has rescued man’s existence, his being, from a dependence on essence. He has liberated the human subject from Protestant, Catholic and Islamic fatalism, and at the same time from Newtonian determinism. Yet Sartre has merely reversed the hegemony, and made essence subservient to existence. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966), Archie J Bahm argues that the Existentialism associated Sartre has merely committed the same reductionist fallacy for which they so despised Platonic essentialism. Bahm discusses existence and essence as poles on a continuum, rather than problematic contradictions. He argues instead that “polar opposites depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature” (p152).
In Being and Nothingness Sartre defines the being of humanness as grounded in nothingness. As conscious, self-reflective entities we are both être-en-soi (being-in-itself) and être-pour-soi (being-for-itself). My being-in-itself is what I am before I begin to think about what I am, while my being-for-itself is my consciousness – that part of myself which thinks about what I am. Furthermore, as Earnshaw observes, “there is a gap between the entity thought about, the ‘in-itself,’ and the entity which is conscious of itself as existing, or conscious of itself as a consciousness – the ‘for itself’…Being has a fundamental desire to close the gap, to make its reflecting on its being the same thing as the reflected-on, to make the two one-and-the-same, to make them ‘coincident’” (2007, p81).
Interestingly, Earnshaw goes on “Yet the only creature that could possibly have such a self-coincidence is God (or a god), since a creature that self-created would have no gap between the in-itself and the for-itself; it would be its own origin, it would be, in Sartre’s terms, an ‘in-itself-for-itself’” (p82). But it is precisely this gap between the in-itself and the for-itself that gives rise to our awareness of our true freedom as human beings. “By describing how the for-itself becomes aware of its self as without any kind of grounding, Sartre is able to emphasise how ‘nothingness’ ‘haunts’ being, how the self is ‘free’, but that this ‘freedom’ s accompanied by ‘anguish’, since who I am is part-constituted by who I project I will be, which itself is indeterminate and indeterminable” (p83).
One thing is clear in all of this talk about nothingness – that the Sartrean ground of being in nothingness remains riddled with ambiguity and mystery in any attempt to comprehend it. That our ultimate being, as humans, is constituted by free choices made in a gap of nothingness is strangely reminiscent of quantum physicists explaining that the ultimate force in physics is an unseen muddiness that works according to uncertain laws of probabilities rather than he certainties of mechanical causation (Meyers, 2008). And just as journalists have succumbed to the temptation of labeling the undetectable Higgs boson as “the God particle,” so too is it tempting to consider human interaction with this psychic realm of nothingness as a transcendence into some other world, in a typically “God-of-the-gaps” fashion (Morgan, 2009).
Theism is an Existentialism is a Humanism
But the question must be asked – how could a mechanism of intentionality be constituted of nothingness? And if the ultimate being of humanness is located within such an untouchable realm, despite our being bound to material bodies, then why would an Existentialist be so quick to jump on an atheist bandwagon? With Bahm, a theist might argue for a nonreductionist Existentialism, whereby the mystery of our ultimate being in nothingness and our freedom as non-determined agents, together with Sartre’s ethical ontology of intersubjectivity and of freedom as the foundation of all values, is understood as a type of essence constituent both of man and of the God in whose image he is made. An essence that is ontologically self-coincident. But an essence which, as Sartre admits, cannot achieve that self-coincidence as long as its freedom is preserved in the realm of nothingness, or perhaps more accurately the realm of infinity – the realm of the divine.
References
Bahm, Archie John, Nonreductionistic Existentialism. In The Monist, 1966, The Hegeler Institute, La Selle, IN
Chanda, Nayan, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Warriors and Adventurers Shaped Globalization. New Haven, Yale, 2007.
Cooper, D. E., Existentialism: A Reconstruction. Basil, Blackwell, 1999.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov. 1880.
Earnshaw, Steven, Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed. London, Continuum, 2007.
Jaspers, Karl, Philosophical Autobiography. In Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (The Library of Living Philosophers IX), Tudor, Stockport 1957)
Kreeft, Peter, The Pillars of Unbelief — Sartre. InThe National Catholic Register, January - February 1988.
Meyers, Eric, Big Bang. Washington, D.C., National Geographic, 2009.
Morgan, James, Race for 'God particle' heats up. In BBC News, updated 17 Februaey 2009. URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7893689.stm
New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (London, HarperCollins Publishers, 1989)
Olson, A.M., Jaspers, Heidegger, And “The Phantom of Existentialism”. In Human Studies, 7:387 – 395, Dondrecht, Martinus Nilhoff, 1984.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, La Nausée. 1938.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism is a Humanism. In Kaufmann, Walter, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, New York, Meridian, 1968.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness. London, Routledge, 1969.
Shaw, Jay, Theories of Existence Lecture Notes. Wellington, Victoria University, 2009.
Spade, Paul Vincent, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: Course Materials. Indiana University, 1996.
Zalta, Edward N., Jean-Paul Sartre. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 22 April 2002. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
Zalta, Edward N., Simone de BEauvoir. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 17 August 2004. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/
Zalta, Edward N., Gabriel (-Honoré) Marcel. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 17 November 2004. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcel/
Zalta, Edward N., Karl Jaspers. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 5 June 2006. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaspers/
Zalta, Edward N., Existentialism. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 26 November 2008. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Plato and the existentialists
I enjoyed the feedback I got on my essay Was Jesus a Pacifist. That essay, with Jesus the Pharisee, I produced as part of my Victoria University paper on the historical Jesus.
The other paper I did in Semester 2 was a third-level philosophy paper called Theories of Existence. This was a great chance to get stuck into a subject I've long wanted to study and finally connect up names with ideas and get my head around the field. We studied big names like Plato and Aristotle, and Anselm and Kant, and also the logicians Frege and Russell, and existentialist thinkers Kierkegaard, Heidegger & Sartre.
It was clear from the start that there would be a big emphasis on existentialism, and I was bracing myself to launch some sort of attack on what I'd understood to have been one of the most destructive philosophical movements of the 20th century. Instead I found my heart and mind strangely warmed by existentialist thought. And that was after being wrapt with Plato for months. Thanks to an obscure philosopher by thge name of Archie J Bahm who featured in our readings, I found a way to take the best from everything I learned from Plato to Sartre, in a way that very much fit my own moderating epistemological commitments in other fields.
And so the two essays I wrote for the paper ended up both using Bahm. Firstly with regards to Plato and his idea of The Good which long shaped western philosophy. And secondly with regards to Sartre, whose existentialism I hope to have rescued from the atheism Sartre has locked it into for the last half century. Both essays address the issue of the long-held dichotomy between existence and essence - what comes first, the existence of a thing, or its essence? It can seem on the surface a trivial or even meaningless question - but it is similar to the "what came first - chicken or egg" - question. Sartre preferred to prioritise existence, because essence implies a designer and thus a God, and Sartre wanted an atheist philosophy. My first essay on Plato follows below, and I will publish my essay on Sartre in the next few days.
Nonreductionistic Platonism
What is the nature of existence? Is this a sensible question to ask? Can existence have a nature, or an essence? And if so, is an essence a thing that existence has, a property that makes up what existence is? If this is so, then essences must be prior to existence, which means that essences must be able to transcend existence.
Yet, if essences transcend and are prior to existence, then before existence comes into being those essences must belong somewhere else, outside of existence. Now, if essences belong in some realm other than existence, then in what way can those essences be present in that realm if their presence is not some form of existence? Thus, surely, existence must be prior to essence. An essence can only cause a thing to exist if it at first exists itself. At least, this is the conclusion of modern existentialism.
Archie J Bahm, a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico for the better part of the 20th century, sought tackle this seeming antithesis between essence and existence. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966) he addresses the problem as identified by existentialist philosophy. He critiques both Existentialism and Platonism as taking extreme positions due to their inherent and unchecked compulsive reductionism. Rather than obsessing over which is prior to the other, essence or existence, Bahm proposes a middle way, which he calls organicism, or nonreductionistic existentialism. In this essay I will review Bahm’s nonreductionistic existentialism, and discuss whether or not a middle way is possible in the tussle for priority between existence and essence.
Archie John Bahm (1907 – 1906) spent most of his career as a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico. The same year he was appointed (1948), Bahm also founded the New Mexico Philosophy Society. He was involved with the American Humanist movement from early in its inception, as author of A Religious Affirmation, twice published in the Humanist Association journal (1933, 1953), and later as signatory to the 1973 Humanist Manifesto. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966), Bahm provides a new way of looking at essence and existence, and the wide gamut of other classical philosophical dichotomies, by critiquing the reductionist nature of western philosophy and suggesting a more organic approach. He provides a paradigm which can make sense of these dichotomies by accepting the existence of each opposing category as poles on a continuum, rather than problematic contradictions.
Bahm shows how this new approach resolves classical philosophical problems in four easily understandable ways:
1.He shows that the “falsity of the assertion that ‘essence precedes existence’ does not imply the truth of the assertion that existence precedes essence.’” Precedence need not be absolute – essence may precede existence insofar as existence requires essence to exist, but not so far as to exclude existence from the necessary metaphysic within which it must exist – and vice versa.
2.He highlights the way in which the obsession with existence as “will” (volition, power, freedom), and their chief concern with human freedom, has clouded the ability of existentialist thinkers to willingly consider the complementarity of freedom and determinism.
3.Quoting Gerge Herbert Mead, he shows that as human beings we consider ourselves both as subject (free) and object (determined), that to be social requires us to do the latter, and that as social beings humanness must be considered both in terms of our experience both as subjects and objects.
4.Finally, while existentialists claim that we create meaning as a result of experiencing meaningless (ie death, nonexistence of God), Bahm makes the point that we cannot know what meaninglessness is without first knowing what meaning is. “One can only die if he has first been alive.”
Bahm then goes on to provide four principles to avoid extreme reductionism and sustain a more organic approach to knowledge.
1.We must realise that “whenever a genuine issue arises regarding the nature of man or the universe, there is truth to both sides; for otherwise the issue would not have arisen in the first place.”
2.Reductionism tends to arise when we are too quick to take sides on opposing poles of a dichotomy, and thereby defensively oppose any truth claim which might support the opposite side.
3.Antireductionistic measures require reconsideration of “the nature of opposition which…may be seen to be characterized by polarity rather than contradiction,” and that “polar opposites depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature.”
4.Variability and diversity, and the general manifestation of dichotomic properties, as an indication of the reality of polarity and presence of both opposites in the world. “Persons function sometimes more as subjects and sometimes more as objects.” My existential hunger may cause me to want an essential item of food, or the essential item of food may cause in me an existential hunger.
Bahm’s rejection of extremes and binary thinking has a ring of familiarity to it forty-three years on. His “middle way” of nonreductionistic existentialism would find itself quite comfortably at home among similar moderating paradigms in sociology (structuration theory) politics (third way), economics (Keynesian resurgency) and theology (radical orthodoxy). As far as philosophy goes, Bahm’s ideas could sit quite nicely within the scope of critical realism.
However, in dealing with the idea of existence, has he really successfully dispelled the Platonic notion of essences having an origin beyond existence? In order to address this I would like to look at Plato’s notion of The Good in relation to the ontological problem of existence, and consider its merits with reference to Bahm’s four principles of organicism.
Plato’s Theory of Ideas
In A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (1920) Walter Terence Stace summarises the ontology of Plato. Stace begins by discussing the way Plato develops the Socratic notion of concepts into a Theory of Ideas, as is illustrated in Meno. Plato poses that the nature of truth is when the concept I hold in my mind corresponds as a copy to something that exists outside my mind. In this way Plato argues that ideas must form the basis for both the substance of the world and our perception of the world as we experience it. Stace summarises (p187), “…the Ideas are substances. They are absolute and ultimate realities. Their whole being is in themselves. They depend on nothing, but all things depend on them. They are the first principles of the universe.” Furthermore as the ultimate substance of reality, the world of ideas is the location of “the essences of all things” (p189).
Stace then discusses Plato’s ontology of this world of ideas in relation to existence, or being, the term Plato uses. Here Stace draws on Sophist and Parmenides (p195 – 197). Against the Eleatics, Plato argued that the One is both a unity and a plurality, for we cannot conceive of the One without also conceiving its predicate, which immediately implies a duality. Similarly, “every many is ipso facto a unity, since we think of the many in one idea, and, if we did not, we should not even know that it is a many.” In the same way, being cannot totally exclude non-being. “The being of anything is the not-being of its opposite. The being of light is the not-being of darkness. All being, therefore, has not-being in it.”
Thus, for Plato, the One – that is, the ultimate reality – is both a unity and a plurality, and is both being and not-being. Plato’s Theory of Ideas is very clearly an ontology of plurality, as there are many ideas. Yet it is also an ontology of unity. For Plato, ideas are ordered in a hierarchy. “Just as the one Idea presides over many individual things of which it is the common element, so one Idea presides over many lower Ideas, and is the common element in them.” In Plato’s system, there is one highest Idea which is supreme over all other ideas, and that is the Idea of the Good (p198).
It is this idea of The Good as the highest ontological principle that caused later thinkers, influenced by Plato, to suggest that essence must precede existence. The first to make this argument explicit was the great Persian and Islamic philosopher, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980 – 1037). Ibn Sina, similarly to Plato, concluded that because essences can be present in either in things or (intentionally) in the intellect, their substance is not tied to the reality of things (the position of the Aristotelian tradition). However Ibn Sina creates a new category for essences which are in intellect and not in things – esse essentiae, a notion of pure possibility with a certain kind of existence, though inferior to actual existence (esse existentiae). Christendom’s answer to Ibn Sina, Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), also employed Ibn Sina’s idea that essence must precede existence. Yet, as Plato posed The Good as the highest ontological principle, and source of all ideas and by implication all essence, so Aquinas has God taking the place of The Good as the First Cause.
Platonism as ultimately non-reductionistic
In expounding his nonreductionistic existentialism, Bahm observes that Platonists overlook or deny the idea that existence and essence could be mutually independent, and hence mutually prior to each other. Bahm claims that a nonreductionistic and realistic approach to the existence-essence problem would better accommodate and understand “the nature of opposition” where the existence-essence dichotomy would be understood as “polarity rather than contradiction,” which “depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature” (p152). Affirming Bahm’s principle of polarity, I would argue that Platonism, in the work of the philosopher himself, and also in the father of the existence-essence dichotomy and his Western interpreter, are not purely reductionistic in their treatment of the problem. All of these thinkers certainly argue that essence precedes material existence, yet there remains a causative link between the material world and the world of ideas (Plato), possibilities (Ibn Sina) and God (Aquinas). Thus these ultimate worlds are no less real than the material world, and thus no less having existence or being.
Nowhere does Plato state the origin of The Good, or those ideas that proceed from The Good. It would seem that The Good was to Plato, because of its ultimacy, something eternal in nature, and thus without beginning. The same can obviously be said of Ibn Sina & Aquinas’ idea of God. The essence of The Good for Plato, or of God for Ibn Sina & Aquinas, could not precede the existence of The Good or of God. And so neither Plato, Ibn Sina nor Aquinas can be said to be purely reductionistic in this matter, nor should they be interpreted to be so. Bahm has reacted to what he calls extreme Platonism and extreme existentialism in his work, and as a solution has produced what he calls a nonreductionistic existentialism. Why he leaned to the existentialist camp with his label is unclear, as this interpretation of Plato, Ibn Sina and Aquinas shows that a nonreductionistic Platonism, at least in terms of first principles of ontology, is just as feasible.
Conclusion
Bahm’s nonreductionistic existentialism as a middle way in existence-essence tussle is certainly of merit. Yet it would appear there has always been plenty of room in the Platonic tradition for a mutuality between the ontological forces of existence and essence. The extent to which an extreme and reductionist Platonism has been propounded by Existentialists as a platform for their own reductionist enterprise would make for an interesting study.
References
Aquinas, Thomas, On Being and Essence
Bahm, Archie John, Nonreductionistic Existentialism. The Monist, 1966, The Hegeler Institute, La Selle, IN
El-Bizri, Nader, Ibn Sina, or Avicenna. In Medieval Islamic Civilization (London, Routledge, 2005).
Goodman, Lenn Evan, Avicenna (Cornell University Press, 2005).
Plato, Meno.
Plato, Parmenides.
Plato, Sophist.
Plato, The Republic.
Stace, Walter Terence, A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (London, Macmillan, & Co., 1969).
Zalta, Edward N., Existence. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 24 May 2002. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/
The other paper I did in Semester 2 was a third-level philosophy paper called Theories of Existence. This was a great chance to get stuck into a subject I've long wanted to study and finally connect up names with ideas and get my head around the field. We studied big names like Plato and Aristotle, and Anselm and Kant, and also the logicians Frege and Russell, and existentialist thinkers Kierkegaard, Heidegger & Sartre.
It was clear from the start that there would be a big emphasis on existentialism, and I was bracing myself to launch some sort of attack on what I'd understood to have been one of the most destructive philosophical movements of the 20th century. Instead I found my heart and mind strangely warmed by existentialist thought. And that was after being wrapt with Plato for months. Thanks to an obscure philosopher by thge name of Archie J Bahm who featured in our readings, I found a way to take the best from everything I learned from Plato to Sartre, in a way that very much fit my own moderating epistemological commitments in other fields.
And so the two essays I wrote for the paper ended up both using Bahm. Firstly with regards to Plato and his idea of The Good which long shaped western philosophy. And secondly with regards to Sartre, whose existentialism I hope to have rescued from the atheism Sartre has locked it into for the last half century. Both essays address the issue of the long-held dichotomy between existence and essence - what comes first, the existence of a thing, or its essence? It can seem on the surface a trivial or even meaningless question - but it is similar to the "what came first - chicken or egg" - question. Sartre preferred to prioritise existence, because essence implies a designer and thus a God, and Sartre wanted an atheist philosophy. My first essay on Plato follows below, and I will publish my essay on Sartre in the next few days.
Nonreductionistic Platonism
What is the nature of existence? Is this a sensible question to ask? Can existence have a nature, or an essence? And if so, is an essence a thing that existence has, a property that makes up what existence is? If this is so, then essences must be prior to existence, which means that essences must be able to transcend existence.
Yet, if essences transcend and are prior to existence, then before existence comes into being those essences must belong somewhere else, outside of existence. Now, if essences belong in some realm other than existence, then in what way can those essences be present in that realm if their presence is not some form of existence? Thus, surely, existence must be prior to essence. An essence can only cause a thing to exist if it at first exists itself. At least, this is the conclusion of modern existentialism.
Archie J Bahm, a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico for the better part of the 20th century, sought tackle this seeming antithesis between essence and existence. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966) he addresses the problem as identified by existentialist philosophy. He critiques both Existentialism and Platonism as taking extreme positions due to their inherent and unchecked compulsive reductionism. Rather than obsessing over which is prior to the other, essence or existence, Bahm proposes a middle way, which he calls organicism, or nonreductionistic existentialism. In this essay I will review Bahm’s nonreductionistic existentialism, and discuss whether or not a middle way is possible in the tussle for priority between existence and essence.
Archie John Bahm (1907 – 1906) spent most of his career as a philosophy professor at the University of New Mexico. The same year he was appointed (1948), Bahm also founded the New Mexico Philosophy Society. He was involved with the American Humanist movement from early in its inception, as author of A Religious Affirmation, twice published in the Humanist Association journal (1933, 1953), and later as signatory to the 1973 Humanist Manifesto. In Nonreductionist Existentialism (1966), Bahm provides a new way of looking at essence and existence, and the wide gamut of other classical philosophical dichotomies, by critiquing the reductionist nature of western philosophy and suggesting a more organic approach. He provides a paradigm which can make sense of these dichotomies by accepting the existence of each opposing category as poles on a continuum, rather than problematic contradictions.
Bahm shows how this new approach resolves classical philosophical problems in four easily understandable ways:
1.He shows that the “falsity of the assertion that ‘essence precedes existence’ does not imply the truth of the assertion that existence precedes essence.’” Precedence need not be absolute – essence may precede existence insofar as existence requires essence to exist, but not so far as to exclude existence from the necessary metaphysic within which it must exist – and vice versa.
2.He highlights the way in which the obsession with existence as “will” (volition, power, freedom), and their chief concern with human freedom, has clouded the ability of existentialist thinkers to willingly consider the complementarity of freedom and determinism.
3.Quoting Gerge Herbert Mead, he shows that as human beings we consider ourselves both as subject (free) and object (determined), that to be social requires us to do the latter, and that as social beings humanness must be considered both in terms of our experience both as subjects and objects.
4.Finally, while existentialists claim that we create meaning as a result of experiencing meaningless (ie death, nonexistence of God), Bahm makes the point that we cannot know what meaninglessness is without first knowing what meaning is. “One can only die if he has first been alive.”
Bahm then goes on to provide four principles to avoid extreme reductionism and sustain a more organic approach to knowledge.
1.We must realise that “whenever a genuine issue arises regarding the nature of man or the universe, there is truth to both sides; for otherwise the issue would not have arisen in the first place.”
2.Reductionism tends to arise when we are too quick to take sides on opposing poles of a dichotomy, and thereby defensively oppose any truth claim which might support the opposite side.
3.Antireductionistic measures require reconsideration of “the nature of opposition which…may be seen to be characterized by polarity rather than contradiction,” and that “polar opposites depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature.”
4.Variability and diversity, and the general manifestation of dichotomic properties, as an indication of the reality of polarity and presence of both opposites in the world. “Persons function sometimes more as subjects and sometimes more as objects.” My existential hunger may cause me to want an essential item of food, or the essential item of food may cause in me an existential hunger.
Bahm’s rejection of extremes and binary thinking has a ring of familiarity to it forty-three years on. His “middle way” of nonreductionistic existentialism would find itself quite comfortably at home among similar moderating paradigms in sociology (structuration theory) politics (third way), economics (Keynesian resurgency) and theology (radical orthodoxy). As far as philosophy goes, Bahm’s ideas could sit quite nicely within the scope of critical realism.
However, in dealing with the idea of existence, has he really successfully dispelled the Platonic notion of essences having an origin beyond existence? In order to address this I would like to look at Plato’s notion of The Good in relation to the ontological problem of existence, and consider its merits with reference to Bahm’s four principles of organicism.
Plato’s Theory of Ideas
In A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (1920) Walter Terence Stace summarises the ontology of Plato. Stace begins by discussing the way Plato develops the Socratic notion of concepts into a Theory of Ideas, as is illustrated in Meno. Plato poses that the nature of truth is when the concept I hold in my mind corresponds as a copy to something that exists outside my mind. In this way Plato argues that ideas must form the basis for both the substance of the world and our perception of the world as we experience it. Stace summarises (p187), “…the Ideas are substances. They are absolute and ultimate realities. Their whole being is in themselves. They depend on nothing, but all things depend on them. They are the first principles of the universe.” Furthermore as the ultimate substance of reality, the world of ideas is the location of “the essences of all things” (p189).
Stace then discusses Plato’s ontology of this world of ideas in relation to existence, or being, the term Plato uses. Here Stace draws on Sophist and Parmenides (p195 – 197). Against the Eleatics, Plato argued that the One is both a unity and a plurality, for we cannot conceive of the One without also conceiving its predicate, which immediately implies a duality. Similarly, “every many is ipso facto a unity, since we think of the many in one idea, and, if we did not, we should not even know that it is a many.” In the same way, being cannot totally exclude non-being. “The being of anything is the not-being of its opposite. The being of light is the not-being of darkness. All being, therefore, has not-being in it.”
Thus, for Plato, the One – that is, the ultimate reality – is both a unity and a plurality, and is both being and not-being. Plato’s Theory of Ideas is very clearly an ontology of plurality, as there are many ideas. Yet it is also an ontology of unity. For Plato, ideas are ordered in a hierarchy. “Just as the one Idea presides over many individual things of which it is the common element, so one Idea presides over many lower Ideas, and is the common element in them.” In Plato’s system, there is one highest Idea which is supreme over all other ideas, and that is the Idea of the Good (p198).
It is this idea of The Good as the highest ontological principle that caused later thinkers, influenced by Plato, to suggest that essence must precede existence. The first to make this argument explicit was the great Persian and Islamic philosopher, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980 – 1037). Ibn Sina, similarly to Plato, concluded that because essences can be present in either in things or (intentionally) in the intellect, their substance is not tied to the reality of things (the position of the Aristotelian tradition). However Ibn Sina creates a new category for essences which are in intellect and not in things – esse essentiae, a notion of pure possibility with a certain kind of existence, though inferior to actual existence (esse existentiae). Christendom’s answer to Ibn Sina, Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), also employed Ibn Sina’s idea that essence must precede existence. Yet, as Plato posed The Good as the highest ontological principle, and source of all ideas and by implication all essence, so Aquinas has God taking the place of The Good as the First Cause.
Platonism as ultimately non-reductionistic
In expounding his nonreductionistic existentialism, Bahm observes that Platonists overlook or deny the idea that existence and essence could be mutually independent, and hence mutually prior to each other. Bahm claims that a nonreductionistic and realistic approach to the existence-essence problem would better accommodate and understand “the nature of opposition” where the existence-essence dichotomy would be understood as “polarity rather than contradiction,” which “depend upon each other and require each other for their existence and their nature” (p152). Affirming Bahm’s principle of polarity, I would argue that Platonism, in the work of the philosopher himself, and also in the father of the existence-essence dichotomy and his Western interpreter, are not purely reductionistic in their treatment of the problem. All of these thinkers certainly argue that essence precedes material existence, yet there remains a causative link between the material world and the world of ideas (Plato), possibilities (Ibn Sina) and God (Aquinas). Thus these ultimate worlds are no less real than the material world, and thus no less having existence or being.
Nowhere does Plato state the origin of The Good, or those ideas that proceed from The Good. It would seem that The Good was to Plato, because of its ultimacy, something eternal in nature, and thus without beginning. The same can obviously be said of Ibn Sina & Aquinas’ idea of God. The essence of The Good for Plato, or of God for Ibn Sina & Aquinas, could not precede the existence of The Good or of God. And so neither Plato, Ibn Sina nor Aquinas can be said to be purely reductionistic in this matter, nor should they be interpreted to be so. Bahm has reacted to what he calls extreme Platonism and extreme existentialism in his work, and as a solution has produced what he calls a nonreductionistic existentialism. Why he leaned to the existentialist camp with his label is unclear, as this interpretation of Plato, Ibn Sina and Aquinas shows that a nonreductionistic Platonism, at least in terms of first principles of ontology, is just as feasible.
Conclusion
Bahm’s nonreductionistic existentialism as a middle way in existence-essence tussle is certainly of merit. Yet it would appear there has always been plenty of room in the Platonic tradition for a mutuality between the ontological forces of existence and essence. The extent to which an extreme and reductionist Platonism has been propounded by Existentialists as a platform for their own reductionist enterprise would make for an interesting study.
References
Aquinas, Thomas, On Being and Essence
Bahm, Archie John, Nonreductionistic Existentialism. The Monist, 1966, The Hegeler Institute, La Selle, IN
El-Bizri, Nader, Ibn Sina, or Avicenna. In Medieval Islamic Civilization (London, Routledge, 2005).
Goodman, Lenn Evan, Avicenna (Cornell University Press, 2005).
Plato, Meno.
Plato, Parmenides.
Plato, Sophist.
Plato, The Republic.
Stace, Walter Terence, A Critical History of Greek Philosophy (London, Macmillan, & Co., 1969).
Zalta, Edward N., Existence. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, updated 24 May 2002. URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence/
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