Modern Condition, Existential Crisis: The Development of Existentialism

Existentialism is the attempt to honestly, unflinchingly, confront "the modern condition" and to find meaning where all meaning seems lost.  We might say it is an attempt to develop an unflinching, honest, rational philosophy that allows one to rise above the sound of T.S. Eliot's "rats feet on broken glass" or Conrad's "the horror", without simply discarding the many well proven findings of “modern” Enlightenment science and philosophy.

A Brief Contextual Review: The Modern Condition

The application and development of Enlightenment Rationalism led to the following cultural, historical, and philosophical results, some of which we've already covered this semester:

The Triumph Of Reason. For roughly the past 400-500 years, the development of scientific, rational thinking has consistently proven itself an accurate means of understanding the natural world – the application of Enlightenment thinking has explained the genetic basis of life, explained the nature of the moon, planets and stars, taken humans into the heavens, literally, helped us create democratic republics, lengthened our life-spans and alleviated much physical suffering through the development of medical science etc etc….  Scientific thinking is confirmed each and every time an engineer applies it to design and successfully build anything, anything at all, that works the way it was designed to work;  it is confirmed each and every time doctors and pharmacologists use it to cure a disease using medical science and technology; it is confirmed, in short, each time rational hypotheses are confirmed through direct, repeatedly verifiable observation.  Darwinian evolutionary theory is a good example of this: science can even explain the origin of life itself, and with each increasing test the theory is more deeply confirmed.

In short, to a large degree, we Westerners all agree we like the fruits of Modern, Enlightenment thinking, at least to the degree that we seem unwilling to abandon science and return to Medieval philosophical models of feudalism, bleedings and believing the earth is the center of the universe.

The Failure Of Reason.  But the application of Enlightenment Reason to understanding the human experience also all but obliterated the assumptions upon which we originally built our civilizations, and little is more depressing and problematic than proving that humans are simply biological organisms developed through random events and evolutionary chance.  God, or gods, heaven and hell, cosmological purpose, even a means of determining moral truths...all these have been sytematically eliminated from our rational, empirical explanation of existence.  Yet even though our society -- our courts, our (American/European) medicine, our technology, our constitution -- is otherwise entirely predicated on reason and fact, reason and fact seem to do little, or perhaps nothing, to address our deepest concerns: What is love?  What is death? What is the meaning of life? How should I live my life?

The Quagmire Of Cultural Relativism.  In fact, the more we study humans, the more we find that each culture and sub-culture has its own definition of God and morality, even of "Truth" itself or how it is obtained, and reason dictates that we weigh each theory equally and look for evidence of which is most accurate.  Yet no evidence exists whatsoever that any one definition of God is more accurate than any other.  This is for the obvious reason that each theory of God or gods, and even of morality, is built upon faith -- the belief in that which is "beyond" or outside of material/empirical/quantifiable, scientific evidence. (In other words, outside of faith, on this world there is no means whatsoever to universally determine -- to prove -- whether or not Mohammed, or Joseph Smith, or Krishna etc is a true prophet of God, or the gods).

And if there is a single unifying theory of rationality, it is that no theory can be built on faith rather than quantifiable evidence.

So, Now What?

But without a belief in transcendent truths, so called "Big T Truths" --  such as a God or life after death predicated on rewards and punishments -- how can humans decide what is moral, what is right and wrong?  Or even when morality seems clear, what compels us to choose the right over the wrong, if in the end life is, essentially, meaningless, in the larger scheme (or lack thereof) of the universe?  If Nietzsche was right that moral categories such as “good and evil” are little more than what we’d call Ideology – ideas constructed by societies to maintain social order rather than ultimate, universal Truths – how can we ever agree, as a society, what actions are good and evil?  If life is, as science seems to suggest, nothing more than biology built and random chance, dictated by nothing more than heartless laws of physics, how possibly can we argue that the Holocaust is "wrong" any more than we could argue that, say, it is wrong for a lion to kill an antelope, or, for that matter, male lions to kill the offspring of competing males?

Further, if our existence results from nothing more than chance, and if our lives are but a dim "blip" on the grand cosmological radar scheme -- not much more than a moment in a vast universe that is billions of years old -- how can we see our lives as "meaningful"? 

This is the question Existentialists pick up and attempt to answer.  And it is the question modern philosophers still struggle with.