A Response to Lukacs's "Existentialism"

I finally got around to reading Lukacs’s critique of existentialism, and although I am glad he recognizes phenomenology as the movement’s theoretical foundations, I have issues with his interpretation of the method (upon which his critique of existentialism is built). Since I have a presentation on Husserl’s passive and active synthesis to finish, I’ll keep this short by responding to a few main points:

“Is there any room for a “third way” besides idealism and materialism? If we consider this question seriously, as the great philosophers of the past did, and not with fashionable phrases, there can be only one answer, “No.” For when we look at the relations which can exist between being and consciousness we see clearly that only two positions are possible: either being is primary (materialism), or consciousness is primary (idealism). Or, to put it another way, the fundamental principle of materialism is the independence of being from consciousness; of idealism, the dependence of being on consciousness. The fashionable philosophers of today establish a correlation between being and consciousness as a basis for their “third way”: there is no being without consciousness and no consciousness without being. But the first assertion produces only a variant of idealism: the acknowledgment of the dependence of being on consciousness.”

The problem with this is that when speaking about a human being’s engagement with the world, it is impossible to leave out the perspective from which they experience that world in which they are embedded in. That is the problem with idealism and materialism according to the phenomenologists. With idealism, there is too little emphasis on being-in-the-world and the dialectical play that is involved for any intuitive evidence to be acquired; with materialism there is too little description as to what the necessary conditions for the possibility of a given experience are. For Husserl, the point is that as individuals we experience multifaceted objects from given perspectives that become synthesized into intuitive objectlike formations, unified by the temporal stream of consciousness and associated affective awakenings of past experiences. For Sartre, consciousness is a transphenomenal dimension functioning as a privation that conditions the appearance of being to the individual. Despite the inability to experience the object in full positivity, the phenomenologists would not deny that there is an object that those facets belong to in the “natural world” (as well as our experience), and therefore wed the idealist and materialist traditions.

“The arbitrariness of the method is seen especially when the question is raised: Is what phenomenological intuition finds actually real? What right does that intuition have to speak of the reality of its object? For Dilthey’s intuition, the colorfulness and the uniqueness of historical situations are the reality; for Bergson’s, it is the flow itself, the duration (durée), that dissolves the petrified forms of ordinary life; while for Husserl’s, the acts in which individual objects are meant constitute “reality” – objects which he treats as isolated units, with hard contours like statuary. Although mutually exclusive, these intuitions were able to dwell together in relative peace.”

The issue with this is precisely what Sartre discusses in Being and Nothingness: it fails to recognize that knowledge is founded on being. In Husserl’s work, we see that a familiarity with objects is what constitutes a truly objective realm; in order to “know” whether what is being intuitively recognized in the primordial present is “real,” we must have past experiences to test that intuition against. Of course, knowledge is never absolute due to the inexhaustive nature of the object, but it is probable. Therefore, the objects are not treated as isolated units, but are pitted against other intuitions of retained experiences in gradations of clarity.

“So Sartre complains of Husserl and Heidegger, two men he otherwise prizes highly. Husserl, in his opinion, has not gone beyond Kant; and he criticizes Heidegger as follows: ‘The character being-together [co-presence, Mitsein] introduced by Heidegger is a character of the isolated ego. Hence it does not lead beyond solipsism. Therefore we shall search Sein und Zeit in vain for a position beyond both idealism and realism [meaning materialism].’”

Just as a side note, Sartre also tells us that to Heidegger, solipsism is a false problem since we are first and foremost a “we,” rather than an “I.” Individuality has to be earned by a call of conscience and a projection towards death (to Heidegger). The one criticism that I believe Lukacs is getting at is Sartre's notion that primordially, we are an objectified "us" that can only be realized as a "we" by an individual in the act of collectively looking at something else. What this means is that we are fundamentally for-others before we can experience ourselves as being-with them. Additionally, Sartre goes on to say that since all consciousness is consciousness (of) being (the parenthetical “of” here representing the co-dependent unity of consciousness as lack and being), the problem with the existence of Others is not a problem with the Other’s existence, but of the consciousness revealing the being.

Lukacs then goes into a tangent and somehow makes the leap that seems ubiquitous to all critiques coming out of his school of thought, classifying phenomenological and existentialist theories of the Other as fetish, albeit without necessity. After moving to a misrepresentation of nothingness in Heidegger and Sartre, which, if anything, conditions the ability to become aware of reified social relations and commodity fetishes, he goes on to say:

“A very specialized philosophical dissertation would be required to show the chains of thought, sometimes quite false, sometimes obviously sophistical, by which Sartre seeks to justify his theory of negative judgment. It is true that, for every “No” which expresses a particular judgment, there is a positively existing situation. But it is only idolizing of subjective attitudes that gives nothingness the semblance of reality. When I inquire, for instance, what the laws of the solar system are, I have not posited any negative being, such as Sartre envisages. The meaning of my question is simply that I lack knowledge.”

Again, however, the point is that in order to gain knowledge, that knowledge must be founded on being, which is obviously lacked (since knowledge is simply a presence to being). Otherwise, we cannot even talk about what we are lacking knowledge of.

“Existentialism consistently proclaims that nothing can be known by man. It does not challenge science in general; it does not raise skeptical objections to its practical or technical uses. It merely denies that there is a science which has the right to say anything about the one essential question: the relation of the individual to life. This is the alleged superiority of existentialism to the old philosophy. ‘Existential philosophy,’ Jaspers says, ‘would be lost immediately if it started believing again that it knew what man is.’ This radical ignorance on principle, which is stressed by Heidegger and Sartre, is one of the main reasons for the overwhelming influence of existentialism. Men who have no prospects themselves find consolation in the doctrine that life in general has no prospects to offer.”

Now this is just an unfair treatment of the literature. The natural sciences have plenty to inform us about the biological or physical relation of human beings to the natural world, but to claim that they have some sort of known grasp of a human being’s “essence” is absurd. But the concluding sentence of the above paragraph implies that to existentialists there is no meaning to be created or discovered by the individual, which is simply not the case (and is the antithesis to one of the major principles of the movement).

“Jaspers and Sartre are less radical than Heidegger in this respect, although their thought is not the less conditioned by time and class. Sartre flatly rejects the concept of specific or personal death as a category of existentialism.”

I thought I’d point out at least one thing Lukacs got right.

Moving on, Lukacs’s quite harsh critique of Sartre’s notions of freedom and responsibility simply don’t seem to present the problems he is drawing from them. He does hit Sartre where he is weakest, which is Existentialism is a Humanism, a lecture given to the “general public” in an attempt to convey the complex ideas of Being and Nothingness that Sartre himself regretted writing (according to Annie Cohen-Solal in the latest translation of Existentialism is a Humanism, if I’m not mistaken). This, however, is not an adequate exposition of Sartre’s notion of value (which I will not go into here, as this has already turned into a much longer post than anticipated), and should be further investigated before accepting Lukacs’s criticisms.

To conclude, Lukacs’s claim that phenomenology is a less-cogent version of Kantian theory is simply indicative of Lukacs’s knowledge depth (or lack thereof) when it comes to the phenomenological method. The point of the epoché is to bracket an experience and shift to a phenomenological reduction, suspending belief about the mode of existence of an object and dogmatic attitudes toward it. What we have in the end is not merely the object as objective reality, but again, an understanding of the necessary conditions for experiencing the object in the way that we do, providing us with, as Lukacs’s school’s fundamental project seeks, the tools to de-fetishize our natural attitudes and recognize the collective social structure as essential to our existence. Just because we are free to act within a determinate framework of social and natural conditions, does not mean we lack a level of indeterminacy within that framework. As Marcuse tells us in his critique of Marxist aesthetics, community originates in the autonomous decisions of individuals, and until we recognize that we are committing ourselves to the same bourgeois ideality we are claiming to critique.

A Perfect Example of Misunderstood Existentialism

I came across an article this morning that was written back in March, which turned out to be a perfect example of what causes the perpetual misunderstanding of existentialism. The author, Lynsey Hanley, of course starts off with one of the most overused and misunderstood quotes from Sartre: "Hell is other people."

Let me first start off by saying that Sartre did not mean that other people create a hellish world for me, or that I should go through life only caring about myself. On the contrary, Sartre explains that our awareness of ourselves is contingent on other people. Whenever I reflect on who I am, that reflection is not without my awareness of what others think me to be. Essentially, "hell is other people" means that no matter how much I want to be something, I can never fully be considered as such if another has an opposing view. In that type of situation, I am constantly struggling to find a medium between what I want to be and how I am perceived to be. With Sartre, one has to remember not to get caught up in his dramatic terminology, and instead pay close attention to what that terminology means, rather than what it implies.

Hanley continues by stating: "Being an existentialist requires being satisfied with the absurd and random nature of events, freeing you to create your own life in circumstances that aren't of your own making." Not so much. Being an existentialist does not require a satisfaction of the absurd, and I hesitate to even say that it requires an acknowledgment of the absurd. In Sartre, the absurdity of the world is used to portray the individual's ability to create meaning for oneself, since there is not essential meaning to begin with. In Camus, the absurd lies not in the individual or the world, but rather the individual seeking clarity in an irrational world. To Camus, the world is not necessarily without meaning, but he claims that if the world does have meaning, it transcends the individual's intelligence. One thing that people who are not familiar with the actual philosophy of Sartre, for instance, is that they do not realize that his philosophy is based on ontology, which is the study of being. It does not necessarily say that "one must do this in order to do that," rather it merely describes what is. To the existentialists, the absurd is, and there is no imperative that follows (i.e., be satisfied with). More importantly, the root of Sartre's philosophy is that you always have the freedom "to create your own life in circumstances that aren't of your own making," and being satisfied with the absurd is not a prerequisite.

"I'd like to be an existentialist in the sense of wanting to approach life as though I were a mind-body battering ram, but tend instead to hover at obstacles wondering what the best course of action would be from every possible angle, knowing really that there is no best or worst, simply what is, and must be, dealt with."

Hanley, I hate to tell you, but what you "prefer" is what existentialism actually is. In order to be able to "wonder what the best course of action would be from every possible angle, knowing really that there is not best or worst, simply what is," you must first realize that there are possibilities available to you, and that there is no choice that is better than another; either way, it is your choice.

Another confusion that Hanley states is: "At the centre of this philosophy is the insistence that, while you must think, there's a time when you have to act on what you've been thinking about," which is again, not the case. One point that is stressed by existentialists is that not choosing is still a choice. You can think all you want, but not acting is still a choice.

Her statement, "wanting cheap goods while blaming migrants for low wages, in spouting populist opinions and then berating politicians for the consequences of populist policies, in blaming cakes for obesity and guns for murder," is partly false. Bad faith is one's rejection of one's available choices and the freedom and responsibility of one to choose from amongst those choices. Hypocrisy is not bad faith, as long as one does not reject the choice of being a hypocrite being one's own, but blaming one's obesity on cakes and guns on murder is a semi-appropriate example, since it was up to one to eat the cake or pull the trigger on the gun.

"But here again my inner softy counsels caution. We can't reject the loop-like nature of how individual actions contribute to social effects, which in turn influence individual actions. You can't eat a hamburger by osmosis, but it would be stubborn to deny that capitalism has an interest in getting you to eat more of them than is healthy."

This, though, is bad faith. Our social circumstances do limit the choices available to us, but we still have the ability to choose. Eat your hamburger, Hanley, but don't blame it on anyone else.

Hanley then throws a curve ball into the mix, and I am not sure whether she is now a proponent of what she thinks is existentialism, or is against it: "There are some unfortunate proponents of the law of individual responsibility, who corrupt the essentially optimistic nature of existentialism."

Either way, her concluding paragraph just goes to show her naïveté as she oversimplifies Nietzsche and improperly attributes it to existentialism: "It's not so much that existentialist thinking can't be applied to life's moral greyscale. It's more that the problem with maintaining, or at least refusing to challenge, a popular political culture based on denial and hysteria is that it requires regarding people who are not like you as simultaneously less than human and superhuman. Only the deserving get to be simply human."

Nietzsche is considered an existentialist due to some of the views that he shares with the other existentialists, but his theory on the Übermensch is not one of them.

Thank you, Lynsey Hanley, for adding to the confusion and misunderstanding that plagues existentialism today.