To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

Simone de Beauvoir

Anything goes

Existentialists have long been criticized for their rejection of moral absolutes and emphasis on individual freedom because such a position appears to undermine the possibility for ethics. If ‘God is dead’ and there are no binding moral principles that we can turn to in order to guide and evaluate our actions, then existentialists seem to be espousing an ‘anything goes’ view of morality. Although there are many examples in existentialist literature, from Dostoevsky's ax-wielding Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment to the vicious trio of Garcin, Estelle, and Inez in Sartre's No Exit, the work cited most often by critics as representative of existentialism's amorality is Camus's The Stranger. In this work, the reader is introduced to Mersault, the alienated anti-hero who appears to be the incarnation of moral nihilism. For him, “nothing, nothing had the least importance” (1946, 152). The story begins with the death of his mother, an event that Mersault is completely unaffected by. “It occurred to me,” he writes, “that somehow I'd got through another Sunday, that Mother now was buried, and tomorrow I'd be going back to work as usual. Really, nothing in my life had changed” (30). Later, his girlfriend asks if he loves her, and he replies with total indifference: “Much as before, her question meant nothing or next to nothing” (52). The story reaches its climax when he and some friends confront two men on the beach, a fight breaks out, and Mersault later shoots and kills one of them. What is brought into stark relief in the description of the event is how Mersault is completely free and disconnected from any moral principles. He knows he can turn around and walk away from the conflict, but there is nothing that tells him he ‘ought’ to do it. At his trial, the prosecutor tries to understand his reasons for killing the man, and Mersault makes it clear that there was no reason. “Why had I taken the revolver with me, and why go back precisely to that spot? … [It] was a matter of pure chance” (110, 116). What is especially irritating to the reader is Mersault's lack of contrition or remorse. The story ends with him facing execution by guillotine but accepting his situation and, in this acceptance, realizing “that [he'd] been happy, and … was happy still” (154).

The Stranger is criticized for its moral nihilism and for its apparent glorification of freedom over any considerations of moral conduct. But to use this story to characterize the ethical shortcomings of existentialism misses the mark. It is true that existentialists reject the idea of normative ethics that aim to provide universal prescriptions or norms for how we should act. In this sense, the standard Kantian view of ethics as rational self-legislation and duty to the ‘moral law’ and the utilitarian view of ethics based on the detached calculation of happiness are dismissed. There can be no normative ethics on the existentialist account because there is no justification, no ‘God's-eye view’ for these kinds of prescriptions. “My freedom,” says Sartre, “is the unique foundation of values, [and so] nothing, absolutely nothing justifies me in adopting this or that particular value [or] this or that particular scale of values” (1956, 38). Sartre goes on to claim that “one can choose anything” (2001, 307), that “man is a useless passion” (Sartre 1956, 784), and that “all human activities are equivalent. … It amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations” (797). But such claims, taken in isolation, do not mean that existentialists are unconcerned with how we ought to live and treat others. The point is that human beings must own up to their freedom and, in doing so, take responsibility for what they do in the world. In this sense, freedom is not an abstract or formal concept; it is realized only through our concrete actions in the world. Beauvoir explains:

From these remarks, we can begin to see that existentialist freedom has nothing to do with Mersault's impulsive actions. As we saw in , the distinctive attribute of being a person is self-consciousness, the ability to take a concrete stand on one's desires by interpreting them, giving them meaning, and seeing how they shape one's identity in the future as a law-abiding citizen, for example, or as a cold-blooded murderer. If Mersault is acting only on ‘first-order’ impulses, he is what Harry Frankfurt calls a ‘wanton’ and not a self; he is not yet free because his action is not mediated by the desire to be the person that he wants to be. As we have shown, it is only when we act on these higher ‘second-order’ volitions that we are truly free and responsible because these actions transcend the determinations of our impulses in a way that orients us in the world and gives shape and coherence to our identities as a whole.

Of course, we are still unable to judge whether or not Mersault's actions are objectively ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ but we can certainly determine whether or not he is being honest with himself to the extent that he makes no excuses and understands that his actions make him who he is. “One can still pass judgment,” writes Sartre, “one can judge … that certain choices are based on error and others on truth. If we have defined man's situation as free choice, with no excuses and no recourse … every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions … is a dishonest man” (2001, 305). If you deny your freedom and responsibility, the existentialist can judge you as being dishonest because, on the basis of your actions and self-interpretation, “that's what you are” (306). If, however, you are willing to own up to your choices and actions, then the image of the existentialist as an ‘anything goes’ anarchist falls apart. We see that, as self-conscious beings, we are not free from the consequences of our actions or from being responsible for what we do. The inescapability of human freedom and responsibility becomes the basis for existentialist ethics. This is why Beauvoir says that “to will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision” (1948, 24).

Sartre goes on to claim that the commitment to human freedom is not only for one's own sake. Indeed, his position takes a distinctively Kantian turn by emphasizing how owning up to and affirming the value of human freedom involves a kind of universalizability, because it entails affirming the value of freedom for all of humankind. In ‘Existentialism is a humanism,’ Sartre puts it this way:

Although it is difficult to square this position with his claim in Being and Nothingness that human relations are a ceaseless struggle for self-assertion – as I try to assert my freedom and objectify others and they try to do the same to me – we can see what Sartre is aiming at. We create ourselves through our choices but our choices don't just involve ourselves because they always take place in relation to others, creating a particular image or picture of the kind of person we think others should be. Sartre writes, “In creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be” (293). In good faith, I acknowledge freedom as my essence, and, in doing so, I cannot help but acknowledge that it is the essence of others as well. And if the cultivation of my own free projects is the ultimate aim and good of my life, then my actions “involve all of mankind” (304) in the sense that they should in some way cultivate this possibility for others (Barnes 1967, 61–62). Sartre is unclear about how exactly I can move from an authentic recognition of my own freedom to the moral consideration of cultivating freedom for others, but we can look to Heidegger's conception of ‘solicitude’ (Fürsorge) for guidance.

In Being and Time, Heidegger describes two modes of what he calls “positive solicitude” (1962, 157), referring to the ways in which we are actively concerned for others. On the one hand, I can ‘leap in’ for the other. In this mode of concern, I decide for the other what they should do and how they should act and thus ‘disburden’ them of their freedom and from taking responsibility for their own lives. Here we can imagine the overprotective mother whose daughter is going off to college. The mother ‘leaps in’ for the daughter by telling her what discipline to major in, what kind of roommate she should have, and what neighborhood she should live in. She is preoccupied with her, constantly checking in with phone calls and text messages. She even gives her a living allowance and pays her tuition. The daughter interprets this behavior as a manifestation of a mother's love, but it is actually a kind of tacit “domination” (158). The mother's concern for her daughter is inauthentic because she is manipulating and controlling her as if she were a thing. As a result, the mother is ‘taking over’ her daughter's possibilities for her. The daughter is stripped of her freedom so that she is unable to choose and take responsibility for her own life.

Heidegger contrasts this inauthentic concern with what he calls authentic or ‘liberating solicitude.’ In this mode, the mother does not ‘leap in’ for the daughter but ‘leaps ahead’ of her. Leaping ahead signifies that the mother does not care for her daughter as if she were a dependent thing to be sheltered. She is concerned, rather, with granting her daughter freedom so that she can face herself as a ‘being possible’ who alone is responsible for creating her own identity. The mother does this “not in order to take away [her] ‘care’ but rather to give it back to [her daughter] authentically as such for the first time” (159). For Heidegger, “this kind of solicitude pertains essentially to authentic care. … It helps the Other to become transparent to [herself] in [her] care and to become free for it” (159, my brackets). In this way, the mother plays the role of “conscience” in the sense that she calls her daughter to “know [herself]” (159, my brackets), to anxiously confront her own self-responsibility. Being concerned for her daughter's freedom, then, is not the same as being concerned for her material welfare. The latter issue is best served by means of ‘leaping in’ and ‘taking over’ her possibilities for her. Although they are not mutually exclusive, the aim of liberating solicitude has nothing to do with her daughter's happiness, protection, or good health but with granting her the freedom to create and take responsibility for her own life. From this, we can say that there is a universal value espoused by existentialists when it comes to being-with-others. It is to care for the other by releasing them, by letting them ‘become free.’

In positing freedom as a universal value, existentialists are clearly indebted to Kant. The difference is in Kant's claim that freedom and reason are intimately connected, and that, insofar as we are moral agents, reason always serves as the ultimate authority and justification for our actions. As Kant says, “Free will is a kind of causality belonging to living things so far as they are rational” (1964, 114, my emphasis). The universality that is distinct to reason provides a binding necessity to act on the basis of duty to the ‘moral law’ rather than on one's own heteronomous inclinations. Freedom, on this account, has nothing to do with being allowed or permitted to choose and do what one wants but to be self-regulated and duty-bound to the law by means of reason. Existentialists make no such claim. Indeed, as we saw in , existentialist freedom can be understood as freedom from the authority of reason and from universal laws; it is the freedom to be ‘irrational,’ ‘unnatural,’ and ‘irreverent’ if that is what matters and is of value to you as an existing individual. As Dostoevsky's underground man reminds us, “Reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature” (2009, 21). Freedom, on the other hand, may result in “destruction, chaos, [and] suffering” (23) because it involves the choices of the whole person, not just the rational part, and “even it goes wrong, it lives” (93).

But we see now that freedom from rationality does not mean that the actions of the existentialist are empty of moral content. They may not offer prescriptions that tell us how we ‘ought’ to act, but the existentialists do tell us something about what an authentic or choice-worthy way of life is. We are inauthentic when we deceive ourselves about who we are, deny our freedom, and refuse to take responsibility for our actions. We are authentic when we affirm our freedom and accept the fact that our actions have consequences and always involve others. In good faith, we affirm that we are not anything because we are always in the process of choosing, of making and remaking ourselves as we take stands on our situation. This means that whatever meanings or values I commit myself to I am always aware that they are not binding on me a priori, that I give things meaning only through my actions in the world, and I am always free to choose other meanings as my situation changes. But defending existentialism in this way is still problematic because it looks like pure ‘subjectivism,’ where it is up to the individual alone to invest the world with meaning, and whatever choice I make is acceptable insofar as I take responsibility for it. This raises the question of whether or not existentialists can identify some set of shared values that can place moral demands on us.

Subjectivism or historicism

Existentialists reject the possibility of moral absolutes because this puts universal principles above the concrete needs of the individual. In committing to these principles I am ‘disburdened’ of my primary responsibility, which is to be true to myself. This is why the acknowledgment of God's death is so distressing for existentialists; it reveals the extent to which I am totally abandoned and forlorn, that there is nothing binding that tells me to choose one way of life over another. Without God, our moral evaluations are completely ungrounded. There is no course of action that is right or wrong because all we have to go on is our own subjective commitments. This creates a bleak picture of morality, where it is up to the solitary subject alone to choose his or her own life without appeal to a background of meanings or values that can put evaluative limits or constraints on us. Existentialists, as Iris Murdoch writes, “no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will” (1983, 46; cited in Vogel 1994, 41). This view is especially problematic for figures like Sartre who identify subjectivity as the starting point of existentialism and radical freedom as its supreme value. But for figures like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who posit the centrality of being-in-the-world, the charge of subjectivism doesn't hold.

As we saw in , Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty reject the conflation of existentialism with subjectivism because they understand that our choices and actions are already bound up in a world of shared meanings. On their view, I cannot be the sole source and measure of value because I am already thrown into a situation that is value-laden, thus I am already “condemned to meaning” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xix). The most definitive expression of this critique is found in Heidegger's ‘Letter on Humanism.’ Here, Heidegger dismisses Sartre for labeling him an existentialist because such a view suggests that he supports “subjectivism” (1977a, 208–210). For Heidegger, meanings never emerge ex nihilo from the willful intentions of the subject because we are already “claimed” or “appropriated” by Being (199), where Being is understood as the disclosive movement of history. This means that there is an authority beyond the subject that guides our choices and actions, namely our historical situation, or what Heidegger in Being and Time calls ‘historicality’ (Geschichtlichkeit). On this account, we are not radically free to invest things with value “because historicality is a determining characteristic” of our existence (1962, 42). Any choice that we make as individuals is guided and mediated by our historical context. This is why Heidegger says “Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being” (41).

Our predicament, then, is not one of subjectivism, because history invariably places moral demands on us. Thus, a person's acts can still be deemed immoral or praiseworthy insofar as they conflict or correspond with the evaluative measures of his or her community. Of course, this is not to suggest there are moral absolutes that exist independently of human projects. But it does mean that the individual is not a sovereign subject or ‘uncontested author’ of his or her actions, because history has already opened up a space of publicly interpreted values that tell me what I ‘ought’ to do. To be sure, I am still free and responsible in the sense that I have to choose which of these values I am going to commit my life to. But I am not a “free-floating ‘I’ ” (298) whose decisions emerge ex nihilo. Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world decenters the subject, making it clear that my decisions are always bound up in a wider historical framework, where I am invariably appropriating and being appropriated by the values of my historical community. But this view raises its own problems when it comes to ethics.

If moral demands are determined by the historical situation I am thrown into, then they are never fixed and stable. ‘Pride’ and ‘magnificence,’ for example, are honorable traits in Aristotle's ethics but are dishonorable in a Christian morality that emphasizes ‘self-effacement’ and ‘humility.’ And in the West today, it is not Protestant modesty in the face of God but ‘confidence’ and ‘personal magnetism’ that are praised as keys to success in a capitalist economy. All these values are part of our shared history and shape our sense of what is praiseworthy. But there is no way to determine which moral framework we should commit to. It appears that the issue of ‘anything goes’ persists; however, it is no longer rooted in the contingent decisions of the subject but in the contingent movement of history that has already claimed us. As Lawrence Vogel contends, Heidegger appears to have replaced the arbitrariness of ‘subjectivism’ with the arbitrariness of ‘historicism’ (1994, 54). Moreover, if we are embedded beings and there is no way to stand outside of the prejudices of our historical situation, this makes it difficult to subject our own values to moral scrutiny. According to Heidegger, my historical community is “the sole authority a free existing [individual] can have” (1962, 443), but what if my community values an ideology of racism or violence against minorities? How can I take a moral stand on these values if they already shape my self-understanding?

This criticism is especially pointed given Heidegger's own commitment to Nazism and his infamous inaugural address as rector of Freiburg University in 1933. Here, Heidegger speaks of being “truly and collectively rooted” (2009, 109) to a common German heritage, of protecting the “blood and soil” (112) of the German people, and of being “prepared for mutual struggle” (Kampf) (115) in the face of cultural threats. Heidegger's rhetoric opens up a hornet's nest of moral questions. If I am irrevocably bound to the values of my history, then how should I regard those who are outside it? Do I have an obligation to treat others as my moral equals even though they do not adhere to my community's values? If there is no ahistorical standpoint that I can take, can I ever judge whether or not my values are any better or worse than others? Heidegger himself was ‘thrown’ into a tradition of deeply rooted racism and antisemitism. But does this entanglement suggest that he is incapable of denouncing it? Other Germans took a critical stand in the face of Nazism; what historical currents made it possible for them (see Vogel 1994, 66–68)?

Merleau-Ponty offers an alternative to Heidegger's historicism, by arguing that being-in-the-world is grounded not only in the meanings and values of a particular historical tradition, but in a prior “visual, auditory, and tactile field” (1962, 353) that is already opened up by the perceptual activity of the lived body. On Merleau-Ponty's account, beneath the prejudices of our shared history, there is a dimension of bodily experience that is ‘pre-personal,’ that is prior to language, culture, and thought, revealing that I am “already in communication with others” (353) because I am bound up in an inter-human web of feelings, gestures, and affective expressions, and this relational web can provide its own moral orientation.

Intercorporeality

By interpreting the individual in terms of ‘intercorporeality,’ Merleau-Ponty not only unsettles the notion of the sovereign subject, he also invests being-in-the-world with a moral dimension by revealing how we can recognize and feel our way into the lives of others through shared bodily experience. Again, for Merleau-Ponty, the body is not an encapsulated object that exists mechanistically as ‘partes extra partes.’ It refers to the feelings, perceptions, and movements of ‘my own body’ (le corps propre), the body that I am enacting and living through in my everyday life. From this perspective, my being does not end with my own skin because it is already stretching into a shared world, weaving its way into familiar patterns of behavior and recognizing the intentions, gestures, and expressions of others, and the threads of this embodied weave form an interconnected system. In Phenomenology of Perception, he explains,

It is through this ‘prolongation of my own intentions’ that I am able to recognize the other, not as an object that is separate and distinct from me, but as a being whose intentions and experiences overlap with mine because we are both bound together in familiar ways of bodily being-in-the-world. This is because, as a sentient and corporeal being, I am already woven into the world and in dialogue with others through my senses before I ever encounter others from the perspective of ‘subject’ and ‘object.’ In this sense, we are part of the same elemental tissue, or what Merleau-Ponty will later call ‘flesh.’ “My body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is perceived),” he writes, “and moreover … this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it, and it encroaches upon the world. … They are in a relation of … overlapping” (1968, 248).

The recovery of this affective, pre-personal way of being opens up the possibility for a moral orientation, one where we do not interpret ourselves as sovereign subjects but as beings whose bodily fields are sensibly intertwined with those of others (see Levin 1999; Low 1994). This experience of intertwining or ‘chiasm’ allows us to recognize the pain and vulnerability of others because we embody these feelings in similar ways. Experiencing myself from this standpoint makes it possible to move beyond the prejudices of my own community, because I am able to encounter the other not as an outsider, but as a concrete individual who embodies his or her experience in ways that resemble my own and who shares the same elemental flesh as me. In this way, Merleau-Ponty offers a response to Heidegger's historicism and alleged antisemitism. In ‘The War Has Taken Place,’ he writes,

The suggestion here is that when we ‘really see’ the other in all of their embodied concreteness, when we witness the affective tension in their posture, the tears welling up in their eyes, the horror or the joy in their face, we also witness ourselves. But this emotional recognition is not a product of “reasoning by analogy” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 352), not a conscious objectification of others as material bodies that move and act as I do. It is, rather, an immediate experience of bodily co-presence, one where we live in the expressions, gestures, and movements of others. Merleau-Ponty uses the example of an infant mirroring the gestures of an adult to show how this primitive experience occurs and how it is anterior to self-consciousness and history. “A baby of fifteen months,” he writes, “opens its mouth if I playfully take its fingers between my teeth and pretend to bite it. And yet it has scarcely looked at its face in a glass, and its teeth are not in any case like mine. … ‘Biting’ has immediately, for it, an intersubjective significance. It perceives its intentions in its body, and my body with its own, and thereby my intentions in its own body” (352). For Merleau-Ponty, the infant, as a sentient being, is already in affective dialogue with the other and has a sense of the meaning of the other's acts, not by means of intellectually grasping them, but because there is an overlapping of bodily fields (Welsh 2007). In this web of mutual presence, the infant relates to and recognizes my feelings long before it can put words to them.

Interpreters such as David Michael Levin (1999) have pointed out how Merleau-Ponty's account of being-in-the-world not only offers an opening for a radical critique of the ideologies of individualism that prevail in modernity; it also opens up the possibility of recovering the moral dimension of bodily co-presence that constitutes the child's way of seeing. In this opening, as Levin writes, “I recognize myself as another for an other, and I am obliged to acknowledge that there are other perspectives. … Looking into the eyes of others, I may see myself; but what I should see is that I am exposed, vulnerable, held in their beholding” (228). Martin Buber will develop this notion of moral vision, agreeing that there is a primitive ‘bodily reciprocity’ that undermines the idea of the self as an encapsulated sovereign subject, and that when it comes to the immediate, pre-linguistic recognition of the other, the child has “more complete information” than I do (1970, 76). For Buber, this kind of recognition is sacred and constitutes the heart of what he calls the ‘I–Thou’ relation.

I and Thou

One of the consistent threads that run through the writings of religious existentialists like Dostoevsky, Marcel, Buber, and Levinas is a concern for how we treat others. These thinkers are united in their critique of modern society that they see as increasingly rationalistic and objectivizing, fostering a selfish and instrumental existence. Buber will refer to this as the ‘I–It’ attitude. In this attitude we tend to interpret ourselves as self-contained subjects that are detached from others. In this sense, it “erects a crucial barrier between subject and object” (1970, 75), reducing the other to a utilitarian thing to be manipulated and used for our own ends. What rises to the surface in this attitude are the self-centered, purposive, and materialistic concerns of my own ego. In this way, “the person beholds [only] his self; the ego occupies himself with his My: my manner, my race, my works, my genius” (114). It is important to note, however, that Buber does not regard the ‘I–It’ attitude as evil, nor does he deny the importance of selfishness or instrumental dealings with others. Such an attitude is essential for our survival; it gives our lives a measure of predictability and control and is central to the practical worlds of economics, finance, and manufacturing. The problem is that in the modern age, this attitude has come to dominate and block out any other way of relating to others, and consequently it denies us our essential humanity. This is why Buber says, “Without It a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human” (85). Today, we are caught up in what Buber calls the “spell of separation” (125), where we see ourselves as autonomous, self-reliant individuals, who are independent from the rest of humanity, and this undermines the possibility of genuine community and reciprocal concern for each other. Dostoevsky offers a powerful description of this spell in The Brothers Karamazov:

In order to move beyond the individualism and isolation of the ‘I–It’ attitude, we have to move beyond instrumental reason to a layer of lived experience that cannot be captured in language or thought. Buber conceives of this experience as the ‘I–Thou’ relation.

As a ‘Thou’ or ‘You,’ the other is encountered as a ‘relation,’ not as an object or thing that is separate from me. The “You,” says Buber, is “no thing among things nor does he consist of things” (1970, 59). In relation, we encounter others in a non-purposeful, non-manipulative, and non-objectifying way. Unlike the ‘I–It’ relation, which is always mediated through rational concepts of productivity and usefulness, the ‘I–You’ relation is “unmediated” (62–63), that is, there is nothing conceptual that gets in the way or intervenes in the encounter. It is a mode of relating that is immediate and direct, one where we feel ourselves bound together in a reciprocal, inter-human relationship. Buber suggests that this relational way of knowing the other is already articulated in the Hebrew Bible. When the Bible speaks of knowing God, it is not referring to conceptual knowledge through a detached, subject-object model, but to the ‘I and Thou,’ to the immediate relational presence of God. This is why, as Walter Kaufmann explains, the Hebrew name for God as ‘YHVH’ is so instructive. The word literally means “He is present” (1970, 26). Relational knowledge pulls us out of the spell of separation, resurrecting our sense of “wholeness” as persons and co-presence with others (Buber 1970, 69–70). And it is a knowledge that can only be felt; it cannot be rationally explained or discovered. “The You encounters me by grace,” writes Buber; “it cannot be found by seeking” (62). In order to be open and ready for God's grace, we need to give up or release ourselves from the illusory security of the ‘It-world’ and from our selfish need to control and objectify others. “What has to be given up,” then, “is the false drive for self-affirmation” (126). Being ready for grace in this way is “a finding without seeking” (128).

Although it is difficult to describe, Buber believes we often have experiences of the ‘I–You’ relation in our ordinary lives. If I am walking down a busy sidewalk, for instance, and pass by a homeless man, I usually encounter him as an object. I notice various thing-like aspects, his ragged clothing, his dirty hands and hair, his lowered head and worn shoes. In these observations, I remain at a cool distance, separate and detached from him. But when he raises his head as I walk by, I happen to directly look into his eyes. In this moment, the objectifying ‘I–It’ relation collapses, and I encounter this man immediately and directly as a ‘whole person.’ In the blink of an eye, I am pulled out of my self-absorption and am present and open to him as a ‘You,’ and he is present and open to me as a ‘You.’ In this experience of mutual recognition and openness we are exposed and vulnerable to one another. This experience is ambiguous; it is both threatening and consoling. The presence of the ‘You’ is threatening because it exposes the fact that I am not a self-affirming ego but a frail being who is attached to and dependent on others. But the ‘You’ is also profoundly consoling because it reveals that I am not isolated and alone, that my experience is bound up with others like me who are also suffering and vulnerable, where “all is spun with a single thread” (121). Buber offers a moving description of this tension between horror and consolation in his masterwork I and Thou:

Buber's theistic existentialism is strikingly different from Kierkegaard's, where belief in God involves the isolated subject who, in ‘fear and trembling,’ makes a leap of faith toward his own subjective truth. On Buber's account, Kierkegaard's focus on the inner life of the individual betrays the idea that we can never fully realize and understand ourselves from a solitary vantage point. It is only by the grace of inter-human relations that I can be true to myself and genuinely realize who I am. “The individual,” writes Buber, “is a fact of existence insofar as he steps into living relation with other individuals. … The fundamental fact of human existence is man with man” (Buber 1965, 203, cited in Silberstein 1990, 127). Interpreting existence in terms of mutual dependency introduces a moral component to the act of self-creation, one that requires us to be open, caring, and non-judgmental toward others. Marcel envisions this intersubjective openness in Catholic terms of “agape (charity) or philia (attachment)” (2005, 181) that can serve as a corrective to the selfishness and greed of modern life. This stance is not to be understood in a Kantian sense, of a ‘moral formalism’ that brings all human acts under a set of rational and universal commands. This is impossible because “no two [human] beings, and no two situations are really commensurable with each other” (181). It is not necessarily a moral but an ontological recognition of who we are as intersubjective beings that are vulnerable and mutually exposed. This recognition, as Unamuno writes, “may serve as the basis for an ethic” (1954, 261) because it has the power to shake us out of our everyday self-absorption and awaken us to the fact that we are already involved in the lives of others and affectively bound together in our shared joy and suffering. Levinas will develop this idea, referring to ‘ethics as first philosophy,’ one that is already rooted in our intersubjective life, that is, in our concrete and situated relations with others and is, in this sense, always prior to any form of detached or abstract philosophizing.

Levinas suggests that the essential aspect of our intersubjective relations cannot be accessed by thought. It is, rather, felt in the pre-reflective immediacy of the face-to-face encounter, where I sense the other person addressing me and I am called to respond to that particular person. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes ‘the face’ (le visage) of the other not as a thing or object to be conceptualized, but as a pure expression of “defenselessness,” “nudity,” and “vulnerability” (1969, 199) that is largely hidden from me under the veil of everyday propriety and social convention. In this sense, the face-to-face encounter is a rupture or breach in the flow of ordinary life that reveals a layer of interpersonal relation that demands something of me, burdening me with responsibility for the other. It is a fundamental ethical-religious event that affects me, calling me to the other in a way that is prior to any conscious reflection about who or what the other is. This is why Levinas says, “The face resists possession, resists my powers,” but it nonetheless “speaks to me” (197–198). Encountering the other in terms of this raw defenselessness and vulnerability, as a “relation without relation,” is what Levinas calls “religion” (80). Of course, ‘religion’ here does not refer to institutional practices or obeying ‘Articles of Faith.’ It refers to a relation, where I am, in my ordinary life, called to respond to and accept the other as a particular person who is vulnerable and dependent on me, and it is this relation that underlies all that is fundamental and genuine to religious or ethical life (Morgan 2011, 62).

Levinas's use of the term ‘face’ helps illuminate his allegiance to existentialism. Instead of the approaching the other from a standpoint of detachment and objectivity, the face-to-face encounter puts us squarely in the experiential world, where the other is not an abstraction but a concrete and particular person. And of all the aspects of the other's embodied presence, none is more vividly expressive than the face. Through the face, and especially the eyes, we witness the other's needs, his or her anguish, sorrow, and joy, and this witnessing underlies all of our everyday social interactions. In this regard, the face of the other has the power to draw me out of my own egoistic concerns, saying ‘no’ to my self-interests by revealing the other person as defenseless, dependent, and vulnerable. “The absolute nakedness of a face, the absolute defenseless face, without covering clothing or mask,” writes Levinas, “[that] is what opposes my power over it. … The being that expresses itself, that faces me, says no to me by his very expression. … The face is the fact that a being affects us not in an indicative, but in an imperative” (1998, 21). The face, then, represents an expressive imperative, an affective command or plea to be responsible to the other, a plea that is prior to any moral law or utilitarian calculus. What this reveals is that our everyday being-in-the-world is already rooted in the pre-reflective ethical discourse of the face-to-face, a discourse that is largely covered over by the masks of social convention and is taken for granted or “presupposed” (18) by the impersonal ethical systems of traditional philosophy. This is why ethics, for Levinas, is to be regarded as ‘first philosophy.’ Hidden in the most ordinary and mundane of human interactions is the face of the other, a layer of experience that calls us to acknowledge and be held accountable to the suffering and vulnerability of that person.

From this discussion we can conclude that the criticism of existentialism as an amoral, ‘anything goes’ philosophy is unfounded. With religious existentialists, we see the development of an ethics that challenges the modern attitudes of selfishness and individualism, one that is rooted in the affective recognition of human vulnerability and suffering and that calls for an orientation of mutual responsibility, where, in the words of Dostoevsky, “we are all responsible to all and for all” (1957, 278). With existentialists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who advocate a form of situated freedom, we see that values are not created ex nihilo by the sovereign subject because there are moral demands that are already placed on us, whether these demands come from the historical tradition that we are thrown into or from the affective meanings of our intercorporeality. Even existentialists like Sartre, who promotes a form of ‘absolute’ or ‘radical’ freedom, recognize that we are not free from taking responsibility for our actions or from cultivating the ideal of freedom for others. To this end, critics have to acknowledge that existentialism offers a clear vision of what a valuable or praiseworthy way of life is. It is a life that is free from self-deception, that owns up to the finitude and vulnerability of the human situation and accepts that our individual actions always impact the lives of others.

Because it consistently engages moral questions of human vulnerability and suffering, it is not unsurprising that existentialism has had a profound impact on the healing professions, especially psychiatry and psychotherapy. In the proceeding chapter, we will draw on the work of influential psychiatrists such as R. D. Laing, Irvin Yalom, Rollo May, and Ludwig Binswanger to see how the insights of existentialism serve to both challenge uncritical assumptions in mainstream biomedicine and inspire new approaches to therapy. We will see that, from the existentialist perspective, the therapist does not interpret psychic suffering as a medical disease but as an existential ‘given’ that has the power to disclose who we are as human beings. When suffering brings us before our own freedom and death, the therapist does not simply want to manage or control these feelings with medications or psychiatric techniques. The aim, rather, is to accept and integrate the feelings into our lives because they are part of what it means to be human. As we will see, it is only then that we can be freed from everyday forms of fear and self-deception and be opened up to deeper and more meaningful ways of living.

Suggested reading

Barnes, H. E. (1967). An existentialist ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Demeter, D. (1986). Freedom as a value: A critique of the ethical theory of Sartre. Chicago: Open Court.

Low, D. (1994). The foundations of Merleau-Ponty's ethical theory. Human Studies 17 (2): 173–187.

Vogel, L. (1994). The fragile “we”: Ethical implications of Heidegger's Being and Time. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.