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Existentialism Today
I can't go on. I'll go on.
Samuel Beckett
There is no denying that the Golden Age of existentialism has long passed. In the 1950s and 1960s, smoke-filled apartments, cafes, and jazz clubs in France and the United States were buzzing with late-night discussions of ‘la condition humaine,’ and an entire generation of young writers, musicians, and intellectuals could be seen carrying around tattered copies of works by Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Articles on the movement appeared regularly in mainstream magazines such as Life, Time, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, and the Atlantic Monthly, giving a popular voice to themes of ‘alienation,’ ‘absurdity,’ and ‘death.’ Indeed, the movement became so fetishized that the American fashion magazine Vogue would publish full spreads on Sartre and Beauvoir detailing both their radical ideas and the stylized look of the “French existentialist” (Cotkin 2003, 95). But if the cultural phenomenon has faded, does this mean the core ideas of existentialism are also passé? Was the French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard correct when he said, “We have thrown off that old existential garb. … Who cares about freedom, bad faith, and authenticity today?” (2001, 3; cited in Reynolds and Woodward 2011, 261). In this concluding chapter, I want to challenge this suggestion and argue that the legacy of existentialism is alive and well in current research in the humanities and social sciences.
We have already touched on existentialism's impact on contemporary trends in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (), in dialogical and narrative conceptions of the self in recent Anglophone philosophy (), and in current theories and practices in psychiatry and psychotherapy (). But there are also new areas in political theory, feminist and post-colonial thought, and critical philosophies of race that are shaped by the ideas of existentialism. And many of the cutting-edge debates in environmental philosophy are informed by existentialism's critique of modern dualisms and the articulation of the self as relational and already bound up in the natural world. This relational ontology has also influenced key developments in comparative philosophy, revealing deep affinities between the existentialist conceptions of suffering, finitude, and selfhood and those found in the Eastern traditions. Finally, existentialism has made a profound and lasting impact on contemporary approaches to healthcare by reframing our interpretations of health and illness, engaging them from the perspective of lived experience rather than from the standpoint of scientific detachment and objectivity. The proceeding discussion will display existentialism's relevance by highlighting some of these contributions and how they have shaped the current intellectual landscape. We begin with an area for which existentialism has long been criticized, namely, politics.
One of the most important critiques of existentialism comes from the Marxist tradition, one suggesting that the existentialist's narrow focus on the individual and subjective freedom in the face of meaninglessness and death tends to overlook concrete forms of social and political oppression that invariably inhibit the possibility for authentic self-creation. On this view, existentialism represents the perspective of a small, privileged, and affluent class of people who are often writing behind the secure walls of the academy and whose living conditions are not already fraught with daily struggles for food, healthcare, and shelter. For the vast majority of people, then, the existentialist call to heroically confront the possibility of death is eclipsed by more basic material needs for physical survival in order to avoid actual death. Indeed, although the ideas may have informed the slogans of the student and labor revolts in France in May 1968 and the activist politics of the New Left in England and the United States, existentialism's emphasis on the solitary individual, the extensive criticisms of the bureaucratic state and mass society, and the rejection of the possibility of moral absolutes and the viability of normative ethics suggests a deep ambivalence toward politics. But this criticism only skims the service.
It is true that existentialists tend to neglect traditional political questions concerning human ‘rights,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality.’ These values are largely dismissed as ‘metaphysical comforts’ or manifestations of bourgeois conformism that get in the way of the individual's confrontation with freedom and death. But the careful reader understands that there is a deeper aim for the existentialists, one focused on a radical reconfiguration of the way we interpret ‘the human,’ one that challenges the modern liberal tradition and the view of the self as a rational, masterful, and atomistic subject. And this reconfiguration has opened up a more nuanced sensitivity to the particularities of human suffering and aspects of oppression and exploitation that have been largely covered over by the abstract universal values of liberal democracies. Thus, even though many held political positions that were at times questionable and in Heidegger's case despicable, their philosophies nonetheless laid the groundwork for new ways to theorize oppression by dismantling the assumptions of the modern self.
From a political perspective, to universalize ‘the human’ as a rational and sovereign subject is problematic, if not dangerous, precisely because it tends to exclude ‘the Other,’ those groups – women, colonized peoples, migrants, deviants, racial minorities, the mentally ill and disabled – who have historically existed outside of the dominant cultural discourse of reason and power. As Judith Butler notes regarding Islamic populations after 9/11: “[They] are considered less than human or ‘outside’ the cultural conditions for the emergence of the human … [and] they are regarded as not yet having arrived at the rational human. … It follows from such a viewpoint that the destruction of such populations … constitutes the destruction of what threatens the human, but not of the human itself” (2009, 125; cited in Kruks 2012, 27). One of the more significant contributions of existentialism, in this regard, is the recognition that reason is not a foundational or necessary given when it comes to conceptualizing ‘the human.’ It is, rather, a contingent historical construct that happens to take hold in the West with the dawn of Greek philosophy. Indeed, the existentialists show that reason plays only a small role in our everyday agency. As figures like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche made clear, our actions are all too often motivated by irrational drives, desires, and affects that we are never explicitly conscious of, and there is no political system that can fully contain them. It is a mistake, then, to regard the realm of politics as a neutral domain occupied by rational agents because unconscious drives and forces are already influencing our actions behind our backs. By challenging the notion of ‘the human’ in this way, existentialists have been able to create a discursive opening for those who exist on the margins, whose experiences fall outside the normative space of reason and who have, as a result, interpreted themselves as ‘invisible,’ ‘absent,’ or ‘unreal.’ Fanon offers an example as a colonized black man when he writes:
I was hated, despised, detested, not by the neighbor across the street or my cousin on my mother's side, but by an entire race. I was up against something unreasoned. … I would personally say that for a man whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason. … When I was present, it [reason] was not; when it [reason] was there, I was no longer. (1967, 118–120)
Here, we see existentialism's critique of the rational subject and its recognition of the oppressive power of reason as a normative construct. But, more importantly, Fanon's words provide us with a positive acknowledgment of the concrete particularities lived out by individuals as situated, affective, and embodied ways of being and the forms of oppression unique to each situation. Of all of the major figures in existentialism, perhaps none engaged the theme of situated oppression more rigorously than Beauvoir.
In three important works, Beauvoir addresses different manifestations of oppression, exploring the situation of women in her masterwork The Second Sex (1949), indigenous and African Americans in America Day by Day (1954), and the elderly in The Coming of Age (1970) (see Kruks 2012). Following the existentialist credo, ‘existence precedes essence,’ Beauvoir recognizes there is no pre-given essence or nature – no disembodied reason or will – that makes us who we are. We are, rather, self-making beings that become who we are on the basis of the self-conscious choices and actions we make as our lives unfold. But, as we saw earlier, Beauvoir's project is unique in the way it articulates the extent to which these choices and possibilities are always constrained by the embodied situation we find ourselves in. The human is not a detached, free-floating consciousness surpassing the fleshly limits of age, sex, skin color, and ethnicity. Our freedom (i.e., transcendence) is always in a state of ambiguous tension or conflict with the ‘givenness’ (i.e., facticity) of our embodiment. Thus, against Sartre's early conception of ‘radical’ or ‘absolute’ freedom in Being and Nothingness, Beauvoir emphasizes that we can never fully rise above the material limitations of our bodies or the situated meanings and values of our culture. This is because it is only against a horizon of cultural meanings that we can understand ourselves, and it is this horizon that opens up possibilities for existing and interpreting ourselves in particular ways. This helps to explains why Beauvoir says that “the body is not a thing; it is a situation … subject to taboos [and] laws. … It is a reference to certain values from which [she] evaluates [herself]” (1952, 38, 40–41, my emphasis).
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir describes how the woman's situation is shaped by the structures of domination in Western patriarchy. Through socioeconomic and political power structures, the woman's capacity for transcendence is restricted in ways that the man's is not. She is, all too often, reduced to an object or thing, confined to the subjugated identities of a masculine world – as virgin, whore, mother, or housewife – and this closes her off from the possibility of creating her own life. She is, as Beauvoir writes, “shut up in a kitchen or boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly” (672). This helps us to understand what Beauvoir means when she says that the woman is not ‘born’ subordinate by virtue of inferior anatomy and biology. Rather, she is ‘made’ subordinate by virtue of ‘being-in’ a masculine world. She is “shaped as in a mold by her situation. … Her convictions, her values, her wisdom, her morality, her tastes, her behavior – are to be explained by her situation” (664, 694). But the originality of Beauvoir's account is in how she articulates the ambiguity of oppression by showing how the woman is often complicit in her own objectification, willingly giving up her transcendence and embracing her identity as ‘the Other.’ For Beauvoir, interpreting oneself as a passive, inferior, even childish thing has its advantages because it allows the woman to flee from her own freedom and from taking responsibility for her existence. In the famous introduction to The Second Sex, she writes:
To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by her alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification for her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm her subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for she who takes it – passive, lost, ruined – becomes henceforth the creature of another's will, frustrated in her transcendence and deprived of every value. But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect her to manifest deep-seated tendencies toward complicity. (xxiv)
Beauvoir interprets this active complicity as especially prevalent among white upper-class women because they have the most to gain in preserving the masculine status quo both in terms of material comfort and, more importantly, in terms of being disburdened of the “terrible freedom” of self-creation. Mired in bad faith, “they are eager accomplices of their masters because they stand to profit from the benefits provided. … They repress all thought, all critical judgment, all genuineness is dead in their hearts and even in their faces” (697).
But the political oppression of privileged white woman is different from more extreme forms of oppression. As we saw earlier, existentialists generally regard the human situation as intersubjective or relational, that is, we can understand ourselves only through our public interactions with others. ‘The look,’ that is, the social judgment of others, is essential to the formation of our identities. Beauvoir takes this idea to show that the man – in order to understand himself as superior – needs to be seen and recognized by the woman as such. Following Hegel's notion of the ‘master–slave dialectic,’ Beauvoir argues that man's self-identification as ‘master’ is dependent on the ‘slave,’ in this case on the woman's recognition of him as a more powerful and noble being. Thus, if the woman is wholly reduced to a thing and stripped of her transcendence, she cannot freely give the man the recognition he needs to maintain his identity. Yet the politics of recognition do not extend to all aspects of alterity. If the woman is too old, for instance, mentally ill, poor, disabled, or black, she may be dehumanized to such an extent that she falls outside the sphere of inter-human relations. In these cases, her judgments are irrelevant to the master's self-interpretation. This brings up the problem of ‘total objectification,’ and it is here that we can begin to appreciate existentialism's impact on the development of critical race theory by providing a vocabulary and conceptual framework to articulate the black experience of oppression.
There are a number of black theorists and writers, including W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), Alain Locke (1885–1954), Ralph Ellison (1914–1994), Richard Wright, and Frantz Fanon, whose works resonate to the core ideas of existentialism, especially those of Sartre and Beauvoir. In Ellison's novel Invisible Man (1952), for example, we are introduced to a black man whose existence is so diminished that he feels himself to be literally absent or invisible because white eyes do not see or recognize him as a human being. “I am an invisible man,” writes Ellison. “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (1995, 3). This total lack of recognition results in an experience of ‘total oppression,’ where every aspect of an individual's capacity for future self-creation is stripped away (Birt 1997). The individual is transformed into a brute thing, deprived of his or her ontological status as a human being. In Beauvoir's words, s/he is “reduced to pure facticity, congealed in his [or her] immanence, cut off from his [or her] future, deprived of his [or her] transcendence … no more than a thing among things” (1948, 100).
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon will refer to this phenomenon in terms of “overdetermination” (1967, 118), where the objectifying gaze of the white colonizer destroys the very struggle between facticity and transcendence that makes him human (Gordon 1997, 73). His identity becomes fixed or frozen; he is transformed into ‘a new genus,’ into something subhuman or bestial by the color of his skin:
I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am a slave … of my own appearance. … I progress by crawling. And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed … I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it's a Negro! (Fanon 1967, 118)
Overdetermined in this way, the human ability to give meaning, to ‘take a stand’ on one's own facticity, becomes impossible. He is wholly contained and trapped in his blackness. And there is no way to transcend this predicament, to freely remake his identity. “Wherever he goes,” says Fanon, “the Negro remains a Negro” (173). Cornel West will later expand on Fanon's insight by articulating the extent to which the social forces of late modern capitalism fortify this dehumanizing situation, reinforcing the experience of hopelessness, paralyzing rage, and self-loathing that is so pervasive in poor black communities. The result is what he calls “a kind of walking nihilism” (1993, 90).
For West, the ‘walking nihilism’ of the black underclass is, in large part, the byproduct of our global market economy, where everything and everyone is transformed into an object or commodity for profit. In this kind of situation, the possibilities for individual self-creation are already extremely constrained because one's identity and sense of self-worth is limited to acts of crass consumerism and material excess, glorified daily on television, in magazines, movies, and pop music. But the black underclass cannot participate in these self-defining acts, and this only exacerbates their feelings of despair and worthlessness. Yet in his attentiveness to the particularities of market-driven poverty, West shows how the contemporary experience of nihilism transcends race, class, and gender, affecting huge swaths of the post-industrial population and leaving whole generations of the unemployed and underemployed adrift and unsupported, trapped in their facticity (Gates and West 1997, 107–112).
Like many critical race theorists, West makes it clear that his philosophy is indelibly shaped by existentialism and its focus on the concrete and particular concerns of being human rather than the traditional focus on intellectual detachment and abstraction that characterizes so much of “academic” or “university” philosophy (1993, 33). But it can be pointed out that existentialism's attentiveness to lived experience is not only neglected in mainstream Anglophone philosophy departments; it is also largely absent in the ‘postmodern’ philosophies that share many of the same theoretical commitments as existentialism in, for instance, their critiques of foundationalism and the authority of reason, their rejection of universalism and essentialism, and their focus on issues of ‘Otherness,’ heterogeneity, and difference. As bell hooks argues, postmodern discussions of alterity and difference often perpetuate the very political hierarchies they are trying to ‘deconstruct.’ First of all, the discussions generally take place in contexts that invariably exclude ‘the Other,’ specifically the privileged white halls of the academy. In these rarefied contexts, it is usually only those from a particular race and class, trained in the jargon-infused language of contemporary French theory that can participate in the discussion. Those who are most oppressed and exploited are not present, and if they were, they could not possibly understand what is being said. More importantly, the intellectual focus of postmodernism is largely on ‘Otherness’ as a theoretical abstraction. It is not on the concrete other, the impoverished minority who washes the dishes in the back of the restaurant or cleans my hotel room after I give my talk on ‘Otherness’ at the philosophy conference. “It is sadly ironic,” writes hooks, “that the contemporary discourse [of postmodernism] which talks about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of Otherness, still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge” (1993, 512).
Here, we see existentialism's unique contribution to political philosophy. The starting point does not come from a position of theoretical detachment but from the situated, flesh-and-blood struggles of everyday life. These concrete descriptions serve as testaments to what it means to be human and do not require privileged training in academic jargon and are not exclusive to the seminar room or lecture hall. They can be found in the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Doris Lessing, in the poetry and short stories of black, Latina, and indigenous writers, in the independent films and documentaries that capture the lived experience of the migrant worker, the mentally ill or disabled, in the blues and rap music that express the frustration and despair of life in the racialized South or in urban ghettos. By attending to the concrete and particular, these testimonials have the power to validate the experiences of those who have long been silenced. Instead of universalizing ‘the human’ around monolithic values conceived by a privileged white Western world, they disclose the exquisite differences in suffering and oppression unique to each individual situation.
Indeed, the existentialists make it clear that political values can never be universalized. There are no fixed and timeless truths that ground our moral commitments. Values are ambiguous and finite human constructs that emerge against the background of specific sociohistorical contexts. (It was the European Enlightenment, after all, which made it possible for philosophers to universalize the modern liberal values of ‘rights,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘equality’ in the first place. Such an egalitarian view would have been inconceivable in the hierarchical social arrangements of the Greco-Roman or Medieval worlds.) To this end, the political aims of existentialism may look modest. The primary goal is to remind us that our political projects are fragile and historically contingent and that these imperfections cannot be eradicated because they are constitutive of human existence itself. This is why Beauvoir calls for political philosophers to let go of the “dream of purity” (2004, 189; cited in Kruks 2012, 42). The best we can do is to create a discursive space so that the suffering individual can speak, be heard, and be recognized as such and to act, in the limited and incomplete way that we can, to free them from this situation. But when it comes to universal prescriptions for how all humans ‘ought’ to act when confronting oppression, the existentialist often remains silent.
By exploding the myth of the modern subject and forwarding an interpretation of the self as finite, vulnerable, and already bound up in potentially oppressive relations, existentialism has deeply influenced the way contemporary theorists conceptualize our relationship to the polis. But it has also broken new ground in how philosophers think about our relationship to the natural world, laying the conceptual groundwork for a ‘radical’ or ‘deep’ ecology that challenges the metaphysical assumptions of modern philosophy, assumptions that have proven to be so destructive in the technological age. In the next section, we turn to existentialism's contribution to recent developments in environmental philosophy.
As we saw in , one of the great legacies of existentialism is its dismantling of the subject/object metaphysics that has been largely axiomatic to the Western worldview since the time of Descartes. On this account, there is an explicit separation between the ‘inner’ perceptions of my mind and what exists ‘out there’ in the real world, creating a situation of skepticism about whether anything in the world can be known with certainty. This position results in an epistemological gap or barrier between self (as encapsulated mind) and world (as objects), creating the impression that the world is somehow apart from us rather than part of us. Nature, from this perspective, is seen as being elsewhere; at best, it is the place we drive to on vacation or weekends, the National Parks, the beaches, the conservation areas or nature preserves. But more problematically, the scientific view tends to reduce the natural world to an aggregate of material objects. This is because, in order to gain genuine knowledge of things, the scientist focuses only on the objective ‘facts’ by following a method or procedure that abstracts out the ‘values’ that we bring to our experience of nature such as beauty, meaning, and purpose. The subject/object dualism, then, creates a more insidious fact/value dualism, one that interprets the natural world as a calculable domain of valueless matter that can be measured in terms of weight, mass, and volume. On this view, nature becomes in Heidegger's words a “resource” (Bestand) waiting to be “set upon” and mastered by technology. “The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district. … Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, uranium to yield atomic energy [etc.]” (1977b, 15).
But existentialists show that in my everyday life I do not experience myself as a detached mind or subject, nor do I encounter the world from a disinterested perspective as the sum total of objects that are separate and distinct from me. Rather, in my ordinary acts and practices I am ‘being-in-the-world,’ already bound up and involved with things that have meaning, that matter to me in particular ways based on my own embodied and situated perspective. For instance, unless I'm a hydrologist doing research, the river that runs through town does not reveal itself to me as a measurable mass of waterpower. It is, rather, the place that invites me for a swim on a hot day or the bittersweet memory of fishing with an old friend or the area that threatens to flood during rainy season. Camus's meditations in ‘Summer in Algiers’ illuminate how our own experience reveals a natural world vivid and rich with meanings and how these meanings are disclosed not through detached cognition but through penetrating emotions or moods. He writes of “the carob trees covering all of Algeria with a scent of love,” of the bay “opening to the sky like a mouth or a wound,” of the “flight of the black birds rising against the green horizon.” Struck by what he calls the “paralyzing excess of nature's bounty,” he asks:
How can one fail to participate in that dialogue of stone and flesh in tune with the sun and season? … In the evening or after the rain, the whole earth, its womb moist with a seed of bitter almond, rests after having given herself to the sun all summer long. And again the scent hallows the union of man and earth and awakens in us the only really virile love in this world: ephemeral and noble. (1955, 141, 144, 153–154)
Camus's description of the sensual ‘union of earth and man’ undermines the dualisms that are foundational to the modern worldview by showing how they uncritically assume a standpoint of theoretical detachment, a standpoint that is betrayed by our own experience.
Heidegger's work is especially helpful here because he makes it clear that the primary relationship we have with the world is based not on ‘knowing’ about it but on ‘caring’ about it and our place in it. Before we can know anything about present-at-hand objects, we already embody a felt sense of care or concern with things that arises from our situated frame of reference. This is why Heidegger says, “Care is ontologically earlier” than any detached reflection (1962, 194, my emphasis). This means that the objectifying view of modern science is not only parasitic on our everyday being-in-the-world; it also covers over and hides the layers of experiential meaning that allow the natural world to emotionally affect us. Environmental philosophers have recently taken up this point, highlighting the significance of Heidegger's alteration of the famous Cartesian dictum from “I think, therefore I am” to “I care, therefore, I am” (Evernden 1985, 70). On this view, we are not disinterested minds looking down on the natural world as a calculable grid of resources. We are already situated and involved in such a way that forests, animals, rivers, and mountains light up for us in meaningful ways.
Yet Heidegger shows that our objectifying worldview has become so habituated and ingrained in our everyday life that it is now difficult to see the natural world in any other way. This self-interpretation, says Heidegger, is “not only close to us – even that which is closest: we are it, each of us” (1962, 36, my emphasis). Heidegger will refer to this as the “totalizing” aspect of modern technology; it has become so dominant that it “drives out” (1977b, 27) any other way to understand or make sense of the natural world. One of the consequences of this view is an interpretation of nature as threatening and constantly in need of being subdued and controlled, resulting in a feeling of alienation, of not belonging or “being-at-home” on the earth, a feeling Heidegger associates with an anxiety that “has never been greater than today” (1999b, 97). The modern experience of ‘homelessness’ reveals the unique paradox of our ecological crisis. Scientific advances cannot solve our predicament because it is the scientific worldview itself that is the source of the problem. Replacing environmentally destructive fossil fuels, for example, with ecologically friendly energy sources like solar, wind, or geothermal does not create a ‘home’ because it does nothing to change the dualistic paradigm and our view of nature as a storehouse of resources. What is required instead is an ontological transformation in how we see ourselves, not as atomistic ‘subjects’ that master ‘objects’ but as situated and concerned ways of being that are inextricably bound to the earth. This is where the insights of existentialism play such an important role. By using our own lived experience as a starting point, we not only gain access to our own inherence in nature; we also allow the affective meaning and value inherent in nature to speak to us (Thomson 2004, 383).
For Heidegger, this Gestalt shift creates an opening for a radically new way of dwelling, one that is no longer mired in calculative attempts to control and manipulate the earth, but rather “lets (lassen) the earth be as earth” (1971, 224). Heidegger describes this kind of dwelling in terms of Gelassenheit, referring to a solicitous and attentive practice that “releases” or “lets go” of beings (1966, 55). Heidegger believes that in cultivating Gelassenheit we are able to free ourselves from our own objectifying tendencies and, as a result, free the earth from technological domination. It allows us to recognize that we are irrevocably woven to the transient and enigmatic interplay of nature and to see this interplay as our only home, one that needs to be preserved and cherished as such. This, however, does not mean Heidegger is espousing a kind of neo-Luddism that rejects modern technology in toto. He wants us to realize that the technological worldview serves an important function, but it is only one of many possible ways for us to interpret nature. The danger today is that this worldview has become totalizing and excludes all other interpretations; it “rules the whole earth” and turns it into a “gigantic gasoline station” (50). Heidegger will refer to this monolithic view as a “flight from mystery” because it covers over and destroys the possibility of recognizing our enigmatic interdependence with nature (1977a, 135). Thus, in contrast with the anxiety of ‘homelessness,’ Gelassenheit fosters a different mood, a sense of ‘wonder’ and ‘awe’ at our precarious enmeshment, and it opens up a way of dwelling that resonates to the original meaning of technology, a meaning captured in the ancient Greek word technê.
In ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ an essay that has become a classic in environmental philosophy, Heidegger suggests that technê was originally understood in relation to nature or physis, which for the Greeks referred to the dynamic way in which beings are initially “brought-forth” (poiēsis) or come into being; it is “the bursting open of the blossom into bloom, in itself” (1977b, 10). Understood this way, technê refers to the human capacity to make or build things in a way that is in harmony or rapport with physis, that is, with how beings are naturally ‘brought-forth.’ The Greek craftsman, for instance, would build a bridge in a way that does not obstruct or destroy the natural flow of the river, but “lets the river run its course” (Heidegger 1977a, 330, my emphasis; see Young 2000, 37–38). Contrast this ancient interpretation with how technê is understood today, where the hydroelectric plant is built to force the river into a reservoir, into a resource waiting to be “challenged” and “set upon” by industry (Heidegger 1977b, 16). Gelassenheit allows us to recover the original sense of technê and the lost connection between building and dwelling. Indeed, Heidegger shows how the Old High German word for ‘building’ (bauen) is etymologically related to the word ‘dwelling’ (buan). But bauen is a word that “also means … to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for” (1977a, 325). Understood this way, to dwell is to build in a way that preserves and cares for nature as the primordial bringing forth of beings, a bringing forth whereby each thing is in a state of fragile and dynamic interplay with other things in a “primal oneness” (327). Dwelling protects this delicate web of relations by releasing it and letting it be.
Heidegger's idea of letting go of our anxious need to control and master the earth and the non-dualistic recognition of ourselves as bound up in the dynamic interplay of nature leads us to another aspect of existentialism's influence, namely, its impact on comparative philosophy and the legitimation of Asian thought within the mainstream philosophical tradition. In fact, it could be argued that Heidegger's work has been received more enthusiastically in the East than it has in the West. The first translation of Being and Time, after all, was in Japanese in 1951, over a decade before the book was ever officially translated into English or French. And in the subsequent years, Being and Time has been translated a full six times in Japanese, with another Asian language, Korean, offering three complete translations (Parkes 1990, 9; Ciocan 2005). And, in his later writings, Heidegger spoke explicitly of the need for “dialogue with the East Asian world” (1977b, 158) in order to combat the nihilism and destructiveness of modern technology. In the next section we will take a look at the affinities between existentialism and Eastern thought, focusing specifically on the tradition of Zen Buddhism, and how the two schools complement each other in fleshing out the nature of suffering and what it means to be human.
The most immediate and obvious connection between existentialism and Buddhism is the recognition of the anguish and despair at the heart of the human condition. This connection began to take shape in the early decades of the nineteenth century, primarily through the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who drew on the Buddhist notion of suffering to develop his own view of how the ‘Will’ torments us through its ceaseless cravings and that it is only by extinguishing or letting go of these cravings that we can achieve some kind of solace or liberation. In a famous line from the second volume of his masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer wrote, “If I were to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should concede to Buddhism pre-eminence over the others” (1966, 169). And, with a significant debt to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also expressed his admiration of Buddhism as a religion that is “a hundred times more realistic than Christianity” for its rejection of moral absolutes and its recognition of the human condition as a fundamental “struggle against suffering” (1990, 20). But the question of what exactly the existentialists mean by suffering remains unclear, and it is here that the insights of Buddhism are especially profound.
The teachings of the Buddha are summarized in ‘four noble truths’: (i) life means suffering, (ii) the origin of suffering is attachment, (iii) the end of suffering is attainable, and (iv) the path to the end of suffering. The Sanskrit word for ‘suffering’ (dukkha) is a sweeping term that refers to all the physical pains, anxieties, dissatisfactions, frustrations, irritations, and stresses that are part of being human. Dukkha, then, is not something we have; it is something we are. It is a structural or constitutive aspect of the human condition (Loy 1996, 83). The Buddhist tradition generally distinguishes between three different kinds of dukkha. The first refers to all of the inescapable pains of living such as the trauma of birth, illnesses, everyday worries, anxieties of physical diminishment and impending death, and grief from the inevitable loss of loved ones. Existentialists have long described how life is fraught with this kind of meaningless suffering and how the clear-sighted realization of this often brings us face-to-face with the question of God's absence and the ultimate concerns regarding the meaning and purpose of life. Tolstoy, for instance, described how this realization nearly shattered him, pushing him to the edge of suicide:
I could not attribute a reasonable motive to any single act in my whole life. I was only astonished that I could not have realized this at the very beginning. All this had so long ago been known to me! Illness and death would come … to those whom I loved, to myself, and nothing remains but stench and worms. All my acts, whatever I did, would sooner or later be forgotten, and I myself [would] be nowhere. Why, then, busy oneself with anything. (1994, 16)
The Buddhist tradition goes on to suggest that when we are momentarily free from this first kind of suffering, we are able to examine a deeper and more subtle manifestation of dukkha, the suffering caused by the ceaseless change and impermanence of all things.
In this second state, we suffer in the way we cling to the things we desire but that are invariably fleeting and transitory. In an effort to deny or flee from the impermanence of things and from our own impermanence, we attach ourselves to our possessions, our physical health, our relationships, our professional accomplishments and social identities because they create the illusion that we are real and that there is something secure and thing-like about our existence. But Buddhism shows that clinging to attachments in this way is ultimately self-defeating. Each time we attain the thing we crave, a feeling of emptiness invariably follows it, and this creates a new craving. The result is an endless cycle of craving, revealing that we are never happy or content with where we are – right now – in our lives. Happiness is always around the next corner; it will come after the promotion at work, after the wedding, after the children are born, after retirement, etc. This insight teaches us the second of Buddhism's four noble truths, namely, that the origin or cause of our suffering is in our ceaseless craving for attachments. Stuck in this cycle, we are always diverted and distracted from the present moment by desiring the next thing. But filling ourselves with things cannot fill the void because the human situation is itself a void; it is no-thing. A number of existentialists have pointed out how this manifestation of suffering is exacerbated today because modern technology has created increasingly sophisticated ways to manufacture distractions and rapidly satisfy new cravings. Indeed, Heidegger will refer to this state of restless distraction as one of signature ‘symptoms’ of modernity, where we are “unable-to-bear the stillness” of our own lives and are always caught up in the “mania for what is surprising, for what immediately sweeps [us] away and impresses [us], again and again and in different ways” (1999b, 84).
This second kind of suffering is similar to what existentialists like Sartre and Beauvoir have called ‘bad faith’ insofar as it is a way of being that desires the thing-like security of ‘being-in-itself’ and flees from the structural contingency and impermanence of consciousness or ‘being-for-itself.’ By asserting ‘existence precedes essence,’ existentialists remind us that there is no pre-given essence that makes us who we are. Our identities, rather, are fundamentally transient and unstable; as long as we exist we are a ‘not yet,’ always in the process of becoming, of ceaselessly making and re-making ourselves. This is why Sartre says, ‘I am what I am not.’ But like the Buddhist, existentialists are also sensitive to the psychological need we have to deny our impermanence because denial protects us from the painful truth of our situation. Nietzsche, for instance, describes how we let ourselves be deceived so that we never have to confront the fact that there is no stable ground or foundation that can secure our existence. He refers to this historical mass deception in the West as the ‘will to truth.’ From Greek philosophy to Christendom, a story has been told regarding the truth about the way the world really is. It is, according to Nietzsche, our “longest lie” (1995, 344), and we cling to it because it tells us there is something real and enduring about us, that we have a ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘will’ that is not subject to the terrible vicissitudes of life. But the acculturated habit of clinging to the idea of the self in this way leads to the third and deepest form of dukkha.
In the Buddhist tradition, the consuming effort to secure our sense of self and cover over our own impermanence results in ‘conditioned states’ where self-centered craving becomes automatic and unconscious. Life simply becomes the ceaseless struggle against our own impermanence, where we endlessly try to order and arrange our lives in an effort to feel grounded and secure. This is an all-encompassing form of suffering because it permeates every aspect of our lives. But it is also the subtlest and most inconspicuous form of suffering because the patterns of socialization that constitute these conditioned states prevent us from realizing that we are suffering. In this sense, “Everyone collaborates in everyone else's forgetting” (Batchelor 1997, 22). The worst kind of suffering, then, is when we forget that we are suffering. Our lives are lived on autopilot, reflexively conditioned around our attachments to money, work, possessions, family, and friends, all in an unconscious effort to make ourselves real. But this conditioned way of living is ultimately futile. As the existentialists make clear, no matter how culturally entrenched and tightly wound the illusion of the enduring self becomes, we are always vulnerable to penetrating emotional experiences or ‘limit situations’ that have the power to jolt us out of this state, shattering the armor of the self and leaving us naked and exposed to life's overwhelming transience.
But this leads us to the third noble truth of Buddhism, the truth that there is an end to suffering. If the source of our suffering is rooted in the self's ceaseless desire to be permanent and real, then the end of suffering has something to do with dismantling our understanding of selfhood altogether. Buddhism does this with the idea of ‘dependent origination’ (pratītya-samutpāda), suggesting that all things, including the self, arise or come into being in mutual interdependence with all other things. On this view, there is no such thing as an independent, self-subsisting entity. Everything is in a state of dynamic interplay or ‘co-arising’ with everything else. It is a mistake, then, to talk in the way we usually do about principles of causality, of X causing Y, because this creates the impression that X and Y are separate entities. Dependent origination reveals that there are no subjects or objects, that things are always interdependent and in a state of mutual inter-causality (Loy 1996, 88–90). The Western idea of the self as an autonomous and stable consciousness or ego creates the impression that we are somehow separate and distinct from this transient, interrelational flux, and we spend our lives clinging to this illusion. But clinging to the self in this way is itself the source of our suffering. The end of suffering, then, involves letting-go of the illusion of the self, of undoing this conditioned state and realizing that we are ‘no-self’ (anatman). It is only then that we can be freed from the compulsive cycle of attachment and craving and begin to accept the poignant transiency of things in the present moment.
Reading existentialism through the lens of Buddhism is especially illuminating in this regard because, as we saw earlier, there is an obvious tendency in the existentialist tradition to romanticize suffering as if it signified a life lived with more self-awareness, intensity, and passion. The aim of Buddhism is not to simply recognize that the human condition is fraught with meaningless pain. Nor is it to show that there are deeper levels of suffering rooted in the fundamental impermanence of things and in our conditioned efforts to deny impermanence by clinging to things we hope will make us real. Existentialists have made similar points. The difference is that Buddhism attempts to offer a ‘path’ or ‘way’ to end suffering by showing us how we can decondition our reflexive need to secure ourselves from the threat of impermanence. By cultivating the meditative practices of the fourth noble truth, Buddhism teaches us how to free ourselves from attachments, to become centered and still in the flux of impermanence rather than compulsively recoiling from it. Such practices silence the din of habituated thoughts, feelings, memories, and desires that keep alive the illusion of the self, and in the stillness one is able to merge into the flux and become no-thing. In these moments, there is no suffering because there is no self.
Recent scholarly conversations between existentialism and Buddhism have helped to breathe life into the emerging field of comparative philosophy, helping to legitimize Eastern thought not only in the mainstream philosophical tradition, but also in new approaches to psychotherapy and psychiatry and to healthcare practices in general. With the issue of human suffering now fully in view, we can turn our attention to our final topic, a practical one that engages the question of what it means to be healthy or ill. In this concluding section, we will see how existentialism offers an important corrective to scientific medicine by challenging healthcare professionals to see their patients as more than biological bodies that need to be ‘fixed’ but as vulnerable, self-interpreting beings that, more than anything, need to be able to make sense of and give meaning to their condition.
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych is arguably the most powerful account of an individual confronting death in world literature. But hidden within the story is a compelling indictment of modern medicine and the scientific worldview in general for being poorly equipped to address the experience of human suffering. After injuring himself in a banal home decorating accident – falling off a ladder while hanging curtains in his new house – Ivan is plagued by a persistent pain in his left side. The pain gradually becomes worse and is accompanied by a strange taste in his mouth and increasing irritability. Reluctantly, he goes to see the doctor. Tolstoy's description of Ivan's clinical encounter paints the classic picture of the modern doctor as a detached observer, dispassionately gazing at the suffering Ivan from the perspective of objectivity. For the doctor, Ivan doesn't show up as a frightened and vulnerable human being but as an interesting set of symptoms to be observed and categorized and that may lead to a diagnosis of a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or perhaps appendicitis. For Ivan, the doctor's detachment is not only cold and impersonal; it is dehumanizing in its failure to address the gravity of his condition. Ivan doesn't want to know what disease he has and what pills to take; he wants to know if he is going to live or die. “ ‘Vermiform appendix! Kidney!’ he said to himself. ‘It's not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life and … death’ ” (Tolstoy 1960, 129–130, my emphasis).
Ivan's frustration with the doctor is symptomatic of a larger problem in modern medicine, where the aim of the healthcare professional is to fit the human being into preestablished diagnostic categories with little attention paid to the patient's own needs and feelings. The patient is reduced to a set of objective and testable facts, to heart rate and blood pressure, to cholesterol levels and kidney and liver functioning. From this perspective, the first-person reports of the patient's own experience often get in the way of a proper medical assessment. What is of primary importance for the doctor is the diseased body itself, not how the patient lives, feels, or interprets their dis-ease. The signature piece of equipment in modern medicine, the stethoscope, helps to illuminate this point.
The invention of the stethoscope in the early nineteenth century allowed the doctor to attend, with objectivity and precision, solely to the sounds emanating from the body, and it has became a symbol of the scientific distance that should exist between doctor and patient. Instead of attending to the voice of the person, the stethoscope made it possible to listen only to the palpitations and rumblings of the heart and lungs. With this technological breakthrough, doctors began to neglect, even distrust, the patient's own words, regarding them as unreliable and subjective. The patient came to be treated more as an object of scientific investigation than as a suffering person (Svenaeus 2001, 30–31). And with each new observational tool or ‘scope’ introduced in the clinic – from the ophthalmoscope and rhinoscope to the otoscope and gastroscope, to X-rays, CAT scans, and MRIs – the further medicine has moved away from attending to the lived experience of the patient and toward the objective facts that are read off the body from the instruments, resulting in an increasingly impersonal and instrumental approach to care (Aho and Aho 2008, 79).
But, as figures like Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Beauvoir, and Marcel have shown, the human being is not a ‘material body’ (Körper) whose biological functions can be controlled and measured. Such a view creates the impression that the body is somehow separate and distinct from me. But my body is not something external; it is what I am; it is a ‘lived body’ (Leib). In fleshing out the distinction between Körper and Leib, existentialists illuminate the extent to which self and body are bound together and that any experience, perception, or feeling we have is invariably embodied. In this sense, the body cannot be understood as a static thing in the world. It is, rather, the mediating activity or way of being through which the world comes into being for us. And when we are healthy and caught up in the flow of everyday life, our body actually recedes from our awareness, operating inconspicuously as we move about, handle equipment, and engage in various situations. When struck with a serious illness or injury, however, there is a breakdown in this seamless flow, and the body begins to obtrude as something foreign and clumsy (e.g., Fuchs 2005, Leder 1990, Svenaeus 2001, Toombs 1992). Indeed, we may only become aware of our body when it is dysfunctional, and this dysfunction can fundamentally alter our self-understanding and experience of the world (Nettleton 2001, 53). In Ivan's case, his taken-for-granted ability to walk, get dressed, bathe, and use the toilet begins to erode. His once manageable and well-ordered world eventually shatters, and he retreats to his room, shutting out his friends and family. His previously sociable and optimistic disposition is replaced with dark brooding and dread. Tolstoy makes it clear that living his body has dramatically transformed who Ivan is.
What irritates Ivan is the doctor's treatment of him as a mere Körper. The medical diagnosis of a ‘floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or appendicitis’ does not help Ivan make sense of his own experiences as he is living it. He does not see his condition as being separate from him; he is living his body and being forced to confront a collapsing world and the terrifying given of his own frailty and impermanence. Understood this way, healing has less to do with the objective metrics of the biological body than with how we choose to interpret and give meaning to our embodiment. Ivan wants the doctor to be honest with him, to listen to him and treat him humanely, and to help him come to grips with the possibility of his own death. Nietzsche calls this “a moral code for physicians” (1990, 36), where healthcare professionals should not just attend to the mechanistic functioning of the body but to help the patient express and give meaning to their experience. What matters is not the alleviation of the pain and suffering of being human, but the ability to make sense of it and to integrate it into our lives. Without this aspect of healing, we are left, in Nietzsche's words, “to vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life … has been lost” (36).
But, as we saw with Beauvoir's account of the ambiguity of oppression, we are often complicit in our own objectification. To interpret ourselves as biological things that can be managed and controlled with medical technology can disburden us from having to face ourselves. We are, then, often in bad faith, motivated toward ‘cowardly dependence on physicians’ in an effort to flee from who we are. Doctors, on this view, can be viewed as the new priests of the secular age to the extent that they symbolize power over the body and mastery over suffering and death. Indeed, as Irvin Yalom (1980) suggests, this power may be what motivates physicians and priests to choose their career path in the first place. He points to evidence suggesting that those who enter ‘death-related professions’ often do so because they suffer from higher levels of death anxiety, and the illusion of power that their profession provides helps to alleviate it (127). Existentialists unsettle this illusion altogether, making it clear that neither the physician nor the priest is an ‘ultimate rescuer’ and that suffering and death cannot be eradicated because they are constitutive of what it means to be human. In fact, as we saw in , the more we deny or try to control our death anxiety, the more overwhelming it can become. Regardless of the sophistication of our medical technologies or the increasing precision of our diagnostic classifications, existentialism shows there is no escape from the frailty of the human situation. And, as Michel Foucault (1926–1984) demonstrates, the diagnostic authority of modern medicine is itself a fleeting historical construct.
Following Nietzsche's method of critical genealogy and influenced by his notion of ‘will to power,’ Foucault shows that the objectifying tendencies in modern medicine are simply a historical outgrowth of the scientific Enlightenment and its rational project of ordering knowledge by classifying living things into fixed categories (e.g., Foucault 1980, 1991, 1994). In this way, reason is able to stabilize and give order to the chaotic plurality, impermanence, and flux of life. For Foucault, this is why ‘knowledge’ is an expression of ‘power,’ because it transforms human beings into objects and regulates their behaviors and self-interpretations by placing them into ready-made categories. The idea is that power is constituted by accepted forms of knowledge or what Foucault calls ‘regimes of truth’ that we internalize and that are diffused ‘everywhere’: in our educational systems, in our workplaces and prisons, in the media, and in the healthcare complexes that we grow into. The medical establishment, for example, produces ‘knowledge/power’ in the form of professional documents and manuals like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that classify different kinds of behavior and emotional states as diseases, and these classifications are then reinforced in schools, offices, factories, and prisons and dispersed in magazines, television programs, and websites. The problem is that these classifications are treated with the authority of being timeless and fixed, rather than the contingent historical constructs that they are. In the nineteenth-century American South, for instance, we should not be shocked when the Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright discovered the new disease of “drapetomania” that caused “Negroes to run away” from working the fields and that could be “cured” by amputating their big toes (Aho and Aho 2008, 59). Nor should we be surprised to learn that homosexuality was removed as a mental disorder from the DSM in 1974 in the wake of the Stonewall Riots in New York City and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement (Kutchins and Kirk 1997, 60–61). And, in our own overstimulated, distracted, and technologically obsessed culture, we are witnessing a childhood epidemic of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a condition that did not even officially exist until 1994. Today, 20 percent of all high school–aged boys in the United States have received the diagnosis (Schwartz 2013).
These examples show that scientific medicine as a ‘regime of truth’ is, like all other forms of power, historically contingent and unstable, and that the advanced technologies and disease classifications we use to objectify and discipline the body can do little to disburden us of the anguish of being human. This is where the insights of the existentialists play such an important role. By recognizing that suffering and death are not biological problems that can be categorized and ‘fixed’ but inescapable givens that must be accepted and integrated into one's life, existentialism illuminates a deeper issue for healthcare professionals. It reminds us that being healthy is not so much a matter of proper biological functioning, of prolonging life, or of living pain-free, but of confronting and working through our fundamental frailty and impermanence. As Nietzsche says, to simply stay alive “is indecent.” The call of the physician is to regard the patient as a human being, to help us face our own vulnerability and give meaning to it while we are “still there” (1990, 99).
It is this reenvisioning of the idea of health that stands as one of existentialism's signature contributions. It has profoundly reshaped contemporary approaches to healthcare and opened up exciting new areas of research in bioethics, narrative medicine, and medical humanities, in nursing, gerontology, and palliative care, and in medical sociology and anthropology. It is interesting to note that in speaking to a group of Swiss physicians toward the end of his career, Heidegger said this was what he had hoped for all along, that “his thinking would escape the confines of the philosopher's study and become of benefit to wider circles, in particular to a large number of suffering human beings” (Boss 1988, cited in Guignon 2006, 268).
The previous discussion shows that existentialism is in no way an outdated or moribund philosophy. The legacy of the movement endures in important areas of contemporary research. It is visible in the explosion of scholarship that applies the idea of being-in-the-world to current debates in cognitive science and philosophy of mind; in new accounts of selfhood and embodiment and the forms of political oppression related to gender, race, class, disability, and sexual orientation; in cutting-edge approaches to environmental philosophy and comparative thought; and in innovative applications in medicine, psychotherapy, and psychiatry. To this end, countless books and articles on existentialism continue to be published every year, professional conferences and research circles are devoted to it, and its major figures are thriving. But the urgency of existential questioning is less clear. Sixty years after the poet W. H. Auden famously referred to ‘the age of anxiety,’ there is an undeniable sense of cynicism and indifference when it comes to the ultimate questions of human existence. The early aftershocks regarding the announcement of ‘God's death’ appear to have worn off.
Interestingly, just a few years after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger began to speak of a new cultural mood. It was no longer ‘anxiety’ that disclosed the underlying meaninglessness of the human situation but an insidious feeling of ‘boredom.’ In our blasé state, we are no longer distressed or shocked by Nietzsche's announcement, and this for Heidegger was a much more “shocking” problem (1999b, 73). To be sure, Westerners are not facing the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation or recovering from the visceral horrors of the Holocaust and two world wars. These events forced philosophers and writers of the time to confront the existential givens of absurdity, freedom, and death. Yet we work and live in a turbo-capitalist marketplace that is riddled with economic insecurity, inequality, and stress; we confront the global threat of anthropogenic climate change, unprecedented environmental devastation, and species extinction; and our inter-human relations are increasingly vacuous and impersonal, mediated by the ubiquitous presence of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Out of this disjointed and absurd situation, life's ultimate questions would seem to bubble to the surface and the words of the existentialists would resonate with renewed urgency to a new generation. But today it is our indifference, our lack of urgency that is so disconcerting.
The danger, for Heidegger, is that our boredom has become so ubiquitous and all-encompassing that it is now hidden, and this is why he is so concerned. The fact that we are bored with our existence but are unaware of our own boredom is what he calls “the greatest distress” (1999b, 87). But this brings us back to the enduring relevance of existentialism. By bringing us face-to-face with the ultimate questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘How should I live?’ existentialism has the power to pull us out of our busy, listless drift, forcing us to confront the choices and actions that make us who we are. It reminds us that regardless of how distracted and consumed we may become in our day-to-day lives, we cannot escape the anguish at the heart of the human situation, and that only by facing this anguish can we identify what is truly at stake for us. To this end, existentialism always creates the possibility for a confrontation that allows me, in Kierkegaard's words, to find a truth ‘for which I can live and die.’
Suggested reading
Gordon, L. (1997). Existential dynamics of theorizing black invisibility. In L. Gordon (ed.), Existence in black: An anthology of black existential philosophy (pp. 69–80). New York: Routledge.
Kruks, S. (2012). Simone de Beauvoir and the politics of ambiguity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Loy, D. (1996). Lack and transcendence: The problem of death and life in psychotherapy, existentialism, and Buddhism. New York: Prometheus.
Thomson, I. (2004). Ontology and ethics at the intersection of phenomenology and environmental philosophy. Inquiry 47 (4): 380–412.
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