The stone is given its existence; it need not fight for what it is. … Man has to make his own existence at every single moment.

José Ortega y Gasset

The problem of substance

Beginning with the Greeks, philosophers have largely adopted what can be called ‘substance ontology,’ the view that beings – rocks, trees, animals, and humans – must be understood in terms of substance of some sort, where ‘substance’ refers to the enduring properties or essence that ‘stands under’ (i.e., sub-stand) and remains the same through any change (Frede 2006). Plato, for example, conceived of the essence of things in terms of immutable forms or ideas (eidos). Descartes regarded things as either one of two substances, immaterial minds (res cogitans) or material bodies (res extensa). And today, with the dominance of naturalism, we tend to see things as causally determined physical substances. As we saw in , viewing human beings as entities with a pre-given ‘essence’ is problematic because it overlooks the fact that we make ourselves who we are on the basis of our meaning-giving choices and actions, and this activity of self-making underlies any account of our physical or psychical makeup. This is why existentialists are cautious about traditional designations of the human being such as ‘living creature,’ ‘rational animal,’ ‘ego cogito,’ or ‘organism’ and largely avoid discussing our zoological, anatomical, or spiritual makeup. As Heidegger says, “What is to be determined is not an outward appearance of this entity but … the how of its being and the characters of this how” (1985, 154). By focusing on ‘how we are’ rather than ‘what we are,’ existentialists develop a conception of selfhood that dissolves the substance-centered view of the self.

First, existentialists contend that humans exist in a way that is fundamentally different from other beings in the natural world. We cannot be interpreted as things or substances that are objectively present, because we exist, that is, we are always choosing and acting as our lives unfold. This means there is no pre-given nature that determines who we are. We are self-creating beings that become who we are on the basis of our life decisions. There is, then, no complete or definitive account of who we are. We are always a ‘not yet’ as we press forward, fashioning and re-fashioning our identities – as a loving husband, a loyal friend, or a responsible citizen – and there is no essential ground or foundation that underlies and secures the identity that we create. What distinguishes us from all other entities, as Ortega y Gasset writes, is that our “being consists not in what it is already, but in what it is not yet, a being that consists in not-yet-being. Everything else in the world is what it is. … Man is the entity that makes itself. … He has to determine what he is going to be” (1941, 112, 201–202, my emphasis).

Second, substance ontology tends to regard the self as an encapsulated mind or will that is separate and distinct from objects. As we saw in , existentialists argue that this view betrays the fact that, in our everyday involvements, we are already bound up in meaningful situations. Given this account, the standard view of the self as a detached cogito is a mistake that uncritically assumes the existence of an independent mental sphere that is somehow detached from the outer world. For the existentialists, there is no ‘inner/outer’ distinction. “Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only the ‘inner man,’ ” says Merleau-Ponty, “or more accurately, there is no inner man; man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself” (1962, xi).

Finally, the existentialist conception of the self dissolves the Cartesian idea that the human being is a composite of two substances, a mind (or soul) and a body, where the mind is viewed as the ‘subject of experience,’ the sovereign center of beliefs, thoughts, and perceptions, and the body is viewed as a physical organism governed by the causal laws of the natural world. On this view, one's own body is seen as something that we are only contingently connected to, a material shell that is just one more object that the mind can examine and represent from a detached standpoint. In terms of human agency, this material shell is regarded as a tool or instrument that the mind manipulates in order to realize desired ends. It is by means of forming a particular mental representation, for instance, that I cause my legs to move so I can walk out of my office and interact with colleagues at the end of the hall. This view suggests that we encounter our body (and other bodies) only indirectly, through the mediation of the mind.

Again, as we saw earlier, existentialists undercut this dualism by arguing that when we are absorbed in the acts and practices of everyday life, our body is not encountered objectively as a physical machine. As I drive to work, drink my coffee, type on the computer, or chat with friends, my physical body disappears and takes on a kind of mindless transparency. “It flows together,” says Heidegger, “[with everything else] in the situation” (2002, 174). Here ‘body’ refers to my pre-reflective ability to move through my surroundings, to be absorbed in the flow of a particular situation, and to be affectively attuned to others. Indeed, for the existentialists, the distinction between an immaterial mind and a physical body is derived from and made possible by our situated and embodied way of being. As Merleau-Ponty explains, “Our body provides us with a practical knowledge, which has to be recognized as original and perhaps primary. My body has its world or understands its world without having to make any ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying’ function” (1962, 140–141). This notion of embodiment is one of the definitive contributions of existentialism.

Embodiment

When it comes to accounts of embodiment, twentieth-century existentialists are largely indebted to Husserl's work in Ideas II (1912) and his seminal distinction between two senses of the body, the quantifiable “physical body” (Körper) and the “lived body” (Leib) (Husserl 1989, 151–169). The notion of Körper is derived largely from Cartesian and Newtonian science, where the body is defined as res extensa, as an object that has a material composition, a determinate shape and boundary, is causally determined, and occupies a specific spatial location. In his Meditations (1641), Descartes offers the classic description:

On this account any physical object is an example of Körper, but this definition does not help us understand how the body is lived, felt, or experienced. With etymological roots in the German words for ‘life’ (Leben) and ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis), the lived body is not a physical object that can be studied from a perspective of scientific detachment, and, therefore, it is not to be understood as a thing or possession that I have. It refers, rather, to the first-person experiences, perceptions, and feelings of my own body. In this sense, I do not ‘have’ a body; as Marcel writes, “I am my body” (1950, 100, my emphasis), and I can never gain objective knowledge of my body because I am already living through it; it is what I am experiencing and sensing immediately and spontaneously at this moment. This is why, as Sartre says, “the body is lived and not known” (1956, 427). I can certainly perceive and know my material body – my height, weight, spatial location, etc. – from a position of detachment, but I cannot perceive my living body in this way. The existentialists are suggesting that my experiences are never encapsulated or self-contained; they are always bound up in the concrete situation or ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt) that I am engaged in and responding to. It is this experiential intertwining that makes it impossible for me to perceive my body as a discrete object because I am already pre-reflectively situated and oriented in the world on the basis of my body. Thus, I cannot get behind or “distance myself” from it; it always “stands in my way” as the “zero point” of all my perceptions and orientations (Husserl 1989, 166–167).

To say ‘I am my body,’ then, is to say that my thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and experiences are situated and perspectival; they are entwined in the world “through the medium of my body” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 82). Things matter to me in the ways that they do because of the unique “mediation of [my] bodily experience” (203). On this account, there is no way to distinguish “the world” from my “experience of the world” (Moran 2000, 422). How I perceive and feel about things is already colored by my embodied situation, one that would include aspects such as sexual orientation, physical ability, temperament, upbringing, or any other aspect of my bodily being-in-the-world. The fact that I spontaneously perceive a mountain as climbable, a colleague as trustworthy, or a social gathering as something to be avoided is due to the fact that I am situated and incarnated in a way that is irreducibly complex and indeterminate. This means that the self-conscious choices and actions that define us and make us who we are always take place against the situated background of our embodiment. And, for the existentialists, it is the ongoing struggle we live through in choosing to interpret or take a stand on our embodied situation that constitutes what it means to be a self. The self, understood this way, is a tension between the limitations and constraints of our embodiment and how we choose to interpret and give meaning to these limitations.

The self as a tension

From the previous discussion we see that the self is not a thing but a kind of embodied agency shaped by our meaning-giving choices and actions. Here, the existentialist conception of selfhood is strongly influenced by Kant, who suggests that human behavior can be understood in one of two ways, either deterministically from the mechanistic perspective of natural science or from the perspective of moral agency that regards human behavior in terms of freedom and responsibility. The former view treats the human being as a theoretical object whose behavior is determined and, like that of any other entity in the natural world, can be predicted and explained on the basis of causal laws. The latter view regards the human being as a responsible agent and the creator of his or her own life (Korsgaard 1989, 119–120). Given this distinction, existentialists generally do not deny that there are determinate facts about being human. It is a fact, for instance, that I am equipped with anatomical body parts, that I have a particular weight and height and a specific skeletal structure, and that I was born in a particular time and place. But it is also a fact that I am a professor and a husband. Being a professor and a husband, however, cannot be captured by means of the same descriptions that we attribute to objects in nature. They are not objective states of affairs but ‘ways of existing’ or ‘being-in-the-world,’ a composite of actions and choices I make that are embedded in a situation where being a professor and a husband are possibilities that matter to me. Heidegger clarifies this by distinguishing between objective “facts” (Tatsachen) and the “Facts” (Fakta) that pertain exclusively to human existence (1962, 82; see Blattner 2006, 44). The latter, our ‘facticity’ (Faktizität), is a reference to the embodied situation that we are engaged in, a situation that limits and constrains us in certain ways. This situation would include such things as our sexuality, our physicality, and our genetic code, but also our sociocultural context, our geographical location, and our history. For the existentialists, humans are unique in terms of the factical determinations that limit us because we have the capacity to self-consciously reflect on these limits and make decisions regarding how to deal with them. The structure of existence, then, is understood in terms of a struggle or tension between ‘facticity’ (our situated givenness) on the one hand and ‘transcendence’ (our ability to surpass our givenness through our self-conscious actions and choices) on the other. It is for this reason that Ortega y Gasset describes the human being as “a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it” (1941, 111). We are determined by our nature and embodiment but are simultaneously endowed with the freedom to interpret it and take action in the face of it. These interpretations endow our situation with meaning, and these meanings in turn shape the direction of the choices and interpretations we make in the future. In other words, I make myself who I am only on the basis of the concrete ways in which I engage this tension.

What this means is that human beings, unlike animals and infants, do not always act on the basis of causal necessity, mechanically responding to immediate needs and desires. We are self-conscious beings or ‘being-for-itself’ who have the ability to transcend these needs and desires by embodying an evaluative or self-reflective concern about them and coming to grips with how acting on these desires shapes our identity and sense of who we are. The American philosopher Harry Frankfurt explains this view by distinguishing between ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’ desires. “Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that,” writes Frankfurt, “men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are” (1971, 7). This is what distinguishes humans from other animals. Animals and infants have the capacity for ‘first-order desires’ or ‘desires of the first order,’ which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. But only humans have ‘second-order desires,’ that is, we have the unique capacity to care about, reflect on, and evaluate our first-order desires in a way that shapes us in becoming the distinctive kinds of selves that we are. On this account, for instance, my strong first-order desire for alcohol or cigarettes can be moderated by a higher second-order desire to be a sober and healthy person for the sake of my self-interpretation as a healthy and responsible father who wants to be present for his children. And this second-order volition is not causally determined; it is free, an expression of will that orients me in the world in a particular way and guides me toward future projects and identities that I seek to realize in creating the person I want to be.

On Frankfurt's view, without the capacity for second-order volitions a human being cannot properly be called a ‘person’ or ‘self.’ He describes such a creature as a “wanton” (11), referring to someone who is pulled around by his or her desire for certain things without any evaluative recognition that he or she actually wants to do these things or may prefer to do other things. In this sense, the ‘wanton’ does not care about his or her will. But this does not mean that the ‘wanton’ is an unfeeling automaton or that he or she is irrational or not self-aware. It simply means that he or she is unconcerned about making evaluative judgments about the desirability of his or her first-order desires and whether or not these desires are worthy of being acted upon. He or she simply follows whatever factical desire is strongest and is wholly “indifferent” (13) to the act of evaluating them. But in not taking a stand, interpreting, or giving meaning to his or her desires, the ‘wanton’ does not manifest freedom of the will and, consequently, is not engaged in the struggle for self-creation. Indeed, the ‘wanton’ has no identity at all apart from his or her first-order desires.

The American philosopher Dean Zimmerman suggests that Camus may be offering a version of Frankfurt's ‘wanton’ with the character Mersault in his famous novel The Stranger (see Solomon 2012, 417–418). Although he is keenly self-aware, Mersault's actions seem to be entirely dictated by whatever sensual impulse is strongest without any indication of whether or not he actually wants to do these things. He is drawn to the ocean for a swim on a hot day, to the warm buzz of a glass of wine or a cigarette, to dozing off with an afternoon nap, to kissing his girlfriend, Marie, when the feeling arises. But he has no evaluative ‘second-order’ volitions about these impulses and appears completely callous and unconcerned with how acting on them affects others or gives shape to his identity. Even when he commits the act of murder, it is described in terms of the pull of a random impulse: “To stay, or to make a move,” says Mersault, “it came to much the same thing” (Camus, 1946, 73). What frustrates the reader is that there is no remorse in Camus's character; he appears trapped in the impulses of the present moment without the ability to interpret or give meaning to them. He fails to see how second-order interpretative acts constitute the self by orienting or guiding him toward goals and projects that he hopes to realize in the future. Indeed, when Mersault admits he has “always been too absorbed in the present moment” (127), this not only reveals an unwillingness or inability to engage in the struggle for self-realization; it also reveals the unique temporal structure of selfhood.

Existentialists tend to interpret the self as being constituted by time. But against the standard view of clock-time, where time is interpreted as something external to us that can be measured, saved, or lost (as in the expression, ‘I just don't have the time’), existentialists put forth the idea that time is not something we have; it is what we are. We live our time. In Heidegger's words, the self is a “thrown-project” (1962, 185), that is, we have been thrown into a past, into a factical situation that limits and constrains us, yet we simultaneously interpret and give meaning to this situation by projecting forward into possibilities that are always shaping and reshaping our identities. Understood this way, the self exists in the future to the extent that we understand or interpret who we are in terms of possibilities we project for ourselves. But in this forward-directed projection we are also circling back, bringing our factical situation (or past) with us. Heidegger refers to this aspect of existence in terms of the Greek expression ek-stasis, as “stepping beyond” or “standing outside” ourselves (1982, 267). In the course of our lives, we are continuously moving back and forth, stretching into the future as we reinterpret and redefine ourselves against the limitations and demands of our facticity. In this way, the temporal structure of ‘thrown projection’ provides an orienting framework or horizon for me; it shows me where I stand, what I care about, and what is valuable and worth pursuing as my life moves forward, and it is this horizon that is missing in the ‘wanton.’ A character like Mersault is trapped in the present. He is pulled around by whatever first-order desire or impulse is strongest and is indifferent to whether or not these desires are worthwhile or how acting on them constitutes a particular identity. Without second-order volitions, he is unable to take a stand on his existence or to evaluate and interpret his actions. In this regard, he is not a self because he is unable to realize or create the kind of person he wants to be in the future.

It is important to note here the extent to which the existentialist account of the self – as an ongoing, self-interpreting activity or process – has influenced recent Anglophone philosophy and the broader humanities and social sciences in general. It not only offers an alternative to overly reductive assumptions regarding selfhood and agency that modern philosophy has inherited from Descartes; it is also deeply attentive to the ways in which our choices and actions are both self-defining and socially embedded. By rejecting various versions of substance ontology, the existentialist self cannot be conceived of as a ‘thinking thing,’ the willing, desiring, and perceiving subject that exists prior to any experience. Nor can it be conceived physically, as the aftereffects of neurophysiological or brain states that can be observed from a perspective of scientific objectivity (Baynes 2010, 441). Indeed, there is no substantial self at all. The self exists only in its own self-interpretations. On this view, we are thrown into a social situation or world that shapes our identity. But we are not simply passive social constructions. We also have the ability to transcend our facticity, that is, to actively shape our own identity by interpreting the values and meanings of our situation and tying them together into a cohesive and unified story or narrative. The self, then, is constituted by the continuous, open-ended process of choosing and pulling together the social interpretations that we care about and that are made available by the situation we grow into. Thus, it is not the substantial or thing-like attributes that define us. Rather, what makes us who we are is the narrative unity and coherence of the self-interpretations we take over in composing our own life story (Guignon 2004a, 127).

Although there are a number of prominent Anglophone philosophers who have developed this narrative conception of selfhood, including Harry Frankfurt, Charles Guignon, Christine Korsgaard, Alasdair MacIntyre, Alexander Nehamas, and Bernard Williams, the figure that has arguably played the most decisive role in fleshing out the idea and introducing it to the philosophical mainstream is Charles Taylor (b. 1931). While acknowledging his debt to figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, Taylor pioneered the idea of the human being as a “self-interpreting animal” (1985). On his account, human beings make or create themselves by constructing stories about who we are and what matters in our lives out of the context of meanings that we grow into. This is, for Taylor, a “basic condition” of being human, “that we grasp our lives in a narrative” (1989, 47). Recognizing that there might be gaps or breakdowns in the unity and coherence of one's life story – perhaps the result of suffering through a psychological disturbance or experiencing a traumatic event – the general point is that when speaking about a person or self we are referring to what Taylor describes as “leading a life” (1997), referring to one's ability to construct a unified life story or narrative and to taking responsibility for its construction. This, of course, means that the process of self-creation is not a free-floating event where the individual creates him or herself ex nihilo. Self-creation is always social or ‘dialogical,’ that is, it takes place against a background of cultural meanings that are laid out in advance and that we continually take over and appropriate as our life moves forward. The problem is that if we are already immersed in a background of meanings that shape us and from which we actively construct our narrative, how do we know if our self-interpretations are genuinely our own? As Charles Guignon suggests, there appears to be no “real self” that exists below the stitched-together roles, projects, and identities that constitute my life story (2004a, 130).

Moreover, if it is true that we have the capacity to ‘lead a life’ by making evaluative choices and enacting self-interpretations that are significant or important to us, we have to recognize that these self-interpretations often conflict with our hardened tendency to conform to the everyday norms and expectations of the public. Rather than taking a stand on our situation and fashioning our own story, we all too often drift along with the crowd, living the life story that ‘they’ live. In this sense, as Heidegger says, “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure. We read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The ‘they’ … prescribes the kind of being of everydayness” (1962, 164). This means in our everyday dealings, we are usually not self-creating individuals but herd animals, alienated from who we are and what matters to us. For this reason, any account of narrative self-constitution must be reconciled with our inveterate tendency of conforming to ‘the they.’

Conformism and self-deception

In his polemical essay ‘The Present Age,’ Kierkegaard captures the struggle that human beings face in creating themselves. To transcend or take a stand on one's own situation is difficult because we are already caught up in the comforting and stable norms of ‘the public.’ We are told what to do, what to believe in, and what to value, and this unburdens us from having to make our own self-defining commitments. We simply let others choose our lives for us. “No single person who belongs to the public makes a real commitment,” says Kierkegaard. “More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all. … This indolent mass … understands nothing and does nothing itself” (1946b, 266–267). Drifting along with the ‘indolent mass’ creates the impression that I am living comfortably and well because I am doing what everyone else does, but this, of course, stifles the possibility of transcendence, of genuinely coming to grips with what really matters in my own life.

In The Death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy introduces a character that lives a life of shallow conformism. Ilych is the ‘everyman,’ a superficial society creature who does everything as ‘they’ do it. His decisions to pursue a particular career as a judge, to propose to his wife, to have children, even to furnish his house in the way that he does are all made because his social circle approved. But a life based entirely on the standardized and leveled-down values of ‘the they’ prevents Ilych from realizing who he is as an individual. He is unaware or unwilling to acknowledge his own capacity for transcendence. As a result, he is unable to take a committed stand on anything – a stand that might give his life a sense of focus, direction, and purpose – because nothing really matters to him. He flees from himself and lets the public decide the course of his life. When faced with his untimely death, he is confronted with the terror of not knowing who he is or what he stands for. In his last days, he laments:

Swallowed up by ‘the they’ and unaware of what matters to him as an individual, Tolstoy describes Ilych's life leading up to his death as one that was “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most horrible” (104).

The self-deceptive shallowness of public life is echoed in Nietzsche, who praises those who have the courage to create their own lives and live independently from ‘the herd.’ For Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard, the public reduces everything to the lowest common denominator and deadens our capacity for healthy and creative self-expression. And this, in turn, prevents us from becoming who we are. He describes this herd-like tendency in Beyond Good and Evil:

For Nietzsche, those who live ‘beyond good and evil’ have an inborn capacity for self-creation and are naturally equipped to rise above the deadening tyranny of mass culture. This is why he rejects modern democratic values such as equality. The idea that ‘all human beings are created equal’ and have common interests and needs creates a mass ideology that stifles the idiosyncratic strengths and creative tastes unique to the individual. The emergence of modern egalitarianism, then, combined with the forces of mass media, advertising, and entertainment industries, mechanized mass production, and the culture of consumerism, creates what Ortega y Gasset will later call “the mass man,” where each human being “feels just like everybody [else] and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is in fact quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else” (1932, 15).

Heidegger will develop this theme in Being and Time by suggesting that our absorption in the public world consoles or “tranquilizes” us, creating the comforting illusion that “everything is in the best order” because we are doing what “they” do (1962, 177). Tranquilization prevents us from facing the fact that there is nothing stable that secures or grounds our choices and that our being is always threatened by the possibility of non-being, of death. ‘The they’ conceals this existential threat from us, and as a result it alienates us from who we are. It “provides a constant tranquilization, [an] indifference [that] alienates Dasein from [itself]” (254–255). It is important to note, however, that being a ‘they-self’ is not to be understood as a morally inferior way of being. It is true that Heidegger is critical of our inveterate tendency to fall prey to the conformist fads and fashions of ‘the they,’ but he does not evaluate this negatively. It is, in fact, a positive structure or condition of being human, what Heidegger calls an ‘existentiale’ (Existentiale). “The ‘they’ is an existentiale,” he writes, “and as a primordial phenomenon, it belongs to Dasein's positive constitution” (129). This means existence is necessarily structured by ‘falling’ (Verfallen). Insofar as we exist, we ‘fall prey’ to the shared meanings and practices of the world we are thrown into. Given this account, ‘the they’ does not simply represent a source of tranquilized conformism; it is also the source of meaning and intelligibility for our lives. Without ‘the they’ we could not make sense of who we are or why things matter to us in the ways that they do. It is “the ‘they’ itself,” says Heidegger, “[that] articulates the referential context of significance” (129). The upshot is that, in our everyday lives, we are inauthentic, that is, “everyone is the other, and no one is himself” (128). And there is no way for us to completely rise above or extricate ourselves from the tyranny of ‘the they.’ Consequently, Heidegger's view of authenticity, as we will see later, cannot be viewed in terms of a solitary individual or subject who somehow rises above the superficial norms of the public world. Any attempt to free oneself from the crowd and take hold of one's life as an individual requires coming to grips with the publicly interpreted meanings that have already been laid out in advance by ‘the they.’

The existentialist account of alienation and self-deception takes a darker turn in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. According to Sartre, I can only become aware of who I am through ‘the look’ (le regard) of the Other. The look is a social judgment that defines me as a ‘being-in-itself,’ as an object or thing, and this, in turn, dehumanizes me, stripping me of the possibility of creating and fashioning my own identity. I am, as Sartre writes, “possessed by the Other; the Other's look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret – the secret of what I am” (1956, 475, my emphasis). This means that when the Other judges me to be unattractive, cowardly, heroic, or successful, I tend to internalize this judgment and see myself as that kind of thing, as if it were a destiny. Being-with-others, then, becomes a ceaseless conflict, where I struggle to affirm or assert my subjectivity by turning the other into an object, while the other does the same to me. “While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other,” says Sartre, “the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me. … Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others” (475). Sartre captures this struggle for self-assertion in the famous words of Garcin, a character in his play No Exit, who describes the experience of being-with-others as a living hell: “I'd have never believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl.’ Old wives’ tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is – other people” (1989, 45, my emphasis).

As we will see in more detail in , this struggle is complicated by the fact that we often participate in our own dehumanization, not only because it creates the consoling impression that there is something secure and thing-like about our identities, but also because it prevents us from having to take responsibility for our choices. In short, it keeps us from acknowledging the fact that we are free, self-making beings. Sartre will refer to this kind of self-deception as ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), and it occurs when we deny “the double property of human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcendence” (1956, 98). I deceive myself, for instance, when I adopt the persona of a college professor and see myself solely in terms of the professor's peculiar habits. Thus, the fact I am bookish, absent-minded, and self-absorbed is just the way I am, “and society demands that [I] limit myself to [this] function” (102). In this way, I interpret myself as a professor-thing. But, as ‘being-for-itself,’ I am also not a professor because I have the ability to take a stand on these patterns of behavior and choose to do otherwise. Transcendence, then, is the ‘not’ or ‘nothing’ that always underlies my facticity. In bad faith, I usually cling to my socially constructed identity for security and deny the nothingness, the fact that my identity is always incomplete and that I alone am responsible for my existence. I try, in other words, to “hide” in my facticity “in an effort to flee the being which I am” (351). As a result I forget what Sartre calls “the first principle of existentialism,” namely that “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (2001, 293).

From this discussion, it appears existentialists offer only a negative account of human relations, one that is mired in conflict, alienation, and self-deception. However, a number of religious existentialists reject the claim that there can be no authentic communion or intimacy between self and other – that a “unity with the Other is … in fact unrealizable” (Sartre 1956, 476) – and suggest that there are deeper possibilities of being-with-others that modern society covers over. Marcel, for example, argues that it is the unique nature of today's technocratic society that compels us to see ourselves as atomistic individuals, where our relations with others are reduced to exercises in manipulation and control. This, in turn, robs us of the primordial experience of intersubjectivity, mutual dependence, and obligation to others. Buber draws on the Hasidic mystical tradition to make a similar claim with his critique of the ‘I–It’ relations that dominate modern society. In this relation, we see ourselves as isolated subjects that are separate from others (Its). This relation conceals a richer experience of community, where human beings encounter each other not as objects for manipulation but as enigmatic and vulnerable subjects to whom we are irrevocably bound in “a living, reciprocal relation” (Buber 1970, 94). Buber calls this experience of mutual vulnerability the ‘I–Thou’ relation: an experience that can shake us out of the alienation and forlornness of modern life. Dostoevsky's novels also reflect the communal values of the Eastern Church, offering powerful critiques of the modern cult of individualism for the sake of a more profound sense of spiritual solidarity, social responsibility, and ‘belongingness’ (sobernost) embodied in the close-knit practices of the Russian peasants, practices where “we are all responsible to all and for all” (Dostoevsky 1957, 278–279; see Guignon 1993, xli).

We see, then, that existentialists differ in their assessments of being-with-others, but they are generally in agreement that the conformity and self-deception of everyday life tends to conceal or cover over the struggle for self-creation. To the extent that we conform to the ready-made identities of the public world, we are alienated and inauthentic; we disown ourselves by simply going along with the crowd, never having to face up to the truth about who and what we really are. It is for this reason, as we will see in the proceeding chapters, that the questions of freedom and authenticity become central to the existentialists.

Suggested reading

Frankfurt, H. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. Journal of philosophy 68 (1): 5–20.

Hatab, L. J. (2012). Nietzsche: selfhood, creativity, and philosophy. In S. Crowell (ed.), The Cambridge companion to existentialism (pp. 137–157). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hoffman, P. (1983). The human self and the life and death struggle. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Taylor, C. (1997). Leading a life. In R. Chang (ed.), Incommensurability, incomparability, and practice reason (pp. 170–183). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.