EXISTENTIALISM AND MAN’S

SEARCH FOR MEANING

by Manuel B.Dy, Jr.

Just as there are many definition of philosophy, so there are as many philosophical
approaches to the study of man.

The Western definition of philosophy as the “love (or search) of wisdom” originated
from the Greeks. The pre-Socratics were primarily concerned with the basic stuff of the cosmos,
with that constituted the universe. The question on man could not be totally divorced from the
cosmological, since man was conceived as part of nature. The Socratic motto “Know Thyself”
was viewed not in the isolation from the quest for some order in the cosmos, for immutable
harmony and stability. Man was seen as a microcosm, and the search for the truth about man
was simultaneously the search for the truth about the universe. Truth was the immutable object
of theory, the episteme, and man’s ideal was its contemplation. Ethics as a practical philosophy,
dealing with man’s action, was synonymous with politics, the art of patterning one’s behavior
with the common good centered around the polis, the city. Wisdom was the primary virtue, and
in the practical order wad identical with prudence, the habit of maintaining a delicate balance
with nature. Thus, the ancient philosophical—philosophical because now they were concerned
not with a part of the cosmos but with the totality—approach to the study of man was
cosmocentric.

With the coming and predominance of Christianity in Medieval Europe, philosophy

became the handmaid of theology. Reason was the companion of faith, its task was to make
faith reasonable, if not reconcilable with Aristotelian philosophy. Man was viewed still as part
of nature nut nature now was God’s creation, and man, next to the angels, was the noblest of
God’s creatures, created in his image and likeness. Philosophy became the search for the
ultimate causes of things, eventually leading to the truth about God. Man’s ideal was to
contemplate God and his creation, and his action was to conform to the natural moral law
implanted in his reason. Thus the Christian Medieval philosophical approach to the study of man
was theocentric.

The change of focus began with the philosophizing of Rene Descartes (1956-1650), the
father of modern philosophy. Descartes, impressed by the progress of the sciences and the
mathematics of his time, wanted to achieve the same advance in philosophy by starting on
someone certitude, and indubitable, that which cannot be doubted because if it can be doubted,
then all else are dubitable. And so, the Cartesian Meditations, as Descartes’ meditations are
called, consisted of a methodic Cartesian doubt. Everything was dubitable, for Descartes, even
his own body, all except for one fact—the fact that he was doubting. He could not doubt that he
was doubting, being a mode of thinking, brought him to the realization “Cogito, ergo sum” (I
think, therefore I am”). I am sure I exist as a thinking being. And from this certitude Descartes
proceeded to establish the certitude of their existents, including God, by a criterion borrowed
from mathematics: the clear and distinctness of the idea.
With the mergence of Descartes’s Cogito, philosophy became the anthropocentric. The
question of man was now on the foreground of other questionings on nature or on God. Reason
was now liberated from nature and faith, sufficient to inquire on its own truth. The modern
philosophers after Descartes pursued this quest with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) finally
introducing a Copernican revolution in philosophy: rather than reason conforming to the object
or nature that must be subjected to the a priori conditions of the mind or the subject. With Kant,
philosophy became a search for the priori conditions of knowing (and doing), rather than for the
object itself for the object as such is unknownable.

This rationalistic kind of anthropocentricism reached its climax in the philosophy of

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel built a system of the Mind in the process of
evolving itself in a kind of dialectic, of reason putting another to itself (antithesis) and coming to
a resolution (synthesis). And it is against the philosophizing of Hegel that contemporary
philosophies are said to have started.

On such reaction is Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the acknowledged father of

existentialism. Reacting against the System of Hegel, Kierkegard emphasized the individual
man who cannot be placed as a “cog in a machine” or part of a system. Reacting against the
rationalism of Hegel, he stressed the infinite passion of man. Truth is what is held on with the
passion of the infinite. With Kieregaard, philosophy became the search for the meaning of life.
The search for truth was now the search for meaning.

In talking about the existentialist’s search for meaning, one is immediately faced with
two difficulties. First existentialism is not so much a philosophical system as a movement, an
attitude, a frame of mind. For one thing, the existentialist philosophers are very much against
systems. As a reaction against Hegel, they labor philosophical system and philosophize in an
systematic though not inconsistent manner. In this regard, it is more appropriate to talk of many
existentialist philosophies rather than a single existentialist philosophy. Secondly, the question
of what is the meaning of man’s existence is for them more important than the answer, for they
do not agree on the answer. It is not that the existentialist thinkers do not have an ethics, a notion
of the highest good or value, but their ethics for the most part is intertwined with their ontologies
and philosophies of man. And so, the existentialist would rather invite us (not impose) to ask
similar question but seek the answer for ourselves.

In spite of the divergency of thought, the existentialist thinkers in general can be divided
into two camps, the theistic and the atheistic. Belonging to the theistic group are Soren
Kiergaard. Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber. In the atheistic group, the well-
known existentialist are Jen-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Mausrice Merleau-Ponty. Martin
Heidegger refuses to be identified with any of the two camps for the simple reason that the
question of god, he claims, is beyond his phenomenological approach.

There have been denials and counter denials by these thinkers of the label “existentialist”
assigned to them, but what merits the title of “existentialist”? if these thinkers have different
philosophies, what accounts for the title of “existentialist philosophy”?

We can cite five common features of existentialist thinkers, keeping in mind, however,
that each one has his own interpretation, his own unique way of handling the matter.
 1. Existentialists thinkers attempt to philosophize from the standpoint of
an actor rather than from the spectator. This is due to the fact that the problems considered by
existentialist thinkers arise out of their personal experience. The life of an existentialist thinker
can hardly be divorced from philosophy. It is not surprising why many existentialist writers
make use of the play, the short story and the novel to dramatize these problems. They are means
to universalize the personal and the human. In their philosophical writings, the existentialist use
phenomenological description, each in his own way, to explicitate rather than to explain the
hidden structure of human experiences.

2. Existentialist philosophies are basically philosophies of man, stressing

the subjectivity of man. The existentialist do not deny that man to a certain extent is an object,
that he is a thing, given, conceptualizable, manipulable, controllable and determinable by others.
But this does not constitute his humanity. In protest against the dehumanization and
depersonalization of man, the existentialist thinkers hold on to the subjectivity of man: man as
the original center, the source of initiative, who has depth, who transcends determinations, the
openness and giver of meaning to the world.

In their ontology, the existentialists do not deny the reality of the object but emphasize the
subjective. The object is that which objects (gegestand) to the consciousness of man, and yet the
object is meaningless, senseless without man. To be subjective is not necessarily to be
subjectivistic; rather, it could be only the only way to be objective, to talk meaningfully of a
world. According to Heidegger the worldiness of the world is due to man’s concern. Among
theistic existentialists, God is not an object but God-for-me, the God of my prayer, the Thou that
I as a person can address to.

3. Existentialist philosophies stress on man’s existence, on man as

situated. This situatedness of man takes on different shades of meaning for different
existentialists. For Soren Kierkegaard, existence is a religious category: the situation of the
single, finite, unique individual who has to make a decision before the One infinite God in fear
and trembling like the situation of Abraham. For Martin Heidegger, man is dasein, there-being,
thrown into the world to realize himself, doomed to potentialities, the extreme of which is death.
For Karl Jaspers, to exist to transcend oneself through limit situations and eventually to find
God. (Jaspers admits of a vertical transcendence of man). For Gabriel Marcel, esse est co-esse:
to exist is to co-exist, to participate in the fullness of being (God) through love, fidelity and faith.
On the other hand, for Jean-Paul Sartre, to exist is to be condemned to freedom. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty retorts by saying the man is condemned to meaning. And for Albert Camus, to
exist is, like Sisyphus pushing and rolling the stone, to live the absurdity of life.

4. Existentialist thinkers emphasize the freedom of man. Again, each

existentialist has his own interpretation of freedom. In the case of Kierkegaard, freedom is that
which enables man to pass from aesthetic states to the ethical, and ultimately, to make leap of
faith, the highest act of man’s liberty. Heidegger equates freedom with self-transcendence in
time, the being-ahead-of-itself of dasein while having-been and making-present entities in his
worlds. Early Sartrean freedom, however, remains the most popular notion of freedom among
existentialists. It proceeds from his dictum that existence precedes essence. Man first exists and
then gradually creates his own essence. Nothing determines human freedom from creating its
own essence except freedom itself: man cannot help but free. and freedom stems from the
negating power of consciousness being no-thing of the world the being-in-itself. Merleau-Ponty
criticizes this notion of freedom of Sartre and brings out his own notion of Sartrean freedom,
Marcel stresses the affirming power of freedom: freedom is man’s ability to say “yes’ to Being,
to pass from the realm of having to that of being, the realm of participation. One becomes free
only if he transcends himself and goes out to others in love, participating in something greater
than himself.

5. Existentialist philosophers propagate authentic existence versus

inauthentic existence. Inauthentic existence is living under the impersonal “on” (they) of
Heidegger the crown mentality of Kierkegard, bad faith of Sartre. The inauthentic man is the
“l’etranger” of Camus, indifferent, tranquilized, unable to make a personal decision of his own.
He is the functionalized man of Marcel living in the mass society, the man living the life of
monologue of Buber. On the other hand, authentic existence is personal and the authentic man is
one who freely commits himself to the realization of a project an idea, a truth, a value. He is one
who does not hide himself in the anonymity of the crowd but signs himself to what he manifests.

From the above common features of existentialist philosophers, what then can we infer
with regards to their notion of value?

The question of value for the existentialist cannot be divorced from the more original
question of what does it mean to be? What is the meaning of life? Camus in his Myth of
Sisyphus says that the truly philosophical question is the question of suicide for in suicide one
poses the question of the meaning of life. Value then is intimately related to life (and to death as
the corollary of life), and if human life for the existentialist is to be lived freely, authentically,
responsibly, personally then, value is that for which a person lives and dies for. Value is that to
which the authentic man commits himself. Marcel says in his Mystery of Being that for existence
to be truly human it must have a center outside itself. For life to be human, it must answer the
question, what am I living for? Value is then that around which all my human activities revolve.

Is value for the existentialist subjective or objective? The answer is that both subjective
and objective. Value is subjective because value always presupposes a subject who values; value
is always value-for-me. Value is objective because there is truly something I can live and die
for. Value is intimately connected with truth, for I cannot live and die for what is false or for
what I think is untrue. And yet between the two poles of value, the existentialist would prefer to
emphasize the subjective side, holding on to it as Kieregaard would put it, “with the passion of
the infinite”.

But where do values come from? What is the source of value? Here is where atheistic
and theistic existentialists part ways. The atheistic existentialist like Sartre would assert that man
is the ultimate source of values; he is responsible for what he commits himself to. Values spring
from man’s freedom to realize himself and no outside source can be attributed to them. Values
are not absolute. Man alone is responsible for his own being; he cannot depend on any absolute.
This assertion may be tantamount to a certain kind of individualism, and indeed existentialism is
pictured many times as a man on a solitary island surrounded by the lonely span of the waters of
the ocean. Nevertheless, we find in the philosophy of Sartre a stress on the responsibility of the
person to mankind for his decision (I chose not only for myself but for the whole of humanity),
and in Camus, the spirit of rebellion.

The theistic existentialist, on the other hand, would admit of the relativity of values as
precisely pointing to an Absolute Value who grounds them. The subjective source of values is
human freedom, yes, but human freedom is limited and becomes fulfilled only when it
participates in Someone greater than itself. Man’s commitment to a value is finite and needs to
be grounded in an absolute. Above and below are linked with each other (Buber). The objective
source of value is none other than God, the Absolute Thou who can give final and complete
fulfillment to my life.

What then is existentialist’s search for meaning? In spite of the divergency of thought
between theistic and atheistic existentialists, we can infer that it is ultimately a search within.
Man the subject is the giver or discover of meaning. But the search within is a search that
“erupts,” extends to the outside, to the other than the self. How far this will extend depends on
how deep man can reach into the recesses of the subjectivity. Dag Hammarskjold once wrote a
diary, “The longest journey is the journey inwards.” The search is a life-time task and time is the
essence of this meaning, for as Merleau-Ponty quoting the poet Claudel says,

Le temps est sens de la vie (sens:

comme on dit le sens d’um course d’eau,
le sens d’une phrase, le sens d’une stoffe,
le sens de l’odorat).

Time is the meaning of life (meaning: as

One say of the direction of course of
Water, the meaning of a sentence, the
Texture of material, the sense of smell).

Just as man cannot evade time, so he cannot escape from this search for meaning, for
upon this hinges the integrity and wholeness of his humanity.