Existentialism as a whole - and the first thing you need to know about Existentialism is that it does not exist.

Over the next week or so, I'll be talking about Existentialist philosophers. Today however, I’m going to talk about Existentialism as a whole - and the first thing you need to know about Existentialism is that it does not exist.

Wait… what?

Existentialism was not a single, organized school of thought, and there is no essential similarity that we can use to group its authors. They have radically different metaphysics and epistemologies. Some, like Søren Kierkegaard, acknowledge the role of reason and objectivity, however reluctantly, in understanding the world around us, while Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger argue against discussing anything other than subjective experience - and even their particular brands of subjectivism are considerably different from one another.

Their ethics and politics were also radically different from one another. Jean Paul-Sartre was a Marxist, while Kierkegaard was a conservative monarchist who vehemently criticized Marx - and Heidegger was a Nazi, who would have likely have sent both to a concentration camp if he had the chance. “Existentialists” couldn’t even agree on whether or not there was a God, or what is the nature of art - so why are they grouped under the same term?

To put it bluntly: because contemporary philosophers are awful at their jobs. They have their heads so far up their… irrational classifications, that they can’t see beyond them. “Existentialist” philosophers rejected the rationalism proposed by the likes of Descarte and Kant, identifying their claims as arbitrary, but they also rejected the empiricism of Hume and the positivists as crude. They rejected traditional Christian morality, yet were also just as vehement in their condemnation of its modern, pseudoscientific alternatives. They rejected traditional oligarchies and their claims of divine right, but had contempt for democracy, and the masses as a whole. Unsurprisingly, most of them created very authentic works of art, as they rejected both classical and modern aesthetic standards. With all their rejections, however, they did not abandon philosophy as a whole, and the quest for truth and standards, so they can’t be considered post-modernists.

So what does a lazy intellectual do when he comes across a group of existents that do not fit any of his flawed concepts? He groups them all under the same concept, despite the fact that they do not have a conceptual common denominator. The result is an intellectual package-deal, with a nonsensical definition. The Oxford Dictionary defines Existentialism as a philosophy “which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent”, grouping them with every single individualist philosopher who believes in free will. Most college professors I’ve met, however, echo Macquarrie’s definition of a philosophy that “explores that nature of existence by emphasizing the experience of the human subject”, ignoring the fact that every single philosophy does that. It is also common to have those authors grouped due to their emotional reaction of anxiety and dread at the magnitude and meaninglessness of existence - yet we don’t group Democritus, Aristotle and Epicurus together due to their emotional reaction of happiness and enthusiasm towards existence.

Like Ayn Rand, they rejected both the intrinsicism of thinkers who focused exclusively on the inherent nature of objects, and the absolute subjectivism that followed from Kant and Hume’s split between mind and world. Instead, they tried to deal with the relationship between subject and object in different ways, but failed to identify the primacy of existence. Because of that, I’ve been grouping them under a negative-based concept for a while now: Proto-Objectivists, i.e. authors who do not belong to a particular school of thought, but preceded Objectivism in their efforts towards a philosophy based on the relationship between subject and object.