Existentialism and Man’s Search for Meaning by Manuel B. Dy, Jr.

Just as there are many definitions 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 some one 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, Kierkegaard 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 Kierkegaard, philosophy became the search for the
meaning of life. The search for truth was now the search for meaning.

Philosophy of the Human Person Page 1

 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 a 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 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 Kierkegaard. Karl Jaspers,
Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber. In the atheistic group, the well-known existentialist are Jean-Paul Sartre,
Albert Camus and Maurice 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 explicate
rather than to explain the hidden structure of human experiences.

2. Existentialist philosophies are basically philosophies of man, stressing

the subjectivity of man. The existentialists 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 ob-jects (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 worldliness 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.

Philosophy of the Human Person Page 2

 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 Kierkegaard, 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 Kierkegaard 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.

Philosophy of the Human Person Page 3

 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
andtime 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.

Philosophy of the Human Person Page 4