Kevin Aho. Existentialism. London: Polity Press, 2014.
By giving primacy to being-in-the-world, existentialists challenge the subject-object model that characterizes much of modern philosophy. This model, expressed most famously in the work of Descartes, regards humans as self-contained subjects of experience trapped in their own minds and who are trying to discover whether or not their ‘inner’ perceptions and ideas accurately represent ‘outer’ objects in the world. This representational view creates skepticism or doubt about whether or not anything in the world – that is, outside the ‘I’ or consciousness – can be known with any certainty. The result is an explicit separation between mental and physical phenomena and creates two competing accounts in the modern epistemological tradition, ‘realism’ and ‘idealism.’ On the realist view, the world and material things are said to exist externally or independently of our minds; on the idealist view, the only things we know that exist are the ideas in our own minds. Underlying these two accounts is the problem of proving the existence of a mind-independent world if the only thing we can claim to know with any certainly is the contents of our own mind. After all, how could I possibly doubt that I perceive, desire, or feel something? The problem is whether or not what I perceive, desire, or feel actually represents or corresponds to things that exist in the world. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) will famously refer to the fact that modern philosophers have still not proven whether or not an external world exists as a ‘scandal.’ Existentialists will go further than Kant by arguing that the whole ‘inner/outer’ question is nothing more than a tired pseudo-problem that has bogged down philosophers for three hundred years. As Heidegger says, what is truly “scandalous” is not that philosophers have failed to adequately demonstrate the existence of an external or mind-independent world, “but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again” (1962, 249).
Existentialists reject both realist and idealist accounts by arguing that in our ordinary experiences there is no separation between ‘inner’ and ‘outer,’ between self and world. On their view, these accounts distort the fact that we are, first and foremost, “already out there,” already engaged in the world and “opened toward beings” (Heidegger 1992, 167). Indeed, interpreting existence in terms of being-in-the-world suggests that the debate between realism and idealism is not even worthy of philosophical consideration (e.g., Guignon 1983). This is because the whole problem is based on an error that assumes human beings are basically self-enclosed minds who are trying to get clear about their beliefs of mind-independent objects. Against this view, existentialists argue that we are already enmeshed in the world in our everyday practices and that we already understand things in terms of their practical uses and purposes. I do not, for instance, first stare at the computer and reflect on its objective properties before I use it. As a professor involved in the acts and practices of the academic world, I already inhabit an understanding of the computer in terms of its practical function and use. My hands simply begin to press the keys, with my eyes leveled at the screen and my elbows resting on the desk. This kind of oriented and purposive activity is performed pre-reflectively, without the accompaniment of mental representation.
Interpreting existence in terms of situated understanding also allows existentialists to challenge the ‘fact–value’ dualism central to modern philosophy. On this view, there is a fundamental distinction drawn between what is objective or real in the physical universe versus what is subjective or existing only in our own minds. The aim of the philosopher or scientist is to bracket out ‘values,’ that is, the subjective colorings that we impose on things based on our own idiosyncratic tastes, cultural backgrounds, and sensory apparatuses in order to discover mind-independent ‘facts.’ What is factual or true, as we saw earlier, is usually interpreted in terms of what is quantifiable, pertaining to the measurable qualities of mass, weight, movement, and spatial-temporal location. The upshot of the fact-value dichotomy is that there can be no such thing as a ‘moral fact’ and that the meaning, significance, and purpose of things comes to be regarded as merely subjective or a sociocultural projection rather than qualities that adhere to the things themselves. Existentialists reject this picture by arguing that in our everyday dealings we never encounter quantifiable objects in isolation. Rather, the things we encounter are already bound up in contexts of meaning, and their significance is disclosed not through inner acts of consciousness but through our purposive involvements within this context. “[We] do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is present-at-hand,” says Heidegger, “we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world” (1962, 190–191).
In other words, although it may be an objective fact that my computer weighs a certain number of pounds, this is not how I encounter it in everyday life. It is not a brute object ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden); it is ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden), an available and functional tool that already means something to me because it is bound up with the purposive activities, projects, and equipment that constitute my identity as a professor. The computer matters to me, in this case, because I use it to communicate with students, to do research, to contact journal and book editors, and to compose manuscripts that I hope will be published one day, and these activities are ultimately performed in an effort to fill out my self-interpretation as a responsible, hard-working professor. What this reveals is that the fact–value distinction is itself derived from a more basic way of being in which we are bound up in shared contexts of meaning, and in these contexts fact and value are inseparable. We can unpack this account in more detail by turning to Heidegger’s famous account of the ‘work-world’ (Werkwelt) in Being and Time.