23 - Words and things in phenomenology and existentialism

Summary

‘To live or to recount … You have to choose.’ This is the dilemma facing Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea (1938): one either involves oneself in the world of action or exists in a state of distant, conceptual abstraction. Existentialism is a philosophy of the gap, the gap between concepts and experience. It affects both ethics and epistemology. On the one hand, how does one represent – through art, literature or philosophy – lived experience? On the other, how does one live in a world increasingly defined through representation, where ‘representation’ can extend from the self-image of the individual to the human possibilities created by advances in technology? Sartre's disavowal of the substantive Cartesian self might give the impression that he is advocating an amoral nihilism. However, he in fact wants an immersed, committed existence, an adventure or a project, but is all too aware that the order granted by concepts and grammar is only to be found in literature, and not available to the individual. In this chapter, I examine the relationship between art, philosophy and experience in phenomenology and existentialism. I concentrate on Sartre and suggest points of contact between his ideas and the work of Nietzsche, Husserl, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. The gap which Roquentin opens for us between writing or living, I shall argue, is not another binarism in the history of philosophy, demarcating two irreconcilable opposites, but a state of affairs which, for Sartre, is an unavoidable aspect of our experiential participation in the world.

Existentialism emerges from phenomenology, and this, in turn, derives from transcendental idealism. The line can be traced back from de Beauvoir and Sartre through Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche, Bergson, Brentano and, ultimately, to Kant. Phenomenology asserts that we are immersed in the world and implicated within it, as opposed to being observers whose thoughts and actions are formulated at a distance from events. Kant is the first to argue that our faculties are always already active in structuring the world.