EXISTENTIALISM

Man would sooner have the void for a purpose than be void of purpose.

German-born Swiss philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

In the 1960s American developmental psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow (1908-1970) realized that human beings have several different levels of needs motivating them. Only, he thought, when basic bodily needs have been satisfied do human beings act to achieve other, less basic needs -- needs we might describe as higher, psychological or spiritual, and, well, of the soul or mind.

Such higher needs (remembering the definition of "value" of Russian-American novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982), we might also call them values) are often called spiritual or religious.

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First, Maslow thought, humans struggle to achieve basic physiological needs such as oxygen, water, food, and shelter. Second, they pursue personal goals that help achieve their security and safety -- goals such as having money and a job.

Third, they seek love and feelings of belonging. Fourth, they pursue goals of competence, prestige, and esteem. Fifth, human beings pursue self-fulfillment; and sixth and finally, curiosity and the need to understand.

If one pursued the six levels of needs, one would increasingly, Maslow thought, be rewarded with what he called "peak experiences." These are moments in which one seems to transcend one's human problems; and feels as emotionally and totally happy and fulfilled as if one were enjoying the view and clean air of a sunny mountaintop. These are moments of joy or bliss.

Six levels. A Hierarchy of Needs -- the last levels being needs or values relating to spirituality.

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Almost immediately, Maslow's ideas were very influential in American psychology and religion. Combined with ideas from the vitally important client-centered psychologist Carl Rogers (1902-1987) and from Gestalt psychotherapists like Fritz Perls, they formed the central core of 1960s-1970s California humanistic psychology, the psychology which, in my opinion, has succeeded that of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytical school.

In his work on the Hierarchy of Needs Maslow identified what human beings were ultimately seeking through the attainment of survival and spiritual values. He called it "self-actualization." (Others dubbed it "self-realization.")

Self-actualization is a kind of attainment of self, of deep self-understanding and respect. As it happened, Maslow's idea fit well with certain philosophical ideas that had been around for two millenia.

Plato

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (circa 428-c. 347 B.C.E.), for instance, had believed that human beings have innate knowledge of a perfect World of Forms. These are in another dimension: the Forms cause, underlie, and participate in the visible world we seem to see around us. They make it what it is. Things in the visible, tangible world imperfectly imitate the Forms. According to Plato in his dialogue Theaetetus, good teachers lead their students to the (innate) knowledge that students already have within them, if they but knew it. Good teachers, that is, merely "educe" (Latin for lead out) innate knowledge until students become aware how much they have always known. Therefore the task of education (as this Platonic teaching process came to be called) is to help pupils ultimately realize their true natures.

You can see how that is like Maslow's idea of self-realization.

Aristotle

There was yet another connection to Maslow's ideas in the philosophy of Plato's pupil, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.). In Aristotle's philosophy, things in the visible universe are "entelechies", a term which means "having an end or goal in themselves". Things in Aristotle's philosophy -- even, I think, dead things -- are thought to be moving and evolving to achieve inner goals. An Unmoved Mover (sometimes called the "Prime Mover or Prime Cause") causes the direction of the overall Universe and permeates it with immanent purpose.

It is easy to see how Aristotle's idea of entelechies fits with Maslow's idea of self-actualization. The entelechies are self-realizing entities.

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Now a moment's reflection leads one to understand that people's spiritual (or "existential" or "primary") values involve both idiosyncratic needs (that is, ones individual to a certain person) and universal needs (ones common to all). To realize oneself one may need both what others do not -- the clarinetist needs access to clarinet scores, for example -- and what everyone needs; for example, food and a well-grounded orientation to the world.

One universal spiritual value, therefore, we might call the Need for Identity.

The Universal Need for Identity

It seems to be a matter that all of us can understand, that each of us -- each individual -- needs to feel that we know who we are; what we are here for in this world; and what our life goals are. And each of us needs to know, each minute, what to do right now.

These are not just adolescent matters. These needs are essential. They last all our lives. On the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the basic needs are literally a matter of life and death. We must have air, water, food, and other essentials. But all levels contribute to our viability.

As German-born philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) said, "With the proper why, a man can endure almost any how."¹ Human beings have psychological, as well as physical needs, among which is what Ayn Rand called Purpose.

Complicating the matter, however, is the fact that -- at least on the higher, more advanced levels -- our needs and values change over time, with our growing experience and changing life stages. (See the American journalist Gail Sheehy's work on life passages, particularly her book Passages.)

Our needs must be fulfilled at all of life's stages. As American developmental psychologist Erik Erikson (1902-1994) revealed, we human beings go through predictable sequences of psychological development and maturity. Therefore we encounter predictable life-crises at the juncture between each stage. At each juncture there are important life-choices to be made. (Popularizers like Gail Sheehy call these junctures "passages". Again, see her book of that name.) Erikson's work as a psychologist was an attempt to outline and clarify the predictable stages of human emotional development. His work, Maslow's, and the work of others led to the exploration of the stages (with their predictable crises), and eventually to what has been called (without intended prejudice) touchy-feely "California psychology".

Existentialism

Some time earlier there had been a corresponding but less concrete movement in philosophy.

Existentialism -- the modern tendency in metaphysics to be deeply concerned with man's fate, and the arbitrariness of the world -- is commonly thought to have originated in the early nineteenth century with the Danish philosopher Sören Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855), and to have peaked in public awareness in the early years after World War II. Supposedly Existentialism passed out of serious philosophers' ken about 1960. Philosophers realized about then, in American philosopher Morton White's words, that existentialism was only a "café philosophy", not a serious one.²

I doubt this. I doubt that existentialism has gone away or that it can.

Has Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs gone away? If we are concerned, as I think we are, with more than our brute survival, each of us must pursue some version of the needs and values of Maslow's hierarchy. And our guide to the achievement of spiritual needs and values must be religion or philosophy -- or both in some mixture. There is nothing else. Human beings seem to need both basic and spiritual values. If the attainment of spiritual values is to be achieved, not on the basis of faith, but from reasoning about our experience, I think it is impossible for philosophy to ignore the deepest relevance of philosophy to human beings. I mean, existential philosophy. I think it impossible for existentialism to be wished away, ignored, or superseded.

In other words, I do not think philosophy is ultimately about a number of unsolved linguistic puzzles in the history of philosophy. Philosophy is ultimately valuable for its attempt to solve the deepest angsts of human life; for its attempt to solve the riddle of why sentient creatures are in the cosmos; and the enigma of what they are to do, cast as they are in the difficult situation of mortality.

So perhaps it would be useful at this point to consider the history of existentialism.

Thinkers have always felt the weight of existential struggle. The Ancient Greek and Roman Stoics emphasized fortitude, forming one's inner self to resist and endure the pain and struggle of existence. We can see in the youthful struggle of the German Christian theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546) to have faith a typical existential crisis. However, it is tempting to call the French mathematician and religious Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) the first existentialist. For Pascal was deeply concerned with man's fate, and believed that fate was essentially arbitrary. He reasoned with his existence, and chose religious faith on what he believed were rational grounds.

Pascal was also among the first to point out that justice on one side of a river becomes injustice on the other side. In other words, that human laws and values are relative. (The hidden implication was, that they are also arbitrary.) And Pascal believed that man, in his words "a thinking reed", is inevitably doomed to suffer because of the nature of human life.

These ideas are very existentialist. Yet such pessimistic ideas had been around for much longer than the early 1600s.

In ancient Egypt one can find, among the most ancient surviving documents, complaints about how the world has declined since the time of the ancestors. Children no longer obey their parents. Morality has grievously declined. Among the most certain of human truths is that many humans have always believed that the world is in a state of moral decline and decay, relative to the world of their past; that, as Canadian literary critic Herman Northrop Frye (1912-1991) used to say, all the paradises are lost ones.

In particular, religious people before Pascal had long believed in the inevitability of human suffering. The Indian philosopher-prince Siddhartha Gautama (known as Buddha, the "enlightened one"; 563?-483? B.C.E.) believed that the essence of human life was inescapable pain and suffering. The Persian teacher Mani (216-276? B.C.E.) believed that a great war was going on between absolute evil and absolute good; man is caught painfully between the two forces. The Gnostics (flourished a little after the time of Jesus of Nazareth until about 250 C.E.) believed that the official creator of the world was evil and ignorant; in His indifference or ignorance, He caused (or allowed) human suffering.

The Jews, on the other hand, believed that their national god the Lord actively watched over them and guided and interfered with their national history. Everything that happened was the express result of the will of the Lord of Israel. But the Lord was powerful and jealous; life on this earth for early Jews was life surrounded by dangerous national and religious enemies. Sometimes the Jews' demanding and supervising deity allowed them to be overrun by their enemies, to punish them for wickedness. Jews believed the Lord might or would reward the righteous ones, but that it was nevertheless their duty to serve Him regardless. Jews were not promised immortality in return for good life (although, by the time of Jesus, a few came round to that belief).

Christians, on the other hand, believed that for belief in Jesus and repentance of their sins they would inherit eternal life. For them, God's justice was real; if not on this earth during this life, then in heaven after it. They believed, often, that because their god was good, there was and should be justice on the earth.

Pascal, on the other hand, is like a throwback to those religious people and pre-Christian philosophers like Plato and Plotinus (205 -270 C.E.) who believed that something about the Earth or human life is just essentially hopeless. Perhaps the hopelessness is because our world is a faded duplicate of the World of Forms. Perhaps the hopelessness comes about because of death and suffering. But essentially many of the ancient philosophers and religious persons believed that elements of life on earth were hopelessly fouled.

Pascal has never struck me as a believing Christian. He seems to me like one who takes the Wager named famously after him: the wager of believing (or, more accurately, of claiming to believe) in Jesus because of the possibility that this may give one the infinite benefit of eternal life. But Pascal strikes me as one who genuinely does not know whether God exists. Like many a French literary figure on his deathbed, Pascal makes a kind of submission to official Catholicism.

I respect the 19th and 20th century existentialist philosophers because, it seems to me, they realize the horrible contingency of human life: namely, that one moment we are here, thriving, healthy, and successful -- and the next moment, fatally struck. They realize what Renaissance and Elizabethan scholars called "mutability" (change) hovers over us like the sword of Damocles. Human beings may sicken, be killed, or die naturally at any moment. This arbitrariness of things, to me, is the central situation of philosophy. It is the central situation of human life. It must cause us to ask philosophy's central question.

Which is, in my opinion: What do we do -- what can we do -- about our intolerable situation?

For me, most of the rest of philosophy -- epistemology (including logic), esthetics, politics -- is simply a group of less important puzzles. Human mortality and fate -- what in the English Renaissance was called mutability -- must be at the center of human philosophy.

Though pessimism about the arbitrary nature of things had been common in early religions, the movement we now call Existentialism began in the 19th century with the amazing Sören Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard was an eccentric Protestant Christian who felt that the religion of Denmark was a dead thing. The historian of myth Joseph Campbell once remarked that if one truly believed in Christianity, one would be frantically trying to escape Hell; Campbell seems to have felt that most Christian "believers" really didn't believe in Hell. (Just this last year, the Roman Catholic church has quietly let it be known that it no longer believes in Hell.³) But Kierkegaard, I think we can see, really did believe and really was afraid of Hell. He therefore lived an ascetic fanatic's life, renouncing marriage and attempting to rejuvenate Copenhagen Christians with his writings.

Kierkegaard abhorred the systematic philosophy of the German metaphysician Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), some of whose lectures he had attended. In his many books Kierkegaard emphasized the responsibility of each of us to choose the truth. He advocated that, like Abraham in the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, one trust in God; take, as we might say today, a "leap of faith" into belief in (presumably Protestant) Christianity. But, whatever one did, one had to act from one's subject, one's self, authentically; one's faith had to be genuine and alive.

I think few would be cheered by studying the results of his philosophy in Kierkegaard's own life. True, he lived as an individual. But he was somewhat eccentric and bizarre. He did not seem to achieve happiness. He broke off with his fiancé, and never married or had children. He died young, without any apparent influence or result for his time on earth.

Yet we cannot, I think, account him a failure. He lived according to his lights. He had an integrity toward his values. His ideas have been rediscovered, and are ubiquitous.

Dostoyevsky

Kierkegaard was forgotten for a long time. But the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) was not. In his novels he presented with graphic intensity what we must call the most extreme existential situations.

• The situation of Raskolnikov, a wretched student who seeks to transform his life utterly by murdering his landlady with a hatchet, and escaping the consequences of the crime.
• The situation of the epileptic idiot Myshkin, trying to trust and being cruelly abandoned.
• The situation of Stavrogin and the other nihilists in The Possessed.
• The situation of the brothers Karamazov, particularly Ivan and Dmitri, in a world where God is silent, humans are fallible, and humanity needs forgiveness.

[To Be Continued and Revised]

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Ayn Rand's Definition of Value

A value is "that which one acts to gain and/or to keep." (Rand, in "The Objectivist Ethics", in The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, pg. 15.)

Notes

¹Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pg. 2.

²Introduction, The Age of Analysis: 20th Century Philosophers, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1955, pg.1.

³ I have been assured by an e-mail correspondent that this is not so. The dogma of Hell cannot be changed, ever, by anyone. And yet it seems to me I read this on the front page of a reputable broadsheet newspaper, The (Toronto) Globe and Mail.

Sources

Barrett, William. What is Existentialism? New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1964.

Kaufmann, Walter. From Shakespeare to Existentialism. New York: Beacon Press, 1959.

Macquarrie, John. Existentialism. New York: World Publishing Co., 1972.

Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. 1962.

-------. Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. New York: Kappa Delta Pi Publications. 1964.

-------. Farther Reaches of Human Nature. 1971.

Microsoft Corporation. "Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich". Article. Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 2000.

------. "Maslow, Abraham Harold". Article, ibid.

Perls, Fritz. Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. New York: Bantam Books.

-------. In and Out the Garbage Pail. New York: Bantam Books.

Rogers, Carl. Client-Centered Therapy. New York:

-------. On Personal Power. New York:

Sheehy, Gail. Passages. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976.

White, Morton, ed. The Age of Analysis. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956.

------. Beyond the Outsider. London: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1965.

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