Is Existence Intelligible?

Abstract

Is Existence Intelligible? Taylor Carman Half a century ago, the word “existentialism” referred to an intellectual trend that crossed genre boundaries as it crossed national borders, finding expression in not just philosophy and psychology but also literature, art and popular culture. More recently, philosophers have begun reclaiming the term for their own purposes. A 2017 collection of essays purports to broaden the humanistic reach of cognitive science, ushering in what the editors call “Third-Wave Existentialism” under the rubric, which is the title of the book, Neuroexistentialism (Caruso and Flanagan). Around the same time, Markus Gabriel, who wrote a vigorously critical review of that book, published an essay of his own entitled Neo-Existentialism, in which he invokes the term in support of his own version of Hegelian idealism (Gabriel). Neither attempt to appropriate the label is very convincing, in my view, but what Gabriel and the neuroexistentialists have in common, in spite of their differences, is that both are attempts to invoke the spirit of existentialism in the name of what I shall call “reconciling projects,” borrowing a phrase from David Hume. Neuroexistentialism tries to bridge cognitive neuroscience and the humanities. Neoexistentialism aspires to assimilate large swaths of contemporary philosophy into the grand vision of absolute idealism. A different but related attempt to combine rationalist and existentialist conceptions of human existence can be found in Martin Hägglund’s This Life, which is not explicitly an interpretation of either Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or Martin Heidegger but appeals to both throughout, if only tacitly, [End Page 931] in its construction of a philosophical reconciliation of freedom and nature, secularism and faith, social theory and theology.1 Here I want to make a case against all such reconciling projects in the name of existentialism. My plea on behalf of what might be called “good old-fashioned existentialism”—or perhaps paleoexistentialism—rests on a reading of existential philosophy as a philosophy of incommensurability and a vision of philosophy itself as concrete, realistic and antisystematic, in contrast to the abstraction, idealism and systematicity of traditional philosophy.2 Another way to put this is to say that existentialism is kind of antirationalism. By “rationalism” I mean the idea, traceable back to Parmenides, that being and thought are somehow identical or coincide. Rationalism defined in that way can also be called idealism—but more the absolute idealism of Hegel’s Logic than the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which at least draws a boundary between what he called “things in themselves” and our concepts.3 Robert Pippin has rightly characterized Hegelian absolute idealism as a reiteration of “the founding principle of Greek rationalism,” namely, “that to be is to be intelligible,” that “there is nothing in principle unintelligible” (168). If there is a single idea uniting the existential tradition, not just in philosophy, it is the denial of that claim. Although Søren Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre have interestingly different conceptions of existence, they are united in denying that it is transparent to reason or that it is identical or coincident with intelligibility. 1. That-Being as Facticity One way to understand the rationalist equation of thinking and being—or reason and existence—is to see that intelligibility, at least since Plato, has been understood in terms of the “whatness” or essence (essentia) of things, in contrast to their “thatness” or existence (existentia). [End Page 932] What something is is specified by the concept or category under which it falls. That it is is without determinate content of its own but functions simply as either a kind of volume knob or a mere on/off switch. Plato was not alone among the ancients in supposing that there are degrees of being—in his jargon, degrees to which a thing can be said to “participate” in a form or idea. To many in modern thought, by contrast, it has come to seem self-evident that being is an all-or-nothing affair: either a thing exists or it doesn’t. In either case, the existence of the thing to which a form, idea, concept or predicate (take your pick) applies is a matter of indifference to that form...