Steven Earnshaw's recent book, Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed, makes an important contribution to filling the absence of student and beginner-oriented literature on existentialism. Apart from David Cooper's book Existentialism (Blackwell, first released in 1991), there has been a dearth of decent introductory books on this subject, at least until Earnshaw's book and my own recently released Understanding Existentialism (Acumen 2006).

It is interesting to briefly compare the very different approaches of these three texts. Cooper's book is thematically oriented, and, despite its erudition and philosophical acumen, has a resulting tendency to sometimes make the differences between Sartre, Heidegger and others, difficult to pinpoint. My own book proceeds chronologically in relation to the main authors considered, and draws thematic comparisons as it proceeds. The weakness of this approach may be that what gives existentialism its structural integrity becomes difficult to discern, although I try to address this by having each of my chapters revolve around five key themes: 1. freedom; 2. death, finitude and mortality; 3. phenomenological experiences and 'moods'; 4. authenticity and responsibility; 5. a rejection of any external determination of morality or value, including certain conceptions of God and the emphasis upon rationality. Earnshaw's book, however, attempts to do both and more besides. Part One is structured around the key philosophers Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus (I think it unfortunate that de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty are missing). The shorter Part Two is structured around exploring key themes: being and self; phenomenology and consciousness; God and nothingness; freedom, ethics and commitment. Earnshaw's book also endeavors to pay significant attention to existentialist literature, something that neither my own book, nor Cooper's, do to the same extent. This breadth of ambition of Earnshaw's book is both a strength and a weakness. It means that his book would indeed make for very interesting reading for a perplexed individual, but this polyvalent approach arguably makes it less suitable for course-adoptions at university level, where a certain pedagogical necessity requires a more systematic way of proceeding than is generally afforded here.

While Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed is a valuable book, certain interpretive mistakes are made and these are particularly acute in relation to the philosophy of Sartre. While there is an enlightening and sustained discussion of Sartre's views of the emotions and imagination, the account offered here is mistaken in suggesting that being-in-itself is somehow part of consciousness, or pre-ontological consciousness (81). This is not the case. Sartre and Hazel Barnes explicitly equate consciousness with the for-itself; the in-itself, Barnes tells us, is 'non-conscious Being' (BN 630). Even though consciousness always requires a situation, a facticity (and this is not equivalent with the in-itself, which we can never know for quasi-Kantian reasons), for Sartre both reflective and pre-reflective consciousness are distinguished by negation, and involve merely different aspects of the for-itself (Sartre certainly does not think that in our unreflective action we are thing-like, an 'in-itself').  On the following page, Earnshaw also misconstrues Sartre's famous example of the 'Peeping Tom' who, wholly absorbed in peering through a keyhole, suddenly hear footsteps behind them and feel shame before the look of the Other. Earnshaw observes that they are thus rendered an 'in-itself'. Technically, this is again not the case, although there is clearly a phenomenological feeling of being objectified. Sartre explicitly argues, however, that this experience of being-for-others that the voyeur has is neither reducible to, nor derivable from, the categories of being-for-itself and being-in-itself. Likewise, the suggestion that being and consciousness are interchangeable for Sartre (81) is also wrong (on the contrary consciousness and nothingness are much closer to synonyms), and the description of Sartrean masochism is also misleading (87). Masochism is avowedly not an attempt to no longer by an object in the eyes of another (which would, in fact, be a sadistic project) as Earnshaw claims; for Sartre, it is the projecting of trying to be seen as a degraded object in the eyes of another, rather than, say, as a special or privileged object in the other's eyes (as Sartre somewhat pessimistically suggests we seek in love).

There are two final problems I have with this book, which are less to do with interpretive accuracy and more to do with the question of the relation between this branch of philosophy and the broader discipline. The discussion of postmodernism, and in particular the way in which the postmodern self is said to present a "simplified" version of the existential self is an example of my concern in this regard. I cannot conclusively argue against this here, but it is remarkable how an often complicated and not univocal philosophical position can be so easily dismissed. While this caricature of postmodernism does not significantly reduce the overall value of Earnshaw's book, at least for those of us who are primarily perplexed about existentialism, it is far too simplistic an account for those of us who also want to appreciate the subtle and ambiguous relation of influence that exists between many of the key existentialists and their successors on the French scene. Christina Howells' work, in particular, has shown the often surprising proximities that obtain between the Sartrean insistence on the impossibility of coincidence or unambiguous presence in selfhood, and the Derridean discussions of différance, etc.

Finally, Earnshaw suggests that phenomenology was a method that some of the twentieth century existentialists used in order to get to their main thematic concerns (freedom, self, God, etc.), but he argues that their concrete positions could have been reached without phenomenology (133). I think this is quite misleading. Although it is true that Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc., all utilized very different understandings of phenomenology, understandings that were also vastly different from the methods employed by Husserl, Earnshaw's assertion nonetheless seems implausible. Sartre, for example, initiated his account of freedom, bad faith, and his view of subjectivity in his phenomenologically-based attempt to refute Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego (1937). Heidegger also saw fundamental ontology, and thus the entire project of Being and Time, as synonymous with phenomenology, even if he too wanted to problematize the Husserlian understanding of the reduction. One possible reason Earnshaw fails to see the centrality of phenomenology to Heidegger and the French existentialists is that he seems to assume that phenomenology started and ended with Husserl. This is also perhaps why, in concluding the book and discussing 'the future of consciousness', he pays no attention to the plethora of literature on the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science. Phenomenology is still very much a live philosophy, constantly being reinvented, in a way that, sadly, cannot be said to be the case for existentialism.

© 2007 Jack Reynolds

Jack Reynolds, Ph.D., La Trobe University

Categories: Philosophical