LIFE OF A HUMAN AS SEEN BY EXISTENTIALISM AND STRUCTURALISM
Human life and the concepts that revolve around it like life and death, social status, power, and freedom are seen very differently through the different theoretical views of structuralism and existentialism.
This article may appear to you like a fiery love story between philosophers and academic movements. So let me clarify something: The clashes of ideologies were never by any means romantic, and the figures we mention in this article are but the handful of hieroglyphs carved on the tip of the massive pyramid that is history. While these great men were indeed the glorious creations of history, at the same time, they were also just flesh-and-bone humans who wouldn’t survive the time. As a not-so-great man who lived in a different time and space, it would be difficult for whatever I make of this big story to not be an oversimplification, so I hope you would always bear that in mind and will, by yourselves, look into these people and concepts in case you want to learn more.
Basically, existentialism is the philosophical belief that the meaning of everything is a blank, and humans have to by themselves fill in that blank, whether it is for the meaning of the world or that of their own existence; humans have the power and capacity for that task. Structuralism, meanwhile, believes that whether or not there is meaning to anything, humans would not be able to comprehend it, and that applies to their existence as well; there is no liberty to fill in the blank like suggested by existentialism.
1. The rise and fall of existentialism
After the bloodbath that was World War II, France, which was the one to suffer the most from the war in the Western World, needed a hero to help it get back on its feet. Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher whose name was one with that of existentialism, became a hero. The diverse and inconsistent thought currents of the pre-war period that originated from both France and Germany (which was more or less torn apart by the catastrophe of German Nazism and the great war), such as Husserl’s Phenomenology, Heidegger’s Ontology, Lefebvre’s Marxism, Nietzsche’s nihilism, Freud’s Psychoanalysis, as well as the existential ideology that had been existing within Western literature and philosophy for over a century before that, was unified by Sartre in one same ideology system in his masterpiece written in 1943 — Being and Nothingness.
Jean-Paul Sartre pretty much became an intellectual celebrity to both the academic world and the public. And it was rare for France to have such a superstar, who were comparable to Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Jasper, Heidegger and many other crucial figures who all hailed from Germany. Before Sartre’s rise to stardom, France only had Henri Bergson to speak of for about half a century, and the next big name dated back centuries in history: Rene Descartes — the man who had laid the foundation for modern philosophy. Sartre’s name was so great he outshined almost every other post-war figure, The book Being and Nothingness by Sartre was compared by the next generation philosophy student Gilles Deleuze as a meteor falling on the lecture hall from heaven; meaning that the younger generation, no matter how hard they struggled with the limitless creativity they had, couldn’t create anything without passing the spectrum of influence that Sartre created [1].
So what is existentialism? Before discussing the content of this ideology, we need you to have a brief look into the history of the schools of philosophy that placed humans at the center of the world which were mutually termed as humanism. With its history spanning all the way from the early 15th century to the 20th century, humanism was massively influenced by the ideas on God and humans of Christianity, which was for the first time generalized into philosophical theory by Hildegard von Bingen [2] of the 11th century. Humanism was particularly flourishing in the 14th century’s Renaissance when the people of Europe were convinced that they could pull heaven down to earth and live like gods because they had the form of god. It explained why the sculpture David by Michelangelo had the shape of Aphrodite [3], the great religious paintings of Renaissance shared the same fetish for the vanishing point technique — which was a result of the biology of human eyes [4]. Until the Age of Enlightenment in the 16th century, with the trust in the limitless wisdom of humans, the philosophers had eliminated the presence of God from their philosophical reasoning. For example, like how Descartes was able to prove his own existence without citing Creationism or like how Spinoza replaced the role of the omnipotent Lord of Creation with the physical universe in its entirety and founded Pantheism — the denial of the existence of a sole Lord of Creation [5]. And with the declaration that “God is dead’’ by Nietzsche in the 19th century, Western thoughts had officially secularized, and especially thoroughly so compared to Medieval times [6].
If God was no longer around, then who would decide the fate and purpose of the life of men? Perhaps it was time for humans to grasp their fate with their own hands and find for themselves the meaning of life because God no longer did that for them. We were God because we had in our hands Science. You may say that Existentialism was the final summit of the development of humanism before the history of Western thoughts turned a new page. At least that was what Sartre had to claim when he wrote his book Existentialism as a Humanism. It highlighted the absolute stature of human individuality, off from the ground that was the social and natural lives.
Specifically, the core statement of existentialism was “Existence precedes essence” [7]. Put it simply, existentialism believed that humans were born without a predesigned roadmap, whether God-made or biological-made, to define their nature, or the way they would live or die. When a man is born, it is unquestionable that he’s existing, but that existence is empty of meaning and nature. And that was the reason why Sartre said: “Man is condemned to be free”. In a life without a predestined fate, humans have to create meanings for their own life; in other words, humans define what they are. So in order to live a meaningful life, each individual has to realize their emptiness of life purpose and thus sets out on the journey to consciously seek for their authentic self. The authentic self is a position within the society where the individual finds full consciousness of his own existence, the social responsibility that it bears, as well as of his power to create his own fate and meaning of life. Without that, an individual’s existence would, as argued by Sartre, be bad faith.
The legacy still accepted nowadays of the argument of “Existence precedes essence” would be its stand against essentialism and positivism. As existentialism believes that human nature is not predefined, that also makes it impossible to discover by natural science. Instead, a scholar would have to return to a more traditional way to look at humans, namely to see them as constantly changing entities. The problem with essentialism, though, was that Sartre reasoned it with a binary rationale greatly similar to that of Descartes — that human’s authentic self was transcendental, and that had more or less shot his previous arguments in the feet. Sartre believed that humans were constantly in the motion to find their authentic selves and to reach the state of transcendence. Meaning that regardless of how an individual was born, his existence could be fixed and intervened with to make him a better individual. We should keep in mind that Sartre was once a believer of Soviet Russia’s communist rules. He believed that Stalin’s ideal of communist humans was makeable. And as his belief was betrayed, Sartre officially gave up on communism when the Soviet tanks blood bathed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Indeed, to find the authentic self was something very difficult; so difficult that it seems impossible. Thus the existential allies of Sartre like Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett gave the notion that human existence was absurd, as a more fortified basis for Sartre. It was absurd in the sense that there was meaning preexisting the existence of humans. All the meanings of the world were what humans seeded into it. The path to the authentic self might have been a punishment like that on Sisyphus in Greek mythology — to push a boulder up to the top of a mountain just to see it roll back to where it originally is, and rinse and repeat till the end of time. So how can we break out of this dilemma? — Camus asked himself, and he found an answer — to commit suicide [8]. But don’t this “suicide” as to hang oneself or to cut one’s own wrist artery. For Camus, he was convinced that philosophical suicide was the only way for humans to attain true freedom. To physically commit suicide means to rob of God the right to end your life, so to commit philosophical suicide means to rob of God the right to define your meaning. When one questions himself on the meaning of his own existence, he has effectively stepped out of life, because no normal human would ask himself what the nature of his own existence is.
So this is where a lot of people would begin to ask: What purpose does it serve, the existence of existentialism? It didn’t mend a world shattered by the Great War, nor did it contribute any political ground to help with the war that followed it — the Cold War; it didn’t provide a methodological frame of reference for academic studies, and didn’t have an answer on what people had to do to make their life better either. As a result, existentialism faced lots of criticism, especially since the 50s of the 20th century. The Christians would discard it as a rebranded version of atheism. The communists would condemn it as a romantic ideology of the petite bourgeoisie. And then there were the critical theorists greatly influenced by structuralism, whom we will discuss in the next part of this article, to believe that existentialism was trying to pull humans back into some kind of primitive materialism. The senseless universe was one day suddenly occupied by the senseful humans, end of the story.
And obviously, any ideology that rises to the mainstream would become target for opponent thinkers. Martin Heidegger, the author of Being and Time — the book that was honored as the most influential work until the masterpiece of Sartre — had to claim that Sartre had completely misinterpreted him. In his Letter to Humanism, Heidegger explained how his view disagreed with Sartre’s, and of course, resorted to all sorts of ways to deny any ties with existentialism. The great French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty — a man of the same time as Sartre — also kept a distance from existentialism, and refuted Sartre’s Cartesian viewpoint by stating that the human body is the crystallization of existence, and there’s no such thing as the duality of body and soul. But the most pivotal criticism of existentialism might actually come from the generation of students that were taught by Sartre; the people who, even though not officially, were still grouped together as structuralists.
2. Structuralism and the end to the illusion of freedom
Also in the year of 1945, when Jean-Paul Sartre turned into a superstar philosopher, the 18-year-old boy Michel Foucault left his hometown Poitiers for his education at the famed pedagogical university on Ulm street, Paris — the École Normale Supérieure. Foucault was quick to be identified as a genius, and became friends with his professor Sartre, even though after that period, other than participating in the protests in Paris, they didn’t exchange so frequently. The reason was that after a short while, Foucault had grown completely fed up with the ideology of the authentic self of humans.
Foucault tried to kill a couple of times; he joined the French communist party by the invitation of his close friend Louis Althusser and bounced out of it just as fast. He traveled around Europe and met some great friends/teachers, such as Gaston Bachelard — the scientific philosopher who had contributed to the idea on the discontinuity of rationality in Foucault’s philosophy through the concept of epistemological break, Ludwig Binswanger — the Swiss phenomenological psychoanalyst who introduced him to the works of the great structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. And most importantly, Foucault gained some serious access to the works of Nietzsche and came to realize that the free human of existentialism was but an illusion because when humans killed God, they had also killed themselves — the shadow of his [9].
The relationship between Michel Foucault and structuralism was a rather complicated one; even Foucault himself also once said that his ideology was closer to the Russian formalism — the studies of the role of text with the structure of language — than the French structuralism. And, nonetheless, the French press somehow began to hail the Gang of Four of structuralism, which included Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. The story continued to grow even more haywire when we shift the discussion to the relationship between formalism and structuralism. It simply cannot be built into a linear storyline as we did for that of existentialism, because structuralism took its roots from lots and lots of different fields of study, namely: Linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism, while having surprisingly little of itself inherited from philosophy.
But what I can still do for you is to give you the statement that serves as the core of structuralism, and from that, we would step by step untangle the mess that is its history in the next section. Contrary to the individual freedom promoted by existentialism, structuralism believes that humans are already aware of their own selves, of the meaning of their lives, of their own birth and death within a structure much greater than themselves. And this structure is often defined by language.
These ideas originated from the linguist thesis of Ferdinand de Saussure [10]. De Saussure believed that all objects and phenomena that we come into contact within our daily life are all signs. To put it simply, humans access and understand the world by putting them into a frame that is a system of signs. A sign has two components — the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the physical surface of the sign, that consists of language, sounds, images, etc. The signified is the idea within the mind that humans have attached to that sign. For example, I want to convey to you an idea about a cup, but due to the limit of cognition, I have to use the intermediary that is language to convey that idea: “That is a cup!”. The cup would then be a sign that includes the signifier — the word “a cup”, the sound I make as I speak that word, and the image of the cup, and the signified — the idea of the cup that you and I have in our minds.
From this semiotic model, de Saussure made 3 theses on language: (1) The vocabulary surface of language is entirely speculative instead of having an absolute origination from the meaning for which it is used to convey; (2) The signs do not convey meanings by themselves, they only become meaningful when being banded together in a network; (3) The function of language isn’t to describe the existing world, but instead to help create a different world. Basically, humans exist in the world created by language more than in the physical world. While arguing that the linguistic world and the physical world were independent of each other, de Saussure also had the ambition that the nature of the world could be found within language. Or, precisely, the truth lies at the deepest part of what is being expressed inside our minds.
There were two big successors to de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics, one of whom was the Russian literary critic Roman Jakobson — who had to take refuge in the U.S. after Lenin overthrew the government in Moscow. He was also the coiner of the term “structuralism”. By sheer coincidence, the other successor — the anthropologist Levi-Strauss — also presented in the U.S. around that time, and met Jakobson in a conference. As he returned to France, Levi-Strauss also brought this term with him and developed it into an entire philosophical theory on human science. Levi-Strauss said that the identity of each human and each culture was defined by language structures. There were countless cultures in this world, but the rules of language structure applied universally everywhere. He argued that every culture was built based on the chain of binaries of sign A-what sign A isn’t, such as life-death, love-hate, right-wrong, high-low, clean-dirty, we-other, etc.
Levi-Strauss’s ambition was that by studying the rules existing within language, he would be able to find the nature of humans and culture. Because humans have always been the product of the language structure that they belong. Even freedom itself was but a factor that was born within the language and existed under the binary of freedom-slavery. Levi-Strauss named his studies structural anthropology. And this was also the largest nail hammered in the coffin of existentialism. Structuralism, after a short while, was replaced by post-structuralism — an academic approach that boasted the longest lifespan in the history of humanities studies. But we’ll save that discussion for another day.
So for these academic causes, existentialism gradually faded away into oblivion. At the end of the day, we would come to realize that to complain about the pointlessness of life and to seek the most authentic self was utter naivety, so naive that it was useless. Because in doing so the philosopher might have forgotten of the contexts that dictated the knowing of humans. Individuality was absolutized, and in that process, our social nature was also overlooked.
Back to Foucault, since his 18 y/o till him finishing his doctoral studies, he had written countless of books. But it was only until 1962 that he made his first masterpiece of a lifetime — Madness and Civilization. The target of the book’s criticism was none other than Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of the authentic self. Foucault [11] pointed out that by making humans’ mission be to find their authentic selves and criticizing the bad faith, Sartre had ignored the influence of history and culture over humans. An authentic self would never be the finish line for the meaning of human life; it was but a product of 19th century Europe. In previous times and different societies, there was no standard for cognitive capacity, because cognition was shaped by context. And the further we dig into history, the more we’ll find of the different forms that the self of human used to take. Existentialism’s authentic self was nothing other than an attempt to absolutize Western rationalism.
Foucault’s second assault against existentialist philosophy was fully packed in the second of his greatest works — The Order of Things. This book was precisely what brought Foucault to replace Sartre as the most important scholar of France. In The Order of Things, Foucault [12] presented a massive range of problems across various fields of studies that were made out as natural by existentialism, to name a few: language, history, intellect, truth, etc. The most crucial concept is that every thought and behavior of individual humans, which were considered completely free of constraints by existentialism, had been proven by Foucault to be a product of a massive social structure. Existentialism and structuralism might agree at one point, that is, nobody is born human, they are born to become human. But there is one crucial difference: while existentialism believed that becoming human was a decision laid solely in the hand of individuals, structuralism believed the becoming was dictated by how the times, culture, and geography morphed the individual.
And with that, human life and the concepts that revolve around it like life and death, social status, power, and freedom are seen very differently through the different theoretical views of structuralism and existentialism. And despite that existentialism had been defeated in the front of philosophy, it could still help out our cognition in other ways. It created an overly dazzling illusion of the free humans who dared to charge in the nothingness to build meaning for their own life. It was the idealism that was the downfall of existentialism to be replaced by the much more pessimistic outlook on the human life of structuralism. Who are we born to become? The structure decides that. How do we perceive ourselves? The structure decides that. How should we face those two most important moments of human life — our birth and death? The structure also decides that.
Albert Camus [13] said: “Between this sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion — only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch”. It was indeed such a great pain and sorrow, to realize the utter loneliness of humankind within the empty universe. But structuralism would tell you that wasn’t the worst. The worst thing about being humans would be that they’d never reach any ultimate truth, including that of life and death. They were but soulless puppets to the larger structure that they lived in.
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References:
[1], [9] J. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000.
[2], [3] R. Braidotti, The posthuman. New York: Polity Press, 2014.
[4] J. Berger, Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 2008.
[5] J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
[6] F. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra. London: Arcturus, 2019.
[7] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2020, Jun 9). Existentialism [online]. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/
[8] A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage Books, 2018.
[10] P. Barry and J. McLeod, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory: Fourth Edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.
[11] M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Random House US, 2013.
[12] M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2018.
[13] A. Camus, and P. Thody, Lyrical and Critical Essays. New York: Knopf, 1968.
