On Existentialism and Education...

(We present below two statements on the significance of Existentialism for American education. Both are the statements of educational philosophers; but they were written and submitted separately, and each is to be conceived as the response of "a particular man" It seems to us to be significant that existential philosophies have aroused such widespread interest among educators; and the fact that the two papers which follow come from widely separated sections of the country may be an indication that people in many American places are responding to what Dr. Morris speaks of as a "summons." Dealing with freedom, selfhood, values, and ^“the absurd," the two writers make possible a certain amount of clarity with respect to ideas too frequently considered esoteric or odd. Neither would consider himself to be a definitive spokesman; both would want to launch the reader into his own inquiries, once the reader's interest is aroused. The Editor.)

FROM VAN CLEVE MORRIS:

As philosophies go, Existentialism is something of a special case. For one thing, although its themes are very old, they are offered to us with a sense of arrest and poignancy rather untypical of what we have come to regard as the philosophic temperament. These themes have a haunting quality, and although modern men like to think of themselves as sophisticated and hard-boiled, they are never entirely free of the sense of haunt in considering man's situation.

For another, Existentialism's message is not to man in general, but to a particular man trying to define with his life that which makes him human. It is always addressed to one person at a time. In this sense, it is not a program but a summons. Finally, Existentialism directs our attention to the tragic elements of the human condition. Most philosophies are argued from a sense of hope. This philosophy does not deny hope, exactly; rather, it throws the possibility of hope back into our faces.

By now, Existentialism's main ideas are familiar. It begins with one of the oldest of philosophical ideas—the contingency of the universe. By this we mean simply that the world seems to have no reason for being. But instead of trying to fight its way through this contingency as has been the case with classical and medieval philosophies, or simply ignoring the problem altogether as irrelevant, as is the case with modern scientific philosophies, Existentialism dares to make this very contingency the precarious platform for a view of life. It plants us down before this agonizing question and announces that we can neither see through it nor turn from it. We are required to ponder it. And if the world doesn't make any sense, let us not call it by the polite term "contingent." Let's come right out and call it "absurd." Because that, in fact, is what it is.

ABSURD BEGINNINGS

Let us remember also that if the world is absurd, then so are we. Indeed, the most absurd thing in an absurd world is a being who does not realize he is absurd. And by absurd, I mean that our personal existing makes no sense. My existing is literally nonsensical. And this philosophy, for the moment, lets the matter stand right there. It does not show me the way through this absurdity, nor does it let me turn away from it. I am chained to this puzzle—the reason for my existing. Now what are we going to make of this impossible predicament? Is this the occasion for despair? Well, some people think so. But such a response misses the point. It is only when my existing is seen as completely without reason that I can start assigning my own reasons to it. Absurdity is therefore the ground of human freedom. If the being-in-the-world of Van Cleve Morris had a reason, I would not be a free agent in deciding for myself what that reason is. And if I do not have that basic freedom—that is, the freedom to decide the reason for my being-in-the-world—then no other freedom can possibly mean anything. It is this feature of Existentialism which is exhilaratingly positive in thrust, rather than negative and nihilistic as most people persist in thinking of it.

Some writers, it is true, continue to reflect the popular stereotype. Robert Olson, in a very readable little volume on the subject, interprets the Existentialists to be saying that "Man could not become happy without ceasing to be man."1 I have myself been introduced to people at national conferences as "that most paradoxical of creatures, a happy Existentialist."

Well, perhaps there is more than one way to take this philosophy. Certainly sadness is one of them, and one ought not diminish the difficulty of living this kind of life. But, there is more to Existentialism than sadness, as important as this mood might be as a starting place from which to set out. There is an excitement and exhilaration, a sense of inner power one feels when he faces up to absurdity without flinching, when he is not intimidated by knowing that he is a nonsensical entity in the world, and—in the late Paul Tillich's words—has "the courage to be." This positive note is struck in a remark by Garland Usher; in discussing Heidegger's "shudder before death," he says: "Man is not different from the animals because he dies, but because he knows—and can live with the knowledge—that he is fastened to a dying animal."2 To paraphrase for present purposes, we might say that man knows—and can live with the knowledge—that he makes no sense, that he is absurd in an absurd world. This seemingly unpromising stance and posture, when we look at it closely, actually offers fresh possibilities for the human career.

CHOOSING VALUES

But what of this freedom made possible by our radical absurdity? Just this: Man is the maker of values. He is the maker of values because his radical freedom puts him in the predicament of having to choose. He has to choose what his reason for being is. Every morning, he gets up and sets out on certain projects. He makes plans, he decides to pursue some ends and not others. If you add up all of the mornings, you will find a human life being lived out by a being who has chosen certain things to devote his life to. And what can these ten thousands of choices be but small building blocks of the structure of his life? They represent what he thinks his life should be devoted to. Taken as a whole, they represent what he considers his reason for being-in-the-world. A life is a project in choosing. And since choosing is, by definition, opting for one thing as against other things it is inevitably a value operation in the sense that what is opted for is thought of as being better than what was not opted for. Choice, then, is the primitive function out of which values come. And when choices are piled upon one another—as they are in a human life—then we can say that men carve out what they believe to be their meaning in the world. It is in the living of a single human life—what the Existentialist calls the human project—that man creates values. He creates them out of the nothingness, out of the absurdity, out of the very lack of meaning that his existence has.

The human creation of values must be understood against the backdrop of absurdity. That is, none of the values man creates has any warrant in a total sense. It is not enough to point out, as Dewey did, that man has both instrumental and intrinsic values, those which function as mediating and those which are simply immediate. By now, this is a truism with which none of us can disagree. What is necessary is to make the further claim that none of man's values, particularly the intrinsic ones, is justified. And that is simply because man himself is not justified. Since his very being is absurd, whatever values he concocts are themselves totally absurd.

ARBITRARINESS

This is what the Existentialist means when he says that all human values are arbitrary. They are arbitrary in the sense that they cannot be justified. They spring from the absurd base of man's freedom. And since freedom is the very medium out of which values can come in the first place, it is a contradiction in terms to speak of human freedom on the one hand and the justification of values on the other. So, we are driven inexorably to the axiological position that man's values are themselves arbitrary and unwarranted and unjustified.

Those who find it difficult to accept this argument must remember that there is more than one attitude one can take toward it. Specifically, one does not have to think, upon hearing that values are arbitrary, that he is not entitled to hold to some values. This is an all too common reaction; people get the notion that they can't believe in anything unless it has some kind of final justification. This is ridiculous. If a man justifies one value by another—and we all do—and if he then justifies the higher value with still another, there must come a time when he runs out of justifications. He has bumped his head against the ceiling of values. There are no more justifications. This is usually the case with some holistic or global value such as "Human life is sacred," or "Lying is wrong," or "Peace is better than war." At this point, the justifications are exhausted. There are no more reasons to be put forward to justify these value statements. But this does not mean that one has no right to such values. All it means is that when one says he believes in a value of this magnitude, he must also admit that he holds such a value arbitrarily, in the sense that he cannot offer further reasons for believing in it. He is, in any case, a genuine creator, an inventor of reasons for looking at something the way he does.

Perhaps the trouble lies in the word "arbitrary." To many of us, it sounds bad. It conjures up all kinds of notions about whim or caprice or vicious willfulness. But if this is all the word meant, why then do we talk about arbitrators to disputes? Certainly an arbitrator is not brought into a dispute in order to hand out merely willful or capricious decisions. On the contrary, we bring arbitrators in precisely because they think through their decisions before handing them down. But the point is that their decisions are arbitrary in the sense that there are no ultimate reasons that can be offered in support of these decisions. If there were reasons, then arbitrators would be merely clerks, sifting out the right reasons for viewing a dispute in this way or that. But arbitrators are not just clerks. They are brought into disputes precisely because the precedents and arguments and rationale for deciding them are lacking. So the arbitrator is brought in to decide. And, in the act of deciding, he creates an arbitrary value—in the technical sense that he has offered us a decision which has no further reasons to justify it.

HUMAN RELATIONS

Another Existentialist idea worth touching briefly consists of the attitude of man to his fellow man. Throughout Existentialist literature, but particularly in Sartre, Buber, and Marcel, the problem of other people is considered with a concern and care quite unusual in philosophy. Elsewhere in the tradition of philosophical thinking, especially in our contemporary empiricisms, man's gregariousness and sociality are taken for granted. Not only that, man's sociality is somehow thought of implicitly as a good thing, something to be glad of. In Dewey's Experimentalism, for instance, we find great emphasis accorded to social endeavor and the sharing of experience. In Dewey, it is almost as if human experience simply had to be social in order to be experience at all.

Existentialism not only rejects this; it offers something in its place. It provides us with a very helpful analysis of human relations which goes considerably deeper than what we have been used to in the earlier philosophies. Man's relation to others can be understood under two modes. Buber calls these two the "I—Thou" and the "I—It" relations. Gabriel Marcel speaks of a "presence" and of an "Object." Sartre in his analysis of "the Look" presents us with human subjectivity and the "hell" of other people. All of these conceptions can be brought together by saying that man sees his fellows both as things and also as selves. The relation with others is therefore not quite so benign as Dewey had always seemed to assume. This relation is always fraught with the possibility that what began as an I—Thou relation would any moment collapse into an I—It relation.

In this sense, Sartre perhaps put the matter most bluntly—certainly more bluntly than Buber or Marcel would have done—by saying that other people represent a serious threat to my humanness. For if I recognize that I can see others as things, it is altogether easy to realize that they can see me also as a thing. Hence, the other when he sees me as a thing in his experience is my absolute enemy because his regard for me in this way destroys in one stroke my freedom. So long as he gazes at me as a thing, whatever I do is on his behalf.

Existentialism finds in this threatening relationship the basic criticism it levels against the behavioral sciences. Science, when applied to man's behavior, cannot avoid treating human beings as things! The behavioral sciences are not interested in private, personal motivation; they are interested in overt behavior. The only way in which a social scientist can study human motivation is to make it overt verbal behavior on a questionnaire. And by the time motivations which are objectified and recorded in this way are run through the machines and are plotted on charts and graphs, they have lost whatever person-alky they began with. To the Existentialist, therefore, there is an ideological collision between Existentialism and what we may generalize as "the social science view of man."

PROGRAMMATIC SIGNIFICANCE

We may turn now to the challenge presented to us by this account of the human situation. This may be looked at in two ways. The first we may describe as the programmatic concern—that is, the manner in which education is studied in this country, how educationists go about comprehending the nature of the learning process, the role of schools, and the general mission of the teaching profession. The other has to do more specifically with the pedagogical concern, that is, how we teach young people, how teachers conduct a class, what kinds of questions they ask and why.

First, the programmatic concern. The most general challenge is that presented to us by considering the world and its contents as absurd. The challenge may be more psychological than anything else, and can be phrased somewhat as follows: Can educators approach their work with the nagging notion in the back of their skull that there is no over-all reason for what they are doing? The Existentialist would like to put this question to the teachers of America. Why? Not just to shock them or unnerve them, but rather to jar them into total consciousness of what they are about. If education is the bringing of the young into some state of awareness which we associate with adulthood, and if the existential awareness of radical absurdity is one of those contemporary awarenesses of adults, then how can educators—those who practice it and those who study it—possibly avoid this question? But not only that. Earlier the idea was developed that you have to have a pretty healthy idea of your own absurdity before you can turn yourself around and start out on the positive program of creating your own reasons for being. If this general principle can now be vocationalized, I should say that you have to have a healthy notion of your absurdity as an educator and the absurdity of the entire educational enterprise before you can address your work with the idea of creatively assigning your own reasons for there being an educational profession in the world. If absurdity is the ground of freedom in the larger sphere of human experience, it most certainly is the ground of freedom in the vocational and professional sphere.

Not many of us have been willing to accept this challenge to awaken to our own absurdity as professional educators. For one thing, we take ourselves awfully seriously. And when questions are raised about why we have made a career of education or what role education plays in the destiny of man, we are all too ready to come forward with propositions which are very grand in scope and which purport to justify our work at a sufficiently high level of abstaction as to be beyond the reach of criticism. We trot out the idea of the "search for truth" being the highest human pursuit, and since most people will not argue with that, we feel we have somehow justified ourselves. But all of us know that this is a deception; it is an instance of professional inauthenticity to rely on some General Excuse for what one is doing.

If the above is a general complaint, how might we view more specific programmatic challenges which Existentialism poses? How, in fact, do we study education in this country and what would an Existentialist think of it?

ANTI-GROUP

A few years ago, many of us were agitated about the strong motif of sociality that ran through all discussions of teaching and learning. The fatal mistake being made by Progressive education and by those ancillary theories which had been formulated from an Experimentalist base was to see the learner exclusively in social terms. Not only had social development drawn even with intellectual development as a coordinate aim of the school, but it almost seemed as if social development were the only thing that really mattered in the long run, and that even intellectual development itself would find an outlet only in social undertakings.

Not only that, but the students in our teacher education institutions and of course the professors who taught them were coming to rely almost totally on the social and behavioral sciences for the basic concepts out of which to develop educational programs. The professor of education found himself going to anthropology, to sociology, and most strenuously to psychology for almost all of his basic concepts. Those were the days—no longer ago than the decade of the 40’s—that saw professional educationists laying the theoretical foundations for group dynamics, group process, socio-drama, social promotion, social adjustment, peer group influence, and king of all, human relations. Problem-solving as a theory of pedagogy was somehow converted into problem-solving-with-others theory. There was no problem-solving by oneself.

We are still very much in this epoch—the “group dynamics” epoch of educational study. We still see the teaching-learning process very much in these terms. Existentialist theory, particularly that portion of it dealing with the problem of “other people” (discussed above) finds a lot to argue with in this tradition. Obviously, if professors of education get most of their concepts out of the behavioral sciences and if these sciences must treat human beings as things in order to learn anything about them, then it must follow that the concepts that derive from these fields are afflicted with the same fault, namely, that they show the prospective teacher how to deal with his students as so many problem-solving group operators in the classroom setting. These concepts objectify the role of the learner in the classroom situation; the prospective teacher comes to understand his function as one of managing the group process, and the individuals making up the group are not human beings but group functionaries. They are seen not so much for what they are as a person as for what they are as responders to other functionaries. It is this de-personalizing of the learner in this phase of educational study which too much characterizes today’s education.

ANTI-STRUCTURE

But now something of a new deviation is showing itself which is equally antithetical to Existentialism. The professor of education is now turning to the physical sciences and to mathematics for his newest models of pedagogy. I am not referring necessarily to B. F. Skinner nor to teaching machines and programing. I am referring to some other subtle assumptions that seem to be working their way into educational thinking. Those assumptions make two claims: 1) that all knowledge has a structure, and 2) that learners are structure-seeing organisms and that learning is principally the business of seeing the various structures of knowledge.

An example may be helpful here. Educators are still talking about education in the light of that old cliché, “behavioral objectives.” This is typical enough among educators who champion the “human relations” principle of sociality discussed above. But now the cliché is beginning to take on a slightly different ring. The so-called “behavioral objectives” are now being understood more and more as the verbal behavior by which youngsters comprehend the structure of subject matter. Doing means talking in the new structure-oriented pedagogy.

What this has to mean is that the new breed of education professor sees the learner as a structure-seeing organism, and further that the structure of knowledge is more important than an individual's personal subjective response to that subject matter, whether he gets the hang of its structure or not. It may be a matter of question whether all knowledge can be seen in structural terms. But certainly the end result of this line of thinking, correct or incorrect, will be to depreciate still further the learner's personalized, individualized reaction to what he is learning. This means that once again we are seeing the rise of a pedagogy which continues to view learners as things—not so much, it is true, as group functionaries but as "structure-seeing" concept receivers.

THE SYSTEMS PROBLEM

Recently, there has been much discussion of the so-called "new media" in teacher education: television, tape recordings, programed machines, and other types of hardware. Having run out of ideas, the discussion is taking an interesting turn: now the impulse is to put several of these contraptions together into what they call a "teaching system." A system is to teaching what a structure is to a body of knowledge. When you start talking about teaching systems, you are no longer talking about instruction for real human beings. You are talking instead about some objectifiable set of performances which, when completed, will have resulted in the ability to manipulate experience in a certain way. The Xerox Corporation is now advertising what they call Basic Systems, a category of teaching devices which presumably can be used by the individual to learn anything from flower arranging, to spelling, to how to play chess, or even how to read articles like this one with greater take-home intellectual income.

Perhaps we should applaud these "efficiency-expert" developments in the educational industry. But the danger may be that this whole line of thinking may begin to feed on itself to the point of pre-empting for itself the entirety of what goes on in human learning. All instruction will somehow be thought inadequate if it cannot be analyzed in systemized terms. Just as the sociality principle has taken charge in American education and helped to depersonalize the learning process, so likewise are we now about to witness the ascendancy of the systems principle which will inevitably lead to the further depersonalization of the learning process.

To conclude this discussion of the "programmatic" challenge to contemporary study of education, it is enough to say that the Existentialist conception of knowledge is highly individualized and personal. Knowledge becomes knowledge when it is appropriated by an individual human being. And "appropriation" is to be understood in its literal sense of "making one's own." This conception of knowledge stands opposed to the evident epistemology of the systems people. To them, knowledge continues to be highly objective, so objective as a matter of fact that it can be presented to boys and girls in an environmental system, an experience one could characterize as a kind of "automated happening." If this is the next development of the theater of the absurd, the Existentialist would say that they are going too far!

PEDAGOGICAL CHALLENGES

I turn now to some comments about the relevance of Existentialism when it comes to matters of direct pedagogy and classroom procedure. Perhaps the best place to start is with the question we have just left, namely, the creeping depersonalization of the learning process. This depersonalization is the result first of the heavy impact of the behavioral sciences on teacher training and, second, the more recent movement to chop teaching up into systems. The first of these influences—that of the behavioral sciences—has tended to turn the classroom into a social group activity where the teacher assumes the role of a “research project director.” The teacher is not the authority of some subject matter, but rather the manager of the exploratory process, the helping agent in the students’ development of their group projects.

The emphasis of such a pedagogy is on the method of study rather than on the content of study. Boys and girls are drawn together in group interests and set to work on group projects; what they are to learn is not so much the object of their search as how one goes about learning. Thus, mastery of method displaces mastery of content as the principle aim of instruction. The Existentialist would find in this pedagogy merely another instance of always steering clear of the child himself as the center of pedagogical interest. It is now the methodology of life to which the child’s attention is directed. But the methodology of life, quite the same as the content of subject matter, still lies outside the child’s subjectivity. It lies outside in the sense that the child is expected to adjust to it—to the method—rather than the other way around—that is, making life adjust to him. Hence, this pedagogy continues to move away from the center of all learning, the child’s selfhood and sense of personal identity in the world.

As for the second influence on education, namely, the systems approach, this influence seems to make of the classroom a kind of “learning theater” with the innuendo always implicit that the teacher is some kind of theatrical producer or stage manager who turns on the stage lights, pushes the buttons for certain operations to begin, and generally moves about through a stage set of appliances, visual aids, and environmental stimulators in an effort to maximize the impact of the proceedings on the learner’s attention.

The emphasis of this kind of pedagogy is the same: The learner’s attention is drawn not so much to the methodology of inquiry—as was true in the instance just cited—but rather to the variety of sensory receivers he can use (top limit being five) to comprehend some feature of a symbolic world. His interest is solicited, let us say, in the structure of mathematics or physics. And what makes this system-oriented teaching different is that it attempts to present these structures to the learner in many different ways, thus relieving the printed or spoken word of the entire burden. But what do we have here? We have a pedagogy which continues, like the first kind, to keep the learner’s attention focused on something outside himself and his own response to hi environment. He is expected not so much to engage in inquiry with his peers according to some official method, but rather to sit back and let the world’s truth—edited into sensory systems—feed slowly into the veins in his brain. It is rather like psychological intravenous feeding, where a big bottle slowly drips its contents into the cranium.

THE ABSENT SELF

The Existentialist reaction to this kind of business is what you could expect—a reaction somewhere between dismay and sadness. When, he might ask us, are you going to start putting the learner at the center of the learning act? You’ve been talking about this for at least fifty years but you’re not there yet; you keep thinking up these diversionary tactics to postpone the awful day when the learner himself becomes the focus of attention—not only by the teacher, but by himself.

Having said this in just this way, I must admit not being entirely prepared to go on and suggest just what such a pedagogy would be. One thing, however, is obviously, namely, that such a pedagogy will attempt to awaken the child’s sense of value. Most of our learning in today’s schools is relatively value-free; we do not pose value questions to the learner for him to figure out. This is one result of the depersonalization process just discussed; so long as you depersonalize the learning activity by centering the child’s attention on an official method or on a conceptual system, there is no time to trouble the child with matters of right and wrong or good and bad. But it is precisely in such questions where the personal element in education can begin to take hold. And hence the principal Existentialist challenge to our present-day pedagogy would appear to be the injunction to lay before the learner in school more of those experiences in which he has to make up his own mind as to what is right or wrong with the world.

In this connection, there are occasional references in Existentialist literature to the possibility of resurrecting the Socratic method of teaching as a way of satisfying this injunction. It so happens, fortunately, that Socrates did ask some questions to which he did not know the answer. It is in this type of inquiry that we may find the paradigm we are looking for. Such questions arise principally in the field of value. Now, some critics might say that Socrates did not know the answers to these questions simply because they do not have answers. That is not correct. They do have answers. But these answers are all personal. They are answers which cannot be generalized and assigned to universal features of the world; they are always “how I see it.” They differ radically therefore from answers to empirical questions. But they belong in the teacher’s repertoire because they provide the occasion on which the teacher can get the learner to take charge of his own learning. Such questions as these focus attention not so much on the learner’s selfhood as upon how this selfhood responds to the world. And it is this that the Existentialist is driving at. For it is in the activity of responding to the world that we get individual assessments of the human condition. Moreover we get, in this kind of responding, an increasing sensibility of the individual to the necessity for him to choose his own answers on these questions as he lives out his life. And it is the intense awareness of his necessity for choice which will show the youngster that he is finally grown up and ready to begin the difficult but exciting business of being an adult. He wakes up to the fact that choosing his own answers to the Socratic questions of the teacher is an act of creation. It is the creation of answers that belong exclusively to him. And thee answers are the created values of his own life. They are built up out of nothing but the subjectivity of his own awareness. He therefore begins to witness the emergence of an existent—an instance of existing, i.e., himself—which, being absurd and without justification, is at the ground floor of creating values. He thus begins to witness the emergence of a free person, an individual who knows he has no reason for being, who knows he must choose, and who knows that his life will be authentic only if he decides to make it so.

FROM LEROY TROUTNER:

Although a wide gulf separates the Logical Positivist from the existential philosopher, they do have one thing in common: both are extremely critical of philosophical systems—but for different reasons. Whereas the Logical Positivist's protest is based upon the impossibility of empirically verifying the propositions necessary to build a metaphysical system, the existential philosopher bases his protest on human rather than scientific grounds. His claim is that in any highly structured system of thought the existing individual somehow gets lost, much as Kafka's hero got lost in the castle.3 Under these conditions the major metaphysical categories, by the sheer force of their generalizing power, tend to dominate the entire formulation, including any description of man.

In his consideration of man, the existential thinker differs from Aristotle and from John Dewey. Aristotle's definition of man as "a rational animal" was formulated in terms of and in relation to his metaphysical principles of thing-hood, form, and matter. Dewey tended to see man in terms of biology—as a "psycho-biological problem-solving organism." In both cases, the whatness of man is described in terms of a larger metaphysical view of the world. In both cases, the particularity and concretness of man suffer.

In contrast, the existential thinker uses human existence itself as his point of departure. Beginning this way, he is careful not to prejudice the investigation by asking "What is man?". He does not ask because the very question rests on an implicit assumption that man is a thing. Man may be viewed as a thing, but he is much more than a thing. Existentially speaking, he is more than the kind of a thing that a flower is or a horse, plus rationality. The existential thinker will ask, "What is a flower?" or "What is a horse?": but, when referring to man, he will ask "Who is man?" As a what, man is readily explainable; as a who, "he is both a mystery and a surprise."4

EXISTENCE PRECEDES

So far we have tentatively identified the concrete and particular "who of man" as the point of departure for the existential thinker.5 Also, we have noted his concern that none of the traditional meanings of "man" be used in the investigation for fear of pre-judging it. What is probably the most famous of all definitions of existentialism seems to reaffirm these two ideas. Jean-Paul Sartre claims that, although the exponents of this movement differ on many points, they do have in common one belief, i.e. "they believe that existence comes before essence—or, if you will, we must begin with the subjective."6 Sartre seems to be saying that we must look to man's existence to find his essential meaning, and that we must accept this existence as a fact without any preconceived notions about man's essence.

Many would disagree with the claim that man's essence is to be found in his existence, of course. Herbert Spiegelberg says that Sartre's "neat though mystifying" definition "has been repudiated, with good reason, by everyone but himself."7 Walter Kaufmann writes that it has been repudiated by both Heidegger and Jaspers and "ought to be repudiated by Sartre too, because it is no less unfair to his own thought."8 Nevertheless, although the meanings of the categories and their relationship differ with each thinker, most existentialists would agree that the categories of existence and essence are relevant to existential thought. They might also agree with Ronald Grimsley when he writes: ”It is precisely the way in which he ‘exists’ and ‘acts’ that expresses the ‘essence’ of what we mean by ‘man’.”9

The existentialist at least know where not to start his investigation. He will not begin with any of the existing constructions concerning the nature of man as a rational animal, problem-solving organism, etc., because they have too long concealed the phenomenon which he wants to get at. All the old sedimented layers of secondary meanings must be cleared away so that we can start out with existence as primordial and preconceptual, i.e., naked, pulsing life before it has been clothed with any sort of conceptual structuring. Of course, in any attempt to get at the phenomenon in question we must use language. Eventually, we will need new concepts in order to illuminate existence. But the hope is that the new “naming” will refer not to the essence of man as derived in terms of some prior imposed metaphysical position such as Aristotle’s or Dewey’s, but rather that it will refer more closely to human existence as revealed immediately. We are being asked to follow the lead of Heidegger who, in all his lengthy discussions of existence, did not use the word “man” at all. By so doing he avoided the assumption that we are dealing with a definite object with a fixed nature—that we already know, in short, who man is.10

THE SUBJECTIVE

The existential thinker may well know where not to start. But precisely where is he going to begin and how is existence to be revealed? Sartre answers this question in his definition: “we must begin with the subjective.” The existential philosopher is attempting to open up for understanding a perspective of man as human existent “looking-from-the-inside-out-into-the-world.” This involves an analysis and description of the various moods that each of us experiences in the living of a life. In fact, existence is revealed primarily through moods—such as anxiety, alienation, despair, and guilt. Existence is a perspective of each man in his “lived reality.” It is immediate, subjective and always comes in a package labeled MINE. As a vantage point it encompasses the heart and center of human life itself. The existentialist is trying to recover our own lives intellectually as a theme for clarification. So he asks not what is man “out there,” but “who is man as subject?”

In asking this question the existential thinker is faced with a very difficult problem. How can you get at this primordial, preconceptual phenomenon for purposes of description? How can you conceptualize existence? “But,” someone might interject, “why is this a problem? I know what existence is. I can feel it, I can sense it. In fact, I am existence. So why is it so difficult to philosophize about and put into language?” The major problem of all existential thinkers issues for this statement of fact: “I am existence.”

If “I am existence” how can one construct a “philosophy of existence?” It does not take any profound analysis to bring out what seems to a contradiction between “existence” and “philosophy” as most philosophers traditionally use the words. Existence is immediate, here and now, concrete, always one’s own, self-conscious and thoroughly subjective. Philosophy, on the other hand, is usually thought of in terms of conceptualization and theorizing, involving a certain detachment between the thinker and the object of his thought. So how can you connect the two? How can you philosophize about existence without changing it into something else? All existentialists grapple with this problem of how to think about and express existence in a philosophical way.11

AGAINST DETACHMENT

Consider again, for example, a philosopher such as Aristotle from the Existentialist’s point of view. The act of thinking about philosophical matters presupposed a certain distance between himself and the object of his investigations. Reality for him was “out there” and could be thought about and reflected upon. Individual things, including man, were all seen as natural objects; consequently he was able to work with a sense of detachment, since he himself was not inexorably involved in the object of contemplation. The existentialist, on the other hand, is committed to an examination of and a concern for the concrete particularity of existence of which he himself forms a part. Consequently, he finds it extremely difficult to separate himself from the object of his thought.

So we see that there is something very special about asking the existential question Who? It is noticeably unlike other philosophical questions because here the subject of inquiry is not just another natural object “out there”; and it cannot be treated as such. As in no other philosophical mode of inquiry, we find a reflective coincidence between the inquirer and the object of his inquiry. 12 To ask “Who is Man?” is to be forced into a concern about one’s self as meaning and as man. There is only one door that leads to a serious consideration of this question and that door is my existential self. Why this single access? Because here you cannot completely objectify the object of your thought, because here the inquirer is also the object of inquiry. To question “Who is Man?” seems to force us into a prior question, “Who am I?”

WHO AM I?

I know that "I am." I know that when I walk out that door I will not meet myself coming in. But this radical certainty quickly vanishes when I try to consider who "I am." What is the essence of me as human existent? Suppose I fill out an exhaustive questionnaire about myself listing all the conceivable facts about me from the color of my eyes to the centimeters of my toes, and describing all the various roles that I have played in my life to date. For good measure, I might include all my likes and dislikes in the inventory—on a proper sliding scale, of course. Finally, I might assemble all my friends and throw their collective descriptions of me into the hopper. Am I the sum total of all the descriptions and facts that can possibly be supplied about me? Like Frost's "Poetry is what disappears in translation," the who of me seems to disappear when we attempt to translate the facts and values about me into the living me. I can "touch" my existence because I am existence; but how can I conceptualize the essence of my existence? And if I cannot conceptualize who I am, how can I ever conceptualize who man is?

At this point I think a philosopher such as Heidegger would have some very serious objections to the direction the argument has taken.

He believes that there does exist a basic structure to existence (or "Who is man as subject?")—a structure that can be conceptualized by utilizing the method of phenomenology and subordinating existence to the larger category of Being. Convinced of the essential relationship between the human existent and Being, Heidegger has developed an ontology of human existence based upon an original distinction between Being and beings. Although the major concern of his thought is to re-open the question of the meaning of Being, this involves an analysis of the only being who lives in an understanding of Being, viz., human existence or Dasein ("being-there").13 It is true that "I am existence," i.e., Dasein is “in each case mine;" but this does not necessarily lead us into the swamp of solipsism. Heidegger leads us through "Who am I?" to "Who is man" by undercutting the subject-object distinction. Much as a mountain needs a valley to be a mountain, "being-there" needs a "world" to be "there"; hence, Dasein must be seen and understood a priori as "Being-in-the-world." Instead of being locked up in the cocoon of self, here we see "man" is always outside in-the-world. In fact existence itself means to stand outside oneself, to be beyond oneself in-the-world. After thus formulating his analytic, Heidegger then proceeds to show that just as non-Dasein entities (or things) possess certain categories so also does Dasein possess certain existentialia or structural principles of existence, i.e., possible ways for it to be. To Heidegger existence definitely can be conceptualized: Being and Time is the proof.

Whether or not existence can be described completely within a system of rational meanings is a very complicated and much debated question. The important thing to remember is that all existential thinkers, in one way or another, are trying to analyze and capture the meaning and significance of existence. All are making "a fresh attempt to connect thinking about man with the 'existence' of man . . . ,"14 and the substantial results of their efforts simply cannot be denied—or ignored.

EDUCATIONAL IMPORT

But what can the educator learn from this attempt to connect existence with thought? The study of existential philosophy can help the educator in his teaching as well as in his deliberations in certain specialized areas of education.

Although it may be true that the educator has always found students difficult to understand, there seems to be mounting evidence that this generation of students may take the prize for being the most difficult to understand. In this connection the educator can learn much from the existential philosopher. His analysis of the predicament of modern man as well as his analysis of the structure of existence bear directly on this problem.

From the University of Maine to the University of California the signs are unmistakable. As Robert McAfee Brown has so aptly described them (with admiration, incidentally, not dismay), this generation of students is "a revolting generation."15 Today's student is no longer content merely "to listen" to the truth, no matter how pleasant or reassuring it may sound. Today's student is no longer awed by the authority of the words no matter how impressively it is packaged, or by whom it is presented. Whether the issue is Vietnam, free speech, or civil rights, today's student feels compelled "to do" the truth, i.e., to witness to his own inner truth—to be heard. They are desperately trying to establish their own meaning out of the conditions of existence. More often than not, this means rejecting the traditional answers provided them by their parents and teachers. The multiple "double-standards," the sterile, objectified, ubiquitous Word, the packaged pitch, the thousand and one ways we mask the unpleasant, the monumental pretensions of our leaders and ourselves, the phoniness of our smile, the busyness of our life, as well as our lazy dependence upon the anonymous They for direction as well as refuge—all of these and many more inauthenticities are finally "getting to" this younger thinking generation. But why now? Why is it this generation that is finally revolting? The answer to this question is the very same answer to the question, Why is the existential philosopher now making a "fresh attempt to connect thinking about man with the existence of man . . . ?"

PROBLEMATIC MAN

Behind this fresh attempt lies a concern which constitutes a basic premise of all existential thinking, i.e., there is something radically wrong with the "state of being human" today. Modern man constitutes a problem to himself. He is searching for a home, for meaning, for identity.

As Tillich suggests, it is the threat of an infinite loss—the loss of their "authentic" self—that drives the existentialists to their attack. They all agree that contemporary man is in grave danger of losing his ground and meaning in existence, primarily because of the technological, mass producing, controlling society in which he finds himself involved. They realize a process is going on in which people are being "transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control."16 The existential thinker as well as today's college student struggle "for the preservation of the person, for the self-affirmation of the self, in a situation in which the self is more and more lost in its world."

This is one of the main reasons why this generation of students is so difficult to understand. They are becoming increasingly aware of this threat to their existential self. Moreover, they are doing something about it. Merely to become aware will avail them nothing; hence, we see running parallel with this awareness the corollary phenomena of protest, demonstration, and revolt. Merely to listen to the truth is not enough. They instinctively know they must do the truth; for to do the truth is to strengthen the self which, in turn, neutralizes those forces which tend to reduce the human to the status of a thing.

A study of some of the analyses of the structure of existence will also help the educator in his attempt to understand his students. Heidegger's Dasein analysis, for example, reveals that existence includes tension, alienation, and death, that existence entails choice, choice entails risk, risk entails anxiety. In fact, this is the very stuff of existence. To live honest, authentic lives is not easy; and, Dewey notwithstanding, empirical science will never be able to provide the answers to the important questions of life, death, and the good. The modern thinking student in his attempt to be honest with himself is becoming increasingly aware of the hard facts of life. Furthermore, some of them are choosing to live the hard, honest way rather than accept the soft, easy way offered to them by the They.

ENCOUNTERING OTHERS

Another recurring theme in existential literature that upon investigation should help the educator is the question of the other—the meaning of the other and how we encounter the other. Anything that will help us to become more aware of how we do in fact respond to our students should be a net gain. For example, a study of existentialism should help us to become more aware of the difference between responding to students as natural objects and as existing subjects. It may also show us that we favor the former approach unduly. There are at least two very good reasons why we so often treat our students as objects that must be handled: the necessity of controlling a class in the lower and secondary levels and the attitude on all levels "that we have something to teach them" Also the fact that we believe we must grade them "objectively" contributes to this same attitudinal posture towards students. To some instructors students will always be viewed primarily as vessels passively waiting to be filled with knowledge, and/or instances of a normal curve. In other teachers we may find a very judicious mixture of the two approaches,17 while still others may accent the human approach to the detriment of their teaching. The point here being made is not that we necessarily should become more aware of the "lived reality" of our students (although I would personally recommend that we do in order to understand this generation better), but rather that at least as a first step we should become more aware of just exactly what is our relationship with our students. A study of existentialism will help us in this attempt.

SELF-UNDERSTANDING

It has been suggested that a study of some of the analyses of the structure of existence will help the teacher better to understand his students. By the same token it will also help the teacher better to understand himself as well as his relationship with his students. In order to get at existence for purposes of description we have noted one must go through one's existential self. Some of the findings of these thinkers reveal in a very acute sense this route of passage. For example, one cannot struggle with Heidegger's analysis of the They, of death, or of temporality, or Kierkegaard's description of dread and despair without reflecting about existence in general and one's own existence in particular—if for no other reason than for purposes of verification. Of course if one is persuaded that an educator is primarily a technician who transmits "knowledge" to students, a better understanding of one's self would make little difference. On the other hand, if one is persuaded that in teaching we not only transmit knowledge but we also transmit ourselves in the form of attitudes and values of which we are largely unaware, then any increase in our self understanding should at the same time result in an increase in our effectiveness as teachers.18

Jacques Maritain has said that "The primary aim of education in the broadest sense of the word is to 'form a man' or rather to help a child of man attain his full formation or his completeness as a man."19 The existential thinker is also interested in what it means to realize "completeness as a man," and what he has to say about this completeness should help the educator as he tries to wrestle with the problem of giving overall direction to education. What educator can deny the relevance of the question "What is man in his existential wholeness?" Although we manage to keep very busy with the minuscule tasks that plague the teaching endeavour, we must ultimately wrestle with such questions if we are to assume the full responsibility of our profession. The logic of the situation clearly implies that the educator needs to re-think the aims of education in terms of the "who of man as subject."

GUIDANCE AND CURRICULUM

Finally, the relevance of existential thought to certain specialized studies within education should be fairly obvious. One of the grave weaknesses of counseling and guidance as a study, in my opinion, has been its lack of grounding in an adequate theory of what it means to be human. The existential thinkers, particularly Heidegger, have provided that ground. The same can be said of educational psychology. Although those of empirical-behavioral persuasion in the field have always assumed that they can safely disregard the question "Who is man as subject?," there is mounting evidence to suggest that they may not be able to do so much longer. The priority and force of this question are finally being felt. Using the insights of existential philosophy and the method of phenomenology, a whole new perspective in educational psychology and counseling is gradually being developed.

The social studies curriculum builder could well follow the lead of the educational psychologist. For example, in an article entitled "Man: A Course of Study" by Jerome S. Bruner we find the following description of the structure of a social studies course for fifth graders.

The content of the course is man: his nature as a species, the forces that shaped and continue to shape his humanity. Three questions recur throughout, namely:

What is human about human beings?

How did they get that way?

How can they be made more so?20

Here we can see the educator and the existential thinker wrestling with the same problem. Unfortunately, however, the curriculum builders so far seem to be unaware of the studies of the existential philosopher; for nowhere, from my reading of the description, can I find any specifically "existential insights" being brought to bear upon the development of this course of study. In fact the question "What is human about human beings?" (which is just another way of asking "Who is man?") seems never to have been seriously considered by this group of educators. It seems simply to have been posed as a question, almost in a rhetorical sense, and then assumed to be known by Everyone. It is hoped that those who concern themselves with social studies curriculum construction soon will take seriously the relevance and priority of this question to their field of study.

Yes, both as teachers of this "revolting," thinking generation of students and as specialists in those dimensions of the educational enterprise where the question "Who is man as subject?" is relevant, we have much to learn from the existential philosopher.

1 Olson, Robert, An Introduction to Existentialism. N. Y.: Dover Publications, 1962.

2 Usher, Garland, Journey Through Dread. London: Darwen Finlayson, Ltd., 1955.

3 Kafka, Franz, The Castle. N. Y.: Knopf, 1954.

4 Heschel, Abraham J., "Who is Man?" Stanford Today, Summer 1965.

5 This does not apply to Heidegger, whose starting point is the question of the meaning of Being. But, in reopening the question, he too finds it necessary to make an analysis of human existence.

6 Kaufmann, Walter, Ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Mentor Books, 1956

7 Spiegelberg, Herbert, "Phenomenology and Existentialism," The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. LVII, No. 22, Oct. 27, 1960.

8 Kaufmann, op. cit.

9 Grimsley, Ronald, Existentialist Thought. University of Wales, 1955.

10 Barrett, William, Irrational Man. N. Y.: Doubleday, Inc., 1958.

11 Tillich, Paul, Theology of Culture. N. Y.: Oxford University, 1958.

12 Buber, Martin, Between Man and Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

13 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time. Tr. by J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson. N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1962.

14 Grimsley, op. cit.

15 Brown, Robert McAfee, "Forward to the Dance of Joy," Stanford Review, May-June, 1965

16 Tillich, Paul, The Courage to Be. Yale University Press, 1952.

17 Buber, op. cit.

18 Troutner, Leroy, "Philosophy and Teacher Education," The Journal of General Education, April, 1966.

19 Maritain, Jacques, "Thomist Views on Education," Modern Philosophies and Education Nelson Henry, ed. 54th Yearbook of the NSSE, Part I. University of Chicago Press, 1955.

20 ESI Quarterly Report. Educational Services Incorporated, Summer-Fall, 1965.