Definition

I will reiterate how I opened the previous page: existentialism is not a religion, but a belief system based on the nonreality of essence. That is, the claim that “essence” is merely an imposition made by the mind. No one is here “for” something, no one is required to be a particular way, life is what you make of it. Although Sartre’s “existence precedes essence” carries some implied philosophical baggage beyond this, I think it is a pithy description of this idea. This is, of course, the natural corollary to atheism or agnosticism.

Preface: Existentialism

Before we move forward, we have to understand the meaning of the word essence. Essence is “that which is expressed by its definition,” or, more concretely, “the basis by which nature is expressed.” So, for example, the “essence” of a guitar would be “to be a stringed musical instrument, with a fretted fingerboard, and six or twelve strings played by plucking or strumming.” If something expresses that essence, it is a guitar. If something does not express that essence, it is not a guitar.

So to say that existence precedes essence is to say that the idea of essence is subjectively imposed, as opposed to objectively instantiated. That is, a policeman is really just a uniformed person who is allowed to handcuff people. The president is really a person in a suit who bombs things with impunity. Even inanimate things like chairs are really only chairs because we define them as such, not because they have an essential, objective “chair-ness.”

Now Sartre pontificates further on the idea by saying that “if existence precedes essence, God is meaningless.” I would go even further. If existentialism is true, God can’t exist. God is a pure essence, not a material being, and that can’t be real under this paradigm.

Preface: Essentialism

But on the other hand, if essences are objective, then God certainly exists. Deducing this is simple:

Nothing can create itself, for that would require existing before one exists, which is a contradiction. But not every essence can rely on another for existence, for this would result in an infinite regress, and nothing could exist – imagine plugging your TV into an infinite chain of power strips; it would never turn on. Thus, one essence must be identical to its own existence. That is, it is existence – it is not self-created, but self-evident, uncreated. There can, of course, only be one such being, since any distinction from this essence would be a distinction from pure existence, which is the exact sort of thing which requires pure existence to precede it. Let us call this one being “To Be.”

To Be cannot change, since it cannot be distinct from its essence, and so To Be is immutable. And what is immutable cannot be material, since material is inherently conditional (here or there, big or small) – so this being must be immaterial. Further, because To Be is immutable, immaterial, and uncreated, To Be must be eternal. To Be cannot be composed of parts, because a composite being’s existence is dependent upon its parts, and this being depends on nothing. So, it must be absolutely simple. This being is the principle by which all things exist, and is in this sense present to all beings. But because To Be is simple, it is wholly present to all things, whether the smallest particle or the entire set, and present to its whole self. So, it is omnipresent.

Power is the ability to act upon something else. An agent’s power is greater the more it has of the form by which it acts. For example, the hotter a thing, the greater its power to give heat; if it had infinite heat, it would have infinite power to give heat. This being necessarily acts through its own essence, for it does not rely on anything prior to itself. But it is one with its essence, and thus both are eternal. Likewise, this being’s power must be eternal, so it is omnipotent.

Now, it is demonstrable that knowledge has an inverse relationship with materiality. For example, a rock knows nothing. An animal experiences through sense images which are immaterial (free of the physical matter constituting them), but does not consciously “know” them. A human knows by understanding immaterial abstractions about these sense images. So, knowledge is precisely this layer of immateriality. And further still, knowledge is the only thing which can move material things while remaining immutable, as when the unchanging idea of ice cream causes your physical body to desire and retrieve ice cream. Consequently, this immaterial, immutable being with causal power must be a mind, and its complete immateriality means there is no constraint on its capacity for knowledge. Because this being is immutable, simple, eternal, immaterial, and wholly present to all things, it is thus omniscient. Its knowledge is reality.

So, To Be is eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. God. Aristotle uses similar deductions to reach the same conclusion that the “prime mover” is an all-powerful contemplative being in Metaphysics.

Metaphysical Argumentation

As such, we find ourselves with two options; two paradigmatically opposed universes. In the existentialist universe, there is no objective essence. The meaning of things, the value of things, and morality are all ultimately up to the agent. God cannot exist. In the essentialist universe, everything has an objective essence. The meaning of things, the value of things, and morality exist regardless of anyone’s subjective opinion. God must exist.

Now, these two ideas are metaphysical. That is, they describe a “foundation” of reality; they are prior to empirical evidence. So, I can’t put a chair under a microscope and find its essence, for example. Now just because metaphysical claims are untestable does not mean they are unreliable or ignorable. Everyone believes in some metaphysical paradigm, and all empirical claims rely on metaphysical claims preceding them. You can’t use the scientific method without first believing in the untestable law of noncontradiction, for example.

How, then, are we to decide between one metaphysical paradigm and another? Suppose I presented the following metaphysical dichotomy: you either are you, or you are not you. Which are you to believe? While you cannot “test” whether you are you, it is clearly the intuitive conclusion, and the alternative leads to apparent absurdities. As such, you can safely conclude that you are, in fact, you. Here, we likewise have two possible metaphysical realities: either there is essence, or there is not. Which are we to believe? I will argue that essentialism is clearly the intuitive conclusions, whereas existentialism leads to absurdities.

Essence

In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre produces a pithy, biting syllogism. “If God exists, I cannot be free. But I am free. Therefore, God does not exist.” His provocative conjecture is meant to describe the immense freedom the “no thing-ness” (total malleability) of the mind implies. He means that, because the mind has no thing-ness, man has no thing-ness, and therefore no essence. And if man has no essence, then existence precedes essence, and God does not determine man; rather, man determines himself, as if he were God. You can think about anything any way you want to, and this is the source of your existential freedom.

In De Anima iii, Aristotle has his own discussion of the no thing-ness of the mind. He points out that the mind is “in a sense all things” – like Sartre, he believes in the mind’s total malleability. However, this observation led Aristotle to the exact opposite conclusion. To Aristotle, the mind’s no thing-ness is its essence – that is, its essence is to receive the essences of things outside itself through its total malleability. In stark contrast to Sartre, this would mean that all things inherently have an intelligible essence which we receive by comprehending, rather than impose upon matter. Further still, Aristotle follows his discussion of the mind by pointing out that the mind’s malleability does not eliminate man’s essence, but is part of it. That is, man’s essence is “to be an animal with the power to understand essence.”

So, a priori, either of these could be true. But which is worth assuming?

When it comes to our sense experiences, we assume that a sense perceives something as it is in reality. When we see something, unless there’s a serious malfunction, we see it because it’s actually there. Likewise with the other five senses. We do not assume that when we touch a coarse material, our imagination imposes the feeling of coarseness upon our hand; rather, we receive the real coarseness. But our relationship with essence is just as fundamental, just as effortless. Stop reading this – look around and try as hard as you can not to see essences in everything around you. I admit that for a short time you can almost “hide” the essence of something from yourself, maybe by staring at it for so long that it starts to look strange. But I would equate this to, say, wearing a ring for so long you forget it’s there.

Could it be that we just impose concepts upon things very naturally? Look around the room again, and this time apply names to everything you see. This takes a moment of thought, does it not? So we see that applying a nominal idea foreign to the essence of an object takes effort. Merely seeing essence, on the other hand, is as natural and inescapable as breathing.

Perhaps evolution has developed in mankind some sort of broad, innate heuristic grouping mechanism? No; this is impossible – evolution adapts a genome to an environment, while humans innately experience essences which transcend material correlates. For example, Chopin’s Nocturne op. 9 no. 2, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias materially have absolutely nothing in common, yet each of these create a moving experience of beauty. The sentencing of Adolf Eichmann, the end of U.S. racial segregation, and a son giving his father a eulogy are each examples of justice. Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, the Tiananmen Square “tank man,” and President Reagan’s demand that the USSR tear down the Berlin Wall are all examples of courage. None of these deeply moving events share any sensible similarities. How could a genome develop innate, coherent heuristics for concepts with no referent in material reality?

To reiterate, the effortless comprehension of essence is a fundamental aspect of human experience. We know that experiencing reality through the five senses is also effortless. Conversely, we know that imposing non-innate concepts onto things, like names, is not an effortless task. Furthermore, the comprehension of essence can’t be some evolutionary mind-trick, as it deals with immaterial, invariant, universal similarities. As such, there seems to be no good reason to assume that the mind imposes essence, and every reason to assume it actually receives essences through comprehension, like how we receive tactile reality through touch.

Purpose

If the existentialist position is correct, then purpose is a subjective imposition from the mind of an agent. But if the conscious agent is the arbiter, how does he determine purpose? Purpose is often cited as a creative project, a fun job, time with family, political power, or something like those. But if there is no coherent, objective structure to reality, then even those desires are shaped arbitrarily by biology, society, or religion. This introduces man into an impossible situation. One does indeed have the power to nominally assign purpose to one thing or another, but all the sources which shape his choice are themselves arbitrary and meaningless. A man can do what he desires, but if his desires come from meaningless preconditions, then they too are meaningless. So, under the existentialist paradigm, there is no real purpose.

Aristotle has a different response. He taught that all things have a purpose (“final cause”) determined by their essence. So, for example, God’s purpose is contemplating Himself (since He is the greatest good and any other exercise would be beneath Him), man’s purpose (as a rational animal) is to live according to reason (also known as virtue), a fox’s purpose is to do fox things as best as possible, a planet’s purpose is to perform revolutions, and so on. A thing better fulfills its purpose the more perfectly it does whatever it does, as a golfer who hits 18 holes-in-one is greater than one who hits par. In this way, Aristotle says, all things ultimately aspire towards God, who is perfection itself.

So again, we have a dichotomy, and either option could be true a priori. On the existentialist side, nothing can have real meaning. All the things we derive meaning from are themselves meaningless. On the essentialist side, everything has real meaning. All things tend towards God’s perfection in whatever mode is appropriate, and for man this is pursuing the life of perfect virtue he explores in Nicomachean Ethics. Which is worth assuming?

We are rational creatures, which means personal knowledge of purpose is required for our actions to be coherent. We are not foxes or gorillas, compelled by nature to act without deliberation. So, without an ultimate “why,” we descend into a Cartesian hole where everything is useless; nothing is ultimately worth doing and nothing is ultimately worth having. If I don’t have to live any certain type of way, then the law is not an austere guide, but an obstacle to my freedom. If life is meaningless, then procreating is just contributing to an endless ouroboros of human suffering. Without sacred duty, my life is about seeking base novelty and avoiding suffering until I die, not selfless service. If life is just a cosmic accident, it makes no difference whether I have a cup of coffee or whether I kill myself.

With the general abandonment of religion, and thus ultimate purpose, people have begun to see themselves as psychological creatures instead of spiritual creatures with spiritual purpose. They posit that we are governed by impersonal subconscious influences, not virtue. If there is no God and no soul, what guides us beyond our physical brains and appetitive desires, after all? We can see the practical results of this type of thinking all around us. Each successive generation reports greater feelings of hopelessness. Objective markers of well-being are increasing, and instead of depression decreasing, it is increasing at the same rate. Meta-analysis after meta-analysis and study after study find that purposelessness has a very strong correlation with depression and despair. Compare this to the purposeful lives led by saints who bore immense suffering with equally immense happiness, or monks who give up all secular comforts to happily experience God more intimately.

We observe that all the creatures around us are structured for life in their given environments. That is, reality itself has molded them into an appropriate shape. We also observe that human beings require purpose (and therefore God), both logically and practically. People with purpose can handle anything. People without purpose can’t even handle being comfortable. So, to say that purpose doesn’t actually exist is to assert that reality fashioned man – and only man – to have a fundamental need for something which doesn’t exist. That man is the one species whose proper function results in dread and hopelessness. If hunger is evidence for the existence of food, is this not evidence for the existence of purpose?

Morality

This preface follows much the same logic as the previous section’s preface. Recall my initial point on purposelessness – if every precondition of your worldview is meaningless and arbitrary, then your worldview is meaningless and arbitrary, and you can’t create purpose. Similarly, you can’t derive objective morals from amoral sources. You can’t use, say, your biological proclivities as an objective framework if biology itself is mindless and arbitrary. As such, the moral system of an existentialist requires subjectively measuring goods against each other. For example, someone of this persuasion may say that it’s alright to have too much to drink, assuming you have fun and aren’t getting behind the wheel. This is called consequentialism – the idea that morality is derived from weighing foreseeable consequences against each other.

Contrarily, recall my second point on purposefulness – if all things have purpose (to tend toward God), then everything is meaningful. This means that goodness is simply acting in accord with one’s essence and tending towards perfection. What is evil under this paradigm? It is acting contrary to one’s essence and tending towards imperfection. Someone of this persuasion would say that it is evil to have too much to drink, regardless of whether you’re getting behind the wheel. Why? Because man’s essence is to be a rational animal, and drunkenness is an act of violence against the ability to reason. This idea – again, expressed in Nicomachean Ethics – treats moral science like physics or biology, a study of a coherent set of objective laws found in reality with definite results (virtue and happiness).

All that said, we find ourselves at our third dichotomy, and once again, either option could be true. On the existentialist side, morality is nominal, reducible only to the subjective weighing of consequences. On the essentialist side, reality already has objective moral order imputed upon it, the same as the laws of physics. Which is worth assuming?

Right and wrong are words which describe an orientation towards something. For example, if I was traveling from one city to another, there would be a right road and a wrong road. Likewise, virtue ethicists believe that the tendency towards God necessitates moral roads humans are obligated to stay on. On the other hand, if I were traveling through wilderness without a predetermined end, there would be no truly right or wrong path. Likewise, the consequentialist, who has no destination (God) has no road. Let us go straight to the most uncomfortable conclusion of consequentialism: the Nazis were not evil. They weighed the good of Aryan society against the good of human lives, and made a subjective judgment. Of course, the world generally disagreed, but rough consensus about which direction to go in the wilderness does not make that the objectively right way.

Of course, most consequentialists try to find ways to ignore this obvious fact. But simple logic quickly lays each method bare. Secular humanism promotes eudemonia through self-determination of people and culture. But self-determination for the good of the people is exactly what Germany did in the 1930’s. Cultural relativists say that we cannot judge another culture by our standards of morality. Which means that, again, we cannot say the German culture of 1935-1945 was evil. Utilitarianism holds that what is good is what has the greatest outcome for the greatest number. So if Hitler figured that genocide would result in the greatest good for everyone, he did the right thing. It is inescapable. Nazism is not even an example of some haywire form of consequentialism; it is a totally coherent, expectable result.

Think back to the great existentialist thinkers on the previous page. Nietzsche’s ideas of will to power, transcendence of morality, the eugenic nature of the Ubermensch, and localized value-creation are all in lockstep with Nazi thought, whether or not they were a direct cause. Sartre justified violence by relating it to a bigger, idealistic goal – just like the Nazis. Camus’ flippant comment about it being no big deal to commit adultery is so similar to the attitude of all those Germans who just found it easier to look the other way.

Let me be clear: my argument is not that “Nazism is compatible with existentialism, and therefore existentialism is wrong.” My argument is that an existentialist cannot make any assertions about morality whatsoever. If there is no divinely imputed framework to reality, there is no objective moral law; if there is no objective moral law, there is no right and wrong way to be. An existentialist is required to take the position that the Nazi genocide was morally indifferent. As Ivan says in Dostoevsky’s masterwork, Brothers Karamazov, “if God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” The Nazi vivisection of live babies, Sartre’s utilitarian justification of gulags, Camus’ absurdist justification of adultery are all, at worst, faux pa’s. Opinions you may happen to take some issue with.

Of course, no one really believes this, not even the people who say they do. To claim objective moral truths don’t exist is to deny our deepest and most cherished intuitions about reality. If we literally cannot accept the Nazi position as valid, why would we accept a metaphysical paradigm under which the Nazi position is valid? If we aren’t willing to let bygones be bygones and accept ethnic genocide, how can we accept existentialism?

Conclusion

There are two metaphysical views of reality I have discussed; one must be true, and the other must be false. In the first, the universe of the existentialists, everything is subjective. There is no such thing as real essence, real purpose, nor objective morality. In the second, the universe of the essentialists, reality is objective. God exists, and is the mind which structured and ordered all things. This metaphysical principle of order is essence. With essence comes a clear and defined purpose, and with that comes objective moral values. In each case, the existentialist opinion does violence to a fundamental intuition inseparable from the human experience.

First, we assume that all of our sense experiences are dependent on something in reality causing them. Like sense experience, the essences of objects come to us effortlessly. This is unlike truly foreign concepts, such as names, which require effort to “see in” things. It is absurd to posit that this is a result of evolutionary mechanism, because essence is instantly comprehended even when there is no material correlate. For example, music, paintings, and poems all evoke a sense of beauty. How could a genome measure these things and unify them under one heuristic?

Second, we see that reality molds creatures to fit their environments. But without purpose, humanity is logically incoherent, and men can hardly stand to live at all. There is no reason to assume reality would craft an innately incoherent creature. It would be absurd to assume that monks who find great happiness with nothing have a weaker grasp on reality than those who can’t even handle satiety. Conversely, just as hunger suggests food exists, man’s longing for purpose suggests purpose exists.

Third, we see that morality is either an objective corollary to essence, or else is simply opinion. We know the human conscience is fundamentally concerned with moral value judgments. But the existentialist must claim that – since there is no God – reality is just an amoral chemical soup. This inability to make value judgments means the existentialist cannot say that the Nazis did anything wrong. I’m sure you, dear reader, find that unthinkable. But you cannot say moral relativism is a sensible assumption if you aren’t capable of accepting its immediate conclusions. If you’re willing to say the Nazis were actually, really, wrong, you’re not an existentialist.

Now I have spent this entire argument taking existentialism on its own metaphysical terms and showing there is no good reason to assume that it’s true. But now that I feel this has been accomplished, I will present an even stronger and more conclusive argument against existentialism: there is very good reason to think God actually does exist, and no strong arguments in favor of atheism. So, not only is existentialism not even worth believing on its own terms, there is also substantial proof that its most fundamental basis (atheism) is false.