哲学中意义存在的可能性

The Possibility of a Meaningful Existence:

The examination of Sartrean nausea brings us to our final question:      What does existentialism have to say about the possibility of existence being meaningful?  In Nausea, Roquentin makes a bold and disturbing declaration: “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance” (133).  From what observation, though, does he derive that conviction?  A fuller description in Nausea sheds light on the lack of “reason” attached to existence.

We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us, each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt in the way in relation to the others.  In the way: It was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones…each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, and overflowed…I insisted on maintaining [these relations] in order to delay the crumbling of the human world…I, too, was In the way…I was In the way for eternity. (128-29)

Man  has no “reason to be there” because Sartre has dissolved the natural relations between man and the world.  Instead of being in-the-world, man is “In the way”, as is every entity in the world.  For three closely related reasons, the severing of that relationship leads to meaninglessness in Sartre’s philosophy in a way that it does not in Heidegger’s.

As we have established, Heidegger’s description of entities as “ready-to-hand” indicates that Dasein’s use of them is determined by the specific usefulness contained in the object as a character of the object’s own Being.  In Heidegger’s elaboration on this theme, he labels ready-to-hand entities as “equipment” and writes that “Equipment is essentially ‘something in-order-to…’” (BT, 97).  Every entity, in its readiness-to-hand, is pointed toward some other thing, or some goal.  He goes on to conclude that “The primary ‘towards-which’ is a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’.  But the ‘for-the-sake-of’ always pertains to the Being of Dasein…Dasein’s very Being [is] the sole authentic ‘for-the-sake-of-which’” (BT, 116-117).  Thus, the very nature of the world is directed toward and for Dasein.  The existence of Dasein becomes central—the world in a very real sense revolves around Dasein in that the Being of the things in the world are defined by their ability to interact with Dasein.  In Sartre’s world of present-at-hand things, though, man is alienated from the things in the world.  The Being of those things has no regard for him.  He is not at home in the world; he is trapped in the world. Man drowns in the sea of “sticky filth…tons and tons of existence, endless” (Nausea, 134).  Each individual occurrence in the world, then, loses the feeling of direction and purpose.  In stripping away the relation between man and the world, Sartre seems to strip away the “meaning” of each occurrence.

Perhaps the root of Sartrean meaninglessness is not the lack of readiness-to-hand in the “objects” in particular, but rather, in Sartre’s present-at-hand world, the lack of readiness-to-hand in the “subject”.  Heidegger establishes that, while Dasein is the “sole authentic ‘for-the-sake-of-which’” for entities in the world, Dasein has its own for-the-sake-of-which: its “ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (BT, 237).  Thus, Dasein itself is, in a sense ready-to-hand.  Its usefulness is its ability to seize its own possibilities of Being.  To seize those possibilities is its function.  Dasein, however, “can be inauthentically; and factically it is inauthentically, proximally and for the most part.  The authentic ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ has not been taken hold of; the projection of one’s own potentiality-for-Being has been abandoned to the disposal of the ‘they’” (BT, 237-38).  For Heidegger, to seize one’s own authentic, ready-to-hand existence, while it provokes anxiety, in fact lends existence a type of meaning lacking in the inauthentic mode of absorption in the “they”—it recaptures Dasein’s “authentic ‘for-the-sake-of-which.”  In Sartre, however, the possibility of Dasein having a “for-the-sake-of-which” is eliminated.  Roquentin says, “I, too, was In the way” and thus establishes the human subject as present-at-hand in the same manner as the objects of the world.  The present-at-hand, unlike the ready-to-hand, has no inherent “usefulness”, no inherent direction—it is for the sake of nothing.

Heidegger goes on to point out that “That very potentiality-for-Being for the sake of which Dasein is, has Being-in-the-world as its kind of Being.  Thus it implies ontologically a relation to entities within-the-world” (BT, 238).  The sense of potentiality-for-Being about which Heidegger writes is the ability to seize possible ways of Being in-the-world and toward entities.  If those entities were not ready-to-hand, if those ready-to-hand entities were not for-the-sake-of Dasein, Dasein could not itself be ready-to-hand and for-the-sake-of something.  What emerges, in Heidegger’s writing, is a structure of Being characterized on all levels by readiness-to-hand.  What is central to readiness-to-hand is relationships, the inherent directionality of one entity toward another entity or goal.  Heidegger’s concept of Being and the world, including Dasein and all other entities, appears to be a closed, interdependent system, “primordially a whole” (BT 236).  Meanwhile, Roquentin (on behalf of Sartre) laments, “These trees, these gates, these stones…each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it…I insisted on maintaining [these relations] in order to delay the crumbling of the human world.”  For Sartre, these relationships are artificially imposed by men in order to create a sense of order.  For Heidegger, these relationships and this order in fact exist.  The system does not dissolve; the human world does not crumble.

Ultimately, we must define what we mean by meaning.  In Nausea, Roquentin says to the Self-Taught Man, laughing, “I was just thinking that here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.”  The Self-Taught Man responds, “You undoubtedly mean Monsieur, that life is without a goal?...A few years ago I read a book…called Is Life Worth Living?  Isn’t that the question you are asking yourself?”  “Certainly not,” Roquentin thinks to himself, “that is not the question I am asking myself” (112).  The question need not be whether life has a “purpose”.  Neither Sartre nor Heidegger would allow for a teleological “goal” that derives a priori value from some external or higher source.  “Meaning”, on the most fundamental level, is an answer to the question “Why?” of existence.  “Why?” can be answered with an aim, but it can also be answered with a reason.  In order for existence to be meaningful, there must be some sense of a coherent explanation for Being, a sense that man fits in to the picture.  The “they” provides such an explanation, in the everyday interpretation of the world, but neither Heidegger nor Sartre accepts “their” distortion of authentic Being, intended only to “tranquilize”, to comfort.  When that layer of inauthenticity is pulled away, though, Heidegger describes the authentic situation of man as one that still submits to explanation, to reasons, to causes.  Man is still in-the-world, still factical.  He is still a component of a system, and that system derives “meaning” from its order and its necessity.  Sartre, however, allows the subject to escape Being and the world into Nothingness, lends him radical freedom outside of the causal order.  He cuts the genuine ready-to-hand ties between subject and object and makes impossible the relatedness and interdependency of existence.  Sartre eradicates the system and with it order, explanation, and a reason for Being:  “No necessary being can explain existence…All is free, this park, this city and myself…In themselves, secretly [men] are superfluous…When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float” (Nausea, 131).  Man is left grasping, helplessly, for a meaning that evaporated when man was cut loose from the world.