This paper was supposed to be an overview of the historical architechure of 19th Cen. Phil. leading in to existentialism. That’s… kind of what it is.
The progression of the discipline of philosophy has been breathtaking in its scope and breadth. From the beginnings as the only pure science, philosophy has grown and shifted—periodically shedding useless elements and dropping seeds that would grow in to their own sciences. From the first pre-Socratics commenting on aperion to the end of the enlightenment, the apparent goal of the discipline has been twofold: understanding and making intelligible both the objective external world of phenomena and the subjective internal world of moral psychology. This two-fold project, the understanding of the universe and the understanding of man, have defined western thought.
After the enlightenment, however, the project of philosophy began to change. Beginning with Immanuel Kant and reaching a poetic summation with Soren Kierkegaard, the phenomenal and proto-existentialist northern European philosophers of the early modern era took the two-fold project and inexorably changed it. In fact, it can be seen that Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and finally Kierkegaard all contributed to this transformation that altered philosophy to this day; the early modern philosophers weaved the imperatives of the objective understanding of the external world and the subjective understanding of the internal moral psychology and made them co-dependent, correlative. Essentially, the 19th century thinkers took the objective external world and made it subject—so to speak—to the subjective assessments of the individual.
The logical place to start in charting this historical progression is with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and specifically with his so-called “Reverse Copernican Revolution.” Before Kant, the basic assumption of the educated world was that our cognitions were shaped by the world around us—that our knowledge is derived experientially and empirically. Kant’s response—a thinly veiled broadshot at Hume—took the form of his masterpiece Critique of Pure Reason. In the critique’s preface, Kant makes reference to this “Reverse Copernican Revolution,” stating a belief contained in the proofs later on in the tract. Kant’s belief was that, just as Copernicus’ revolution in astronomy took in to account the position of the viewer with regard to the celestial body, so too must the “viewer” of the phenomenal world be central for any accurate or intelligible account. He justifies this belief later on in his book through his description of the architecture of the mind—essentially human faculties don’t change much person-to-person, but they are solely the possession of each discrete individual. With this move, Kant takes the location of knowledge from the abstract, indeterminate world and moves it to the human determinant. Kant’s “Reverse Copernican Revolution”, while still not entirely subjective in nature, opened up the possibility for the centrality and primacy of the single human mind.
Continuing logically and chronologically, Hegel took Kant’s major shift to the subjective and developed it further. Hegel’s theory of absolute mind (or spirit, depending on the preferred translation) increases the shift to the subjective in a very important, albeit subtle way. Mind exists in a duality–with a mental and physical portion. The physical side is represented by items in the physical universe, from naturally occurring phenomena to man-made. The mental side is formed by the so-called “total mind” of human beings. In keeping with Hegel’s dialectic logic, mind must—and necessarily, so—go through three stages: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Hegel’s schematic, the basic and incontrovertible result of the synthesis is the realization that everything in existence is an aspect of mind—that there is no alien component—and therefore that there is no subject/object divide. Without the subject/object distinction, and with the central cogito of existence being “mind,” a clear subjective bent is being suggested. Hegel’s project essentially makes the entirety of existence contingent on “subjects” unfolding themselves through history—thus tethering everything that we can experience intelligibly as humans to a distinctly subjective accent. Hegel takes the subjective accent slightly further than Kant by tacking not just metaphysics and epistemology to the subjective view, but also all of human history, present, and future.
In an interesting detour that—due to his views on Hegel—should be expected to break ranks with the trend of increasing subjectivity, Schopenhauer manages to overcome his intense distaste for all things Hegel and advance the subjectivist corpus. Though Schopenhauer’s completely aberrant hybridization of eastern and western philosophical traditions defied most typical definitional markers, his conception of the Will and its manifestations suggests a subjective slant. The Will, in analogy to Kantian terms, would be likenable to the noumena—the only “real” object of existence. Since Will is the only matter of the universe, all physical things—including and especially humans—are aspects of this Will. The human representation of the Will (the human body), due to the uniquely human capacity to rationalize, was the method through which one gains knowledge of the Will. The usage of the Will schematic achieves two things: it makes the bifurcated universe in to a monist one and, like Kant and Hegel, centers the source and wellspring of all knowledge in the individual human mind—an incontrovertibly subjective move. Schopenhauer, despite his Hegelian apprehensions, continued the work of his predecessors in advancing the importance of the subjective mood.
In keeping with the so-far chronological accounting of the subjectivist shift, the next thinker—a pupil of Schopenhauer’s—took subjective slanting to a new and near-obscene level. Freidrich Nietzsche, on many levels, barely qualifies as a philosopher, but his criticism of philosophical tenets earns him a place in this discussion of the progression of subjectivist thought. Though in a facile way Nietzsche’s denial of objective truth makes him, by logical negation, subjectively oriented, there is some nuance and subtlety in this assertion. His most latently philosophical work, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, dictates that truth is only a hodgepodge of metaphors that have been stripped of their original, situational “truth” through repeated usage on objects that don’t fit the exact definition of the original metaphor. In this sense, Nietzsche leans toward the subjective, indeed. Besides this conception of his subjective-preference, “perspectivism” as detailed in The Will to Power provides yet another example of subjectivist thought. In keeping with the theme that he addressed earlier in his career within On Truth and Lies, Nietzsche holds that all metaphysical “truths” are inert due to the cultural or subjective definitions that they are derived from. Again, in a vacuous sense, Nietzsche’s negation of the potential of objective truths—physical and metaphysical—drops him squarely in the camp of the thinkers advancing the cause of subjectivity.
Finally, but in an unfortunately anachronistic manner within the chronological context of this paper, Soren Kierkegaard places the final spike on the metaphorical transcontinental railroad of codified subjectivist thought. Before addressing his advancement of the subjective, his placement in the paper—out of his own timeframe—must be addressed. If this paper had truly been ordered by time, Kierkegaard would have obviously appeared earlier in the argument. We know for a fact, at least, that Nietzsche read him and had perhaps wanted to meet him. This choice however—placing him last—is intentional. Firstly, Kierkegaard’s works were not translated out of his native Danish in Europe until after his death—quite literally leading him to be added to the so-called philosophical canon sometime after Nietzsche. Secondly, Kierkegaard represents the furthest extension of the importance of subjective accenting—to the point that he is no longer a northern European idealist, but the first existentialist.
The weight of this claim, that Kierkegaard is the first existentialist, cannot be overstated in terms of placing him in the lineage of the prior philosophers who advanced subjectivist thinking.
In this way, Kierkegaard’s existentialism relates to the subjectivist camp in a similar way to Nietzsche’s denial of objective truth; definitionally, existentialist theses lead to an overtly subjective worldview. The main way in which existentialism is inherently more subjective is the so-called “existence precedes essence” tenet. This belief, sacrosanct amongst all existentialists following Kierkegaard, holds that the existence of the single human subject subordinates the essence of human existence. The conclusion from this tenet is that all humans, by right of subjective self-determination, are self-defining creatures that create their own consciousness—a far cry from the starting point before Kant made the mind the central figure.
Again, much like in Nietzsche, this is a vacuous way of relating Kierkegaard to the subjectivists. However, besides the logical connection between existentialism and subjectivity, Kierkegaard directly commented on subjectivity itself within his most traditionally philosophical work Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. It is in his attribution to Johannes Climachus that his explicit views on subjectivity are demonstrated—inasmuch as Kierkegaard can be said to have explicit views. Climachus literally opines that “subjectivity is truth” and “truth is a subjectivity.” Beyond the opaque poeticism of Kierkegaard’s philosophical sock-puppet, the meat of that statement is significant in showing the totally subjectivist basis of his philosophy. The statements regarding subjectivity as truth can be best read as a two-fold purpose: truth is not just found in objective facts and the more important truth for the individual (the center and genesis of knowledge for Kierkegaard) was the subjective relation to these objective facts. In this sense, Kierkegaard subordinates the world of the objective to that of the singular and subjective; the facts may be objectively certain, but they only matter inasmuch as they are taken in and interacted with by the subject. Clearly, through the genesis of existentialism and the subordination of objective fact to subjective truth, Kierkegaard finished the project of moving the accent from the objective to the subjective.
Taken in total, then, the project that began with Kant and ended with Kierkegaard was a simple one: this historical progression allowed for the genesis of the existentialist school of thought. It may seem strange that Kant can be considered a forefather of subjectivist thought and existentialism, but the clear intellectual family tree must include him. Starting with the Reverse Copernican Revolution and ending with the subordination of objective fact to subjective truth, the project of the northern European idealists shaped the way that we look at ourselves to this very day.