Existential Social Theory Research Paper

1. Max Weber’s Fundamental Contribution To Existential Social Theory

The centrality of an existential perspective to social theory is nowhere clearer than in the work of Max Weber (1864–1920), who must be accounted its most formidable advocate. The existential character of Weber’s perspective is most evident in his essays on politics and science and, more especially, in his methodological writings. These stress both the centrality of meaning to a proper understanding of social action, and the essential freedom of humans in relation to the values that ultimately confer meaning on events. In a radical fashion Weber insists that meaning flows from an existential ‘orientation to the world’ and does not inhere in any objectively given reality. Weber’s sociology, thus, is concerned primarily with the typification, on a world historical scale, of an extraordinarily varied range of such meaning complexes, their historical contextualization, and the existential orientations within which they were formed and enacted.

Weber’s social theory also established critical insight into the existential problems of modern society. On the one hand, he argues that modernity can be understood in terms of a specific set of values which he typifies as the ‘spirit of capitalism’ or ‘modern rational capitalism’; while, on the other hand, he argues that modernity is characterized above all by the ‘disenchantment of the world,’ which involves nothing less than the annihilation of value as such. Not only are these two very different conceptions, but the notion of disenchantment seems to contradict his philosophical methodological premise that all human activity be inherently open to meaning through its relation to extra-rational ends. This duality in Weber’s characterization of modern life in fact brings to light the seriousness of the struggle in modern society to create and maintain a sense of individual human worth and dignity in the face of powerful processes of rationalization. He traces this theme substantively to the Reformation and the ‘unprecedented inner loneliness’ which was its religious expressions and the historical foundation of the anxiety which has become a general condition of modern existence. In this approach it is clear that Weber was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813– 55). Indeed, a remark of Nietzsche’s might well stand as an epigraph for his existential sociology;

Man first implanted value into things to maintain himself— he created the meaning of things, a human meaning! Therefore he calls himself: ‘Man,’ that is; the evaluator … Evaluation is creation.

2. Kierkegaard And The Origins Of European Existential Thought

But it is to Kierkegaard that we must turn as the originating source of the varied forms of modern existential thought. Not only in his work do we find the first modern account of human reality focused directly on the elusive and difficult character of ‘existence,’ we also discover, linked to it, a significant social theory of modernity.

Kierkegaard’s writings provide a rich exploration of all the forms of existence which have become possible in the modern world. Rather than analyze these positions in terms of an abstract analytic framework—itself presumed to be outside of any of their existential determinants—he presents them as the self-expressed orientations of a number of pseudonymous authors. This semi-fictional method draws author, subject matter, and reader into an existential complicity and Kierkegaard uses this technique to mount a powerful attack on all modern (especially Hegelian) forms of scientific abstraction and objectivity which have been misleadingly applied to problems of existence.

This method, inaugurated in the celebrated Either Or (1987 [1843]), is neither a form of pure ‘subjectivism’ nor does it result in chaos of arbitrary life- views. In fact the authorship reveals a specific, albeit complex, structure which conditions all subjective contents of experience, whatever position is adopted by the protagonist. This structure—a kind of existential map of modern society—is characterized by Kierkegaard in terms of ‘existence-spheres’ within which a number of positions are inter-related. Thus, the aesthetic mode of existing is organized around the polarities of pleasure and unpleasure, and is characterized by successive phases of enthusiasm and boredom; the ethical sphere is ordered in terms of the distinction of good and evil, and emerges in a more concrete selfhood of resolution and guilt; and the religious sphere crystallizes and takes form in the opposition of faith and sin. The fluid interchange and dialogic structure of the authorship, in opposition to any systematic theory of experience leaves this existential experimenting incomplete and unresolved.

Kierkegaard, under his own name, but in the form of a lengthy book review rather than a direct essay, also provided a suggestive existential theory of the social and cultural tendencies of his own time (Two Ages 1978 [1845]). What he called the Present Age (as distinct from a previous Revolutionary Age) is characterized by superficiality, bourgeois philisitinism, empty conventionalism in public life, and a general process of leveling in which all social differences are obliterated in favor of a new ‘mass’ culture. The Present Age, like Hegelian philosophy, has become abstract and empty, obsessed with public opinion and meaningless ‘chatter’; it is the mere play of forms which lack the seriousness of any of the positions explored in the pseudonymous authorship. The Present Age is not at all ‘interesting,’ in the significant sense of engaging the self and enriching its interrelational structure with authentic life-contents; everything happens as if one were a spectator of a remote and detached world. Yet it is just the character of existence that it is and remains interesting, that the pervasive boredom of the Present Age, at the same time discloses the possibility of a new reality and prompts the continual renewal of groundless but not hopeless existential experimenting. The pseudonyms, thus, choose boredom over conventionality, propelling themselves into new and unpredictable projects of existence.

The existential value of ‘authenticity,’ it should be noted, is not associated in Kierkegaard’s seminal writings with the romanticism of ‘self-positing’ and the self-realization of a specific inner ‘personality,’ but with the decisive character of ‘choosing.’ This is not conceived in a utilitarian market sense as deciding among available alternatives but, rather, is constituted as a transformative ‘leap’ into new forms of existence. To ‘choose’ is simultaneously to be chosen, to surrender to a value outside the self, only thus can it genuinely become part of the self; it is like falling in love, a possibility which the rationalizing conditions of the Present Age make daily more difficult.

Kierkegaard’s extraordinary writings were for a long time all but ignored and it is only relatively recently that his work has been read again as a creative and significant contribution to modern social theory. His influence was felt more directly in the philosophical tradition. First, through Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), himself a friend of Max Weber’s and also an ardent reader of Nietzsche, who, in addition to his major philosophical works, in Man in the Modern Age popularized Kierkegaard’s social criticism of the Two Ages and in an original fashion opened up a vast field of psychopathology to existential investigation (Jaspers 1963). Second, through Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) whose Being and Time (1962 [1927]), which is hardly conceivable without Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety (1980 [1844]), made existence once again a central preoccupation for contemporary philosophy.

Jaspers represents a turn away from nihilistic interpretations of existentialism back to an appreciation of the positive insights of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. His view of existence is explicitly social in character; ‘Since man only exists in and through society … we must study his nature by studying society.’ And, although in Jaspers view, ‘owing to the turmoil of modern life, what is really happening eludes our comprehension,’ he proposes a conception of modern society as a dynamic structure rather than an undifferentiated crowd; ‘there are only diverse masses which form, dissolve, and reform … articulated masses are mutable, diversified, transitory expressions of some specific historical outcome of human existence.’ But, as ‘even an articulated mass always tends to become unspiritual and inhuman,’ modern existence is generally inauthentic.

Heidegger marks a turn from nihilism towards primitivism; an approach to human existence as primordial Being. For Heidegger authentic Being is always preconceptual and unthematized, it is founded upon a rejection of the world of modernity rather than an encounter with, or within, it. In the extraordinary elaboration of this project he introduces a new language of Being in which all subsequent existential reflection took place. In this language he emphasizes and makes his own Kierkegaard’s rejection of every misdirected form of objectifying thought: ‘Philosophy cannot base itself on the illusion of making man a disinterested spectator of himself.’

The openness of existential reflection to new realities and new interpretations of reality is evident both from its originating variety and in the ideological diversity of its followers. Whatever the political, religious, or ethical tendency favored by its major proponents, however, each has been distinguished by fearless radicalism. In its still best known version, indeed, existentialism and radicalism become synonymous. What had begun as a pitiless anatomy of despair was transformed by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) into a new, optimistic but equally uncompromising vision of liberation. Reading Heidegger in relation to Hegel he produced in Being and Nothingness (1956 [1943]) an impressive restatement of the entire project of modernity as the discovery of human autonomy. Here the commitment to freedom as the fundamental prerequisite for any valued form of human being is restated with unsurpassed determination. The result is less a secular version of a Christian notion of existence (Kierkegaard) than the consecration of a particular kind of Romanticism (Fichte). This is characteristic also of Albert Camus (1913–60), whose The Rebel (1954) returned to nineteenth-century Russian literature for an understanding of nihilism as the most consistent and fearless of existential views of the human world. Only the free act could be considered authentically human, and as conformity to any existing convention was tainted with coercion, acts of rebellion bore the only indubitable sign of freedom and, therefore, of authenticity.

Sartre increasingly sought for his existentialism a larger and more dramatic stage; history and the collective subject, rather than the small individual acts of everyday life, supplied the setting for the working out of the great refusal; the negation of everything intolerable in modern life. The attempted synthesis of existentialist and Marxist traditions resulted, in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1976 [1960]), in a social theory paradoxically ‘founded’ on ‘anti-foundational’ existential insights. Through this Sartre sought to establish praxis relevant to contemporary life rather than an explanation of its various features.

His views, thus, remain rooted in existential insight; ‘The only concrete basis for the historical dialectic is the dialectical structure of individual acts.’ The radical freedom central to Being and Nothingness is somewhat muted here—reciprocity and otherness, mediated through a series of ‘objective’ forms (dyad, triad, serial group, fused group, statutory group, organization, class), are conceived as pre-given and as essential aspects of, and constraints upon, every human project. However the subversive genius of its empty form is also invoked: ‘For freedom is nothing other than a choice which creates for itself its own possibilities.’ The human remains the being for whom ‘The upsurge of freedom is immediate and concrete.’

Existential social theory seeks to realize two distinct and seemingly incompatible values; the absolute and untrammeled freedom of the subject; and the actualization of authentic selfhood. Much of the development of existentialism is an attempt to reconcile these two values and to imagine a social world in which they could be harmonically interrelated. The urgency and difficulty of such a task is the source of the pathos, which distinguishes all serious existential social theory.

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